preface a tale of
two planets

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” The opening line of Charles Dickens’s 1859 masterpiece, A Tale of Two Cities applies equally well to our present era. We live in unprecedented wealth and comfort, with capabilities undreamt of in previous ages. We live in a world facing unprecedented global risks—risks to our continued prosperity, to our survival, and to the health of our planet itself. We might think of our current situation as A Tale of Two Earths.

This is a story about these two conflicting realities of our present day. The core argument of this book is that the force that’s propelled us to our present well-being is also the most powerful resource we have to tackle our future challenges: innovation. If we tap into and direct that force correctly, we have the very real potential to lift global wealth and well-being while reducing our impact on the planet and even reversing the damage we’ve done. If we fail to tap into that force, we flirt with the very real prospect of disaster.

Exceptional claims demand exceptional evidence. I’m claiming in this book that it’s possible for humanity to live in higher numbers than today, in far greater wealth, comfort, and prosperity, with far less destructive impact on the planet than we have today. I’m claiming that raw energy, materials, and the other resources we need to survive are plentiful on Earth and limited primarily by our understanding of how to collect, harness, and efficiently use them. I’m claiming that in the midst of this abundance of matter and energy the most valuable resource we have and that we have ever had is the sum of our human knowledge—our comprehension of how the universe around us functions and how to manipulate it to our ends. I’m claiming that if we act quickly enough and decisively enough, we can have our cake and eat it too—a healthy thriving planet, and a human civilization of ever-growing wealth. These propositions are at odds with the prevailing wisdom that energy or land or oil or fresh water are our most precious resources, that their finite nature and growing scarcity place fairly imminent caps on the size, wealth, and sophistication of human society, and that living sustainably on this planet necessarily means living more modestly and accepting slower or even halted economic growth.

To back those claims up, I’ll show how new ideas have overcome physical resource limitations again and again in the past. I’ll show how our progress in science and technology have the potential to leapfrog us past our current challenges of energy, climate, water, food, minerals, and other resources. And I’ll show how high the true limits on this planet are.

Just because something is possible doesn’t mean that it will come to be. While it’s possible for us to grow our numbers and our wealth while preserving and repairing our planet, there’s no guarantee that we’ll do so. The problems we face are very real. In the face of similar challenges, some societies in the past have crumbled. Others have prevailed. I’ll show in this book that what separates the cultures that have thrived from those that have stagnated or declined is the choices they made. Those choices guided different cultures’ rates of innovation, guided their usage of resources around them, and ultimately determined their fates. If we want to overcome the looming challenges that face us, we need to make the right choices ourselves. We need to innovate not only in science and technology, but also in the economic system that governs resource usage and motivates innovation. I’ll show what those needed changes are and how to make them in ways that enrich us and enrich our planet.

We stand poised between an unimaginably better world and an unimaginably worse one. Which world the future holds is largely up to us.

In that spirit, I’ll close this preface with a few more words from Dickens that I think aptly capture our current situation.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,

it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness,

it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity,

it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness,

it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair,

we had everything before us, we had nothing before us,

we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

R.N.