science

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 less than how the modern world would be powered.

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 engine was inefficient. It burned coal at

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 the entire structure of pre-industrial civilization. The muscle power

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. The one after that might be something we

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 just think and communicate—they transform

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 did in 1970. But here's