Technomass

On a recent family trip to London I saw many interesting exhibits in the Natural History Museum. We visited the "Our Broken Planet" exhibition. One display in particular caught my attention. It showed the variation in the mass of living things (animals, plants, fungi, microbes) and human-made materials (concrete, metals, plastics, gravel, asphalt, glass) over time. The mass of the living material, which ecologists refer to as biomass, has been relatively stable over time at just under 1.2 teratonnes. The mass of human-made material, in contrast, has increased dramatically, growing exponentially to the point that it is estimated to now exceed biomass as of last year, 2020.?

It is tempting to call the human-made material technomass, to distinguish it from biomass. I hesitate to do so yet, though: it will become technomass once the amount of it has stabilised in a manner analogous to biomass. This is because the stability of the amount of biomass is a consequence of the way the natural processes that generate and circulate biomass manage an energy budget. Once we have achieved the same with human-made material we can assign to it an analogous status: technomass. The amount of human-made material is growing exponentially precisely because we have so far failed to do so.?

Living systems entail complex food webs, interconnected food chains, through which energy flows. The energy an organism invests in creating a complex chemical is not lost when the organism dies. Other organisms recover that energy. Of course, living processes increase entropy globally, but maintain a low level of entropy locally in the biomass that expresses these processes. Energy is acquired primarily from the Sun by autotrophic organisms, such as plants and algae, to create living matter from inert substances through processes such as photosynthesis. That energy is then used by heterotrophic organisms such as herbivores (and then carnivores). When they die detrivores break them down into nutrients that also sustain autotrophic organisms. Throughout this process the energy budget required to maintain the low entropy of the biomass is managed through processes that on the one hand acquire energy from the Sun, but on the other, retain energy in the form of complex chemicals that have been synthesised by living organisms and are recirculated by biological processes.

In contrast, human systems require the extraction of raw materials which are processed primarily using energy released from fossilised biomass. The human-made material, and the investment of energy it embodies, is typically discarded after it has served a single purpose. More raw material must then be extracted and processed in progressively more complex ways, using more energy released from fossilised biomass, producing by products like carbon dioxide, and resulting in an exponential growth in the total mass of human-made material precisely because the energy initially invested in creating the human-made material is not recovered by the recirculation of that material in the system. If the energy budget this processed material represents was properly managed by re-using, re-purposing, or re-cycling the material in a manner analogous to biomass, it could be considered technomass, and the amount of it could be stabilised. The solution of other problems, such as the consequences of the by products released by our activities, would be incidental to the stabilisation of our technomass.??

The analogy with biomass can be extended further. Wind turbines and solar panels are examples of autotrophic technology, on which other, heterotrophic technologies depend for energy. We might even contemplate the equivalent of detrivorous technology: some day, perhaps, we will open up once more long disused landfill sites and let small autonomous robots scavenge for technomass we disposed of long ago to recover the energy embodied in material we have discarded as inert and reassimilate it into our economy. Indeed, we will no longer talk in terms of recycling, as this will be assumed. Instead, the disposal of material without recovery of the energy embodied in its manufacture will be termed decycling. We won't encourage recycling, we will discourage decycling, as I have discussed here. Ecology and economy then become the words that describe processes that pertain to biomass and technomass respectively.??

Technomass is an alternative description of what we would call the circular economy, a different perspective on the same objective. It is a useful representation because it makes clear that the value of technomass arises from the extent to which it is part of a processes, rather than from the scarcity of the material and its accumulation. Gold is worthless if it stays in a vault when considered as technomass. It is valuable only when utilised because of its particular properties. Speculation erodes the value of technomass if it removes it from circulation. When assigning value to data and its manipulation by digital assets it is often said that increasing the value of data requires you to "connect, don't collect". Technomass is the corresponding approach to physical assets.?Technomass

I have said that technomass is human-made material whose amount has been stabilised systematically, in a manner analogous to biomass, through the proper management of the energy embodied in its manufacture. That amount is ultimately determined by constraints associated with available raw materials and energy, and the limitation of environmental impacts to a sustainable level. However these restrictions only apply on Earth. In general, a space-faring society will consist of more technomass than biomass. Consider a moonbase, such as the permanent presence on the Moon currently planned as part of Project Artemis. Inevitably the amount of human-made material will exceed biomass under these circumstances. However, if we are not tourists, if we genuinely intend to stay, it must be managed, rather than abandoned as trash, and nothing can be wasted. It must be treated as technomass. One can consider the challenges we face at the moment in relation to climate change, and establishing a permanent human presence here on Earth, as being the equivalent of establishing an earthbase.?

This brings me to my final thought on the subject: if biomass and technomass are so analogous, will we at some point cease to distinguish between them? Will our cities be considered to be concrete coral thrust into the air just as coral of biological origin adorns underwater reefs? What happened, so that we even began regarding the artefacts of human effort to belong to a different category of object to the residue of biology??

I have discussed elsewhere the dynamic whereby innovation allows us to transform the material representation of wealth. This rescues its value from erosion by obsolescence and unsustainable environmental impacts. As a consequence the privileges enjoyed by those to whom the wealth is deemed by society to belong can be preserved. Indeed wealth is how we encode privilege. When this process of wealth renewal proceeds smoothly the inequalities it maintains are generally considered to be equitable, a fair reward for skills and initiative from which everyone benefits. When the process stalls, such that wealth dwindles and must be concentrated in a smaller number of piles teetering ever higher, the sense of equity is lost and so the inequalities become stark and undeserved, provoking strife.?

This dynamic has its origin in the distinction we made at some prehistoric stage in our development between biomass and technomass. A primitive materialism of disposability arose when objects could be put beyond use for ritual purposes, for example, as grave goods. The process of decay rather than renewal to which these objects were subject was observed and we introduced a concept of linear time to describe it. We invented supernatural otherworlds where these laws did not apply, and we could escape from the linear time we had invented, a place where the ancestors could reside, and, once they became too numerous for the genealogists to recite, the gods.?

We sometimes consider the task that confronts us just now, resolution of the challenges that arise due to carbon emissions, as a 50 year journey, from the time in the 1970s when the dynamic of innovation I describe, that could have pre-empted much of what has subsequently occurred had we taken the opportunity then when it first presented itself unequivocally, stalled, and denialists set the agenda on behalf of vested interests unamenable to the change and transformation that was necessary. Sometimes we consider it a 250 year journey, encompassing industrial capitalism from the development of efficient steam power by James Watt and the voracious appetite for coal that stimulated. But we are at the end of a million year journey, a path corresponding to linear time itself as manifested in our material culture and its artefacts. The ultimate destiny of these artefacts is to become technomass.??