Energy Outranks Everything
As it always has in our universe
The electricity to our home was disrupted on Tuesday, November 19, by a windstorm, we got it back on Sunday, but our home did not regain Internet access until today, November 27. That is the longest home outage in my lifetime, for both power and Internet. It is not like I live in the hinterland, either. I live across the street from Microsoft’s headquarters in a neighborhood of multimillion-dollar homes.
What softened the blow was that we still had cellular service, as the cell companies have their own power supply, and our cars could recharge our phone batteries (and my Kindle!), and gasoline was always available. Our local grocery store was only closed the first day, so we made daily visits and ate our breakfast at the store. Not having power was catastrophic; not having information was a nuisance, as painful as it was. Using my phone for the Internet was a torturous experience. Few things can drive home the importance of energy to industrialized peoples more than an experience like that.
Einstein’s E=MC2 is an assertion that everything in the universe is energy. Mass is considered to be a condensed form of energy, and according to Einstein’s general relativity, without mass, there would not be space-time. In that view, our universe’s very existence is predicated on energy, and scientists do not know what energy is or where it came from.
In my career and life, I have witnessed many disasters because people failed to heed the basics. They thought that the basics no longer mattered, as they believed that they played at a higher level of the game. That meant that they really did not understand the basics. I am going to provide some examples, especially in the sciences.
Nick Lane’s work is not just popularized science, but his important efforts have been original in areas of science, and some of his key areas of investigation have been early life, metabolism, and aging. Lane’s hypothesis is that life on Earth began in so-called white smokers, which are volcanic vents on the ocean floor. The chemicals that come from white smokers provide the potential energy that chemosynthetic organisms exploit. ATP is the coin of energy for all known life on Earth today, and the Krebs cycle is how life produces energy for use. But the Krebs cycle also runs in reverse, to build the molecules of life, instead of tear them apart to get their energy. Lane remarked on the DNA fixation among scientists, but he noted that metabolism is more important than reproduction, as without metabolism, nothing would live long enough to reproduce. Energy outranks information, in Lane’s view.
I recently read an article on the divide in cancer research and treatment. Similarly, orthodox cancer researchers have a fixation on DNA, but the metabolic theory of cancer is over a century old and is still neglected. The DNA paradigm cannot explain key features of cancer, such as why cancer cells abandon normal metabolism.
In recent years, I learned the scientific basis for why processed food is so damaging to people’s health, as it wrecks their metabolism. Up to 98% of Americans have metabolic disease, for instance. Metabolic disease is at the root of all degenerative diseases, but orthodox medicine has ignored that root for over a century, as all that Western medicine does for degenerative diseases is treat symptoms while it never addresses the underlying cause. Virtually all alternative cancer treatments that I know of focus on healing people’s metabolism so that their immune systems can deal with the cancer, and those treatments do not attack the tumors.
Even among environmental biologists, energy has often been given short shrift. In the social sciences, the situation can be far worse. A generation ago, as I resumed my scientific studies, I saw that physical scientists had no respect for orthodox economic theory, which relegated energy to just another resource that can be substituted for. It made clear the nagging doubts that I had about economic theory since college. I thought that I had seen it all, as far as how deluded economists are about the real world, and then I saw a paper that argued that England’s unprecedented exploitation of coal had nothing to do with the Industrial Revolution! Similarly, ten years after the USA’s invasion of Iraq, I did not see one retrospective analysis by an American pundit that even discussed the role of oil in the invasion, even though the USA’s president, vice president, and secretary of state were all former oil-company executives. Middle East oil is history’s greatest material prize, which explains everything about the West’s involvement in the Middle East for more than a century. As Bucky Fuller said, if oil was priced at the benefit that it provided humanity, it would cost one million dollars per barrel, but the pundits cannot fathom it. I presented a vivid illustration of what Fuller meant. The elephant filled the room, and the pundits could not see it.
The Kardashev scale makes it clear that the arrival of free energy will be the biggest event in the human journey, the technology for it is older than I am, and the issue is almost never discussed in any mainstream or “progressive” circles. Near his life’s end, Brian O’Leary was stupefied at how forbidden the topic is. The world’s elites know very well about free-energy technology, but they are part of a conspiracy of silence, similar to what Ed Herman noted about genocides perpetrated by the West.
The most important topics on Earth are off-limits in the mainstream and among “progressives,” and nearly all of humanity plays along with the situation. It is surreal.
Energy outranks everything else in our universe and always will, and the most important events in the human journey have been energy events. It is long past time to permanently solve humanity’s fundamental energy issue, which is what my work is all about.