The Energetic Foundations of Humanity’s Epochs

Without the energy breakthroughs, the Epochs of the human journey would not have happened.

One of my conceptual inventions is the idea of human Epochs.  It is not entirely original, as the domestication and industrial revolutions are recognized as watershed moments in the human journey.  However, the energetic aspect of them was often ignored, to the extent that some economists recently argued that England’s exploitation of coal had nothing to do with the Industrial Revolution!  That exemplifies how lost intellectuals can become.  Noam Chomsky’s political coming-out essay was on the responsibility of intellectuals, but his political activities have often pointed out the failings of intellectuals, as they knelt to power, often unconsciously.  Noam himself was blind to the medical racket and the COVID vaccine.  I read this just this morning, on how unbalanced Western “intelligence” can be.

I have long written about the qualities that the people I seek have, and “intelligence” comes in a distant third or fourth.  That stated, my work can be a heavy intellectual lift, and I have been trying to make it easier on my readers since I published my first website in 1996.  Learning to think comprehensively is not easy, but when people learn to, they no longer get lost in the weeds so easily. 

I cannot overemphasize that all Epochs of the human journey were initiated by energy breakthroughs.  Without those breakthroughs, the rest could not have happened.  Without the foundation, the rest could not exist.  The human line’s brain began growing when australopiths began making tools, which increased the energy of their diets, to fuel their growing brains.  If that had not happened, they would have stayed bipedal apes with chimp-sized brains in a small ecological niche.  The control of fire was a seminal moment in the journey to becoming human.  Our societies run on fire to this day.  Without the control of fire, we would not be here.  To a great degree, our tools made us.

Rock-wielding apes immediately began driving Earth’s easy meat to extinction, likely beginning with giant tortoises.  About a million years later, Homo erectus became an apex predator and began driving easy-meat species to extinction in Africa and Eurasia, especially members of the elephant family.  There is plenty of debate today on whether becoming superpredators or controlling fire was the key evolutionary event that led from australopiths to behaviorally modern humans, but they were likely related, in a synergistic process.  Becoming behaviorally modern may have been another synergistic series of events, and when behaviorally modern humans appeared on the evolutionary scene, nothing on Earth could stand up to them, including our fellow human species.  They all quickly went extinct as Homo sapiens conquered Earth and turned the world into an easy-meat bonanza, at least until the meat went extinct.  The elephant family was the most successful mammal until the rise of humans, and it was quickly driven to extinction in the Americas when the human juggernaut arrived. 

The human journey has been one of plundering one energy resource after another to exhaustion.  About 12,000 years ago, when the ice sheets retreated and a warm global climate returned for its brief geological moment, humans began domesticating plants and animals.  Thus began the destruction of Earth’s forests and soils.  Sedentary life is only possible with a locally delivered and sustainable energy supply.  The earliest villages were established on migration routes and where some wild plants could be harvested, such as acorns, and grains were harvested for millennia before they were domesticated.  In the Pacific Northwest, the salmon delivered themselves to seasonal villages.  That was a neat trick that could be played almost nowhere else on Earth.

In four regions where plants were independently domesticated, people invented civilization, but it was only possible by inventing low-energy transportation lanes, primarily on bodies of water.  The hinterlands of early civilizations were devastated.  No civilization has ever had a sustainable energy source, and all early civilizations collapsed.

Europe’s conquest of the world was only made possible by the technical feat of turning Earth’s ocean into a low-energy transportation lane.  Similarly, without the energy of fossil fuels, industrialization could not have happened.  No society could industrialize on wood and hay.  The mid-Epoch exploitation of oil, gas, and electricity made 20^th-century industrialization possible.  There could be no coal-fired airplanes, and try to imagine today’s world without electricity.  Electricity was not a new energy source, but a form of energy that industrializing humans learned to exploit. 

The changes that each energy breakthrough led to were simply unimaginable to the people who lived before each breakthrough.  And so it will be for the Fifth Epoch, if free energy can make it past the organized suppression and humanity’s inertia. 

With free energy, many changes are easily foreseen.  Without free energy, none of them are feasible.  It is just a continuation of the dynamics of prior Epochs.  The energy breakthroughs made what came after them possible. 

There are many “visionaries” in the world, Utopians, Singularity advocates, New Agers, and others, but I have yet to see any of them understand what free energy portends, and how without it, their visions cannot really come to pass.  As I have written, Al Gore and the billionaire “philanthropists” and environmentalists are well aware of free energy, but none of them discuss it publicly.  It is a forbidden topic.  The situation is surreal. 

An Epochal framework helps people understand the changes that energy breakthroughs wrought, and the transformative potential of abundant and harmlessly produced energy.  In the Fifth Epoch, the world as we know it will end, as it ended in previous Epochs, and nobody will miss it.