b'Engineer Innovation | Brownian MotionBrownian Motion.The random musings of a Fluid DynamicistThe Human Race is Powered by Ancient Organisms. If we arent careful, theyll kill us all.I don\'t know about you, but one of my least favorite jobs is fillingconquest) are generally the wealthiest and offer the highest my car full of petrol (known as gasoline to our American readers).standards of living. In the US, you can lock the trigger in place and means that you can detach yourself physically from the whole process. For usIn 1700, before the start of the Industrial Revolution, there Europeans, that isn\'t an option. We have to keep the triggerwere only 600 million people on the planet (about twice the depressed for the entire tedious filling process, the only fun bit ispopulation of the modern USA), today the population of the trying to hit a "00" on the pence (or cents) part of the price. world exceeds 7.5 billion. It took us 99.5% of our 300,000-year history as a species for the human population to exceed This often leaves me contemplating the origin of the80 million people. The world population now grows by more hydrocarbons as I pump them into my tank. How they arethan that every year. The UN estimates that by 2056 the world basically the processed remains of living organisms thatpopulation will exceed 10 billion people.decomposed over millions of years. And how all the energy stored within those organisms will soon - after a brief gloriousThat growth is fueled by, and entirely dependent on the supply moment in which it is transformed into useful work - will beof cheap energy. In 2018 our species used 160 PWh of energy. An converted into useless low-grade heat. That whole process is aaverage healthy fit person can sustain about 100 W of manual metaphor for the development of our species over the last 300work. Across a ten-hour working day, that\'s about 1kWh of work years.done. As a species, we generate (and therefore consume) about 60kWh of energy per person every day. So on average, each Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, humans haveof us consumes 60 times more energy than we could possibly become increasingly dependent on the cheap and plentifulgenerate through manual labor alone. And that\'s a conservative supply of energy. It feeds us, fuels our movements, keeps usestimate. Many of those people are too young or too elderly to warm in the winter and cool in the summer, and providesdeliver their 1kWh of energy. Many of us (especially in the West) endless piles of disposable "things" that we use as a temporaryalso consume far more than our fair share of 60kWh.substitute for happiness. Energy is the only universal currency. Those economies with access to the cheapest sources of energyAbout 87% of that energy used to fuel our species comes (either through the fortune of geographical location or militaryfrom the combustion of the decomposed remains of ancient 98'