Demonstration No. 0021
Civilization Metrics
Measures on work by Earth's dominant life formLet's run some fucking numbersAre you watching closely?
1) Steel Production
Steel is the foundation of physical infrastructure and represents 80% of all primary metal production. Among a great many other things, steel is a fundamental technology behind modern buildings that allows for an ever increasing supply of housing and commercial buildings. Given the massive increases in urbanization, some people think of this as a technology to effectively "print more land."
Learn more. Learn more (technical).Notable people: Henry Bessemer, Andrew Carnegie, Robert Durrer, Paul Héroult, Charles M. Schwab
2) Commercial Aviation
(under construction)Learn more.Notable People: Wright Brothers, Ægidius Elling, Frank Whittle, Charles Martin Hall, Paul Héroult, Ronald Eric Bishop, Robert Bunsen, Zénobe Gramme, Mikhail Dolivo-Dobrovolsky, Seishi Yajima, Kiyohito Okamura, Yoshio Hasegawa, Roger Bacon, Carl Josef Bayer, Jack Northrop, Howard Hughes, Joe Sutter, Francis Versnyder, Others (top 100)
3) Cargo Transportation
The invention of the standard container for shipping was transformational to throughput. Learn more.Notable People: Richard Trevithick, George Stephenson, James Watt, Rudolf Diesel, Malcolm McLean, William Dent & Samuel Priestman, Herbert Akroyd Stuart, Keith Tantlinger, Charles Goodyear
4) Space / Satellite Mass
(under construction)
Learn more.Wernher von Braun, Bernhard Tessmann, Karl Heimburg, Thomas John Mueller, Ernst Stuhlinger, Holger Toftoy, Robert Lusser, Robert H. Goddard, John Pierce, Mikhail Tikhonravov, Sergei Korolev, Joseph V. Charyk, John Leland Atwood
5) Food Production
The foundations of food production are rooted in petrochemical derived fertilizer, and industrial machinery. Unfortunately, the quality of food has degraded significantly: in particular, there has been about a 1.5x fall per capita in the production of ruminant meat, and toxic engine lubricants have become an integral component of the modern diet. Learn more.Notable People: Fritz Haber, Carl Bosch, Norman Borlaug, Cyrus McCormick, Hiram and John Pitts, Hiram Moore, Joseph Bramah, William Armstrong
6) Motor Vehicles
People tend to find these machines useful and production has gone up dramatically in the past few decades. In a decade or two we will be able to add a chart for flying motor vehicles as urban aviation takes off.
Learn more.Notable People: Nicolaus Otto, George Brayton, [Samuel Brown](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SamuelBrown(engineer)), Étienne Lenoir, Carl Benz, Henry Ford, Nils Bohlin, Peter Florjančič, Mario Palazzetti
7) Advanced Ceramic Production
Advanced ceramic materials have unique properties that outperform metals and plastics in various applications. Technical ceramics such as silicon carbide and gallium nitride are rapidly growing in output for power electronics where they massively outperform silicon. Advanced ceramics are a broad category, technically including carbon fibers, which are the foundations for the highest performance structural materials (CNTs = carbon nanotubes). Carbon fibers are interesting: they use more energy to be produced than steel, but their superior strength to weight means that machines that use them ultimately consume far less energy, making their utilization energetically ("economically") favorable.Learn more.Notable People:(under construction)
8) Cement Production
Cement is the main ingredient in concrete, a fantastic construction material used to make roads, buildings, and bridges, some of which you may encounter day to day.
Learn more.Notable People:
Joseph Aspdin, Ernest Ransome, [George Bartholomew](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeorgeBartholomew(inventor))
9) Chip Production
Note, this only charts the total number of chips, and does not factor in the exponential growth in the number of transistors on each chip.
(under construction)Learn more.Notable people: the traitorous eight, Vadim Banine, Erik Loopstra, Fujio Masuoka, Robert H. Dennard, Charles Babbage, Marcian Hoff, Jack Kilby, Masatoshi Shima, Aart de Geus, [John Crawford](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JohnCrawford(engineer)), Vinod Dham, John Vincent Atansoff
10) Ethylene Chemical Production
World base chemical capacity. Ethylene is the most important and valuable chemical feedstock here. It is fundamental to the plastics industry across a variety of goods (precursor to polyethylene, the #1 plastic by volume). It is also used in the production of certain rubbers.
Learn more.Notable People: Vladimir Grigoryevich Shukhov, William Merriam Burton, [Robert E. Humphreys](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cracking_(chemistry)), Leo Baekeland
11) Electricity Consumption
Electricity is the most fundamental metric to look at for the growth of a planetary civilization and it sets a floor. The only reason we need the other metrics is that we get more efficient utilization of the energy everywhere we use it, and by Jevons Paradox, growth in end products/services enables an increase in base resource consumption.Some indicators that you are living on a developing planet that desperately needs more electricity: 1) you are short on food or water; 2) your shelter cannot sufficiently modulate temperature enough for optimal metabolic health since you try to use air to cool materials with 3 orders of magnitude greater volumetric heat capacity; 3) you have endemic respiratory diseases that spread globally (colds/coronaviruses & influenza) rather than having basic air filtration in your dwelling that eliminates this.
Learn more.Notable People: Nikola Tesla, Michael Faraday, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Edison, Charles Proteus Steinmetz, William Stanley Jr., Lee de Forest, Thomas E. Murray, Charles F. Brush, Alessandro Volta, Moritz von Jacobi, William Sturgeon, Werner von Siemens, James Prescott Joule, Lewis Howard Latimer, Isidor Isaac Rabi, [Thomas Davenport](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThomasDavenport(inventor)), Emily Davenport, various others
12) Internet Communication
Bandwidth has grown exponentially for decades in accordance with Edholm's Law. Telecommunications may seem to be a domain of purely subjective value, but they actually have very real repercussions that relate to the efficiency with which people are able to utilize energy and manipulate matter in non-computer systems.
Learn more. Moreover, the growth of the internet itself has its foundations in manufacturing of physical components and infrastructure and the machines behind those.Notable People:
List of Internet Pioneers
13) LED Production
If you look at a highly impoverished area, indoor lighting is one of the single biggest things that will boost their productivity. Prior forms of lighting pale in comparison to the efficiency of LEDs, and it was not too long ago that LEDs became cost-effective.Unfortunately, LEDs are rather awful from a quality perspective. Due to the paperclip-maximization around "luminous efficiency", where luminosity is not based on the physics of light, but of humans, which perceive brightness on a bell curve centered on green, the spectrum is lousy. Blue-phosphor pumped LEDs with a big cyan gap dominate. Violet phosphor-pumped white LEDs solve this issue, but the problem that indoor environments are only 1% as bright as outside remains. The solution? More LEDs.Learn more. Learn more (hardware)Notable people: Shuji Nakamura, James R. Biard, H. J. Round, Rubin Braunstein, Nick Holonyak, Oleg Losev, Isamu Akasaki, Hiroshi Amano
14) Nuclear Energy
Nuclear is the highest quality form of energy. Low quality forms of energy such as renewables are highly unsustainable, leading to phase-shift and grid instability as their percentage on grid load goes up: they also are extremely energy intensive, requiring huge energy costs in their fabrication, and eventually end up in landfills, leaching toxic chemicals into the ground.People who are against nuclear are dangerous, tech-illiterate privileged people who are too stupid to realize their "regulation" enforced at the barrel of a gun keeps billions impoverished, and kills at least tens of millions each year through air pollution.Nuclear is 100% safe, inexpensive, and will be the foundation of human prosperity in the 2nd half of the 21st century.
Learn more.Notable People: Ernest Rutherford, Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi, Albert Einstein, Richard Feynmann, Leo Szilard, Neils Bohr, Otto Hahn, Fritz Strassmann, Lise Meitner
15) CNC Machines
The individual tools used by CNC machines is around a $100b yearly market i.e. over 6x larger than the business of launching satellites, which SpaceX is in. CNC mills and lathes are used to machine precision metal components, which are often used for the manufacture of other items. CNC machines also include pick-and-place machines that are fundamental to manufacturing electronics. 3D printing is a subset of CNC machines, and the industrial use of 3DP is currently too insignificant to merit its own category, despite some very high performance applications.(Let us know if you find a better chart / dataset for this)
Learn more.Notable People: Henry Maudslay, Jacques de Vaucanson, Eli Whitney, John T. Parsons, Richard Kegg
16) Industrial Robots
Robots are one of the reasons we see so many numbers going up and to the right. Automation does not do the same thing with fewer people, it simply magnifies output by orders of magnitude and all that output requires humans to manage. It is fractal, and robots cannot self-maintain. Steel, chips, machine learning, and high torque, high precision electric motors are some of the technologies behind robots.Learn more.Notable People: George Charles Devol, Jr., Joseph Frederick Engelberger, Dick Morely, Odo Josef Struger, Victor Scheinman. Takeo Kanade, Marc Raibert, Marvin Misnky
17) Machine Learning Capacity
Most of the AI algorithms in use today were developed in the 80s. It was the evolution of the manufacturing capabilities bringing massive leaps in computational power that are making these algorithms increasingly useful.Learn more.Notable People:
Top Machine Learning Influencers
18) Copper
Copper is fundamental in just about every electrical application from power transmission to circuits to electric motors. Annual gold production has seen a similar jump in annual production, and has a similarly elastic response to demand where the more people demand, the faster the supply increases, which is the case with everything, including land as we saw with steel, which creates layers of land that can be stacked on top of each other, more commonly known as "buildings".Learn more.Notable People:
19) Unmanned Vehicles
(DJI agricultural drones... not the best metric since these are all pretty small and military is the largest UAV market).Unmanned vehicles make various tasks far cheaper, so those tasks will see a huge jump in volume. This will include cargo drones, among other applications.Notable People: Abraham Karem, Burt Rutan, Leonardo Torres y Quevedo, Archibald Low, Frank Wang, Linden & Neal Blue
20) Human Freedom & Sovereignty
Though we have focused primarily on large scale engineering metrics, there are some fundamental foundations related to liberty that simply cannot be overlooked. Without them, everything else collapses. Luckily, even this metric is grounded in hard, physical production.Learn more.Notable People: James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, Benjamin Franklin, Huco Schmeisser, Samuel Colt, Richard Jordan Gatling, Hiram Maxim, Theodor Bergmann
21) Bitcoin
The supply of bitcoin has been growing exceedingly slowly. In fact, the growth of the bitcoin supply has been so negligible that the amount of bitcoin per each other item shown above has been falling almost precisely at the rate that production of those items has been growing. It is anticipated that bitcoin will become a super-multiplier of all growth rates due to its unique ability to preserve and transfer information across space and time (due to its fixed supply cap) in approximating the analytically intractable multi-objective optimization problem of which approaches to which technologies merit focus on first given the perfectly finite and inelastic attention capacity that exists (temporal exclusion principle, analogous to the Pauli exclusion principle for physical states).Since the supply of bitcoin that will ever exist is constant, we can define every single growth metric above as growth in the quantity of that item per bitcoin (e.g. 1 trillion semiconductor devices divided by ~20 million bitcoin is 50,000 chips per bitcoin in 2020. So that's pretty neat.) The quantity of dollars on the other hand perpetually increases so often the amount of stuff per dollar does not grow or even shrinks, leading to impoverishment and capital misallocation from people who have no business investing since they have no understanding of the basics of human civilization shown here.
Learn more.Notable people: Satoshi Nakamoto, Nick Szabo, Adam Back, Wei Dai, [Hal Finney](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HalFinney(computer_scientist)), Claude Shannon, Martin Hellman, Whitfield Diffie, William Jevons, Carl Menger, Friedrich Hayek
By now, hopefully you have been disabused of the bullshit meme that there is no advancement occurring in the world of atoms, or that there has been some great stagnation for the past half century, and if not, I sincerely hope I never have the misfortune of interacting with you and encourage you to depart from this website at once. There are many problems in the world, and output could be higher, but the achievements in hardware in the past half century and the past decade alone are nothing short of astounding. The only people ignorant of these simple facts are the consoomer-cum-pilosopher "investor" aristocrat class that is so far removed from the real building, they cannot observe it.I hope you have enjoyed your time at the "Why Peter Thiel is full of shit" website. Come back whenever you'd like.
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(Note: the inclusion or absence of individuals under notable people should not be read into. I have not spent all that much time putting the list together, I might refine it over time, and I am not an expert in most of these fields so may have incorrect ideas about which contributors were most impactful.)
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