Smaller Faster Lighter Denser Cheaper Read online

  SMALLER

  FASTER

  LIGHTER

  DENSER

  CHEAPER

  Copyright © 2014 by Robert Bryce.

  Published in the United States by PublicAffairs™,

  a Member of the Perseus Books Group

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, address PublicAffairs, 250 West 57th Street, 15th Floor, New York, NY 10107.

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  Book design by Jack Lenzo

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Bryce, Robert.

  Smaller faster lighter denser cheaper : how innovation keeps proving the catastrophists wrong / Robert Bryce.

  pages cm

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-1-61039-206-8 (e-book)

  1. Technological innovations—Popular works. I. Title.

  T173.8.B76 2014

  338'.064—dc23

  2013049381

  First Edition

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For my mother,

  Ann Mahoney Bryce

  CONTENTS

  List of Graphics, Tables, and Photos

  Author’s Note

  Introduction: Moving Beyond “Collapse Anxiety”

  PART I The Push for Innovation, Its Consequences, and the Degrowth Agenda

  1 Panama: Digging a Faster Cheaper Way to Travel

  2 The Trend Toward Smaller Faster Lighter Denser Cheaper

  The Brain

  The Printing Press

  The Vacuum Tube

  The AK-47

  The Haber-Bosch Process

  The Diesel and the Jet Turbine

  The Telescope and Microscope

  The Pearl Street Power Plant

  The Roller-Cone Drill Bit

  Digital Communications

  3 Never Have So Many Lived So Well

  4 Back to the Past: The Push for “Degrowth”

  SIDEBAR: Bill McKibben’s Energy-Starvation Plan

  PART II Our Attosecond World: How We Got Here, Where We’re Going, and the Companies Leading the Way

  5 Angstroms and Attoseconds

  6 How Our Quest for Faster Drives Innovation

  7 Faster Lighter Doper

  SIDEBAR: Tour de Doper

  8 The Engines of the Economy

  SMALLER FASTER INC.: Ford Motor Company

  9 From ENIAC to iCloud: Smaller Faster Computing

  SIDEBAR: The Incredible Shrinking Circuit

  SIDEBAR: “Green” Computing Can’t Power the Cloud

  SMALLER FASTER INC.: Intel

  10 From LP to iPod

  11 From Kublai Khan to M-PESA

  SMALLER FASTER INC.: Safaricom

  12 Density and the Wealth of Cities

  13 Denser Cheaper Food Production

  14 The Faster the Bits, the Freer the People

  SIDEBAR: Smaller Lighter Cheaper Phones

  15 From Monks to MOOCs: Faster Cheaper Education

  16 Smaller Faster Cheaper Medicine

  PART III The Need for Cheaper Energy

  17 The Faster the (Drill) Bits, the Cheaper the Energy

  SIDEBAR: We’re Running Out of Oil . . .

  18 The Tyranny of Density

  SMALLER FASTER INC.: Clean Energy Systems

  19 Smaller Faster and the Coal Question

  SIDEBAR: India Is Not Going “Beyond Coal”

  SIDEBAR: GOOG < Coal

  SMALLER FASTER INC.: Aquion Energy

  PART IV Embracing Our Smaller Faster Future

  20 Getting Energy Policy Right

  Reject Wind and Biofuels

  Wind Energy’s Incurable Density Problem

  SIDEBAR: Debunking the Big Fibs About Wind and Solar

  Biofuels are “A Crime Against Humanity”

  21 Climate Change Requires N2N (N2N is SFLDC)

  SIDEBAR: We Need to Reduce Gas Flaring

  22 Embrace Nuclear Green

  SIDEBAR: Make Atoms for Peace a Reality

  23 SX Smaller Faster: Why the United States Will Dominate the Smaller Faster Future

  24 Conclusion: Moving Past Fear

  APPENDIX A: SI Numerical Designations

  APPENDIX B: Energy and Power: Units and Equivalents

  APPENDIX C: Gravimetric Power Density from Humans to Jet Engines

  APPENDIX D: Five Leaders in Online Learning

  APPENDIX E: Wind Energy’s Noise Problem: A Review

  APPENDIX F: Areal Power Density Data for Sixteen Wind-Energy Projects

  APPENDIX G: Major Players in Nuclear Energy

  Notes

  Select Bibliography

  Index

  LIST OF GRAPHICS, TABLES, AND PHOTOS

  GRAPHICS

  World Fertilizer Use and Grain Production, 1961–2011

  Cheaper Airfares: The Declining Cost of US Domestic Airfares, 1979–2011

  Declining Global Poverty for Various Income Levels, 1970–2006

  Cheaper: The Trend in Industrial Commodities, 1850–2011

  Cheaper: The Trend in Photovoltaic Prices, 1980–2010

  The McKibben Plan: What a Twentyfold Reduction in Hydrocarbon Use Would Look Like When Compared to Per-capita Energy Use in 2011

  Faster: Winning Times in Men’s Olympic 100-meter Sprint, 1896–2012

  Faster Lighter at the Tour de France, 1903–2012

  Denser: Measuring Power Density from Horses to Jet Engines

  Smaller Faster Denser: Volumetric Power Density in Ford Engines, 1902–2011

  Faster Cheaper: The Volume of Digital Data Created and Shared, projected to 2015

  Forty Years of Smaller at Intel: From 10,000 Nanometers to 22 Nanometers

  Forty Years of Denser at Intel: From 2,300 Transistors per Microprocessor to 2.27 Billion

  Smaller Denser Cheaper: The Plummeting Cost of Computer Storage, 1956–2010

  Smaller Faster Lighter Denser Cheaper Music Storage: From the LP to the iPod

  Denser Means Richer: Highly Urbanized Countries Are Wealthier

  Denser Farming: Global Grain Production Is Keeping Pace with Population Growth

  The Faster the Bits the Wealthier the People

  Number of US Oil and Gas Wells Drilled and Percentage of Dusters, 1949–2010

  Offshore Oil and Gas Discoveries, 1995–2012

  Denser Energy Is Green Energy: Comparing Uranium with Various Other Sources

  Global Coal Consumption 1980–2011, and Projected to 2035

  Electricity Use Is Closely Correlated with Wealth Creation

  If You Want to Replace US Coal-fired Capacity with Wind, Then Find a Land Area the Size of Italy

  Amory Lovins’s Vision for Biofuels: Producing 23 Percent of US Energy by 2050 from Plants Would Require Three Italys of Land

  Global Energy Demand Since 1990 and Projected to 2035

  Cheaper: Natural Gas Prices in the United States, Germany, UK, and Japan, 1995–2012

  TABLES

  The Committee to Protect Journalists’ List of Ten Most Censored Countries (2012)

  Number of Days Needed to Consume 100 Kilowatt-hours

  Estimated Cost of Electricity for Generation Plants Entering Service in the United Stat
es in 2018

  Residential Cost of Electricity in the United States Versus Other Developed Countries in 2012

  PHOTOS

  Excavating the Culebra Cut, Panama, 1909

  Cruise ship heading south through the Culebra Cut, 2013

  Printing operation at Claflin University in 1899

  Vacuum tube

  The AK-47

  The GEnx-1B jet turbine

  Woodcut of a man looking through a telescope, 1637

  Students using microscopes at Bethune-Cookman College, 1943

  Thomas Edison in his laboratory

  A fishtail drill bit

  Patent document for the roller-cone drill bit

  Canadian scientist Paul Corkum in his laboratory in Ottawa

  Eadweard Muybridge image of a galloping horse

  Race car driver Bob Burman, 1910

  Driver Andy Green next to the Thrust SSC, 1997

  Bicycle racer from the early 1900s

  Waterwheel on the Orontes River in Syria

  Amish farmer working his fields in Pennsylvania

  Portrait of James Watt, who made critical improvements to the steam engine

  Locomotive for Lincoln’s funeral train, 1865

  The Corliss steam engine at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, 1876

  Henry Ford stands next to race car driver Barney Oldfield, 1902

  ENIAC, the world’s first general-purpose electronic computer

  ENIAC-on-a-chip, 1996

  Top view of an Intel 8086 processor, circa 1978

  Bottom view of an Intel Core i7 processor

  Computer pioneer John von Neumann standing next to MANIAC, about 1952

  Thomas Edison and colleagues with Edison’s wax-recording phonograph, 1892

  Confederate bank notes

  Market Street in San Francisco, early 1900s

  Image from Eric Topol’s book, The Creative Destruction of Medicine

  Artie White, a driller on an AC top-drive drilling rig, 2013

  A pair of roughnecks working on a drill rig, 2013

  A polycrystalline diamond compact drill bit, 2013

  Heath Evenson of Clean Energy Systems, 2013

  A Peabody Energy employee at the North Antelope Rochelle Mine, 2012

  Coal miners working by candlelight, 1906

  Battery designer Jay Whitacre of Aquion Energy, 2012

  Windmill in East Hampton, New York, 1872

  Reactor vessel arrives at Shippingport Atomic Power Station, 1956

  Jaime Emmanuelli and Jon Miller, the owners of Hive Lighting, at South By Southwest Interactive, 2013

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  I like Austin Kleon’s 2012 book Steal Like an Artist: Ten Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative. One of the lines from it resonated with me: “Write the book you want to read.”

  I did that here.

  Kleon’s book is quirky, and the one you are holding is, too. My aim was to make this book inviting and easy to read. That’s why I’ve included so many graphics and photographs. I wanted to provide lots of entry points so that even if readers don’t capture every word, they can still grasp the key arguments and understand why I’m optimistic about the future and why they should be, too.

  Before I go further, a note about vocabulary. The word “density” usually refers to mass per unit of volume. Here I’m using a broader interpretation of density, so that it includes population density, agricultural density, and other metrics. Given how critical density is to our culture, we need a broader definition of “dense.”

  One other note about the content: where possible, I’ve included metric conversions so that readers from outside the United States, as well as those living here, can have the units being discussed in SI form. (SI is an abbreviation for the System of International Units.) I’ve also included a list of SI numerical designations in Appendix A, as Americans need to get more familiar with the nomenclature.

  Now for some acknowledgments. Books, at least in my case, are solo projects. While this was a solo writing effort, it required lots of people to make it happen. As such, I have many people to thank and acknowledge. The people at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research were wonderful. I joined the think tank in 2010 at about the same time that my last book, Power Hungry, was published. The affiliation has been stimulating and productive. I’m bored by the Left-Right, Democratic-Republican, liberal-conservative divide. I want to be with smart people who are promoting economic growth and liberty. Manhattan Institute is packed with smart people who are doing just that. In particular, I must acknowledge Howard Husock, MI’s director of research. Howard has repeatedly shown his ability to distill complex arguments into their essential points. My other colleagues at Manhattan Institute, including Larry Mone, Vanessa Mendoza, Michael Allegretti, Matt Olsen, and Bobby Sherwood, were also extremely supportive.

  The entire crew at PublicAffairs were, as usual, wonderful. They are all pros. I have been extraordinarily lucky in my book publishing career to have had a single publisher (PublicAffairs) and a single editor. I’m proud to call Lisa Kaufman my editor and my friend. Lisa has a genius for being able to read a 90,000-word manuscript, digest the entire thing, and then explain how it needs to be organized to make it better. She’s the best. My other friends at PublicAffairs—Clive Priddle, Susan Weinberg (who’s now the group publisher for Basic Books, Nation Books, and PublicAffairs), Peter Osnos, Melissa Raymond, Tessa Shanks, and Jaime Leifer—were also great. In addition, Collin Tracy did a great job managing the production of the book, and copy editor Jerold Kappes was thorough and patient.

  I’ve also been lucky to have the same person doing the fact checking on all five of my books. My pal Mimi Bardagjy worked through about a thousand footnotes. She treated each one punctiliously. Better still, she kept her good humor throughout.

  I’ve had plenty of research help. Grant Huber provided helpful data. My friend Leslie McLain was, once again, invaluable. Yevginy Feyman at the Manhattan Institute was great at providing research and graphics. George Voorhes of Red Barn Muse Creative Group in Portland made the majority of the graphics. I recommend his work without reservation.

  While I had plenty of help putting this book together, any errors are mine and mine alone. If you spot a mistake, please let me know so it can be corrected for the paperback edition.

  My appreciation also goes to my friend Buddy Kleemeier, who was instrumental in arranging my visit to a drill rig. Hans Helmerich and Rob Stauder were patient tutors regarding drilling-rig technology. Cal Cooper offered valuable perspective on the history of drilling and the ongoing progress being made in that sector. My friends Hill Abell and Frank Kurzawa never tired of talking about bikes and watts. Jan Van der Spiegel at the University of Pennsylvania went out of his way to send me a photo of ENIAC-on-a-chip that he and his students developed about two decades ago. John Fannin and Michael Ramos were helpful in discussing music technology and recording. I must also thank my pal and Web guru Tyson Culver, who has been instrumental in keeping me current in the digital age.

  I also want to thank Joe Bruno, Mark Ehsani, Anthony Holm, Rob Manzer, Eric Topol, Anas Alhajji, and Jesse Ausubel. Others who need to be acknowledged and thanked include my longtime friend Robert Elder Jr., who patiently read many different drafts and offered encouragement and insights. Omar Kader, the CEO of Pal-Tech, also made time in his busy schedule to read over a draft of the manuscript. Stan Jakuba, who was a pivotal reviewer of the early drafts of my last book, Power Hungry, was also a sharp-eyed reader. So, too, was Rex Rivolo. Rex has been a friend for many years, and he offered some key technical guidance as I thought about power density. Another friend, Bruce Hamilton, provided guidance on nuclear technology and helped me avoid several errors.

  In addition, my Tulsa connections—Bryan Shahan, Violet and Ronald Cauthon, Chris Cauthon, and R. Dobie Langenkamp—have always been supportive and helpful. I must also acknowledge my father-in-law, Paul Rasmussen, a professor emeritus in chemistry at University of Michigan.
Even in his 70s, Paul remains one of the hardest-working people I know. He read numerous chapters and untold drafts with good humor. He was particularly helpful when it came to understanding battery technology.

  I must also acknowledge my agent, Dan Green. We have been friends since 2001, when we were introduced by our mutual friend, Lou Dubose. I am proud to work with Dan. He’s a pro.

  Finally, I must thank my wife, Lorin, and our three children, Mary, Michael, and Jacob. Lorin and I have been married for nearly three decades. Every day I am amazed and humbled by her love and support. As for my children, no father has ever been as proud.

  We are lucky to be living in extraordinary times. And because of the inexorable trend of Smaller Faster Lighter Denser Cheaper, those times are only going to become more extraordinary.

  11 December 2013

  Austin, Texas

  INTRODUCTION

  MOVING BEYOND “COLLAPSE ANXIETY”

  We are besieged by bad news.

  Climate change, pollution, famine, water shortages, war and terrorism, the mess at Fukushima, political gridlock, and the ongoing debt problems and economic malaise in Europe and the United States are dominating the headlines. On October 31, 2011, demographers at the United Nations announced that the Earth now hosts some seven billion people, prompting UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon to declare that “alarm bells are ringing.”1

  Those alarm bells are also continually ringing about the danger of pandemics and epidemics. In 2007, the head of the World Health Organization warned that new diseases are “emerging at the historically unprecedented rate of one per year,” and given the ease of international air travel, she went on to say that it would be “extremely naïve and complacent” to assume that the world will not be hit by another disease like AIDS, the Ebola virus, or severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS).2 In 2013, two new respiratory viruses came to light—including a coronavirus in the Middle East that is similar to a bat virus, and a new strain of bird flu in China, known as H7N9—and the WHO quickly warned health officials to monitor any unusual cases of respiratory problems. Those outbreaks came on the heels of outbreaks of swine flu and a strain known as H1N1.3