J. Storrs Hall is impatient

Something prompted me to look up the recent book “Where is My Flying Car?” by J. Storrs Hall. I found an ebook copy in our local library (the Libby App is awesome), and it seems to be the 2021 “Stripe Press” edition rather than the self-published version from a few years before. While the topic of the title is covered from many different angles, this is mainly a “book of futurism” as the author admits in the last chapter. Hall has clearly been inspired by science fiction stories - the text is liberally sprinkled with references to and quotes from The Jetsons, Tom Swift stories, Robert Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Jules Verne, and perhaps especially, H. G. Wells.

Hall references Wells in describing the conflict he sees between “Doers” and “Do-Nots” foretold by Wells in the movie “Things to Come”, and in referring to the “Eloi” of Wells’ “Time Machine”. The Eloi were the degenerate descendants of humanity in the far future, with their every need attended to and no desire to  exert themselves. Wells’ “Do-Nots” are well-to-do people who feel they have enough and don’t want new accomplishments and change going on around them, an updated and closer to present-day version of the Eloi. Hall sees these as his enemies: essentially, the baby-boom generation that became dominated by Do-Nots and Eloi, stopping the progress that seemed inevitable to the early science fiction writers, and the amazing machines (like flying cars) we could have had by now.

We are missing “the future we were promised”, from the late 1800s to post World War II; though not all of it. Hall claims “science fiction writers were roughly on target […]  in most fields except transportation and space exploration”. He points to the “Henry Adams Curve” - a pattern of exponential growth in energy use per capita which continued at 2% per year until the late 1970s in the US, since which it has flatlined at about 10 kW/person. Where science fiction went amiss was in those technologies that used a lot of energy:

The extent to which a technology didn’t live up to its Jetsons-era expectation is strongly correlated with its energy intensity. The one area where progress continued most robustly - Moore’s Law in computing and communications - was the one where energy was not a major concern.

Hall believes in “The Great Stagnation” (referencing Tyler Cowen) - “Progress has slowed to a crawl. Or is that merely perception? … the second half of the 20th century didn’t seem to bring nearly as many major, valuable advances as the first half.” But he sees different causes than Cowen’s, in part through his interest in aviation. “Another thing that happened right around the end of the ‘70s was that the private airplane industry […] mysteriously disappeared.” Airliner cruising speed flatlined around 1960 (at just under Mach 1) - Hall notes that physics explains why going faster than sound is expensive, but:

It turns out that, for long international flights (eg., Los Angeles to Sydney), the energy used by a jetliner dragging its way through the atmosphere is just as much as would have been needed to put it into orbit - and make the trip in less than an hour.

Actually that would technically be a suborbital ballistic flight, but close enough. Private space companies do seem to be looking into this sort of market now, in the 21st century. It seems to be technically harder than Hall imagines here but it still is a good question why it has taken so long (and the suborbital tourism that has begun is still very minimal).

We can reasonably use the plateau in air travel as an iconic, if perhaps exaggerated, example of the general plateauing, flatlining, and stagnating of life-improving technology that began in the 1970s and ‘80s.

So what is to blame for our stagnation? Hall’s text conjures up several villains to some of which he attaches colorful names (as he does for several futuristic technology ideas we’ll get to later). There is the “Machiavelli Effect”, from Machiavelli’s comment that “… the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old conditions, and lukewarm defenders in those who may do well under the new.”

One possibility is that there is an Overton window effect in technology, a window into the world of ideas that frames what people are prepared to entertain, where ideas outside the window are not seriously considered. Really revolutionary ideas simply roll off men’s minds like water off a duck. Machiavelli described the effect as ‘the incredulity of men, who do not readily believe in new things until they have had a long experience of them.’

Hall refers to the concept of “Baptists and Bootleggers”- different groups who are on the same side of preventing change, with differing motives (idealism on the one hand, maintaining a monopoly on the other). These are both surely real effects, though he doesn’t address how some technology developments have managed to happen anyway, despite being unfamiliar or even unexpected (all the things that have come about thanks to lasers for instance). Clearly there are real opposing forces to change, but changes that are useful enough seem to bubble up anyway. But maybe there’s an exception here for the high-energy technologies Hall prefers.

The culture shift of the 60s and 70s was also real:

… Western culture had succeeded in supplying the needs of the lower levels of the hierarchy, including the security of a well-run society. And with these levels attained, the modern Eloi could be thought of as all those Americans who became able to take certain things […] for granted. This means that they began to be able to spend more of their energy, effort, and concern on the love, esteem, consciousness-raising, and self-actualization levels.

Here we find Hall calling out the “Eloi of the Age of Aquarius” who are interested in anything but technological progress, and worse the “Eloi Agonistes”, continually inventing imaginary crises because they have no real threats to their comfort. Among the imaginary threats Hall attributes to these modern Eloi are “Radiophobia”, the nuclear hysteria of the 1970s, and a general “Ergophobia” - fear of energy - “… the almost inexplicable belief that there is something wrong with using energy per se.”

Hall includes climate change in this list of hysteria - interestingly the same 2% cut to GDP he treats as insignificant when associated with climate (and that number is rather uncertain given debates over the associated economic models) he treats as catastrophic when the cause is our American legal system and the growth in the number of lawyers. Clearly while he bemoans “virtue signaling” there are other signals he is making in his text in some other direction than pure logic.

But despite the snark and frequent utopian visions there is a lot here to ponder. Has over-regulation stymied technological development in transportation since the 1960s? “The Great Stagnation coincided with a rise, nay, a flood, of federal regulation.” This was the Nixon administration that started a “regulatory explosion”. Product liability became a concern for all manufacturers, since all those lawyers had to earn their keep. Aircraft may have been particularly affected by this.

Then there is the role of government spending itself. Hall mentions the Wright (private) vs Langley (government funded) feud in the early days of flight, and quotes a 2003 OECD report that I haven’t been able to locate myself, where he claims “A survey and analysis […] in 2005 found, to the researchers’ surprise, that although private R&D had a positive 0.26 correlation with economic growth, government-funded R&D had a negative 0.37 correlation!” And he claims this makes sense: “Centralized funding of an intellectual elite makes it easier for cadres, cliques, and the politically skilled to gain control of a field, and by their nature they are resistant to new, outside, non-Ptolemaic ideas.”

How the 2003 OECD report included a 2005 survey I don’t know - most likely this is another of the book’s many minor typos (I was quite surprised at the table referring to U208 and nearby text U308 when presumably both meant U238). OECD and other sources I’ve seen generally argue for the need for investment in R&D, so I’m quite surprised at this conclusion and perhaps it was a unique result in this report. Obviously there are cases where government spending has been wasted - but there are plenty of cases of private waste as well (how much effort and energy - real gigajoules! - has gone into the wasteland of blockchain and crypto “investments” by private actors these last few years?)

Along with the flood of government funding Hall points out that higher education has flourished in the second half of the 20th century, coinciding with stagnation. Shouldn’t more education produce more innovation? Maybe we’re doing it wrong?

A final villain in Hall’s list of reasons for stagnation is the recent absence of war among the most technologically advanced nations - we have only battled by proxy, at arm’s length starting with Korea in the 1950s. This is of course thanks to the devastating power of nuclear weapons which have kept the major powers out of direct conflict. Hall doesn’t seem to think it would have been better had direct conflict happened, but nevertheless one can see how the lack of testing of our best technologies on the battlefield could lead to some stagnation.

One could imagine other causes - after all many things happened in the 1960s, and 70s. TV became ubiquitous in American households - is the dumbing down of discourse that came with the boob tube to blame? What about the fall in union membership and the resulting stagnation in worker benefits that could have paid for things like flying cars? What about the end of anti-trust action - the last major one was the AT&T breakup in 1982 - which meant that large corporations have only grown in their power to prevent changes they don’t like? What about the growth in the wealthiest 1% and stagnation in ordinary people’s income especially after Reagan’s tax changes in the early 80’s? Hall doesn’t raise any of these possibilities, perhaps because they would tell against the non-virtue-signaling posture he seems to prefer.

Hall complains about “cost disease” but doesn’t explain how it comes about. The actual problem is similar to one I ran into years ago in computing - “Amdahl’s law”, which notes that the maximum possible speed-up of any computer program through parallel processing is limited by those parts of the program that cannot be parallelized. The issue with human work is that some parts of it can be automated - replaced by machines - and some cannot. The limit to which a job can be made more productive is the fraction of the work that cannot be automated. Over time that changes, but for now those jobs that are subject to “cost disease” are simply those for which automation is not currently possible for most of what they do. Manufacturing, farming, and most work relating to creating physical stuff can be made less and less expensive through automation. Teaching and medical work cannot (as yet). So the relative cost of the latter types of work rises over time. And indeed when Hall suggests the workforce can be envisioned as a line of people stretching across the country of which only a tiny fraction are needed to provide for basic needs, it’s clear that most people are employed today providing goods or services nobody expected to have 100 years ago.

The book delves into speculative or outright pseudo-scientific domains at times. Hall claims there’s something interesting going on with “cold fusion” or whatever it’s called these days, but that seems very unlikely - it’s been well over 3 decades now! Hall seems doubtful about quantum mechanics and thinks some revolution in basic physics is imminent. That would be interesting, but whatever happens there it’s not going to change the things we already can calculate and observe matching to high precision. Hall talks about vast quantities of energy needed by nanotech (which he distinguishes from run-of-the-mill Machiavelli Effect “nanotechnology”) but doesn’t seem to account for how that energy would be dissipated. If you are pairing nuclear energy sources with small molecular machines, those machines are going to melt quickly without an adequate cooling system - not to mention the effect stray neutrons or other energetic particles may have.

I’m not an expert on nanotech and Hall has been at least writing on the subject for years. I do know how electrons in atoms and molecules work though - atoms are very far from billiard balls, and Hall’s proposal (the Feynman approach, he claims) to simply scale the same system down repeatedly cannot work once you get anywhere close to atomic scale. Maybe that leaves some room for what he’s hoping to do, but the flights of fancy regarding making quintillions of diamond-shelled aerostats, separating isotopes one by one at mass scale, rebuilding American infrastructure in a week - well speculation is fun, but these are just not likely to ever be possible. Despite his repeated assertions that “It is a possibility”.

The promise of nanotech is that … Things that now take us a year’s work could be done in a day. And your $3,000,000 flying car would cost just $10,000. It is a possibility.

Maybe those things will happen, but I don’t think this vision for nanotech is likely to be the path to it.

There is much more in this book, some of which will surely fire the imaginations of real innovators and lead to some fun technologies down the road. Hall describes some interesting ideas for reimagining cities (if we could all get around with flying cars) - not unlike some cities from Sci-Fi stories. He describes a possible “Space pier”, a set of towers 100 km high with an electromagnetic launch platform to efficiently get things into orbit (and presumably back down as well). His “Weather Machine” is a collection of a vast number of nanotech sunshades, aerostats that cover the Earth 20 miles up, which can through their control of downwelling sunlight accomplish a wide array of miraculous things. And which would be a natural prelude to a sun-encompassing Dyson sphere in the longer run. And of course nuclear-powered spacecraft (which NASA is seriously looking into).

On robotics and AI Hall seems to think we’re on track, but not there yet. He describes the “Wozniak test” as an interesting challenge for robotics: to “walk into an unfamiliar house and make a cup of coffee”. “I claim that this test addresses the bulk of the aspects of general intelligence that are missing from AI today.”

The book starts with and repeatedly returns to the title question and the challenges with having personal air transport. There’s a lot of discussion of how flying works, requirements like runway length to take off, flying speed, stall speed, energy usage and limitations with chemical fuels. There are many different designs for flying machines - Hall seems to favor the early work on autogyros (which eventually led to the helicopter). The main point of doing this is that flight allows much faster travel than on the ground, so the major value in flying would be long trips - you would make a lot more long trips than you do now. These are higher-value trips, but “too expensive in time to make very often with a ground car.”

… the unexpected empirical finding from travel studies is that people in all societies spend about an hour a day traveling, whether they are in Zambia walking barefoot or in the U.S. riding in an air-conditioned car. […] the average across a given society is just over an hour per person per day- apparently a human universal.

So your flying car needs to be able to get you as far as possible in that daily hour of travel time. Ideally vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL), and fast, so a jet with 400 knot+ speed. This is rather hard to do.

Which might really be the underlying reason for our “stagnation” - we’ve done easy things, and the things we haven’t done are actually hard. This is Tyler Cowen’s low-hanging fruit argument. Hall doesn’t buy this, and maybe he has a point - there are a lot of complex pieces of technology we have access to these days that are inexpensive thanks to mass production. Could something similar have happened with aircraft? Maybe?

Hall states “We are not living in the future of Robert Heinlein; we are living in the future of Philip K. Dick.” But is our present state really so bad? Realistically we are somewhere between the two - as always partway between utopia and dystopia! His claim that “The Great Stagnation was the Qing Dynasty self-strangulation, rerun at internet speed.” actually feels somewhat hopeful to me: China has been rather successful in overcoming that period of stagnation in its history; maybe our “stagnation” will be that much more temporary. The developments in private space transportation in recent years are certainly one encouraging sign there. I also find the recent amazing growth in deployment of solar and other renewable power to point the same way - if much of our “ergophobia” actually stemmed from disgust at the pollution of old energy technologies, these new ones may pull us out of it and make more energy available to everyone, letting us get back to Hall’s “Henry Adams Curve”. It is a possibility.

Hall briefly discusses Kevin Kelly’s concept of the “technium”, a way of thinking about our technology in the landscape of possibilities. “Where the technium would have spilled into the fertile valleys, we have instead built up a theoretical, scientific overhang.” I think there is some real truth there. We may have overemphasized basic science for the last few decades, and created a large number of opportunities for new technology development just waiting to be taken advantage of. And what better way to tackle them than by opening some new frontiers:

Frontiers, in turn, suppress self-deception […] we should also get positive feedback by going in the opposite direction, opening new frontiers and pitting our efforts against nature instead of each other.

Yes, J. Storrs Hall is impatient that the future he was promised hasn’t happened yet. I’m impatient for needed change too. But at least some of it is coming. Whether or not it includes flying cars, I’m confident it will be amazing.

Vaclav Smil yells at cloud

I recently read Canadian energy expert Vaclav Smil’s 2022 book “How the World Really Works”, subtitled “The Science Behind How We Got Here and Where We’re Going”. Highly ambitious one might think, but Smil is not one for modesty. As always with Smil, the facts laid out (and there are a vast number of these - the book is full of all kinds of numbers) are well-referenced and seem largely correct, though I’ll quibble with a few things below. While he raises many good points, many of the implications drawn from those facts and the frequently expressed opinions of the author seem far less reliable. The repeated motif of the book is an attack on what Smil refers to as “gullible” people disconnected from the material world engaging in “wishful thinking” and focused on “streams of electrons in myriads of microdevices”. The book is an attempt to remind these people that all their comforts depend on essential supplies of food and water, minerals and metals, and energy, and we can’t just wish away the challenges involved in sustaining those supply chains.

Smil tackles the energy situation first. The historical review of energy sources for human society is useful and mildly enlightening. Smil waxes particularly eloquent on the benefits of oil - specifically its flexibility and energy-density. Though why do we need to hear in this section about the many non-energy uses for crude oil like lubricants, asphalt, or synthetic materials? Perhaps because a “poor understanding of energy has the proponents of a new green world naively calling for a near-instant shift from abominable, polluting, and finite fossil fuels to superior, green, and ever-renewable solar electricity.” Unlike the many numeric quantities in the text, this straw man group of “proponents” comes with no citation. If Smil thinks a few decades is “near-instant” then that could surely be supported; however the groups I’m familiar with oppose only the burning of fossil fuels; using them for non-energy purposes ought to be fine. In my view (and that of others I’ve talked with) we should save them from burning so we don’t run out of this critical material feedstock for our synthetic materials!

Smil repeatedly states his opinion that a transition from fossil energy to renewables must take longer than two or three decades. But the book is filled with examples of previous major changes in the energy landscape on similar timescales. For example on oil: “European demand had nearly doubled between 1965 and 1973, and Japanese imports became about 2.3 times higher.” Surely a doubling in less than a decade is a pretty good precedent for this sort of change being possible on short time scales? And there’s more: “Between 1950 and 2000 […] China saw an astounding, more than 120-fold, increase [in useful energy per capita].” and later on “… the supply of new renewables (wind, solar, new biofuels) rose impressively, about 50-fold, during the first 20 years of the 21st century …”, while in the same paragraph Smil moans that “… even a tripling or quadrupling of the recent pace of decarbonization would still leave fossil fuels dominant by 2050.” Why is tripling or quadrupling the best that can be hoped for when we have a 50-fold increase from the preceding two decades? We have clear precedents in this very book of energy transitions with fast exponential growth, but Smil somehow doesn’t believe this is possible for decarbonization. I don’t follow his logic. Exponential growth always looks small at first, before it explodes. The many numbers included in the book seem intended more to intimidate than to enlighten us on what is actually possible. Isn’t the point of the vast resource use in our modern world to make us more capable of doing things than we were in previous decades?

When discussing food, concrete, and steel, Smil makes some excellent points. What are the prospects for carbon-free sources for the nitrogen-based fertilizers essential to our food supply? There are some projects along these lines - a fuel cell for making ammonia electrically (which could also make ammonia a useful energy storage medium), or perhaps just using the standard process with “green hydrogen” but scaling up such experiments and trials seems a daunting prospect, and the economic and policy incentives to do this seem missing up to this point. Smil traces the energy inputs to our food supply through a series of comparisons - bread, tomatoes, chicken, and seafood as examples. He invariably converts these energy inputs to diesel fuel equivalents, which seems odd when some of them are already electric (baking, some transportation) and could be carbon-free, with clear pathways for further growth. Including the quantities of plastics that are part of this supply as if they were also energy-based also seems odd - yes they are derived from fossil fuels, but not through burning them, so it’s not an energy cost. In any case, Smil is perfectly correct in arguing that (a) food is essential, and (b) we’re not making good progress as yet on decarbonization of our food production systems.

The story is similar for the vast quantities of structural materials - concrete and steel specifically - which we use. Smil argues clearly for our continued need for these things - particularly with much of the world still developing. Somehow we will need to decarbonize or capture carbon dioxide emissions in the processes that make these materials if we are to achieve world net-zero goals. There are surely technical mechanisms to do this, but where are the economic or policy incentives needed to make it happen?

I won’t say much about Smil’s chapters on globalization and risks. It’s an interesting historical review of globalization and efficiencies in transportation, but also of the degree to which these effects have gone up and down over the years. It’s possible that after COVID (and Russia’s war in Ukraine) we may see a period of declining global trade. The discussion of risks attempts to put different risks on the same footing one way or another, but with some odd calculations that I’m not sure really help to enlighten the situation. Life is risky, and trying to make it less so is one good driver of innovation, though whether it’s the major one that Smil claims I am not so sure. 

The environment chapter tells us that yes, we won’t run out of oxygen, nor food and water (though see above on the challenges relating to decarbonization). Yes the greenhouse effect is real and we are warming the planet by burning fossil carbon. Smil likens our response to climate change to the initially incompetent global response to the COVID-19 pandemic: something completely predictable but with a lot of uncertainty on timing and specific impacts, and things that could have been done to prepare were largely ignored. While there are unfortunate references here to the “climate change religion”, Smil provides a good account of where we have fallen short and the opportunities that are there already:

… we do not need an endless stream of new models in order to take effective actions. There are enormous opportunities for reducing energy use in buildings, transportation, industry, and agriculture, and we should have initiated some of these energy-saving and emissions-reducing measures decades ago … [these] should be perennial imperatives, not sudden desperate actions aimed at preventing a catastrophe.

Most remarkably, we have largely ignored taking steps that could have limited the long-term impacts of climate change and that should have been taken even in the absence of any global warming concerns because they bring long-term savings and provide more comfort. And as if that were not enough, we have deliberately introduced and promoted the diffusion of new energy conversions that have boosted the consumption of fossil energies and hence further intensified CO2 emissions. The best examples of these omissions and commissions are the indefensibly inadequate building codes in cold-climate countries and the worldwide adoption of SUVs.

I was hoping that at some point this book, with all its quantitative assertions, would actually justify Smil’s pessimism about decarbonization by looking at, for example, the capital costs of creating enough photovoltaic panels, wind turbines, electric storage and transmission facilities, new plants for green ammonia, concrete, steel, etc. I don’t see that, and I think the truth is that while these capital costs will be large, the global economy can absorb them easily if spread over several decades. But the real source for Smil’s pessimism, I think, is more a political and historical one - the following captures an essential challenge:

Dealing with this challenge will, for the first time in history, require a truly global, as well as a very substantial and prolonged, commitment. To conclude that we will be able to achieve decarbonization anytime soon, effectively and on the required scales, runs against all past evidence. The UN’s first climate conference took place in 1992, and in the intervening decades we have had a series of global meetings and countless assessments and studies - but nearly three decades later there is still no binding international agreement to moderate the annual emissions of greenhouse gases and no prospect for its early adoption.

Yes, this is true that as a global community we have not yet made the necessary commitments to solve the problem. But there are a lot of signs of progress, even if still inadequate. I think the line between pessimism and optimism here may be between those who can envision only linear change in the future, and those of us who think change can be nonlinear. I’ve long liked Al Gore’s comment on this:

Sometimes, the political system is like the climate system, in that it’s nonlinear. It can seem to change at a snail’s pace and then suddenly cross a tipping point beyond which it shifts into a shockingly fast gear. All of a sudden, change that everybody thought was impossible becomes matter of fact.

There is real reason to hope here. Even Smil admits in several places that future projections are hard - many things have happened in the past that would have been hard to predict in advance. It would have been nice if he had then added a little humility to his repeated assertions that decarbonization in a few decades is impossible.

On numerical quibbles - Smil repeatedly refers to the small share of renewables in “primary” energy supply and the relatively little progress made in reducing “primary” energy from fossil fuels. But this is misleading at best - to quote a section early in the book: “Global primary energy supply usually refers to total (gross) production, but it is more revealing to look at energy that is actually available for conversion into useful forms.” Most burning of fossil fuels is at best 30-40% efficient in converting that primary energy to useful form, due to inevitable thermodynamic losses in heat engines. Meanwhile solar and wind power is electric from the start, requiring only the minimal losses associated with transmission before being put to use. So every unit of solar or wind energy is generally worth 2.5 to 3 times the same quantity of thermal primary energy. As with the risks chapter, translating quantities into perfectly comparable units is tricky, but Smil doesn’t even really attempt to do so here.

There is similar confusion in comparing intermittent renewable electric supply to steady sources like nuclear reactors. Yes Germany’s photovoltaics may only average 12% capacity factor, but why should that matter? Electric power from solar panels or wind farms is power that doesn’t have to be supplied by other sources, and we should build as much of them as is needed to cover demand. Capacity factor really doesn’t enter in except as an element of capital cost vs energy generated (so that economically of course you want to put these facilities where they will generate the most energy).

Anyway, despite some faults I did enjoy Smil’s book. It is informative and thought-provoking in places and does point out some real challenges we face in overcoming our reliance on fossil fuels. I guess the real test of his claims will be how the next few decades actually do turn out. I for one remain optimistic that the world will do what is necessary, in the end.