The Structure of the Upcoming Content: Our Past, Our Present, Our Future

In this second episode I describe the three main sections of the upcoming content. The first section will be about the human race's past - the last 250 years, during which our consumption of just about everything has been multiplying by two every 22 years or so. This has been an extraordinary age, the only time like it in all of the human race's history, a time with no limits. Much of the first section will be an assessment of the sources of the energy that we consume today - roughly sixty thousand Calories per person per day - and whether it is likely that in the long term (say, two hundred years from now, or perhaps sooner) we are likely to be able to continue obtaining sixty thousand Calories per person from any combination of sources, and even to continue multiplying by two. After many investigations of coal, oil, gas, wind, solar, nuclear, and our crops and forests, as well as other sources, the answer is no: it appears that whether or not we consume more energy over the next decades, two hundred years from now we will be back down to current levels, or perhaps at half the current energy consumption. This will bring us to the second section, which concerns the human race's present; the transition where the regular multiplication ends and other things begin. What patterns could the human race follow now, if not regular multiplication, and how should we interpret current world events and trends? The third section will be about the human race's future: what we can say about it now, how to prepare ourselves and our children and grandchildren for it, and what is the meaning of all these dramatic events?

One correction: At one point I said something about some plants doing a factor of two better at harvesting the sun's energy. It's true that some plants do better than others, but the factor of two is in the amount of water they consume. Some plants including corn consume half as much water as most others, including most crops.

Recorded August 16, 2025. Episode 2.