Few times in our life (in most
cases, no times at all) can one assert confidently that he has stood in the
frontlines of our species technological advance, and looked resolutely across
the trenches, if we may use such a bellicose expression, and sized the strength
of the enemy forces (which, in this case, are the unholy alliance of ignorance,
barbarism, regression, poverty, need, hunger, conflict, tribalism, superstition
and squalor that take over societies once science stops progressing and
technology stagnates). And I’m sad to report to my attentive readers that the
enemy forces are, indeed, much stronger than ours, and that sooner rather than
later it is our fate to be overcome, and to witness the unavoidable collapse I
referred to in the title of this post. My admired (and today not widely read)
Arnold J. Toynbee finished the introduction to his monumental Study of History considering that may be
Western Civilization (the inheritor of the Greco-Roman tradition) would be the
first to escape the, until then inescapable, cycle of growth and decay that had
bedeviled every previous differentiated human group until his own times. Sorry,
Arnold, but you were wrong about that one, the West had its run, and it was a
good one, but its days of vigor, its days of being able to successfully solve
the challenges that its environment presented it with, are mostly over. Oswald
Spengler is the one that got it right before you, and the West is, undeniably,
in full decadence mode, and has been for almost half a century now. However, and regardless of the apocalyptic
image I’ve conjured, I will make in the following paragraphs a case for a
guarded optimism.
But first, some background. I spent
the last week trying to position my company to win a bid for doing some work at
the heart of ITER, the experimental fusion reactor being built in Cadarache, in
the French Provence. I won’t go into details of the content of the bid, as it
is understandably very sensitive, but it allowed me to get a firmer
understanding of how it is going, and what the future may bring to such
ambitious and magnificent endeavor. Something I’m already quite familiar with,
as we have been already working for them for the past eight years, and I
regularly audit our work there, which allows me to monitor how things are
going. Everybody just barely familiar with the history of the installation
would tell you it is not going so well: when it was created (in the famous
Geneva summit between Reagan and Gorbachev in 1985, conceptual design started
in 1988 and was approved in 2001 -in a scaled-down version that already
accepted the fact that it would not produce “sustainable, continued fusion”, but
just “longish” pulses of it). At that time it was aiming at producing first
plasma in the first decade of the XXI century. After some vicious political
battles in its first decade of life (including where to build it, the
abandonment of the project by the USA and its later return), it was settled in
2005 that France would be the place, the construction was initiated in August
2010 and the production of “first plasma” was pushed back to the end of the second
decade of the century (for a critical account of the situation, see The really screwed up history of fusion energy ).
As is wont to happen in these
complex projects where you push hard again the limits of what we, as a
civilization, can produce, costs kept ballooning (current price tag is
calculated to be around 20 billion euros, but I don’t know of anybody who
thinks it can actually be completed at that cost, which does not include the
payments in kind by the “Domestic Agencies” of some of the costlier components),
planned milestones kept not being met and the current expected date for first plasma
has been pushed back to 2025. A date that, between you and me, is not very
likely to be met either, as the tougher, most complex part of the construction
has yet to be started: assembling the cryostat and the vacuum vessel that
should contain the fusion reaction, something that until now, as far as we
know, in the whole damn universe, only happens in the heart of the stars.
Well, in the heart of the stars and
in each one of the thirty of so Tokamaks that have been built so far (give or
take a few ones in secret military facilities that have obviously not been
counted) plus in the dozens of explosions (thankfully, only for testing
purposes) of hydrogen atomic bombs that rely on fusion to unleash the
stupendous amounts of energy they are famous for… and, in case you missed it,
ITER is still not going to “produce” energy in any meaningful sense. To keep
the fusion reaction going for a few seconds (which would already be a huge
technological success, and an epochal advance over everything achieved so far,
as in the biggest experimental installations built to date the fusion happens
in “pulses” of a few milliseconds) it will require gargantuan amounts of
electricity to feed its ravenous magnets (the “bottle” that keeps the plasma
confined, and thus dense enough for the light hydrogen atoms to collide and
form helium, freeing energy in the process, is made of ultra-powerful magnetic
fields that need as much electric power as a small city to run). What you
typically see at the side of any self-respecting power plant (a park of transformers
to convert the electricity it generates into high-voltage before pouring it in
the grid, so it minimizes the transport losses) is also here, and at a
humongous scale, but for the opposite purpose (not to convert the energy it
generates to a higher voltage, but to convert the energy it consumes to a lower
one).
So, you may wonder, why are we
spending vast sums of money in a project whose end result always seems to be
twenty years away? Indeed, this last year has been rife with smallish companies
promising alternative approaches to achieve fusion reactions for a fraction of
the cost, in a few years, that would make ITER entirely redundant (a brief
summary of some of them here: Alternative technologies for fusion (if you thought Tokamaks weren't loony enough) ). Well, not to put too fine a
grain around it, those brilliant, bold, innovative schemes have, as Charles
Seife put it in the first link I provided, “a snowball in hell’s chance of ever
coming to fruition”. I can think of only one way of losing your money that is
even surer than investing in a fusion startup promising a revolutionary fast
& cheap (compared with the existing “establishment” path of ITER and
Lawrence Livermore’s National Ignition Facility) track to commercial fusion
energy: burning it in a chimney. And in the chimney scenario at least you can
get some comfort out of it, in the form of heat and light, which is more that
you can say of the first option… Explaining why it is so will take me the rest
of this post, and will allow me to weave many of my previous hunches about the
root cause of our technological stagnation and impending civilizational
collapse, as the main cause of the collapse is the inability to give answer to
the growing challenges we face, an inability that is in turn caused by the
stagnation, or rather the stagnation is but one of the most apparent
manifestations of such inability.
But before we discuss the complex
realities of how scientific knowledge is transformed in usable technologies
that actually change how we live and work, it is of some interest to wonder why
is the media (and, apparently, a good number of naïve VC investors) stubbornly
not reporting this, and falling once and again for the hucksterism of this
miracle solution to all of humanity’s energy needs. Hint: it doesn’t apply only
to energy… In this case, the American journalists, science writers, publishers,
and public in general, have all been successfully primed to enjoy (and find so
satisfying as to not get too caught on little tiny weeny details like the
overall plausibility of the story) news about the sclerotic bureaucracy
prevailing in other countries, especially in old Europe, as opposed to the
dynamism, entrepreneurship and can-do (which so easily morphs into gung-ho)
culture of the greatest country on earth (conveniently, theirs’). So a
lumbering, multi-national, state-funded giant project taking place in foreign
shores (and what shores! In a most traditional part of most socialist France,
no less!), with a governance structure that isolates it from any kind of
“market signal” (an isolation that is extremely noticeable when you present
something in their great council room, festooned with the photographs of the
heads of the organization, invariably old males with suits and ties) is just
too good a target to let it pass, even more so when compared with the wild
dreams of young private enterprising men with only a thin veneer of engineering
or physics and lots of management jargon sprouting from their mouths,
invariably clad in jeans and polo shirts and with presentation skills honed in
TED Talks and the VC circuit.
But let us not be sidelined by the
vagaries of the new-technology-pimping branch of the publishing industry
(“Science”, the “MIT Technology review” and the like). They have a laughably
poor track record identifying what technological trend may actually work and prosper,
as they are too invested in the results and too blinded by the interests of
advertisers, direct and indirect. They are not the real culprits of our, by now
almost half a century long, technological stagnation (outside of the limited
realm of data processing and transmission). The real root cause, then? My
humble, partial, not necessarily fully-formed opinion is that “research” (something
notoriously difficult to define rigorously, I’ll take mostly the idea of “Research
programs” as developed by Imre Lakatos) has gone mostly off-track. Physics is
stuck in a rut since the middle of the last century (when the formulation of
the Standard Model was essentially completed), and since then it’s been mostly
a long, torturous trip to nowhere through the rabbit hole of string theory and
supersymmetry. Chemistry is (as much as chemists hate to recognize it)
essentially a branch of physics after Pauli’s unification and explanation of
the periodic table and its elements’ features by the structure of their
electrons’ orbitals.
As a side note/ rant, the situation
has been aggravated by the mostly pathetic attempt of the humanities to catch
up applying the same failed methodology that essentially killed all progress in
physics: isolate the most advanced students in universities and create a
separate career path for them consisting essentially in reading each other’s
mental masturbations, in a language as arcane and uninteresting as possible
(because hey! If everybody could understand it everybody could judge and
contribute, and how do you justify appropriating an increasing slice of the
social pie by a coterie of self-proclaimed experts then?). What incentives do
we provide to “researchers”, doesn’t matter of what discipline? What do we pay
them differentially to deliver? Discoveries? Ranked by their usefulness? Nah,
that’s too difficult to plan and measure. We incentivize them to write, and to
publish in peer reviewed journals, even if what they consistently keep
producing and publishing is utter rubbish, lacking any interest to anybody
outside of their more and more reduced field. Sounds too harsh? Anybody from
the inside, when considering things with equanimity, will end up agreeing: Academic books are not meant to be read . Please note that I do not intend
to have a recipe for solving such sorry state of affairs (other than my modest
proposal to close all humanities faculties and universities, and look for
alternative ways of teaching them that allowed its practitioners to escape from
the gilded cage which currently lines their pockets -modestly-at the price of
killing their creativity and ability to innovate). I can only give notice of
how messed up things are, and how we are paying as a society for such state of
affairs much more dearly than what we think.
To make things worse, the
organizational environment in which much of that research takes place has
really been assigned a different purpose by the powers that be. Ideally,
universities should be hallowed places where knowledge for knowledge’s sake is
cherished and celebrated, where the truth is selflessly pursued and transmitted,
where the new generation of scholars and researchers, of inventors and
entrepreneurs are taught by their generous predecessors the building blocks of
their respective disciplines. Which is nice and lofty and good, if it happens
at all in a most residual way. Because, as much as it pains me to say it, the
real goal of universities, what determines if they languish or prosper, if they
get stupendous funds to furnish dazzling facilities and attract the most
sublime talent is not how good they are at generating new knowledge and finding
truth, but how good they are at providing a competitive advantage to their
students in a labor market deemed to be ever more competitive (all those
brilliant Indians and Chinese youngsters, coming from a tradition of much
harder work and study than our own kids! In an ever more open and globalized
economy! Man, nothing short of Yale or Harvard can guarantee our scions a good
shot at the good life if they have to compete with those work-obsessed Asians!)
We lavish money and resources on universities for them to produce… as much
social stratification and lack of social mobility as possible. The search for
truth, and knowledge, and the advancement of science ara an afterthought, and
they will foster as much as is compatible with their primary goal, the one
their alumni and the parents of their prospective students are really willing
to pay big bucks for: giving their graduates a leg up in the game of life.
So the only thing I can recommend is
that we stick to our guns in those areas where some advance, costly as it may
look like, is being made, regardless of how slowly it proceeds or how much more
costly it ends up being than what we initially projected. For example, and back
to my original line, at some point in the next two to three years ITER will
reassess its schedule and recognize it needs even more money to be completed,
and a few more years (so no first plasma in 2025, although given the current
level of the works it may be as soon as 2027 or 28). That money and extra time
should be granted as, again, this is our best bet, as a species, to do
something that is really remarkable, epochal, worthy of being remembered by
future ages of the world. Look, I love Wikipedia, find Waze convenient and
think Amazon makes my life much richer and easier. But I don’t think the XXI
century will be remembered by any of them. The iPhone is a technological
wonder, but again, I don’t see it exciting the imagination of the citizens of
the XXXI century much more than our own imagination is excited by the little
clay models of ships that the Egyptians produced (and that can be admired in
any medium-sized archaeology museum): an ingenious bauble, an amusing and
pleasant-looking toy not especially worthy of respect or admiration. But
replicating what happens at the heart of the magnificent fiery balls of
primordial fire that light the firmament for minutes on end! Whoa, that is
something indeed that would put all previous achievements of the human race to
shame!
Of course, we may shrug collectively
our shoulders and say that such intergenerational, inter-civilizational
comparison is childish to begin with, and we should better invest our efforts
in more pressing, immediate concerns like ending world poverty, or curing
preventable diseases (and then non-preventable ones) and curing death itself. I
concede that those are all equally worthy endeavors, that if achieved would
also merit the unbounded admiration of the ages. But none of them is likely to
succeed if we cannot first solve the so far unsolvable problem of making
readily available enormous amounts of energy to power desalination plants,
pharma laboratories, research facilities, agricultural implements and the like
that are required as a precondition for those other equally super-worthy goals,
without toasting ourselves or making the planet inhabitable through hothouse
gasses emissions. Yep, I know that one experimental facility, doesn’t matter
how big, in a remote corner of France doesn’t automatically solve that problem
either, but not being able to complete it because we, as a society (or rather,
as a collection of societies that includes the most populous, the most
economically advanced, the one with most scientific resources at its disposal
and the best governed of our little world) just couldn’t muster the willpower
and couldn’t sustain the effort for long enough would speak volumes of what we
are really made of.
That’s why at the beginning I
resorted to a military metaphor, in which I saw myself (even more so if I can
close the deal and end up participating more directly in the enterprise) as
carrying the banner of a technological society with science, empiricism and a
concern for the common welfare on its side, as aligned against the forces that
have overpowered our species for millennia. Not being able to complete ITER
would be a major loss in that eternal struggle, a confirmation that our best
days are behind us, that we reached indeed a peak in what we as a species are
capable of, and what we can expect now at best is to hold our ground and
decline gently and slowly as we squander the non-renewable resources of our
finite planet, squabbling more and more violently for a perpetually shrinking
pie. Look, I have seen firsthand what renouncing to big, complex,
technologically advanced projects does to a society, because that is for all
practical purposes what we have been doing with nuclear energy (what we now
call “conventional nuclear”) and long range space exploration involving humans.
When it got complex we essentially abandoned innovation, and got contented with
what we already had achieved, and you know what? In technology, as in physical
fitness, there is no “maintenance mode”. You either progress or regress.
And boy, are we regressing! When it
comes to building nuclear power plants we are well behind what we knew
(collectively, although such skill was mastered by some societies much more
than by others) how to do routinely forty years ago: Olkiluoto in Finland,
Flamanville in France (and most likely Hinkley Point and Wylfa in the UK) will
most likely be super-costly failures not because “nuclear energy” in abstract
has stopped being profitable. That’s as silly as saying that building ICE cars
has stopped being profitable, or that building desktop computers has stopped
being profitable (both things that may also be close to being claimed by
unsubtle analysts of social reality), which really means that conditions have
changed and we, as a society, without much conscious deliberation or
enlightened debate, have changed the rules of the game so certain activities
and developments that made sense before stop making sense now. Which is all
well and good, I’m not saying we shouldn’t change the rules ever, as we learn of
the true cost of some technologies, and try to internalize what were borne
before by all of us as externalities (so we ended up paying all the same,
regardless of who benefitted by them).
But that shouldn’t hide the fact
that the real reason every new reactor (started after 2000) in the “western
world” will be a costly failure is, first and foremost, because we as a society
have lost the collective know-how to be able to build them as planned. Simple
as that. We don’t know how to lift the heavy components. We do not know how to
erect the tubing and leak test the pressure equipment. We do not know how to
weld and inspect the welding to the necessary standards… Now, don’t take me
wrong, I’m not saying there isn’t a single individual on the face of the Earth
with the ability to do each of those mildly difficult activities, what I’m
saying is there are not enough of them to plan for them properly, to perform
them at the required rate and cost, and to teach a new generation of engineers,
draughtsmen and operators how to keep on doing them and refining them
predictable and at scale.
And such a loss of collective
ability permeates all the rest of the economy. Yes, we have become better at
installing wind turbines (and don’t get me wrong, that is something great and
to be celebrated also), yohooo! And to line a field with PV cells… but that
doesn’t have the same cascading effect, that doesn’t lift the technological
level of a whole society, that doesn’t serve as a seedbed for engineering
talent as much as the building of massive nuclear plants did in the second half
of last century. And it shows. Any other sector ends up being penalized by such
lack of big projects, technologically ambitious, that forced the engineering
schools to churn out graduates and attracted those graduates to use and develop
their technical skills in the first place.
A very similar story could be told
about manned space flight. You may have read that Elon Musk achieved a
significant milestone this year by launching in February his Falcon Heavy
rocket (essentially, three Falcon 9 rockets ungainly put together), the
biggest, most powerful rocket in operation by far… and about half as powerful
as the mighty Saturn V that took the first humans to the moon… in 1969! If you
follow the industry, you find a very similar story: after the demise of the
Saturn program we just have lost boatloads of knowledge and experience, that
some private firms are trying to recover, amid many setbacks, delays,
unexpected accidents and uncountable difficulties. Because, again, when
technology stops progressing it immediately starts regressing, and in most
fields that’s where we are at: installing windmills is something we know how to
do since a millennium ago, and PV we essentially mastered a century ago, we
have just decided to do it at a bigger scale and thus make it not so dastardly
expensive, although they are still expensive enough not to grow at all the moment
you stop subsidizing them. But don’t suffer, we can collectively decide to
subsidize them as much as we like, that would simply be the exact reverse of “nuclear
energy is not profitable”, and thus it is entirely within our power: it is us
collectively, as a society, who decide what is profitable and what is not by
setting through laws and regulations what level of safety and innovation we are
willing to live with.
Which doesn’t mean that we cannot
reverse such regression, through renewed effort and considerable investment
(mostly public, sorry but private money is timid and risk averse, and tends to
flow only to potential monopolies where it can be assured of predictable,
above-average returns). The question that arises, then, is “this” (be it ITER,
or big thermosolar plants that never seem to work, or mega-constellations of
satellites in Low Earth Orbit that nobody seems to know how to monetize) what
we should be investing big bucks in? aren’t there other big science projects
that could deliver us cleaner energy “at command” (baseload, regardless of how
much the wind blows or the sun shines, factors that are still out of our
control)? Well, there are: Next Generation Nuclear (keep on dreaming...) but don’t hold your breath for
society suddenly deciding forty years of maligning every form and shape of
nuclear energy has been a costly error and changing course… To illustrate the
folly of such expectations I will bring in a personal note: Do you know who wrote
her PhD dissertation on the design of a molten salt reactor (which, according
to the linked article, is the spearhead of the most promising technology to
correct all of traditional nuclear evils)? My mom, that’s who. Forty years ago
(already w five kids delivered). And it seemed back then as close to being
commercially viable as it probably seems to the journos at “Wired” today. So I
wouldn’t be surprised if my own sons (or grandsons) write forty years from now
how advanced and promising some designs for “new nuclear” look like and how
they are the best option to decarbonize the economy, something that at the
current speed will still not have happened fifty years from now, as all the
increase in renewables has gone to substitute the aging nuclear park, (i.e. a non-CO2
emitting energy source is essentially replacing another non-CO2 emitting energy
source), and in the meanwhile we have not minimally dented the total production
of very-CO2-emitting coal and fuel plants, or created the capacity to move
around in electric cars…
So the best case for guarded
optimism I can make (if you can call optimism considering the new dark ages
will come in fifty to one hundred years, instead of in a couple of decades) is
that at least, in a few areas, through the joint investment of most advanced economies,
we are still trying to progress. It is ugly, and costly, and will still break
our hearts a number of times when new delays are announced and additional cost
overruns are uncovered and expected milestones keep not being met, but we are
still putting our best talent on it. “It” being doing things that were never
done before, and thus pushing the technological frontier of what our species is
able to achieve, and thus keeping the flame of hope alight that the complex
challenges that we face as a society may be, if not ultimately solved, at least
ameliorated. Because when that flame of hope is extinguished, and people stop believing
the future may be better than the present, and all we can expect is more of the
same in terms of misery, squalor, inequality and a degrading environment, they
tend to have little patience for the existing social compact, and that’s when
the pitchforks and the torches come out, and the powerful of today can start
worrying…
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