Indulge me in a thought experiment of sorts. Imagine that you have been transported to some technologically primitive environ, whether that’s back through time to some period of human history, or an alternate universe, or an Earth-like planet with convergent evolution – the mechanism doesn’t matter. Put aside concerns about cultural (or temporal) contamination and presuppose that you desire to share the wonders and conveniences of the modern world with the people in whose company you find yourself. You can tell them about automobiles, about airplanes, about computers, and a dozen other marvels. Even if you understand what goes into these things and how they work at a conceptual level, chances are that you and your technologically less advanced companions will be unable to realize even the simplest of them.
I’ve long been fascinated by the complexity of the world that we barely acknowledge on a daily basis. Routinely, I look around at the technology in my life, and I try to think through how I could recreate it from scratch. Material World is a book dedicated to marveling over resources: the way we harness raw materials, process them, and create wonders that no one person in the world could describe how to create from beginning to end. It does this by examining six core materials that Conway claims are the foundation of the modern world, and the inventions which rely upon them: sand, salt, iron, copper, oil, and lithium.
It’s not worth dithering over whether these are really the best six materials to choose for such treatment, or exactly how Conway chooses to define them. Material World’s strength is in examining the many permutations of these substances, and following them from their initial extraction as raw resources through their conversion into recognizable products, although do not expect too great of technical depth. This is a book written for the interested layperson, not, perhaps, people familiar with technical fields.
In fact, familiarity with technical fields will somewhat undermine one of the author’s central reasons for writing the book. Conway posits that we have contrived to divorce our daily lives from the realities of the “material world” upon which those lives depend, with fewer and fewer people and resources devoted to the raw material extraction that underpins all of civilization. That is something that I, at least, already realized, but the book still serves as a useful reminder. It also highlights the remarkable extent to which we’ve reduced the cost and increased the availability of resources by making the extraction and processing methods far less manual and labor intensive. Conway’s economic lens has a higher resolution than his technical lens, and he highlights well that a significant part of why these materials are so fundamental, and so unnoticed, is their ubiquity.
At points, it becomes painfully evident that Conway is a journalist, not an engineer, scientist, or someone working in his so-called material world. This gives Material World the sense of being a kind of travelogue, a report on a strange land that the author visited, without remaining there long enough to become one with the local culture. While it is well researched, it does not have that intimate familiarity of, say, The Substance of Civilization, which has a somewhat similar premise but was written by a material scientist. Also dragging down the text is a certain preoccupation with trendy terms like “climate crisis” and “energy transition.” I could dedicate several posts, I suspect, to why these concepts are problematic, but I don’t know that I desire to stir that particular pot. For now, suffice to say that the largest problem with speaking of a climate crisis is the word “crisis.”
Not just because I work in engineering, but because I am predisposed to consider such matters (all puns intends), I already knew when I started the book that we live in an inescapably material world. No matter how advanced our technology becomes or how we spread through the galaxy, even if we upload ourselves into simulations and forgo organic flesh, there must ultimately be a material foundation. Material World is an excellent place to start thinking about this reality too which we are all too readily inoculated, and I did derive interest from it in spite of my prior knowledge. While Material World makes for a catchier title, it could just as easily be described as a story of energy, and not just because E=mc^2. Our demand for energy increases at least apace to our ability to access energy, which could be the topic of a whole separate book, and is a significant part of why the “energy transition” is unlikely to happen as neatly or as productively as many projections depict.
Conway repeatedly claims that most of us inhabit an “ethereal” world, disconnected from the material world that allows it to exist. This, to me, draws too hard a separation between the two. There is no ethereal world, just a lot of people who don’t need or want to think about the resources underpinning their daily existences. Perhaps a better metaphor would be tiers of a material world. Either way, this book is both an introduction to, and a reminder of, the inescapable material reality in which we are all operating, and that’s a reality of which it’s worth being more aware.
IGC Publishing 