4.6B Years On, the Sun Is Having a Moment

Re:4.6B Years On, the Sun Is Having a Moment by zenkat on Thursday July 10, 2025 @12:04PM (#44522528)

Check out Paul Kennedy's "The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers" for an interesting take on this dynamic for nation-states and political economies. His core thesis is that dominant powers rise as new players leverage new technologies (especially energy technologies), build complex interdependent economies centered around those technologies, but then wither and fall as they spend increasingly more on military power to monopolize and defend the chokepoints of those technologies. When a new more efficient technology comes along, they are doomed to irrelevance as they fail to capitalize on those technologies, and new players swoop in for dominance.

He gives examples of the Dutch and wind power (sailing); Great Britain and coal; and America and petroleum. He also predicted China's ascendency as the next player willing to leverage new technologies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_and_Fall_of_the_Great...

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Re:4.6B Years On, the Sun Is Having a Moment by wanderingstan on Thursday July 10, 2025 @12:18PM (#44522653)

Thanks for the tip! It seems obvious now, but its been interesting for me to realize how much of human history can be understood as a quest for energy, full stop. Even going back to the invention of farming, which at its core was way to reliably source more calories per person. Fun to think of your examples of sailing, coal, and petroleum empires as further chapters in this ongoing quest.

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Re:4.6B Years On, the Sun Is Having a Moment by Lalo-ATX on Friday July 11, 2025 @01:11PM (#44534662)

absolutely.

energy is a time accelerator. You can do more, produce more, using energy.

all of our "wealth" is due to our application of energy. Maintaining and increasing wealth both require energy.

Some people look at the relationship between wealth and energy. And there's more than one way to look at it. I found this interesting for a really big picture perspective.

https://esd.copernicus.org/articles/13/1021/2022/

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Re:4.6B Years On, the Sun Is Having a Moment by debesyla on Friday July 11, 2025 @03:05PM (#44535821)

(And to connect this with AI...)

I guess we could count the need for more efficient IT tools/engines too - use less electric and human power to fulfill our knowledge needs using better algorythms.

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