What are today’s FIRST limits on innovation? Ethical or practical?

This is a collage of two different posts I have found, heavily re-elaborated in my own words. Both explain well a central theme in my thoughts and work, that is the Future of Technological Society and the role and limits of renewable energy, as summarized in this quote:

“You see the great benefits in medicine, communications, and other areas, but you wonder about privacy, economics, and society. It may be, though, that future questions about uses of technology will not be ethical but practical."

Current civilization is a once in a (planet) lifetime

The last two hundred years are not representative at all of what we can do from now on.

The current world was built, and is still totally dependent, on the consumption of amounts of fossil fuels that took millions of years to produce, under unique, irrepeatable conditions. Not two centuries. Not even twenty, or two hundred centuries. That is what “non-renewable” means.

If fossil fuels “just” become too expensive to mine, process, transport and use, the whole world as it is today cannot function anymore. Because all the transportation and electricity it needs will become more expensive and less available, leading to even greater inequality and social tensions than today. Or, as one of those posts puts it, “first crisis to hit will be finance [and] it will hit so hard to make any other crises… feel like an afterthought”.

We are hardwired to do more, and so is the world we have built

The deep reason why we not only consumed a non replaceable resource too fast, but also, too often, in… suboptimal ways seems to be biological: we are biologically hardwired to want more. More of everything, as long as it is more. Including obesity, political instability, anxiety, precariousness, opioids, inequality… The entire global economy is built on growth of GDP, which is the extreme synthesis of this huge limitation of ours. To mention just the biggest examples closer to my own line of work, think 5G networks, driverless cars, and of course the Internet of Too Many Billions of Likely Useless Things.

Renewables are not renewables. And depend on fossil fuels

Thermodynamics still rules reality, and what it says is that no energy source is fully renewable. Reality also says that the whole world cannot upgrade to windmills, solar panels or fuel cells, without burning (lots of) fossil fuels, to mine and ship from all over the planet the necessary raw, and then manufacture and ship the final products, all over the planet again.

Renewables cannot maintain current lifestyles

Technically speaking, we could solve the end of affordable fossil fuels by “simply” living again as in the 18th century. Renewable energy is big because it is a promise that our current lifestyles and consumption levels can continue unchanged. But this is nonsense, due to mere ignorance about what energy, energy returns and energy density really are. Fossil fuels have some qualities that no other energy source can emulate. Not at the same scale and price, at least.

The consequence is that yes, we must transition to use as much “renewables” as possible. But that still means “a huge simplification from our present lives”. If nothing else, because production and deployment of renewable energy systems should take precedence worldwide, at least for some years, over production of clothes, cars, cosmetics, cement, smartphones, weapons… and pretty much everything else but food, medicines and shelter.

Technological innovation will save us. It will, right?

It depends. It depends on how fast and how often it can happen. It depends on the actual possibility to innovate. Above all, technological innovation depends on what one calls, wants and can afford to call “technology” and “innovation”.

Historically, we have lived in an almost steady state for what, 99% of our presence on the planet? Then modern world burst out thanks, see above, to one-time availability of non-renewable resources. Plastics, transistors and container ships to move their countless final applications worldwide can exist only alongside affordable oceans of fossil fuels.

The meaning of words is crucial here. Some things that we don’t even call technology anymore, from combines and container ships to electric heating, are technology just like smartphones. Yes, digital technology can radically transform any sector of human activity (in the right ways, please). But technology is much more than “digital”. What we call, or hope will be, technological innovation can be very, very different from the near-future technology that will be most needed, or actually feasible.

So, what remains?

Without affordable fossil fuels, the Silicon Valley subspecies of innovation and technology may need to leave the front stage to “capacity for renovation”. That would be the development of appropriate, that is actually useful and actually deployable technology. I mean stuff like:

• efficient wind turbines made of… local wood. * farms using drones to monitor… horsedrawn farm equipment
• container ships powered by… totally new types of sails.
• (add your proposals in the comments, please!)

Summing up, the main challenges ahead seem to be in these two quotes those posts:

• First “understand what we will be able to make, given the laws of thermodynamics and the economy. In that order
• Second, “more than anything, probably, we have to ask if [a world so different and simplified] would be such a bad thing”