People tend to think that around 200 years ago humans suddenly became much more enlightened and we just randomly started to see rapid technological progress, wh

People tend to think that around 200 years ago humans suddenly became much more enlightened and we just randomly started to see rapid technological progress, which will forever be the solution to any and all problems humans face. But technology is not the product of sheer human brilliance, but rather something that was purchased with highly available cheap energy. Imagine your timeline of our exponential progress and you'll find it maps pretty well to this timeline of terawatts-hours of fossil fuels [1]. But in the next 100 years we face two related problems that stem directly from this abundance of cheap energy. One problem is the one caused by climate change and the other is the inevitable depletion of natural resource (including those very fossil fuels). The common HN response is that we'll magically fix both of these with "technology!" but once you realize that our technological brilliance is fueled by hydrocarbons you realize that solving the problem of hydrocarbons is pretty much trickier than all the other problems we've solved. And the truth is, despite what people will tell you, we don't have any solutions to the real problems we're facing. We don't have any known viable pathway to large scale energy storage required for a fully renewable grid, we don't have any idea how to produce the liquid fuels at scale essential to a global economy (you need high energy density fuels to efficiently transport goods), we don't know how to engineer global scale carbon capture and storage. And I know people will likely link to a bunch of research projects that "look promising!" But to go from promising research to global scale production takes... tons of energy. Technological progress is just a proxy for high energy density fuel consumption. Given unlimited high energy density fuels and a planet with infinite resources, yes we would also produce exponentially more marvelous things. But the next challenge is how to deal with the consequence of burning far too many high energy density fuels on a limited planet and running into the limitations of energy. [1] https://ourworldindata.org/fossil-fuels https://ourworldindata.org/fossil-fuels