Ryan Collison

Synthesis: Intelligence Scales With Energy We've traveled from cooking fires to fusion reactors, from brain calories to Kardashev civilizations. The journey reveals a single through-line: intelligence and energy are bound together. Not metaphorically. Not loosely. Bound in a way that physics enforces. Every leap in human capacity—

Back to the Future: Fusion, Fission, and Solar Every energy transition in history has been a transition to higher energy density. Wood to coal. Coal to oil. Oil to uranium. The pattern is clear: civilizations climb the energy ladder by accessing more concentrated power sources. The next rung is fusion.

Kardashev Scale: Civilizations as Energy Consumers In 1964, Soviet astronomer Nikolai Kardashev asked a simple question: if we're searching for extraterrestrial intelligence, what should we look for? His answer: power consumption. A sufficiently advanced civilization, Kardashev reasoned, would be detectable by its energy signature. Civilizations don't

Moore's Law: Energy Per Computation In 1965, Gordon Moore made a prediction that would shape the next half-century of civilization: the number of transistors on a chip would double roughly every two years. He was right. A modern smartphone contains more transistors than all the computers on

Oil and the 20th Century: Liquid Civilization Coal powered the 19th century. Oil powered the 20th. The shift wasn't just a change in fuel. It was a transformation in how energy could be stored, transported, and used. Oil is energy in its most convenient form: liquid, portable, energy-

Tesla vs Edison: The Battle That Lit the World In the 1880s, two visions of electrical power went to war. On one side: Thomas Edison, the Wizard of Menlo Park, champion of direct current. On the other: Nikola Tesla and George Westinghouse, prophets of alternating current. The stakes were nothing