Ryan Collison

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 Earth

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-dense.

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

Coal and Steam: Breaking the Biological Ceiling In 1712, Thomas Newcomen installed a steam engine at a coal mine in Dudley Castle, England. It was crude—a massive beam rocking slowly up and down, powered by steam condensing in a cylinder, driving pumps that removed water from the mine. The

Muscle Power: The Limits of Human and Animal Labor For most of human history, the only prime movers available were muscles—human and animal. Everything that got done, got done by biological engines burning food and converting it to mechanical work. This sounds obvious. But it imposed constraints that shaped