Grand Transitions: How the Modern World Was Made

by Vaclav Smil

And, most definitely, our evolutionary experience does not justify any claims about unstoppable progress to ever-greater capabilities: designating our species as Homo deus (Harari 2018) is as unrealistic as is the idea of approaching Singularity (Kurzweil 2017). Our fortunes remain circumscribed by many natural imperatives, and civilization remains vulnerable to catastrophic events, be it the Earth’s encounter with a large asteroid or, as the 2020 SARS-CoV-2 pandemic demonstrated, to recurrent viral diseases that in the age of global travel can engulf the planet in a matter of weeks (Bostrom 2008; Smil 2008a; Li et al. 2020).

Various forms of pollution can be managed, even eliminated, by expensive but effective technical fixes. In contrast, such degradative processes as the depletion of ancient aquifers or widespread loss of biodiversity have no easy technical solutions. And global warming, the ultimate environmental challenge, arising from the grand population, and from nutritional, energetic, and economic transitions, will require unprecedented levels of worldwide commitments as well as technical and socioeconomic adjustments merely to moderate the most worrisome impacts of higher tropospheric temperatures, the ocean’s rise, acidification, and deoxygenation. This challenge may turn out to be beyond our capacity for nimble adjustment: it is now almost certain that we will not be able to limit the increase of average global temperature to less than 1.5°C, the level that is now seen as the maximum compatible with tolerable impacts. Surely no model constructed in 2020 can tell us how we will come out of this by 2050 or 2100. Despite mastering so much we still face the fundamental existential uncertainty.

But in the most fundamental, existential terms—in the dynamics of human population growth, in dominant ways of agricultural production and food supply, in securing energy sources and converting them to power economic growth and the generation of wealth—all premodern societies were marked by a high degree of inertia and pattern persistence.

The key difference is that what took France a century to accomplish was done in China in less than two generations, and even more remarkable is the fact that the trajectory began from incomparably more desperate, truly existential depths of the greatest famine in history. At the same time, this narrative is not such a surprise but rather an excellent example of a late starter’s advantages—mightily aided by nearly four trillion dollars of direct foreign investment and by transfer (legal and illegal) of the latest technical designs.

In nearly all premodern societies, overwhelmingly vegetarian diets (commonly more than 80%, and even more than 90%, of all food energy was derived from plants) were dominated by a few staple crops. Consumption of four major grains (wheat, rice, millet, and corn), and also of tubers in the tropics and in the Andean highlands, was supplemented by a variety of pulses (lentils—one of the oldest cultivated species—peas, beans,

positive category are the elimination of famines, reduced mortalities (particularly in infancy) and lengthened life expectancies, higher per capita incomes, greater accumulations of household wealth, wider opportunities for higher education and for travel, and affordable access to virtually unlimited information. The most challenging negative social outcomes include burdens imposed by aging populations, diffusion of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, increasing intra- and international income disparities, excessive concentration of wealth, poor quality of mass education, a surfeit of dubious information and deliberate misinformation enabled

by the Internet, and, above all, extensive degradation of the biosphere and of its irreplaceable services.

the decline in infant and childhood mortality created “the disequilibrium that triggered not only the fertility transition, but more than anything else reduced the shackles of fatalism which lay behind secularization, the rise of the modern economy, and even the knowledge explosion” (Kirk 1996, 386). But

As Jane O’Sullivan observed, “interventions to promote prosperity are less cost-effective in priming this cycle than interventions for fertility reduction. The data do not support the claim that ‘development is the best contraception.’ On the contrary, they present a strong case that ‘contraception is the best development stimulus’ ” (O’Sullivan 2013, 1).

this one was new and interesting to me- do something else besides having lots of babies drives development. Guess it goes a bit against/along? with educating women being the best contraceptive

the United Kingdom’s economic primacy during the 19th century were already open. By 1700 the United Kingdom derived about 75% of its energy from coal—while in France and Germany coal became the dominant fuel only during the second half of the 19th century, and China began to derive more than half of its primary energy from fossil fuels (mostly from coal) only after 1970

did not realize how much of a head start UK had with the industrial revolution

When Gutenberg used his invention of movable type to print the first pages of his Bible in 1454, he could not foresee that during the remaining 45 years of the 15th-century European printers would publish more than 11,000 new editions, that the number of new titles would rise by an order of magnitude during the second half of the 16th century (to about 135,000), and that they would reach nearly 650,000 during the second half of the 18th century (Buringh and van Zanden 2009). Book printing, not textiles or tools, was the first mass-scale industry of the early modern era whose impact (is the Enlightenment conceivable without it?) was not obvious at the time of its origins. Similarly,

The 1950 census showed only 7.6 million draft animals, and a decade later the USDA stopped counting them. The epochal transition from horses, animate prime movers that provided draft power for millennia, was thus completed in the United States in about 80 years, and most of it was accomplished in less than half of that time, between 1917 and 1957. This rapid shift looks even more impressive because it had to be accompanied (or preceded) by the development of necessary infrastructures to extract, transport, and process liquid fuels.

Jetliners had eliminated shipping as a commercial option within a decade, one of the fastest epochal transitions on record. The first wide-body jet, Boeing 747, had entered the service in 1969, making it impossible to resurrect any regular large-scale ocean-borne traffic. Starting with the Mayflower, average crossing speeds increased by about two-thirds during the two centuries between 1620 and 1820. First steamers more than doubled it, and by 1952 the SS United States (with 66 km/h) was nearly 20 times faster than the Mayflower. Compared to the sailing time of some 960 hours during the 1820s, flight time of less than eight hours is two orders of magnitudes shorter, an overall reduction of 99.2%. If it ever comes, affordable supersonic travel could reduce the transit (as did the wasteful, expensive, and abandoned Concorde) to just over three hours.

But Edison firmly believed that electric cars would prevail, and his company offered Henry Ford, at that time employed as the chief engineer at Detroit Edison Illuminating Company, the general superintendence but, according to Ford’s own description, “only on the condition that I would give up my gas engine and devote myself to something really useful” (Ford 1922, 24). At the beginning of the new century it was not clear which mode of locomotion would eventually prevail. Odds were against steam-powered cars (too heavy, too tricky to operate)—but electric vehicles looked promising. In the first American track race, in 1896 at Narragansett Park in Rhode Island, a Riker electric car decisively defeated a Duryea vehicle; in 1899 a bullet-shaped French electric car named La Jamais contente (Never satisfied) was the first road vehicle to reach the speed of 100 km/h.

love that we're getting back to electric cars and that they raced in Rhode Island 100+ years ago

the Chairman of the US Atomic Energy Commission, who assured the National Association of Science Writers in New York that nuclear electricity will be “too cheap to meter” (Strauss 1954). Commercial generation began in 1956, and while the subsequent rise (in the United Kingdom, United States, and the USSR) was slow—nuclear generation supplied just 1% of the world’s electricity by 1968—that is not unusual in early stages of technical advances.

New US orders ceased by the end of the 1970s (not because of the safety fears engendered by the Three Mile Island accidents, but mainly because of cost overruns); similar orders had (France excepting) almost stopped in Europe and they slowed down in Japan and in the USSR, particularly after the Chernobyl disaster in 1985. The share of nuclear generation peaked at 16.8% of the world’s electricity in 1987 and then stagnated around that level for the remainder of the 20th century.

During the transition, first mortality and then fertility declined, causing population growth rates to accelerate and then to slow again, moving toward low fertility, long life and an old population” (Lee

difference, a gain that is readily imaginable when going from 1 to 10 or from 10 to 100, but impossible to visualize when going from 10 to 100 million (107 to 108).

I wonder/hope this changes. I think we get lost in the minutae because we/I personally struggle with visualizing impacts of things when you add more than 3 zeros. I try to remember how long a million vs a billion seconds is...

There are continuing uncertainties about the first appearance of modern humans, but the divergence is now put as far back as 260,000–350,000 (105) years ago (Schlebusch et al. 2017). By 10,000 bce there were a few million people (106) on all habitable continents, all of them foragers. By 4000 bce the total approached 10 million (107), with increasing numbers of people living in settled agricultural societies, a transition that in some regions took only a few thousands of years to accomplish.

Figure 7.1 The 20th-century multiples for the production of major forms of energy and for the most important materials. The generation of electricity, smelting of aluminum, and fixation of nitrogen had seen the largest expansions; multiples for ammonia and plastics are for 1950–2000. Calculated from data in Smil (2001, 2014, 2016a, 2017b).

Perhaps the best metric for quantifying the gains in communication is the cost of an international phone call. Again, there can be no comparison for the entire 20th century: intercity phone service was available in parts of the United States since the early 1880s, but the first transcontinental call (from San Francisco to New York) was made only in January 1915 and the first trans-Atlantic call (from London to New York) only in March 1926. Starting with the typical charge for an international call in 1930, the relative cost fell by 90% in 1972, to less than 1% in 1993 and to just 0.1% in the year 2000 (OECD 2013), a 1,000-fold decline in 70 years. And during the first 15 years of the 21st century the cost fell by another order of magnitude (Figure 7.2). And in the era of e-mail, Skype, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, WeChat, Telegram, Viber, or Google Hangout, when an individual can reach simultaneously, and virtually cost-free, large numbers of people anywhere in the world, waiting for an operator to connect an expensive intercontinental call on an indistinct line with a distinct delay is a distant memory.

Arthur C. Clarke’s often cited (and highly perceptive) Third Law states that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic (Clarke 1962). The claim could be easily repurposed for describing the quality-of-life gains that have resulted from the two centuries, and in many cases from just one century or its fraction, of grand transitions. Typical longevities, levels of income, amenities of quotidian existence, incessant flows of energies, variety of food, ease and affordability of travel, surfeit of virtually cost-free information—all of these gains have been truly magical for two reasons. First, most of today’s indispensable enabling inputs (from ammonia synthesis to electricity generation) and resulting benefits (from antibiotics to refrigeration) did not even exist two centuries ago. Second, life expectancy aside, the gains for the 20th century have not entailed mere doubling or tripling of the early performance: their multiples have been typically at least one, more often two or three orders of magnitude, improvements whose extent cannot be easily conceptualized and that, in retrospect, appear truly magical.

The Roman Empire is a preferred template of collapse, a practice that ignores two important realities. First, the empire’s eastern part (the capital was removed from Rome to Constantinople in the year 330) continued to prosper (even to expand) for hundreds of years and it had survived almost exactly for another millennium after the last Western ruler was deposed in 476. Second, the manifold legacy of the Western empire had never disappeared, and after 800 ce it was resurrected in a major way in the West, providing an important political and cultural scaffolding for another 1,000 years of European history—and exerting many lasting influences in today’s European Union.

The Roman Empire didn't collapse so much as split and transfer

The direst of all conclusions is that an average of around 25 per cent of species in assessed animal and plant groups are threatened, suggesting that around 1 million species already face extinction, many within decades, unless action is taken to reduce the intensity of drivers of biodiversity loss. Without such action there will be a further acceleration in the global rate of species extinction, which is already at least tens to hundreds of times higher than it has averaged over the past 10 million years.

In extreme interpretation this would entail far more than continuous and vigorous growth: it would lead us to unimaginably rewarding futures: So we won’t experience 100 years of progress in the 21st century—it will be more like 20,000 years of progress (at today’s rate). . . . There’s even exponential growth in the rate of exponential growth. Within a few decades, machine intelligence will surpass human intelligence, leading to The Singularity—technological change so rapid and profound it represents a rupture in the fabric of human history. The implications include the merger of biological and nonbiological intelligence, immortal software-based humans, and ultra-high levels of intelligence that expand outward in the universe at the speed of light (Kurzweil 2001, 1).

umanity’s goal is to render ourselves independent from the natural system . . . we will continue the shift, toward landless and vertical agriculture. . . . Cities will function essentially as closed systems where most materials, including water, will be recycled. . . . We will keep doubling our use of information every ten years, and that will liberate the rest. And within another 60 years we may smile, because our actual achievement will have been to achieve conservation by establishing an enduring trajectory of making Nature useless (Ausubel 2015).

For example, Pinker (2018) refers to declining intensity of CO2 emissions per dollar of GDP and the post-1990 expansion of protected areas as major examples of past steps showing the effective solutions. But while those relative European, US, and global emissions of CO2 peaked two to three generations ago, their absolute level has reached record heights; the global total, contrary to Pinker’s claim, keeps rising—and the atmosphere responds (absorbs slightly more of the outgoing radiation) to the rise in absolute concentrations of CO2, not to relative shifts in national contributions. And while the extension of protected land makes for nice ascending graphs, many natural parks are the places of frequent poaching (not only in Africa but also in Canada), illegal logging, and encroachment by settlements: realities behind claimed numbers are not as encouraging.

our climate optimism based on per capita tracking might be misplaced- at aggregate we're getting worse and we think the per capita numbers might be wrong

And what has China done recently? In order to bring a modicum of prosperity to its nearly 1.4 billion people, in the 25 years between 1990 and 2015 China had increased its consumption of total energy more than fourfold; and of cement and steel, the two infrastructural foundations of modernity, 12-fold; and it now accounts for about 50% of worldwide output of steel and nearly 60% of cement production. Even just to extend China-like improvements to nearly half of the world’s existing population (more than 3.5 billion people in 2020), whose level of economic development remains a fraction of the current Chinese level, would entail efforts that would require at least twice as much energy and material inputs as China consumes now.

The inputs’ improvements show growth rates an order of magnitude lower than those due to Moore’s law, ranging mostly between 1.5 and 3% a year (as do, with the opposite sign, annual energy, material savings, and cost reductions). Here are some important examples of these steady (and in the long term undoubtedly impressive) but modest improvement rates. During more than half a century since the introduction of short-stalked wheat and rice cultivars, average global yields of wheat and rice have grown, respectively, by about 3.2% and 2.6% a year, while the yields of American hybrid corn have been rising by 2%/year since 1950 (FAO 2019). During the 20th century the average efficiency of steam turbogenerators (producing most of the world’s electricity) was improving by about 1.5% a year.

Efficacy of lighting has been gaining annually about 2.6% since Edison’s first light bulb. The energy cost of making steel, the defining metal of modern civilization, has been declining by less than 2%/year since 1950 (Smil 2016a). And the maximum speed of air travel has remained approximately constant since the beginning of regular jetliner service

Traditionally things don't move at Moore's law but rather improve 2% annually.

Today’s nearly 8 billion people turn out products and services whose annual value surpasses US$100 trillion; this global economic system consumes primary commercial energy at the rate of about 18 TW (with 85% of the total coming from fossil fuels); its population consumes about 2.6 Gt of grain and about 300 Mt of meat, as well as some 60 Gt of building materials, metals, and synthetics. Given these scales, any alternatives to processes and industries that now provide these inputs would require considerable periods of time to be widely adopted even if such innovations were