What Technology Wants (9 page)

I haven't done the research to find out the reason for the survival of each item, but I suspect that most of these tools share a similar story. While working farms have shed these obsolete tools entirely and are almost completely automated, many of us still garden with very primitive hand tools simply because they work. As long as backyard tomatoes taste better than farmed ones, the primeval hoe will survive. And apparently, there's pleasure in harvesting some crops by hand, even in bulk. I suspect a few of these items may be bought by the Amish and other back-to-the-landers who find virtue in doing things without oil-fed machinery.

But maybe 1895 is not old enough. Let's take the oldest technology of all: a flint knife or stone ax. Well, it turns out you can buy a brand-new flint knife, flaked by hand and carefully attached to an antler-horn handle by tightly wound leather straps. In every respect it is precisely the same technology as a flint knife made 30,000 years ago. It's yours for fifty dollars, available from more than one website. In the highlands of New Guinea, tribesmen were making stone axes for their own use until the 1960s. They still make stone axes the same way for tourists now. And stone-ax aficionados study them. There is an unbroken chain of knowledge that has kept this Stone Age technology alive. Today, in the United States alone, there are 5,000 amateurs who knap fresh arrowhead points by hand. They meet on weekends, exchange tips in flint-knapping clubs, and sell their points to souvenir brokers. John Whittaker, a professional archaeologist and flint knapper himself, has studied these amateurs and estimates that they produce over one million brand-new spear and arrow points per year. These new points are indistinguishable, even to experts like Whittaker, from authentic ancient ones.

Few technologies have disappeared forever from the face of the Earth. The recipe for Greek warfare was lost for millennia, but there is a good chance research has recovered it. The practical know-how for the Inca system of accounting using knots on a string, called
quipu
, is forgotten. We have some antique samples, but no knowledge of how they were actually used. This might be the single exception. Not too long ago, science fiction authors Bruce Sterling and Richard Kadrey compiled a list of “dead media” to highlight the ephemeral nature of popular gadgetry. Recently vanished gizmos such as the Commodore 64 computer and the Atari computer were added to a long list of older species such as lantern slide projectors and the telharmonium. In reality, though, most of the items on this list aren't dead, just rare. Some of the oldest media technologies are maintained by basement tinkerers and crazy amateur enthusiasts. And many of the more recent technologies are still in production but under different brand names and configurations. For instance, a lot of the technology first introduced in early computers is now found inside your watch or toys.

With very few exceptions, technologies don't die. In this way they differ from biological species, which in the long term inevitably go extinct. Technologies are idea based, and culture is their memory. They can be resurrected if forgotten, and can be recorded (by increasingly better means) so that they won't be overlooked. Technologies are forever. They are the enduring edge of the seventh kingdom of life.

4

The origin of the technium can be retold in concentric creation stories. Each retelling illuminates a deeper set of influences. In the first account (chapter two), technology begins with the Sapien mind but soon transcends it. The second telling (chapter three) reveals an additional force besides the human mind at work on the technium: the extrapolation and deepening of organic life as a whole. Now in this third version, the circle is enlarged further, beyond mind and life, to include the cosmos.

The root of the technium can be traced back to the life of an atom. An atom's brief journey through an everyday technological artifact, such as a flashlight battery, is a flash of existence unlike anything else in its long life.

Most hydrogen atoms were born at the beginning of time. They are as old as time itself. They were created in the fires of the big bang and dispersed into the universe as a uniform warm mist. Thereafter, each atom has been on a lonely journey. When a hydrogen atom drifts in the unconsciousness of deep space, hundreds of kilometers from another atom, it is hardly much more active than the vacuum surrounding it. Time is meaningless without change, and in the vast reaches of space that fill 99.99 percent of the universe, there is little change.

After billions of years, a hydrogen atom might be swept up by the currents of gravity radiating from a congealing galaxy. With the dimmest hint of time and change it slowly drifts in a steady direction toward other stuff. Another billion years later it bumps into the first bit of matter it has ever encountered. After millions of years it meets the second. In time it meets another of its kind, a hydrogen atom. They drift together in mild attraction until aeons later they meet an oxygen atom. Suddenly something weird happens. In a flash of heat they clump together as one water molecule. Maybe they get sucked into the atmosphere circulation of a planet. Under this marriage, they are caught in great cycles of change. Rapidly the molecule is carried up and then rained down into a crowded pool of other jostling atoms. In the company of uncountable numbers of other water molecules it travels this circuit around and around for millions of years, from crammed pools to expansive clouds and back. One day, in a stroke of luck, the water molecule is captured by a chain of unusually active carbons in one pool. Its path is once again accelerated. It spins around in a simple loop, assisting the travel of carbon chains. It enjoys speed, movement, and change such as would not be possible in the comatose recesses of space. The carbon chain is stolen by another chain and reassembled many times until the hydrogen finds itself in a cell constantly rearranging its relations and bonds with other molecules. Now it hardly ever stops changing, never stops interacting.

The hydrogen atoms in a human body completely refresh every seven years. As we age we are really a river of cosmically old atoms. The carbons in our bodies were produced in the dust of a star. The bulk of matter in our hands, skin, eyes, and hearts was made near the beginning of time, billions of years ago. We are much older than we look.

For the average hydrogen atom in our body, the few years it spends dashing from one cellular station to another will be the most fleeting glory imaginable. Fourteen billion years in inert lassitude, then a brief, wild trip through life's waters, and then on again to the isolation of space when the planet dies. A blink is too long as an analogy. From the perspective of an atom, any living organism is a tornado that might capture it into its mad frenzy of chaos and order, offering it a once-in-a-14-billion-year-lifetime fling.

As fast and crazy as a cell is, the rate of energy flowing through technology is even faster. In fact, technology is more active in this respect—it will give an atom a wilder ride—than any other sustainable structure we are currently aware of. For the ultimate trip today, the most sustainable energetic thing in the universe is a computer chip.

There is a more precise way to say this: Of all the sustainable things in the universe, from a planet to a star, from a daisy to an automobile, from a brain to an eye, the thing that is able to conduct the highest density of power—the most energy flowing through a gram of matter each second—lies at the core of your laptop. How can this be? The power density of a star is huge compared to the mild power drifting through a nebulous gas cloud in space. But remarkably, the power density of a sun pales in comparison to the intense flow of energy and activity present in grass. As intense as the surface of the sun is, its mass is enormous and its lifetime is 10 billion years, so as a whole system, the amount of energy flowing through it per gram per second is less than that in a sunflower soaking up that sun's energy.

An exploding nuclear bomb has a much higher power density than the sun because it is an unsustainable out-of-control flow of energy. A one-megaton nuclear bomb will release 10
¹⁷
ergs, which is a lot of power. But the total lifetime of that explosion is only a hyperblink of 10
^-6
seconds. So if you “amortized” a nuclear blast so that it spent its energy over a full second instead of microseconds, its power density would be reduced to only 10
¹¹
ergs per second per gram, which is about the intensity of a laptop computer chip. Energywise, a Pentium chip may be better thought of as a very slow nuclear explosion.

The same fleeting flameout seen in a nuke applies to fires, chemical bombs, supernovas, and other kinds of explosions. They literally consume themselves with incredibly high but unsustainable densities of energy. The glory of a sunlike star is that it can sustain its brilliant fission for billions of years. But it does so at a lower energy flow rate than the sustainable flux that takes place in a green plant! Rather than a burst of fire, the energy exchange in grass yields the cool order of green blades, tawny stalks, and plump seeds ripe with information that can duplicate a picture-perfect clone. Greater yet is the steady energy flow within animals, where we can actually sense the energetic waves. They wiggle, pulse, move, and in some cases radiate warmth.

The flow of energy through technology is still greater. Measured in joules (or ergs) per gram per second, nothing concentrates energy for long periods of time as much as high-tech gadgetry. At the far right apex of the power density graph above, compiled by physicist Eric Chaisson, shines the computer chip. It conducts more energy per second per gram through its tiny corridors than animals, volcanoes, or the sun. This bit of high technology is the most energetically active thing in the known universe.

Power Density Gradient.
Large, complex systems listed in order of their energy flow density, as measured by the amount of energy that flows through the system per gram per second of the system's duration.

We can now retell the story of the technium as a story of expanding cosmic activity. At the very start of creation, the universe, such as it was, was packed into a very, very small space. The entire cosmos began as a flash smaller than the smallest bit of the smallest particle in the smallest atom. It was equally hot and bright and dense within that dot. All parts of this too-tiny spot shared a uniform temperature. There was, in fact, no room for any differences, and no activity at all.

But from the very start of its creation, this tiny spot expanded by a process we don't understand. Every new point flew away from every other new point. As the universe ballooned to about the size of your head, coolness became possible. Before it expanded to that size, in its first three seconds, the universe was perfectly solid, with no emptiness for relief. It was so full, even light could not move. Indeed, it was so uniform that the four fundamental forces we see at work in reality today—gravity, electromagnetism, the strong and weak nuclear forces—were compressed into a single unified force. In that start-up phase there was
one
general energy, which differentiated into four distinct forces as the universe expanded.

It would not be too much of an exaggeration to say that in the initial femtoseconds of creation there was only one thing in the universe, one superdense power that ruled all, and this solitary power expanded and cooled into thousands of variations of itself. The history of the cosmos thus proceeds from unity to diversity.

As the universe stretched out, it made nothingness. As emptiness increased, so did coolness. Space permitted energy to cool into matter and for matter to slow down, light to radiate, and gravity and the other energetic forces to unfold.

Energy is simply the potential—the difference needed—to cool. Energy can only flow from greater to lesser, so without a differential no energy can flow. Curiously, the universe expanded faster than matter itself could cool and gel, which means the potential for cooling kept increasing. The faster the universe expanded, the greater was its potential to cool and the greater were the potential differences within its boundaries. Over aeons of cosmic time this expanding differential (between expanding emptiness and the remnant hotness of the big bang) powered evolution, life, intelligence, and eventually the acceleration of technology.

Energy, like water under gravity, will seep to the lowest, coolest level and not rest until all differential has been eliminated. In the first thousand years after the big bang the temperature difference within the universe was so small that it would have reached equilibrium quickly. Had not the universe kept expanding, very little interesting would have happened. But the expansion of the universe put a tilt into things. By expanding omnidirectionally—every point receding from every other point—space provided an empty bottom, a basement of sorts, down which energy could flow. The faster the cosmos enlarged, the bigger the basement it constructed.