Numbers Don't Lie: 71 Things You Need to Know About the World

by Vaclav Smil

The speed of intercontinental travel rose from about 35 kilometers per hour for large ocean liners in 1900 to 885 km/h for the Boeing 707 in 1958, an average rise of 5.6 percent a year. But speed of jetliners has remained essentially constant ever since—the Boeing 787 cruises just a few percent faster than the 707. Between 1973 and 2014, the fuel-conversion efficiency of new US passenger cars (even after excluding monstrous SUVs and pickups) rose at an annual rate of just 2.5 percent, from 13.5 to 37 miles per gallon (that’s from 17.4 to 6.4 liters per 100 kilometers). And finally, the energy cost of steel (coke, natural gas, and electricity), our civilization’s most essential metal, was reduced from about 50 gigajoules per ton to less than 20 between 1950 and 2010—that is, an annual rate of about –1.7 percent. Energy, material, and transportation fundamentals that enable the functioning of modern civilization and that circumscribe its scope of action are improving steadily but slowly. Gains in performance mostly range from 1.5 to 3 percent a year, as do the declines in cost. And so, outside the microchip-dominated world, innovation simply does not obey Moore’s Law, proceeding at rates that are lower by an order of magnitude.