Valuable Action: Energy (A New Course of Action Part 2)

So, keeping in mind the stated goals of survival and an increase in wellbeing, which I’ll limit to an absence of thirst, hunger and sickness, I’ll say that value is something that accomplishes our stated goals. What sort of actions could humanity undertake that we can feel will have a high probability of generating value?  I’ll start first with what I feel is the simplest to describe but also the most important: harnessing energy.

Let me start this by talking about an idea very fundamental to wellbeing: entropy.  Entropy is the process by which all matter and energy tend to break down into their simplest forms.  Your cell walls are constantly trying to break down, the heat is constantly trying to leave your body, the water in you wants to escape… if entropy had it’s way, you would be a thin cloud of carbon, oxygen, nitrogen and other trace elements and, by extension, very very dead (and you probably would die in an agonizing way).  This is what would happen to you if you were suddenly sent into empty space.

Luckily, you live on a planet that is constantly being hit by energy from the sun, which envelops you constantly in a survival allowing blanket of oxygen and heat.  Now, this blanket is not invincible; actions humans take can and have begun to seriously disrupt this blanket and make life a lot more difficult.  It’s conceivable that we could create a life-support system like exists on Earth by ourselves, and later I’ll say that we should do exactly that on other planets, but the one we have now works so well in so many ways without any human effort that it would be monstrously detrimental to us to harm it.

This life-support system is not enough to keep us alive, though.  Our bodies need a constant supply of specific kinds of chemical energy (ie, food) to maintain homeostasis, our body’s own personal fight against entropy, which, even with the atmosphere around us, would still make us freeze to death if we weren’t getting constant sources of energy.  Maintaining homeostasis is the other side of the coin of keeping our wellbeing high by fighting hunger.  Thus, actions which generate food generate value (note: though I’m not talking about sustainability now, I think that it’s very important; I DON’T think that we should just turn every acre we can find into a farm just to generate as much food as possible), because food keeps us alive and keeps us from suffering hunger (it also provides satisfaction and pleasure if it’s good food and communal joy if it’s eaten in a good crowd, but I’ll talk more about that later).

Similarly, humans need a constant supply of water in order to keep vital life processes going.  In many ways that water is provided to us with very little effort by the constant energy we get free from the sun, which drives the water cycle, providing rainwater which fills streams, rivers and lakes from which we drink. However, energy still plays a very important part in providing us with water.  Even if it’s just energy from the food we eat, we need energy to go to streams, to stick our hands or buckets in the water and to drink.  The energy requirements increase dramatically as we pump water into people’s homes.

Problems with water are really problems with energy.  There are far more H20 molecules in the world than we need at any one time for all of the combined uses on the planet.  The real problem is getting that water where it needs to be in a form that is usable.  With infinite energy (and, to be truthful, the necessary technology, infrastructure and political systems), there would be no water scarcity or water stress; what water we couldn’t get from the water cycle we could desalinate from the ocean and pump to wherever it would be needed and there would still be plenty of water left in the oceans so as not to cause problems with the biosphere.  When people talk about upcoming water scarcity issues, they’re talking about the depletion of groundwater supplies, which is really an issue of depeleting water that doesn’t take much energy to use.  Thus, in order to achieve the goal of survival and limiting thirst, we can generate value for society by generating more energy and using it to provide ourselves with more water.

In so many other ways, energy is crucial to our survival and our ability to increase our wellbeing.  I’ll talk much more about the other ways that energy enables us.  For now, I want you to think about the nature of energy.  Change is impossible without energy.  We exist on a planet that exists at the perfect distance from an unimaginable source of energy to allow for life, and we recieve that energy constantly.  We haven’t even come close to fully utilizing that gift; much of the energy simply bounces off of our planet and back out into space or is absorbed and contributes to global warming.  If we want to make our lives better, we should look first to the sun and ask ourselves how we can better take advantage of its bounty.

Note:  I’m not by any means trying to say that this is the only way to generate value, just that it is a powerful way that clearly generates value for nearly all people.  I also don’t think that generating energy (or any action for that matter) is simple and doesn’t have costs associated with it.  We generate energy from fossil fuels, and I don’t advocate for that at all, especially considering the far better alternatives we have available.  Even solar and wind power take up land and cause negative environmental impacts.  I think, however, that there are many ways to generate energy, such as sustainable farming and the aforementioned wind and solar, where the benefits far exceed the costs.  As always, please feel free to attack parts of the post that you disagree with.