Energy

and limits

A common problem science fiction writers have to solve is explaining where their fantastical future civilization gets all its energy. Freeman Dyson created and popularized the concept of a Dyson Sphere; a leviathan machine—or a swarm of smaller machines—that harvest a significant portion of the output of a star. Once such a device is in place, the idea goes, a civilization could use that energy to explore the galaxy, harvesting other stars as needed to fuel their expansion. They become limitless, unbound by the hard physical and ecological boundaries of their ancient terrestrial home. It’s a seductive idea, as tempting as the notion that the speed of light could one day be exceeded: rare is the author willing to envision a galactic civilization that hasn’t gone super-luminal. The true timescales required for interstellar travel, even at a significant fraction of the speed of light, make traditional narratives difficult to construct. How can you send a protagonist off to visit distant worlds if the journey will take most of their life?

This is the innate appeal of science fiction: it allows us to explore different versions of reality. We can create worlds that look, superficially, like our own, but operate on vastly different scales and with very different rules. As we explore these worlds, we sometimes find nuggets of universal truths that we can bring back with us to reality, like divers exploring the sea floor and stumbling across ancient sunken treasure. We learn new ways of approaching old problems, new ways of thinking about the world. We can change our minds. It can be transformative. It can also trap us.

We are living at the tail end of the most dramatic period of technological advancement in human history, fueled by the ongoing extraction and combustion of non-renewable fossil fuels. Our generational wisdom is that of infinite growth, infinite possibility, infinite potential, and the stories that captured this optimistic zeitgeist became embedded in the expectations of multiple generations. Star Trek is a prime offender: a beautiful, expansive vision of a future that was never in the cards for humanity, yet nonetheless continues to guide political and economic expectations. Energy is what makes our current form of civilization possible, and we are entering a epoch of declining resources. We will have renewable energy, but it cannot replace the artificial fertilizers we use in lieu of regenerative farming practices. We will have electric cars, but we will extract the raw materials to build them by burning fossil hydrocarbons. We will have wind turbines, but the plastics that they’re made from will always be derived from naphtha. All of these resources are finite.

Our species has lived on this planet, in its modern genetic configuration, for roughly 300000 years. Assuming 20 years per generation, that’s 15000 generations. We’ve been burning oil since the 1850’s—that’s less than 10 generations, or 0.06% of the time that we’ve existed. Industrial civilization feels like humankind’s ultimate destiny but it’s a fluke, a miniscule deviation from a mean that’s been lost from our collective cultural memory. The past hundred and fifty years have been but a dream, and we can already see how it may soon become a nightmare. We’re going to wake up, as a species, whether we like it or not, as the physical and ecological basis of our global civilization disappears from beneath us like so much melting arctic sea ice. It’s a terrifying prospect, and a thrilling one. Once we can again see the true natural limits within which we must operate, all kinds of new possibilities will present themselves. Limits, it turns out, breed creativity, and we’ll have new cultural narratives, new guiding principles, and new ways of relating to each other and our environment. As we have always done, we’ll tell stories to make sense of the world, our place in it, and the future we envision, but they will look radically different from those told over the past hundred years.

We don’t have to wait. We can engage with the future before we collide with it. We can take a sober accounting of our predicament and ask ourselves “ok, what now?” I can think of dozens of answers to the question. For years now, its been a common refrain that ‘its easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism’, but why not imagine something else entirely? The future is ours to reinvent, but we have to remember how to envision it first.