The speed of change (technology and also energy) may be the cause of our end….
Busy in our daily routine, we need to realize how fleeting time is and how quickly it speeds up its course, changing our reality. The entire history of humanity is about 300,000 years (if we count from the appearance of homo sapiens), and taking into account earlier human-like forms, we will count some 2.5 million years. Of all this lengthy development time, only the last millennia are known and documented, and the previous hundreds of years are technical progress, which has been accelerating over the past centuries and reaching an unimaginable pace today. Today, fundamental changes must be counted in decades. We feel this only as a side effect (we see the world getting weirder and weirder), and this speed of change is the real threat. Humanity finds it increasingly difficult to adapt to what each new day brings.
At the beginning of my life and career, the energy industry seemed stable and quite conservative. Today, however, it has turned into an express train of transformation. In the beginning (Paleolithic and Neolithic), the apparent energy source was wood (including lighting the caves of our ancestors). In antiquity, charcoal and a revolution in oil lamps using rancid animal fat were added. After another thousand years, peat and candles made from beeswax were added in the Middle Ages. The real revolution came about 500 years later when the Industrial Revolution saw the advent of coal, oil refining lamps, and even the first forms of street lighting (gas lamps). After that, it went downhill – new fossil fuels, electricity, and street lighting banished darkness from our cities, and ever-larger portions of energy allowed more and more comfort in homes. The last hundred and even fifty years have seen the smashing of the atom and the mastery of nuclear power (not necessarily just for energy purposes), and now, in recent decades, we have seen a widespread shift to renewable energy in various forms. What is frightening is precisely this pace of change and subsequent technological revolutions – millions of years, then tens of thousands, thousands, hundreds and decades. One can only think what will come next. We have to adapt our lives to all this, which is under pressure from cell phones, social media, and now Bitcoin and artificial intelligence.
Are we capable of mastering all this? I’m afraid it’s getting worse. It’s hard to explain to employees that technology changes over their lifetimes and that they have to suddenly quit their jobs (as in the case of miners and the coal sector). Making technical decisions about the power industry (like grid and system management – when the demand profile and generation needs are changing exponentially) is equally challenging. It’s hard to live in the new market, where we have something competitive and variable all the time, but on the other hand, everything is getting more expensive and starting to run out of everything. We are beginning to find ourselves worse and worse in the new reality, which, of course, has a side effect in the increasing belief in conspiracy theories, such as about Reptilian’s space currents, as well as in the election of controversial politicians, not only to Assemblies and Congresses but also as presidents of both large and smaller countries. The new leaders, who essentially would not have passed the standard psychiatric examination for a job as an excavator operator, are leading us into the future, further unsettling public sentiment, causing wars and conflicts and increasing uncertainty and mistrust. In energy, it’s hard even to educate anyone because, in public opinion, there is not even a single concept of what the energy system and energy mix should look like if every concept meets a counter-discussion right away (usually in the form of a roll in TikTok). Experts are treated like old dinosaurs and bores who can’t find a solution in 30 seconds, so they’d better not speak up. So we start speeding faster and faster as if in a car with no brakes, now even putting a dark sheet over our windshield, but showing some cool pictures and kitten rolls on the big colour screen inside. Will we be able to return to normal development? The last 10 years have convinced me less and less of this; the trend is somewhat pessimistic, and the new things in the energy industry can already only be written about in a satirical or catastrophic way.
Perhaps in this way, we have even solved the mystery of the extinction of the dinosaurs. They lived in the Mesozoic era (about 250 million years ago) and survived much longer than humans, for almost 200 million years, only to suddenly disappear mysteriously from Earth’s history. The usual blame (as always) is placed on climate change or an extraterrestrial comet strike. Or were they, too, destroyed by technological changes? All that’s left of them are bones and excavations. Or it was in the last of their millions of years of history and maybe even the previous tens of thousands of years dinosaurs developed a high-tech civilization and embarked on a path of exponential progress. Dinosaur quantum computers have aided their dinosaur social media, and dating in large shopping malls illuminated by new technologies has supplanted classic jungle meetings. Perhaps the election of new herd leaders – their “presidents” – has led the former rulers of Earth to disaster. And this pleasant thought that we have solved the mystery of their extinction may also accompany us in thinking about the future, where millions of years from now, our bones will be exhibited in the Natural History Museums of Earth’s new rulers – perhaps furry rodents. They will look at our fossils (because concrete, plastic, and other impermanent forms of civilization will have long since decayed) and wonder with a smile how such horrible animals with small deforested bits of fur on their hairless bodies could have dominated the Earth when they did, and actually how it happened that they are now gone.