This is a terrible bar. By even being on an airplane just once you are already in the top 20% of the world. If you’ve done several circumnavigations you’re outside of the category of flying once or twice for major life events which puts you in the top 1%.
> Even the desperately poor can afford the energy budget to split a cell phone with the rest of their family, and lately they can have a small solar panel and light as well. That's not scarce energy
This is a really uninformed view of the energy requirements to sustain human life. Transportation, getting people food/water, and HVAC dominates this. Enough energy to run a cell phone is a joke.
A world in which anyone at all is flying around the world in dozens of passenger jets several times just in the course of living has an enormous amount of available energy relative to any time in history. If this is scarce, we don't have a word for what it was like before.
> A lightning bolt would be worth only about a nickel
Actually they are. My city is dumping earth into a lake to make new land for residential development. And China is literally building islands in the sea to extend its domain.
Energy? Is not scarce. I'm not even in the top 25% of travel for people who have been in an airplane one time, and I've done the equivalent of several circumnavigations.
Even the desperately poor can afford the energy budget to split a cell phone with the rest of their family, and lately they can have a small solar panel and light as well. That's not scarce energy.
It would be great if it was even less scarce, sure.