How the World Really Works: The Science Behind How We Got Here and Where We’re Going

Book Preface

Every era has its claims to uniqueness, but while the experiences of the past three generations—that is, the decades since the end of the Second World War—may not have been as fundamentally transformative as those of the three generations preceding the beginning of the First World War, there has been no shortage of unprecedented events and advances. Most impressively, more people now enjoy a higher standard of living, and do so for more years and in better health, than at any time in history. Yet these beneficiaries are still a minority (only about a fifth) of the world’s population, whose total count is approaching 8 billion people.
The second achievement to admire is the unprecedented expansion of our understanding of both the physical world and all forms of life. Our knowledge extends from grand generalizations about complex systems on the universal (galaxies, stars) and planetary (atmosphere, hydrosphere, biosphere) scale to processes at the level of atoms and genes: lines etched into the surface of the most powerful microprocessor are only about twice the diameter of human DNA. We have translated this understanding into a still-expanding array of machines, devices, procedures, protocols, and interventions that sustain modern civilization, and the enormity of our aggregate knowledge—and the ways we have deployed it in our service—is far beyond the comprehension of any individual mind.
You could meet real Renaissance men on Florence’s Piazza Signoria in 1500—but not for too long after that. By the middle of the 18th century two French savants, Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert, could still gather a group of knowledgeable contributors to sum up the era’s understanding in fairly exhaustive entries in their multi-volume Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers. A few generations later the extent and the specialization of our knowledge advanced by orders of magnitude, with fundamental discoveries ranging from magnetic induction (Michael Faraday in 1831, the basis of electricity generation) to plant metabolism (Justus von Liebig, 1840, the basis of crop fertilization) to theorizing about electromagnetism (James Clerk Maxwell, 1861, the basis of all wireless communication).
In 1872, a century after the appearance of the last volume of the Encyclopédie, any collection of knowledge had to resort to the superficial treatment of a rapidly expanding range of topics, and, one and a half centuries later, it is impossible to sum up our understanding even within narrowly circumscribed specialties: such terms as “physics” or “biology” are fairly meaningless labels, and experts in particle physics would find it very hard to understand even the first page of a new research paper in viral immunology. Obviously, this atomization of knowledge has not made any public decision-making easier. Highly specialized branches of modern science have become so arcane that many people employed in them are forced to train until their early or mid-thirties in order to join the new priesthood.
They may share long apprenticeships, but too often they cannot agree on the best course of action. The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic made it clear that disagreements among experts may extend even to such seemingly simple decisions as wearing a face mask. By the end of March 2020 (three months into the pandemic) the World Health Organization still advised against doing so unless a person was infected, and the reversal came only in early June 2020. How can those without any special knowledge take sides or make any sense of these disputes that now often end in retractions or the dismantling of previously dominant claims?
Still, such continuing uncertainties and disputes do not excuse the extent to which most people misunderstand the fundamental workings of the modern world. After all, appreciating how wheat is grown (chapter 2) or steel is made (chapter 3) or realizing that globalization is neither new nor inevitable (chapter 4) are not the same as asking that somebody comprehend femtochemistry (the study of chemical reactions at timescales of 10-15 seconds, Ahmed Zewail, Nobel Prize in 1999) or polymerase chain reactions (the rapid copying of DNA, Kary Mullis, Nobel Prize in 1993).
Why then do most people in modern societies have such a superficial knowledge about how the world really works? The complexities of the modern world are an obvious explanation: people are constantly interacting with black boxes, whose relatively simple outputs require little or no comprehension of what is taking place inside the box. This is as true of such ubiquitous devices as mobile phones and laptops (typing a simple query does the trick) as it is of mass-scale procedures such as vaccination (certainly the best planetary example of 2021, with, typically, the rolling up of a sleeve being the only comprehensible part). But explanations of this comprehension deficit go beyond the fact that the sweep of our knowledge encourages specialization, whose obverse is an increasingly shallow understanding—even ignorance—of the basics.
Urbanization and mechanization have been two important reasons for this comprehension deficit. Since the year 2007, more than half of humanity has lived in cities (more than 80 percent in all affluent countries), and unlike in the industrializing cities of the 19th and early 20th centuries, jobs in modern urban areas are largely in services. Most modern urbanites are thus disconnected not only from the ways we produce our food but also from the ways we build our machines and devices, and the growing mechanization of all productive activity means that only a very small share of the global population now engages in delivering civilization’s energy and the materials that comprise our modern world.
America now has only about 3 million men and women (farm owners and hired labor) directly engaged in producing food—people who actually plow the fields, sow the seeds, apply fertilizer, eradicate weeds, harvest the crops (picking fruit and vegetables is the most labor-intensive part of the process), and take care of the animals. That is less than 1 percent of the country’s population, and hence it is no wonder that most Americans have no idea, or only some vague notion, about how their bread or their cuts of meat came to be. Combines harvest wheat—but do they also harvest soybeans or lentils? How long does it take for a tiny piglet to become a pork chop: weeks or years? The vast majority of Americans simply don’t know—and they have plenty of company. China is the world’s largest producer of steel—smelting, casting, and rolling nearly a billion tons of it every year—but all of that is done by less than 0.25 percent of China’s 1.4 billion people. Only a tiny percentage of the Chinese population will ever stand close to a blast furnace, or see the continuous casting mill with its red ribbons of hot, moving steel. And this disconnect is the case across the world.
The other major reason for the poor, and declining, understanding of those fundamental processes that deliver energy (as food or as fuels) and durable materials (whether metals, non-metallic minerals, or concrete) is that they have come to be seen as old-fashioned—if not outdated—and distinctly unexciting compared to the world of information, data, and images. The proverbial best minds do not go into soil science and do not try their hand at making better cement; instead they are attracted to dealing with disembodied information, now just streams of electrons in myriads of microdevices. From lawyers and economists to code writers and money managers, their disproportionately high rewards are for work completely removed from the material realities of life on earth.
Moreover, many of these data worshippers have come to believe that these electronic flows will make those quaint old material necessities unnecessary. Fields will be displaced by urban high-rise agriculture, and synthetic products will ultimately eliminate the need to grow any food at all. Dematerialization, powered by artificial intelligence, will end our dependence on shaped masses of metals and processed minerals, and eventually we might even do without the Earth’s environment: who needs it if we are going to terraform Mars? Of course, these are all not just grossly premature predictions, they are fantasies fostered by a society where fake news has become common and where reality and fiction have commingled to such an extent that gullible minds, susceptible to cult-like visions, believe what keener observers in the past would have mercilessly perceived as borderline or frank delusion.
None of the people reading this book will relocate to Mars; all of us will continue to eat staple grain crops grown in soil on large expanses of agricultural land, rather than in the skyscrapers imagined by the proponents of so-called urban agriculture; none of us will live in a dematerialized world that has no use for such irreplaceable natural services as evaporating water or pollinating plants. But delivering these existential necessities will be an increasingly challenging task, because a large share of humanity lives in conditions that the affluent minority left behind generations ago, and because the growing demand for energy and materials has been stressing the biosphere so much and so fast that we have imperiled its capability to keep its flows and stores within the boundaries compatible with its long-term functioning.
To give just a single key comparison, in 2020 the average annual per capita energy supply of about 40 percent of the world’s population (3.1 billion people, which includes nearly all people in sub-Saharan Africa) was no higher than the rate achieved in both Germany and France in 1860! In order to approach the threshold of a dignified standard of living, those 3.1 billion people will need at least to double—but preferably triple—their per capita energy use, and in doing so multiply their electricity supply, boost their food production, and build essential urban, industrial, and transportation infrastructures. Inevitably, these demands will subject the biosphere to further degradation.
And how will we deal with unfolding climate change? There is now a widespread consensus that we need to do something to prevent many highly undesirable consequences, but what kind of action, what sort of behavioral transformation would work best? For those who ignore the energetic and material imperatives of our world, those who prefer mantras of green solutions to understanding how we have come to this point, the prescription is easy: just decarbonize—switch from burning fossil carbon to converting inexhaustible flows of renewable energies. The real wrench in the works: we are a fossil-fueled civilization whose technical and scientific advances, quality of life, and prosperity rest on the combustion of huge quantities of fossil carbon, and we cannot simply walk away from this critical determinant of our fortunes in a few decades, never mind years.
Complete decarbonization of the global economy by 2050 is now conceivable only at the cost of unthinkable global economic retreat, or as a result of extraordinarily rapid transformations relying on near-miraculous technical advances. But who is going, willingly, to engineer the former while we are still lacking any convincing, practical, affordable global strategy and technical means to pursue the latter? What will actually happen? The gap between wishful thinking and reality is vast, but in a democratic society no contest of ideas and proposals can proceed in rational ways without all sides sharing at least a modicum of relevant information about the real world, rather than trotting out their biases and advancing claims disconnected from physical possibilities.