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Vaclav Smil - How the World Really Works: The Science Behind How We Got Here and Where Were Going

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Vaclav Smil How the World Really Works: The Science Behind How We Got Here and Where Were Going
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How the World Really Works: The Science Behind How We Got Here and Where Were Going: summary, description and annotation

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Vaclav Smil is my favorite author.Bill Gates
The renowned energy scientist aims to [recenter] materials rather than electronic flows of data as the bedrock of modern life largely through examining what he calls the four pillars of modern civilization: cement, steel, plastics and ammonia. David Marchese, The New York Times Magazine
An essential analysis of the modern science and technology that makes our twenty-first century lives possiblea scientists investigation into what science really does, and does not, accomplish.
We have never had so much information at our fingertips and yet most of us dont know how the world really works. This book explains seven of the most fundamental realities governing our survival and prosperity. From energy and food production, through our material world and its globalization, to risks, our environment and its future, How the World Really Works offers a much-needed reality checkbecause before we can tackle problems effectively, we must understand the facts.
In this ambitious and thought-provoking book we see, for example, that globalization isnt inevitablethe foolishness of allowing 70 per cent of the worlds rubber gloves to be made in just one factory became glaringly obvious in 2020and that our societies have been steadily increasing their dependence on fossil fuels, such that any promises of decarbonization by 2050 are a fairy tale. For example, each greenhouse-grown supermarket-bought tomato has the equivalent of five tablespoons of diesel embedded in its production, and we have no way of producing steel, cement or plastics at required scales without huge carbon emissions.
Ultimately, Smil answers the most profound question of our age: are we irrevocably doomed or is a brighter utopia ahead? Compelling, data-rich and revisionist, this wonderfully broad, interdisciplinary guide finds faults with both extremes. Looking at the world through this quantitative lens reveals hidden truths that change the way we see our past, present and uncertain future.

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VIKING An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC penguinrandomhousecom First - photo 1
VIKING An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC penguinrandomhousecom First - photo 2

VIKING

An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

penguinrandomhouse.com

First published in hardcover in Great Britain by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Random House Ltd., London, in 2022

First North American edition published by Viking, 2022

Copyright 2022 by Vaclav Smil

Penguin Random House supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin Random House to continue to publish books for every reader.

ISBN 9780593297063 (hardcover)

ISBN 9780593297070 (ebook)

Cover design: Olga Grlic

Cover art: Tetyana Pavlovna / Shutterstock

Adapted for ebook by Cora Wigen

pid_prh_6.0_139902019_c0_r0

Contents
Introduction
Why Do We Need This Book?

Every era has its claims to uniqueness, but while the experiences of the past three generationsthat is, the decades since the end of the Second World Warmay not have been as fundamentally transformative as those of the three generations preceding the beginning of the First World War, there has been no shortage of unprecedented events and advances. Most impressively, more people now enjoy a higher standard of living, and do so for more years and in better health, than at any time in history. Yet these beneficiaries are still a minority (only about a fifth) of the worlds population, whose total count is approaching 8 billion people.

The second achievement to admire is the unprecedented expansion of our understanding of both the physical world and all forms of life. Our knowledge extends from grand generalizations about complex systems on the universal (galaxies, stars) and planetary (atmosphere, hydrosphere, biosphere) scale to processes at the level of atoms and genes: lines etched into the surface of the most powerful microprocessor are only about twice the diameter of human DNA. We have translated this understanding into a still-expanding array of machines, devices, procedures, protocols, and interventions that sustain modern civilization, and the enormity of our aggregate knowledgeand the ways we have deployed it in our serviceis far beyond the comprehension of any individual mind.

You could meet real Renaissance men on Florences Piazza Signoria in 1500but not for too long after that. By the middle of the 18th century two French savants, Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond dAlembert, could still gather a group of knowledgeable contributors to sum up the eras understanding in fairly exhaustive entries in their multi-volume Encyclopdie, ou Dictionnaire raisonn des sciences, des arts et des mtiers. A few generations later the extent and the specialization of our knowledge advanced by orders of magnitude, with fundamental discoveries ranging from magnetic induction (Michael Faraday in 1831, the basis of electricity generation) to plant metabolism (Justus von Liebig, 1840, the basis of crop fertilization) to theorizing about electromagnetism (James Clerk Maxwell, 1861, the basis of all wireless communication).

In 1872, a century after the appearance of the last volume of the Encyclopdie, any collection of knowledge had to resort to the superficial treatment of a rapidly expanding range of topics, and, one and a half centuries later, it is impossible to sum up our understanding even within narrowly circumscribed specialties: such terms as physics or biology are fairly meaningless labels, and experts in particle physics would find it very hard to understand even the first page of a new research paper in viral immunology. Obviously, this atomization of knowledge has not made any public decision-making easier. Highly specialized branches of modern science have become so arcane that many people employed in them are forced to train until their early or mid-thirties in order to join the new priesthood.

They may share long apprenticeships, but too often they cannot agree on the best course of action. The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic made it clear that disagreements among experts may extend even to such seemingly simple decisions as wearing a face mask. By the end of March 2020 (three months into the pandemic) the World Health Organization still advised against doing so unless a person was infected, and the reversal came only in early June 2020. How can those without any special knowledge take sides or make any sense of these disputes that now often end in retractions or the dismantling of previously dominant claims?

Still, such continuing uncertainties and disputes do not excuse the extent to which most people misunderstand the fundamental workings of the modern world. After all, appreciating how wheat is grown (chapter 2) or steel is made (chapter 3) or realizing that globalization is neither new nor inevitable (chapter 4) are not the same as asking that somebody comprehend femtochemistry (the study of chemical reactions at timescales of 10-15 seconds, Ahmed Zewail, Nobel Prize in 1999) or polymerase chain reactions (the rapid copying of DNA, Kary Mullis, Nobel Prize in 1993).

Why then do most people in modern societies have such a superficial knowledge about how the world really works? The complexities of the modern world are an obvious explanation: people are constantly interacting with black boxes, whose relatively simple outputs require little or no comprehension of what is taking place inside the box. This is as true of such ubiquitous devices as mobile phones and laptops (typing a simple query does the trick) as it is of mass-scale procedures such as vaccination (certainly the best planetary example of 2021, with, typically, the rolling up of a sleeve being the only comprehensible part). But explanations of this comprehension deficit go beyond the fact that the sweep of our knowledge encourages specialization, whose obverse is an increasingly shallow understandingeven ignoranceof the basics.

Urbanization and mechanization have been two important reasons for this comprehension deficit. Since the year 2007, more than half of humanity has lived in cities (more than 80 percent in all affluent countries), and unlike in the industrializing cities of the 19th and early 20th centuries, jobs in modern urban areas are largely in services. Most modern urbanites are thus disconnected not only from the ways we produce our food but also from the ways we build our machines and devices, and the growing mechanization of all productive activity means that only a very small share of the global population now engages in delivering civilizations energy and the materials that comprise our modern world.

America now has only about 3 million men and women (farm owners and hired labor) directly engaged in producing foodpeople who actually plow the fields, sow the seeds, apply fertilizer, eradicate weeds, harvest the crops (picking fruit and vegetables is the most labor-intensive part of the process), and take care of the animals. That is less than 1 percent of the countrys population, and hence it is no wonder that most Americans have no idea, or only some vague notion, about how their bread or their cuts of meat came to be. Combines harvest wheatbut do they also harvest soybeans or lentils? How long does it take for a tiny piglet to become a pork chop: weeks or years? The vast majority of Americans simply dont knowand they have plenty of company. China is the worlds largest producer of steelsmelting, casting, and rolling nearly a billion tons of it every yearbut all of that is done by less than 0.25 percent of Chinas 1.4 billion people. Only a tiny percentage of the Chinese population will ever stand close to a blast furnace, or see the continuous casting mill with its red ribbons of hot, moving steel. And this disconnect is the case across the world.

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