71 Things you need to know about the world

In my holiday, I read Numbers don’t Lie by Vaclav Smil and I loved it. There are some amazing nuggets of information in there and it’s easy enough to read. I will share a few that I found insightful.

On Fertility: The replacement level of fertility is that which maintains a population at a stable level. It is about 2.1, with the additional fraction needed to make up for girls who will not survive into fertile age.

which leads to one of the big ones. It seem that for the during the 50 years between 2020 and 2070 almost 75% of all births will be in Africa. Now this is something to think about on so many levels, and for me a founder and entrepreneur, simply for hiring. This is largely linked with the biggest indicator of quality of life, it being the infant mortality rate. Lower obviously being better. And for those vaccine deniers, it has been calculated that for every dollar invested in vaccination, $16 is expected to be saved in healthcare costs and the lost wages and lost productivity caused by illness and death.

Now let’s go to human beings. We are way better equipped to longer runs than others. And here is why:

The first advantage is in how we breathe. A quadruped can take only a single breath per locomotive cycle, because its chest must absorb the impact on the front limbs. We, however, can choose other ratios, and that lets us use energy more flexibly. The second (and greater) advantage is in our extraordinary ability to regulate our body temperature, which allows us to do what lions cannot: run long and hard in the noonday sun.

We went on into the entire field of motors and how important they are. Motors include e.g. 2 billion tiny 4mm diameter DC devices for making your cell phone vibrate. But these are also about the big ones and he postulated that without the low operating costs, high efficiency, high reliability, and great durability of diesel engines, it would have been impossible to reach the extent of globalization that now defines the modern economy. More on motors later.

He talked about Muybridge who build a device to film animals while running and in 1883 he began an extensive series depicting animal and human locomotion. Its creation relied on 24 cameras fixed in parallel to a 36-meter-long track with two portable sets of 12 batteries at each end. The track had a marked background, and animals or people activated the shutters by breaking stretched strings.

The cool thing is that he invented that. And in 1878 Edison Patented the way to record and play back sounds.

He designed a small device with a grooved cylinder overlaid with tinfoil that could easily receive and record the motions of the diaphragm. “I then shouted, ‘Mary had a little lamb,’ etc.,” Edison later recalled. “I adjusted the reproducer, and the machine reproduced it perfectly. I was never so taken aback in my life. Everybody was astonished. I was always afraid of things that worked the first time.”

Another good things to think about: And why do we measure the progress of economies by gross domestic product? GDP is simply the total annual value of all goods and services transacted in a country. It rises not only when lives get better and economies progress but also when bad things happen to people or to the environment. Higher alcohol sales, more driving under the influence, more accidents, more emergency-room admissions, more injuries, more people in jail — GDP goes up.

Let’s move into the biggest part though, power and energy. The thing is that a wind turbine probably needs a year to generate enough power to pay back for the environmental impact of the hundreds of tons of concrete and steel.

So, for a long time to come — until all energies used to produce wind turbines and photovoltaic cells come from renewable energy sources — modern civilization will remain fundamentally dependent on fossil fuels.

And let’s take shipping: What would it take to make an electric ship that can carry up to 18,000 TEUs, now a common intercontinental load? In a 31-day trip, most of today’s efficient diesel vessels burn 4,650 tons of fuel (low-quality residual oil or diesel), with each ton packing 42 gigajoules. That’s an energy density of about 11,700 watt-hours per kilogram, versus 300 Wh/kg for today’s lithium-ion batteries — a nearly 40-fold difference. […] The conclusion is obvious. To have an electric ship whose batteries and motors weighed no more than the fuel (about 5,000 tons) and the diesel engine (about 2,000 tons) in today’s large container vessels, we would need batteries with an energy density more than 10 times as high as today’s best Li-ion units. But that’s a tall order indeed: in the past 70 years, the energy density of the best commercial batteries hasn’t even quadrupled.

So where is all our energy usage going that we can hardly turn off:

In contrast, several key economic sectors depend heavily on fossil fuels and we do not have any non-carbon alternatives that could replace them rapidly and on the requisite massive scales. These sectors include long-distance transportation (now almost totally reliant on aviation kerosene for jetliners, and diesel, bunker fuel, and liquefied natural gas for container, bulk, and tanker vessels); the production of more than a billion tons of primary iron (requiring coke made from coal for smelting iron ores in blast furnaces) and more than 4 billion tons of cement (made in massive rotating kilns fired by low-quality fossil fuels); the synthesis of nearly 200 million tons of ammonia and some 300 million tons of plastics (starting with compounds derived from natural gas and crude oil); and space heating (now dominated by natural gas).

For example, today’s jet fuel — the most common formulation of which is called Jet A-1 — has a number of advantages. It has a very high energy density, as it packs 42.8 megajoules into each kilogram (that is slightly less than gasoline but it can stay liquid down to –47°C), and it beats gasoline on cost, evaporative losses at high altitude, and risk of fire during handling.

The other big part are ammonia and liquid nitrogenous fertilizers … we need 150 million tons of NH4 a year, which produces 1% of the global greenhouse gas emissions. Of course I have to admit “have to” is a bit hard a term. But it comes to a good point: In order to cut future nitrogen losses, we should do everything possible to improve the efficiency of fertilization, reduce food waste, and adopt moderate meat consumption . And even that will not eliminate all nitrogen losses — but that is the price we pay for having gone from 1.6 billion people in 1900 toward 10 billion by 2100. […] The UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization puts the annual global losses at 40–50 percent for root crops, fruits, and vegetables, 35 percent for fish, 30 percent for cereals, and 20 percent for oilseeds, meat, and dairy products. This means that, globally, at least one-third of all harvested food is wasted. […] Cutting food waste in half would lead the way to a more rational use of food worldwide, and the benefits could be huge: WRAP estimates that a dollar invested in food waste prevention has a 14-fold return in associated benefits.

But on for some interesting data:

• We build short-stalked wheat because you know, the stalk takes nutrients to produce :)
• The average weight of American broilers rose from 1.1 kilograms in 1925 to nearly 2.7 in 2018, while the typical feeding span was cut from 112 days in 1925 to just 47 days in 2018.
• On Wine: By 1980 the per capita annual mean was down to about 95 liters a year, by 1990 it sank to 71 liters, and by the year 2000 it had fallen to just 58 liters, cut by half over the course of the 20th century. The current century has seen further declines, and the latest available data show the mean at just 40 liters a year, 70 per cent below the 1926 record. The wine consumption survey of 2015 (to be repeated in 2020) details deep gender and generational divides that explain the falling trend.
• The minimum water requirement per kilogram of boneless beef is, indeed, high, on the order of 15,000 liters, but only about half a liter of that ends up incorporated in the meat, with more than 99 percent being water needed for the growth of feed crops which eventually re-enters the atmosphere via evaporation and plant transpiration, and rains down.
• Bacteria account for about 90 percent of the human body’s living cells, and as much as 3 percent of its total weight.

And to finish:

The affluent world has used hundreds of billions of tons of it to create its high quality of life, but right now we do not have any affordable non-carbon alternatives that could be rapidly deployed on mass scales in order to energize the production of enormous quantities of what I have called the four pillars of modern civilization — ammonia, steel, cement, and plastics — which will be needed in Africa and Asia in the decades to come.