Vaclav Smil

Energy and Civilization - A History

333.7909 SMI Beaverton Library 2017

Index skimmed. I might check this out again if I need some of the data, but more likely I'll use original sources.

• p12 Energy density MJ/kg
  • Vegetables very low, grains high, oils and fats very high
  • Just the thing if I'm hiding food before a famine - not if I'm planning a healthy diet
• p13 Preindustrial northern cities required 100x wooded area for charcoal
• p253 Diesel compression ratio 14-24, efficiency 50%, Otto Cycle gasoline ratio 7-10, efficiency 25%
• p339 "junction field effect transistor invented by Shockley" ... heh

Invention and Innovation

A Brief History of Hype and Failure

600 SMI Beaverton Library 2023

Read whole book. Perhaps should have read something else.

• Inventions that turned from welcome to undesirable
• 019 Thomas Midgley Jr. (1889-1944) (antiknock) leaded gasoline, chlorofluorocarbon refrigerants
• 036 Paul Hermann Müller 1939 DDT dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane
• 066 Airships / dirigibles
  • 069 LZ-1 1900 / LZ-13 Hansa 1912 45K km 399 flights / LZ-17 bomber 1914, 77/115 shot down in 1917
  • 071 1928-1937 Graf Zeppelin 1.7M km / 1936 LZ-129 Hindenberg 1937 Lakehurst catastrophe
  • 075 recent proposals mostly vaporware

• 079 Nuclear Fission: Nautilus 1952-1955 launch --> Shippingport 1957

  • 085 Fast breeders
  • 086 power demand doubled every decade before 1970, 50% in 1970s, 33% in 1980s, 25% 1990s, 9% 2000s, no growth 2010s

    • wp resumed 7 Nov 2001 to May 2003 (Air France) November 2003 (British Airways)

    • wp 810 kg overload (negligible effect)
    • wp Continental DC-10 wear strip fallen off, incorrectly manufactured and installed Houston 9 July 2000
    • wp many other contributing causes
    • wp 70 other tire-related incidents on Concorde after 1976
    • wp Continental paid 70% of compensation claims
  • 100 drag coefficient square of speed, peaks just above Mach 1, most airliners fly Mach 0.85 L/D 18, M1 15, M2 10
  • 100 787 maximum range 14000 km, Concorde 6700 km, less than transpacific
  • 100 claustrophobic, payload 10% of gross weight, half of 747
  • 101 3x more fuel per passRecentChangesenger than 747, sonic boom 50x louder than 747 takeoff

  • 104 Boom Supersonic Smil smells ridiculous hype

    • book says new factory in 2022, first 1/3 scale Overture rollout in 2025, certification in 2029
    • website says factory production launch in 2024 ... and lots of CGI pictures
• 109 Vacuum tube travel (2013 Musk Hyperloop) 200yo concept
  • 111 Hyperloop 100Pa vacuum

  • 112 1825 Edinburgh Star article promised London to Edinburgh (600 km) in 5 minutes

  • khl calculates to average speed 7200 km/hr (2 km/sec) peak accel > 2.7 gees

  • 115 Brunel
  • 116 Freshman Robert Goddard essay 1904 maglev NYC to Boston (310 km) in 10 minutes, posthumous patent
  • 116 French immigrant electrician Emile Bachelet filed maglev train patent in 1910 (issued 1912), got more attention
  • 117 Siberian physicist Boris Petrovich Weinberg 1911 to 1913,
    • 32 cm diameter 20 m radius ring tunnel, 10 kg carriage, 6 km/hr (100 meter/minute, 1.6 meter/second )
    • proposed 800 to 1000 km/h full-scale
  • 120 Branson proposed Virgin Hyperloop from Cheyenne to Houston
• 123 Nitrogen Fixing Cereals
  • 127 bacteria decompose nitrates to N₂O , 300x worse greenhouse gas at 100 year scale

  • 128 legume crops nodules containing nitrogen-fixing Rhizobium bacteria

  • 133 Azotic Technologies Envita (gluconoacetobacter diazotrophicus) claims 5% to 20% yield increases, Practical Farm Research claims varied results from a few percent to significant yield loss

  • 134 in the end, Smil claims transgenic crops won't be acceptable in the market (never ever EVER?)
• 135 Controlled Nuclear Fusion ... dismissed because progress is slow and expensive
• 152 BCI (noninvasive) Brain Computer Interface, self driving cars, electric cars, electronic health records
• 155 Aduhelm (aducanumab) based on amyloid hypothesis
• 150 Yann Lecun NYU "All of AI has a proof-of-concept-to-production gap"
• 164 2021 IBM announces 2nm chip, 10 atoms wide, thus Smil argues the end is in sight
  • er, no, we are also stacking transistors vertically (like the Samsung 2TB SSD in this computer), which also makes system interconnects smaller and faster. In the (seemingly absurd) extreme, a one millimeter full-3D cube can hold as many 4 nanometer pitch transistors as a one-layer "planar chip" 0.5 meters on a side ... and use 160 times less power, since there is far less capacitance to drive.
  • I don't know how to do that, but I did not know how to make 8 trillion 2-bit memory transistors for less than $50 in 1988, when I spent more than $1000 for an 80 MB Seagate hard drive. As Feynman taught us, there is plenty of room at the bottom.
• 165 rapid increase in population and starvation in Africa - yep. It is politically incorrect to speculate why populations increase faster in starvation areas. It is seemingly NOT incorrect to speculate how China went from famine to relative prosperity in tandem with below-replacement-rate birthrates. Indeed, with 25% of young people unemployed, at ages usually corresponding to the start of families, a skeptic might assume that this is the intent of the Chinese leadership. Me, I believe one should never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by distraction.
• 167 comparison of other advances with Moore's Law - yes, most things advance more slowly. However, biotech is advancing faster than Moore's Law, and will bring surprises, hopefully mostly desirable surprises.

A useful counter-opinion to Vaclav Smil is (well, was) Hans Rosling and his Gapminder Foundation (which still is). [ My own opinion is that our Sun produces 3.8e26 watts, the Earth's biosphere harnesses about 2.8e15 watts with photosynthesis, and 8 billion 20-watt human brains use 1.6e11 watts. Seems like there is plenty of room for improvement, as opposed to doing the same dumb things that kill us in a few parts per billion of the universe's lifespan to date. Yes, we try all the stupid things first, and there are MANY stupid things to try, but occasionally we fail to fail.

• RecentChanges

Pessimistic? Optimistic? Which is more likely to fail to fail?

Speed

How It Explains The World

531.112 SMI . 2025 . Beaverton Lib

• pix: Preface: From Speed's Absence to Singularity

• pxvii speed sensu stricto fundamental physical value

• pxvii speed sensu lato broader change, speed of weight gain, learning, computation, GDP growth, global warming, energy decarbonization

• p001: Introduction

• p001 Hipparchus of Rhodes 2nd century BC, astronomer, mathematician, founder of trigonometry, 12 hour day and night on equinox days

• p001 Eratoshenes estimated diameter of Earth from summer noon solstice, angle between well in Aswan, and Alexandria, 5000 stadia and 7° 12' apart, 40338 km circumference (actually 40,008 km and oblate, 0.8% difference)

• p002 John Harrison's 1772 H5 Chronometer off by ⅓ second per day, half a degree of longitude crossing the Atlantic

• p002 Cesium 133 clock, 9.192631770 GHz, one stable isotope

• p003 Metric standard France December 1799

• p003 Only United States, Liberia, and Myanmar non-metric
• p006 Large Continental plates move a few centimeters per year, and erode a few centimeters per century
• p006 Oldest fossilized aggregations of single-celled Archaean cyanobacteria 3.5 Gya, first complex multicellular animals (sponges and jellyfish-like) 600 Mya
• p007 pre-modern speed range 4 km/h up mountains, to 40 km/h horse (recreational cross-country skiing up to 14 km/h, 80km/h downhill)
• p008 1850 intercity steam trains briefly 100 km/h, also 1902 internal combustion automobiles
• p009 regular transatlantic flight 1958, Boeing 747-100 1969

• p013 sensu lato speed examples can be mass or temperature change divided by time

• p014 China GDP quadrupled between 2000 and 2023
• p016 monetary speed example GDP growth, frequently revised, inadequate measure of real progress

• p016 Napoleon to Moscow, 422K troops east over the Neman River near Kovno, only 10K returned west

• p017 The Taliban controlled Afghanistan hours after the US left in August 2021

• p017 James Watt defined Horsepower in his Blotting and Calculating Book in August 1782

• p018 1 Horsepower is 745.7 watts
• p019 19th century Dutch farmer with 2 good horses and a metal plowshare plowed twice as fast as a Roman farmer with two oxen. A 300 horsepower American tractor 200 times more powerful, can plow a hectare in less than 10 minutes.
• p021 1914 advanced region citizens further from 1814 than 1814 from 1514
• p021 Modern blow molding machine can make 12000 PET (polyethylens terephthalate bottles per hour, compared to 200 glaas bottles per hour in 1900.
• p023 Graph of National Indexes of Economic Complexity from 1995 to 2020
  • Japan #1, USA from 9 to 12, Canada from 22 to 43, China from 46 to 17, Philippines from 70 to 30

  • Canada Economic Complexity Index

  • 28th on trade, most exports were petroleum

• p024 festina lente speed-accuracy trade-off (SAT)

• p025 speed limits increasing (wasteful and dangerous), 7 US states, Ontario, and German autobahn

• Abandoned after Chapter 1. Text doesn't flow, latin neologisms, too difficult to read

• p029 Ch1: Evolution: Non-intuitive time spans and speeds

• p074 Ch2: Organisms: Life's strategies and capabilities

  • p275 note for page 52. Growth Lab (2023). https://atlas.hks.harvard.edu/rankings

.p119 Ch3: Speed Limits in Premodern Societies

.p162 Ch4: The Fast Lane: How modern societies accelerate

.p211 Ch5: Parting Musings: Observations, limits, aspirations

• p225 speed-accuracy trade-off (SAT)
• p228 speed limits increase (costing lives and carbon): 7 US states, Ontario 100 to 110 km/h, Germany Autobahnen unlimited

.p353 Codas