“What important truth do very few people agree with you on?”

Peter Thiel in his book, “Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future,” asks the question: “What important truth do very few people agree with you on?”

I have been thinking about technology and medicine, health and wellness for the last 5 years. Here are 2 of my business answers to this question:

1. Medicine, health and wellness will be radically transform in the next 10 years – just like telecommunication and computing in the last 20 years – or just like medicine 100-150 years ago with the discovery of the germ theory and antibiotics.

1. Other than those with a genetic condition, your health and wellness has more to do with your (or your parents) small daily decisions over the course of your life than the expertise and access to the medical health care system – unless you are hit by a bus.

[side note: maybe people would agree with me on number 2 but they are living their life (and our society is focusing resources on other things) as if they do not agree.]

Related to these 2 answers, I wrote the following essays:

Actionable Information, Wearables, IoT and Seeing a Doctor?

https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/actionable-information-wearables-iot-seeing-doctor-doug-hohulin

The Bad News that Everyone Will Get: Unless They Are 1st Hit by a Bus

https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/bad-news-everyone-get-unless-1st-hit-bus-doug-hohulin?trk=mp-reader-card

Another interest I have is energy and the history and future of energy harvest. Related to this interest is my third truth:

1. We live in a Universe of abundant energy (with just a little bit of regular matter – “4.56% baryonic matter” / atoms (“the stuff of us”)). The story and progress of life and humanity is the story of harnessing energy. With wise planning, innovation and hard work, humanity can continue to find better ways to harness energy for the improvement of all while protecting the planet -- or we can be poor managers of the planet and harm the planet and restrict energy access to the poor which will keep them poor.

A human needs ~2,000 calories/day to live. This is equivalent to 8.4 Million Joules per day of energy or ~100 Joules a second. (A Joule is 1 watt-second so a 100 W space heater needs 100 Joules of energy every second.) Energy is all around us in the food we eat, the sun shine (photons) that warm us, and the machines and the fuel to power the machines that lets us live better than kings just 100 years ago.

Life at one level is the harnessing of energy from the environment (Universe). “Kenneth Nealson at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles [states], we know that life, when you boil it right down, is a flow of electrons: "You eat sugars that have excess electrons, and you breathe in oxygen that willingly takes them." Our cells break down the sugars, and the electrons flow through them in a complex set of chemical reactions until they are passed on to electron-hungry oxygen.” https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn25894-meet-the-electric-life-forms-that-live-on-pure-energy.html#.VM4-Pp3F-So

Until the last 100 years, the challenge for life was how to get food (harness energy). As an example, “Between 108 BC and 1911 AD there were no fewer than 1,828 major famines in China, or one nearly every year in one or another province.” Even Europe had its share of famines into the 1940s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_famines

Today, “Obesity is a bigger health crisis globally than hunger, and the leading cause of disabilities around the world, according to …the British medical journal The Lancet. … "The world is now obese and we're seeing the impact of that. ...

“The report revealed that every country, with the exception of those in sub-Saharan Africa, faces alarming obesity rates -- an increase of 82% globally in the past two decades. Middle Eastern countries are more obese than ever, seeing a 100% increase since 1990. The health burden from high body mass indexes now exceeds that due to hunger.” https://www.cnn.com/2012/12/13/health/global-burden-report/

Obesity is the poor management of energy at the individual level. The energy crisis / pollution is the poor management of energy at a societal level.

In Dr. Ian Morris’ book, “Why the West Rules--for Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future,“ it outlines Social Development through 15,000 years of history measuring four traits: 1) energy capture, 2) organization/ urbanization, 3) war-making and 4) information technology.

From Dr. Morris’ book and from other research, I have come to the conclusion that the earth can support:

• ~100 Million people using Hunter gather age technology
• ~1 Billion people using agricultural age technology – taking ~10K years to perfect
• ~2 Billion people using industrial age technology – taking ~200 years to perfect
• ? Billion people using information age technology.

This is illustrated from the following chart on energy from his book:

In the book, Dr. Morris considered the next 100 years (after exploring the last 15K) where he states, “the twenty-first century is going to be a race. In one lane is some sort of Singularity; in the other, Nightfall. One will win and one will lose. There will be no silver medal. Either we will soon (perhaps before 2050) begin a transformation even more profound than the industrial revolution, which may make most of our current problems irrelevant, or we will stagger into a collapse like no other.”

Jeremy Rifkin, book The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons” goes into detail about the future and energy and substantiality. David Owen's “The Conundrum” is a book about the environment and energy. It states: “We should not be waiting for some geniuses to invent our way out of the energy and economic crisis we're in. We already have the technology and knowledge we need to live sustainably. But will we do it?” In Peter Thiel book, “Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future,” Chapter 13 is on Seeing Green. This book is based on his class at Stanford, where he details the energy marketplace and the clean energy marketplace.

https://blakemasters.com/post/23787022006/peter-thiels-cs183-startup-class-14-notes

From this web site, it states: “Thinking About Energy: Alternative energy and cleantech have attracted an enormous amount of investment capital and attention over the last decade. Almost nothing has worked as well as people expected. The cleantech experience can thus be quite instructive. Asking important questions about what went wrong and what can be done better.” … “So can we do more with less in cleantech? Quite possibly we can. But we need to think about things in the same way we do in the computer industry. Is the breakthrough thorium? Is it something else? We certainly need a big breakthrough. Only then does it makes sense to work on incrementally improving it. The first step, as usual, is to think big and think boldly about the future.”

For those who are interested in Energy, I would recommend the article from the Economist: Special report: Energy and technology “Let there be light”

https://www.economist.com/news/special-report/21639014-thanks-better-technology-and-improved-efficiency-energy-becoming-cleaner-and-more?frsc=dg%7Ca

Where they write, “Thanks to better technology and improved efficiency, energy is becoming cleaner and more plentiful—whatever the price of oil, says Edward Lucas”

Continuing on this theme is the book, “The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves” by Matt Ridley where he highlights: “Over 10,000 years ago there were fewer than 10 million people on the planet. Today there are more than 6 billion, 99 per cent of whom are better fed, better sheltered, better entertained and better protected against disease than their Stone Age ancestors. The availability of almost everything a person could want or need has been going erratically upwards for 10,000 years and has rapidly accelerated over the last 200 years: calories; vitamins; clean water; machines; privacy; the means to travel faster than we can run, and the ability to communicate over longer distances than we can shout.” https://www.rationaloptimist.com/

Robert Bryce has written a few books that provides additional insight into Energy:

• “Smaller Faster Lighter Denser Cheaper: How Innovation Keeps Proving the Catastrophists Wrong”
• “Power Hungry: The Myths of "Green" Energy and the Real Fuels of the Future”

Depending on your background and political persuasion, you may or may not agree with the points or conclusions in these books I have referenced in this essay but I think it is important to get input from all sides of the discussion as you are making your own conclusion and as we work to solve the world's energy problem because we do have an energy problem. Energy harnessing is causing pollution, wars are being fought over access to energy and the poor do not have access to it. We need input from all sides and work together to solve the problem and not just yell at each other.

Robert Heinlein stated in book “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress” “Genius is where you find it.” In his book, The Door into Summer, he states: “Engineering is the art of the practical and depends more on the total state of the art than it does on the individual engineer. When railroading time comes you can railroad— but not before. Look at poor Professor Langley, breaking his heart on a flying machine that should have flown— he had put the necessary genius in it— but he was just a few years too early to enjoy the benefit of collateral art he needed and did not have. Or take the great Leonardo da Vinci, so far out of his time that his most brilliant concepts were utterly unbuildable.” This may be taken from the story: “Mark Twain once listened to the complaints of an old riverboat pilot who was having trouble making the switch from sail to steam. The old pilot wanted no part of the newfangled steam contraptions. "Maybe so," replied Twain, "but when it's steamboat time, you steam." https://www.gutenberg.org/files/19911/19911.txt

I think these quotes can be very useful when considering how to migrate from one energy technology to another. I believe that in the next 50 years, we will go from carbon energy society to nuclear/solar society (solar is nuclear but just at 93M miles away). The question is: when will “nuclear/solar time” come? and what is the most efficient way to transition to it that maximizes our quality of life and not damage the planet?

When I investigate a problem, I try to look at it from all sides, trying to take a neutral point of view initially to better understand the problem. If you have read this essay to the end, you probably have a similar interest in energy and are looking for ways to help solve the energy problems we face.

I believe that with wise planning, innovation and hard work, humanity can continue to find better ways to harness energy for the improvement of all of us while protecting the planet. Here’s to a better future.

P.S.

In the book by Richard Panek “The 4 Percent Universe: Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and the Race to Discover the Rest of Reality” I enjoyed the backstory and history of the search for Dark Matter, Dark Energy. I learned a lot and the book encouraged me want to learn more about the topic; what a really good book always does. The end of the book finishes with the following quote that I thought would be good when considering the topic of the Universe and Energy.

“Let there be dark. Let there be doubt, even amid the certainty. Especially amid the certainties—the pieces of evidence that in one generation transformed cosmology from metaphysics to physics, from speculation to science. In early 2010, the WMAP seven-year results arrived bearing the latest refinements of the numbers that define our universe. It was 13.75 billion years old. Its Hubble constant was 70.4, and its equation of state (w) -0.98 , or, within the margin of error, -1.0. And it was flat, consisting of 72.8 percent dark energy, 22.7 percent dark matter, and 4.56 percent baryonic matter (the stuff of us)—an exquisitely precise accounting of the depth of our ignorance. How the story would end remained a mystery, for now and possibly forever. The astronomers who set out to write the final chapter in the history of the universe had to content themselves instead with a more modest conclusion: To be continued.” …

“I have this three-year-old daughter at home,” Perlmutter [a scientist] said now, sitting in Smoot’s office, “and we’re just at that stage where she’s asking us, ‘Why?’ It’s pretty obvious that she knows it’s a bit of a game. She knows that whatever we say, she can then say, ‘Yes, but— why?’” He laughed. “I have the impression that most people don’t realize that what got physicists into physics usually is not the desire to understand what we already know but the desire to catch the universe in the act of doing really bizarre things. We love the fact that our ordinary intuitions about the world can be fooled, and that the world can just act strangely, and you can just go out and make it good over and over again. ‘Do that again! Do that again!’” Smoot agreed. “They’re always testing the limits. And that’s what we’re doing. We’re babies in the universe, and we’re testing what the limits are.”

If our luck did hold, and another Newton did come along, and the universe turned out once again to be simple in ways we couldn’t have previously imagined , then Saul Perlmutter’s daughter or Vera Rubin’s grandchildren’s grandchildren would not be seeing the same sky that they did, because they would not be thinking of it in the same way. They would see the same stars, and they would marvel at the hundreds of billions of galaxies other than our own. But they would sense the dark, too. And to them that darkness would represent a path toward knowledge— toward the kinds of discoveries that we all once called, with understandable innocence, the light.”

“Nature and nature's laws lay hid in night;

God said "Let Newton be" and all was light.”

Alexander Pope Newton's epitaph