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

by Vaclav Smil

My own choice of a single-variable measure for rapid and revealing comparisons of quality of life is infant mortality: the number of deaths during the first year of life that take place per 1,000 live births.

In 1800, less than 2 percent of the world’s population lived in cities; by 1900 the share was still only about 5 percent. By 1950 it had reached 30 percent, and 2007 became the first year when more than half of humanity lived in cities.

512 cities with a population greater than 1 million, with 45 of them larger than 5 million and 31 surpassing 10 million. This largest group has a special name: “megacities.”

Without the low operating costs, high efficiency, high reliability, and great durability of diesel engines, it would have been impossible to reach the extent of globalization that now defines the modern economy.

outside the microchip-dominated world, innovation simply does not obey Moore’s Law, proceeding at rates that are lower by an order of magnitude.

For a long time to come—until all energies used to produce wind turbines and photovoltaic cells come from renewable energy sources—modern civilization will remain fundamentally dependent on fossil fuels.

Our best hope now rests on light-emitting diodes (LEDs). The first ones were invented in 1962 and provided only red light; a decade later came green and then, during the 1990s, high-intensity blue. By coating such blue LEDs with fluorescent phosphors, engineers were able to convert some of the blue light into warmer colors and thus produce white light suitable for indoor illumination.

The first light internal combustion engines were mounted on three- or four-wheel carriages by Karl Benz, Gottlieb Daimler, and Wilhelm Maybach in 1886.

The first modern short-stalked wheat (based on East Asian plants) was released in Japan in 1935. After the Second World War it was brought to the US and given to Norman Borlaug at CIMMYT (the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center in Mexico), and his team produced two high-yielding semi-dwarf varieties (yielding as much grain as straw) in 1962. Borlaug won the Nobel Prize; the world got unprecedented harvests.

Physics is indisputable, but economics rules.

In the two centuries between 1800 and 2000, the transfer of carbon from fossil fuels to the atmosphere increased 650-fold while the population had increased only sixfold!

the four pillars of modern civilization—ammonia, steel, cement, and plastics