A book about growth—in every sense

After astronaut Rusty Schweickart looked down on Earth from space for the first time, he described a sense of awe that has become common to almost every space traveler since: “You realize that on that little blue and white thing there is everything that means anything to you, all history and music and poetry and art and death and birth and love, all of it on that little spot out there you can cover with your thumb.”

NASA calls this realization “the overview effect.” No matter what country you’re from, you return from space with a feeling that our home is tiny, fragile, and something we need to protect.

Anyone who reads the new book Growth, the newest of 39 brilliant books by one of my favorite thinkers, will come away with similar urgency. The author, the Czech-Canadian professor Vaclav Smil, approaches things from a scientist’s point of view, not an astronaut’s, but he reaches the same conclusion: Earth is fragile and “before it is too late, we should embark in earnest on the most fundamental existential [task] of making any future growth compatible with the long-term preservation of the only biosphere we have.”

这本书的主要讲述的内容：

Simply put, this book deals in realities as it sets the growth of everything into long-term evolutionary and historical perspectives and does so in rigorous quantitative terms.

Chapter 1 introduces a lot of technical detail behind the three most common growth curves seen in our natural and built environments: linear, exponential, and hyperbolic. For example, Intel co-founder Gordon Moore made a surprisingly accurate prediction about the exponential growth in the number of transistors on a chip. But even that “law” is likely reaching the end of its useful life. Transistors are now so small, we’re running into problems making them even smaller.

Chapter 2 is all about the growth of living systems—from microorganisms to sequoia forests, and from humans to dinosaurs. In chapter 3, he lands on a topic he knows better than just about anyone else: the development and diffusion of new sources of energy—from traditional water wheels to nuclear reactors. chapters 4 (artifacts, such as cathedrals, cars, and computers) and 5 (societies and economies), I had to marvel over how Smil’s mind works. The way he synthesizes information from dozens of different domains is amazing. I also marveled over all the miracles that modern civilization is built on, including power grids, water systems, air transportation, and computing. The book gave me new appreciation for how many smart people had to try things out, make mistakes, and eventually succeed.

Smil’s goal for these chapters is to show that no matter what domain you’re talking about, eventually you hit growth limits. Steel, the backbone of modern economies, is a great example. After many years of metallurgical and mechanical innovation, we’re simply not able to make it a lot cheaper or with a lot less energy. Ultimately, his analysis shows that what we’re trying to do in terms of changing our physical economy and the energy flows upon which it is built would be unprecedented in our history.

In chapter 6 and in a brief coda, Smil sounds less like an academic than an activist. He concludes that “treating the biosphere as a mere assembly… of goods and services to be exploited (and used as a dumping ground) with impunity—must change in radical ways.”

Smil’s great strength isn’t predicting the future, but it’s documenting the past. There’s great value in that—you can’t see what’s coming next if you don’t understand what’s come before.

See you tomorrow