"One could say that the process of science opened the door to fossil fuels, but science and fossil fuels might be best described as a dynamic duo. Fossil fuels gave us the power to advance our science-amplified degree of control to an entirely new level. Resources that had been previously inaccessible became available. It became far easier to clear land for agriculture and other uses. We learned to make fertilizer from methane, unleashing unprecedented agricultural surpluses that inevitably resulted in a human population overshoot. Fossil-fueled furnaces led to steel, concrete, and other materials on a massive scale, paving the way to megacities and global trade. Science itself was amplified by having access to fossil fuels, via a flood of new devices and capabilities invented with—and powered by—cheap energy. Advances in science and technology in turn allowed greater access to buried fossil energy. This positive feedback arrangement facilitated runaway expansion of the enterprise, leading to a battery of hockey stick curves."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Thomas W. Murphy, "Our Time on the River". Do the Math. University of California, San Diego. August 22, 2023.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Modernity
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Modernity
80 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Modernity →
Related Quotes
"The twentieth century was the bankruptcy of the social utopia; the twenty-first will be that of the technological one."
"The effects of the automobile in the 1950s not only gave us dating, it also destroyed our communities. Resources were…"
"The modern is only in our desire. It is outside, everywhere, outside of us. The modern is not in our spirit. This is …"
"All civilizations follow a similar pattern of growth, stagnation, and decline—ours is no exception... The rise and fa…"
"That teaching of modern metaphysics ... exhorts man to feel comparatively little esteem for the truly thinking portio…"
"Philosophy—reduced, as we have seen, to philosophical discourse—develops from this point on in a different atmosphere…"
"Since the Greeks the predominant attitude of thinkers towards intellectual activity was to glorify it insofar as (lik…"
"The disease of the modern character is specialization."
"The office is to the modern world what the cloister was to medieval Christendom: a chaste arena with an unrivalled ca…"
"They are born, put in a box; they go home to live in a box; they study by ticking boxes; they go to what is called “w…"