22
the chemical energy they gather, change, and store in their tissues directly and indirectly support all animal life on earth.
The energy stored in renewable plant-based biofuels (wood, charcoal, peat, etc.)
has been civilization’s energetic limiting factor for millennia. (This changed as
Industrial Revolution mining practices created access to ancient underground stores
of concentrated fossil fuels.) Heterotrophs, including all animals, eat plants and convert that chemical energy to power their own bodies’ metabolisms and locomotion.
A continuous supply of nutritious food creates an energy web where innumerable
different organisms eat and are eaten. The primary solar energy passing through this
web continues to sustain the majority of life of earth. Almost everything produced by
humans during the last 10,000 years is a channeling of excess primary solar energy,
a surplus available beyond what is needed to survive. Whether through the directed
efforts of beasts of burden or magnifying the effects of the relatively limited human
strength through simple machines, human settlements were sustained for millennia
by agrarian economies (Smil 2008). Today’s nearly 8 billion people, living in the
midst of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, continue to be utterly dependent on our
sun for survival. And as long as humankind inhabits the earth as we will take advantage of the “almost inconceivably minute fraction [a one hundred and forty thousand
millionth] of the Sun’s heat and light reaching the earth…the source of energy from
which all the mechanical actions of organic life, and nearly every motion of inorganic nature at its surface, are derived…” Kelvin (1854 trans. Lindsay 1976a).
Although each new scientific discovery reveals deeper, more precise, and more
sophisticated insights into nature’s workings and the constant interplay of its forces
at work, our day-to-day lived reality continues to largely reinforce many of the early
findings of theoretical and empirical scientists working since the scientific revolution began.
2.4 Sharing Knowledge Accelerates
Energy-Intensive Inventions
Individual contributions from Copernicus through Newton laid the foundations for
modern science. This Scientific Revolution reached a critical point in the midseventeenth century when discoveries of new provable natural laws moved from
publication in expensive and relatively rare books to their systematic collection and
dissemination available to wider audiences. In 1660 Charles II granted a royal charter to a collective of “natural philosophers” working across diverse scientific
domains to establish the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge.
The Royal Society published the first peer-reviewed scientific journal in 1665. It
remains the oldest scientific journal still in publication.
The dissemination and free exchange of reproducible experiments and verified
facts, since then, have resulted in a steadily growing number of trusted, specialized,
peer-reviewed scientific journals and apply industrial practice publications. The
2 The Energy Essential: Physical Forces Animate All Things
the chemical energy they gather, change, and store in their tissues directly and indirectly support all animal life on earth.
The energy stored in renewable plant-based biofuels (wood, charcoal, peat, etc.)
has been civilization’s energetic limiting factor for millennia. (This changed as
Industrial Revolution mining practices created access to ancient underground stores
of concentrated fossil fuels.) Heterotrophs, including all animals, eat plants and convert that chemical energy to power their own bodies’ metabolisms and locomotion.
A continuous supply of nutritious food creates an energy web where innumerable
different organisms eat and are eaten. The primary solar energy passing through this
web continues to sustain the majority of life of earth. Almost everything produced by
humans during the last 10,000 years is a channeling of excess primary solar energy,
a surplus available beyond what is needed to survive. Whether through the directed
efforts of beasts of burden or magnifying the effects of the relatively limited human
strength through simple machines, human settlements were sustained for millennia
by agrarian economies (Smil 2008). Today’s nearly 8 billion people, living in the
midst of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, continue to be utterly dependent on our
sun for survival. And as long as humankind inhabits the earth as we will take advantage of the “almost inconceivably minute fraction [a one hundred and forty thousand
millionth] of the Sun’s heat and light reaching the earth…the source of energy from
which all the mechanical actions of organic life, and nearly every motion of inorganic nature at its surface, are derived…” Kelvin (1854 trans. Lindsay 1976a).
Although each new scientific discovery reveals deeper, more precise, and more
sophisticated insights into nature’s workings and the constant interplay of its forces
at work, our day-to-day lived reality continues to largely reinforce many of the early
findings of theoretical and empirical scientists working since the scientific revolution began.
2.4 Sharing Knowledge Accelerates
Energy-Intensive Inventions
Individual contributions from Copernicus through Newton laid the foundations for
modern science. This Scientific Revolution reached a critical point in the midseventeenth century when discoveries of new provable natural laws moved from
publication in expensive and relatively rare books to their systematic collection and
dissemination available to wider audiences. In 1660 Charles II granted a royal charter to a collective of “natural philosophers” working across diverse scientific
domains to establish the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge.
The Royal Society published the first peer-reviewed scientific journal in 1665. It
remains the oldest scientific journal still in publication.
The dissemination and free exchange of reproducible experiments and verified
facts, since then, have resulted in a steadily growing number of trusted, specialized,
peer-reviewed scientific journals and apply industrial practice publications. The
2 The Energy Essential: Physical Forces Animate All Things