(عربي) We live in an exception, the optimism inspired by technological advances is about to end, for reasons that were once motives for these advances. One of these reasons, the ghost of non-replenishable resources’ end, mainly the end of oil, looks visible on the horizon. I’ll call the fossil fuel in this article “the exceptional energy”, as the world after it wouldn’t surely be a world without energy, but it will be full of other priorities that were created in the exceptional time and that would clash over the remaining alternative energy sources. It is not going to be as easy as it is today to sustain the current huge population on earth, nor the industries that help to feed them or to provide them with medications. Such priorities may conflict with others such as the vast entertainment industry, the transportation industry, and even with humanity’s huge military arsenal and military industries. Also, the relationship between technology and science doesn’t seem to go on a fruitful path forever and hence doesn’t necessarily be always able to help with critical issues such as the end of fossil fuel energy. All these reasons could put an end to the exception in which we live right now..
Technology helped to increase the human population, but the increased population also meant increasing all the other bills for humanity. Each new technology needs to be produced, consumed, and sustained for a larger population than before, and all that consumes more energy – exceptional energy mainly. Medicine advances, our pains reduce, we live longer, reproduce more, and consume more, but at the same time, we run faster towards the determined moment of the maximum consumption peak of non-replenishable resources. The technology that humans developed to make them live longer and easier doesn’t necessarily affect humanity’s ability to face nature in other aspects, it could be a dead end. Humans need more non-replenishable energy too, they need more exceptional energy.
There’s no guarantee that humans to always have the technology and the energy that enables them to move across the two far ends of the planet using a huge aircraft propelled by jet engines that work with fossil fuels or to enlighten, warm, cool thousands of megacities around the planet.
Technology from writing to nanotechnology has been helping science, and science in turn helps develop more advanced technology. They always were like bike pedals, and many people are betting on that bike to keep going at the same pace. But actually, it is not always going forward, and if it was moving, then it is not necessarily going to move in the same acceleration. Many scientific fields seem totally stagnant today, and the impact of new research and new patents seem to become “less disruptive”. In addition to that, the more development happens, the more difficult it becomes to make a new significant contribution.
The entertainment industry may not seem to have anything to do with the path of humanity toward the future, but it also represents another absurd drainage of technology and energy. It consumes our exceptional energy, consumes more of the processing power of the brains that we have, and it reserves a huge share of all the technologies that are being developed and all the resources required for them. Industries of specific types of foods, alcohol, drugs, and porn, then mobile phones (the essential phone function only represents a tiny bit of what mobile phones are used for today), TVs, airplanes (for tourism and entertainment purposes), cars, games and more technologies that seem to be essential today, but it was never essential in terms of our ancient life or the life of other creatures on the planet (maybe even in other planets). Everything that has been designed to make life easier by our current standards or for any of the 7 billion humans to make them “happy” surely has a huge emotional value, but it is often a drain of exceptional energy.
The optimism that there is a solution for everything and that the way to the future would be as prosperous as it was in the last decades is just a baseless bias towards a limited and exceptional period under the light of exceptional energy. There’s no guarantee that we’ll keep finding more oil and gas. Alternative energy will present a new model, a new philosophy, a new system of consumption, and even new political regimes, but according to the laws of physics and the laws of living on a planet like Earth, the main alternative energy which is the solar energy should never have the same glare and vigor of the fossil fuel. The same reason why we live on a relatively cold and humid planet is that solar energy may never be able to move life as fast as fossil fuel energy does.
The other challenge is that rockets and explosive materials will live long after the last drop of gas gets burned in the last engine, which represents another rope that technology wraps around its neck. The way to replace exceptional energy will be surrounded by flames. Human nations may not only live without sufficient energy, but they may keep an exceptional power of destroying the civilization structure of each other, and when it’s not possible to compete by progressing forward, the competition would be to destroy others to the ground, sending them decades or even centuries back (isn’t that happening now?). The war industry consumes exceptional energy, human brains, and resources, to keep a destruction technology that unfortunately will last longer than any other technology. Previous wars’ land mines are still exploding today, and as military expenditures seem to be the latest thing that humans think of reducing, then probably the last remaining amounts of exceptional energy will be dedicated largely to military usage which may give some predictions about the next world war.
The critical moment for technology fate would probably start with the gas and oil peaks that Hubbert predicted. We may now have already passed that peak for oil, and we are going to reach that peak for gas soon. But what humans cannot renew is not only energy but many metals that are crucial for many industries, including the industries that are required to manufacture alternative energy equipment. Mining and metals industries would also need a considerable share of the new alternative energy sources. Currently, there does not seem to be any consideration of distributing exceptional resources according to the future needs of humanity, what is marginal or even destructive of our industries may consume a bigger share of what is rare, important, and exceptional for the future.
What makes us view the world differently while we leave the exceptional situation – that fossil fuel had put us into – when compared to life before the industrial revolution is the nature of our requirements and priorities. The last two centuries’ legacy is incomparable to the 19th century or even the 20th. The exorbitant bill of what we have today and the huge population, increase the cost of life and the pain of the disaster. Does humanity have a single strategic mind that can decide to choose between the energy share for one or two years of a vaccines factory or a military unit? Such a decision may soon be required when fuel becomes strategic. Humans are still politically divided in an unchangeable pre-historic pattern of identity formations. When humans first reached the level of science and technology that enabled them to move very fast for 2 centuries or a bit more, there was no questioning of priorities, but then, it is becoming clear that the prioritization of technologies and industries is required, and also, it’s going to be required to prioritize what we should maintain and sustain of the technologies, the machinery and the institutions that we have. We don’t feel that we need to repair things today just because it’s easy to replace them, but that’s only easy because we have exceptional energy.
Anyone who thinks that the exceptional energy would last more, they are only postponing the peak moment and the moment of resource depletion, but no one actually can say that the oil reserves on the planet are endlessly abundant, nor that there’s any possibility of having a similar energy. Oil alternatives are available, but they are less abundant and the world would be totally different while operating on a different energy. I still find some logic in the extinction rebellion and other similar groups’ agendas, even though they are aiming for a completely different purpose, but while there is no agenda for the awareness of the end of petrol, the “stop the oil” agenda seems to be – although not intended – a realistic agenda for countries that don’t have high reserves of oil and would like to shift from relying on it within the next decade. Also, regardless of how realistic is it to change the climate if U.S. and Europe stopped using oil, it is realistic that the time to shift from one exceptional energy to another one is limited. What’s possible today may not be possible tomorrow. And regardless of the future energy, the technological demand for today’s energy will be inherited as a demand for future energy too.
I rarely use “we” when talking about humanity, as I don’t believe there’s much to unify humans except for being a species that faces nature, which is the case here.
[1] Park, Michael, Erin Leahey, and Russell J. Funk. “Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time.” Nature 613.7942 (2023): 138-144.
[2] Priest, Tyler. “Hubbert’s peak: the great debate over the end of oil.” Historical studies in the natural sciences 44.1 (2012): 37-79.
[3] Jowitt, Simon M., Gavin M. Mudd, and John FH Thompson. “Future availability of non-renewable metal resources and the influence of environmental, social, and governance conflicts on metal production.” Communications Earth & Environment 1.1 (2020): 13.