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Like rocks, like water | thesephist.com

thesephist.com · 800 words · saved by 1 readers

For a long time, global supply of energy was limited by the total number of humans in the world. We could only put more energy to work by creating more humans, or by each human working more. And then we mechanized it. As energy supply grew exponentially, we came up with lots of new things we could do now that we could spend a thousand or a million times more energy on something valuable. Things that didn’t make sense to even try before when every joule of energy came from human labor, like invent trains and electric lights and build cities and industrialize farming. Before mechanized energy supply, we could have asked, “What would we ever do with a billion times more energy besides make a billion of the things we already make?” But it turns out there are a lot of things we could do with a billion times more energy. Much of the energy consumed today goes to power human activities that did not exist in current form before the mechanization of energy supply, like trade, transit, and compu

For a long time, global supply of energy was limited by the total number of humans in the world. We could only put more energy to work by creating more humans, or by each human working more. And then we mechanized it. As energy supply grew exponentially, we came up with lots of new things we could do now that we could spend a thousand or a million times more energy on something valuable. Things that didn't make sense to even try before when every joule of energy came from human labor, like invent trains and electric lights and build cities and industrialize farming. Before mechanized energy su

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