[cracked] - In Search Of Energy

It is the invisible ghost inside every lightbulb, the silent roar in every engine, the quiet pulse in our wrists. Energy. We spend our lives trying to harness it, store it, and—most critically—find the next place to get it.

The first great energy crisis came in 16th-century England. They had stripped the island of timber. Desperate, they turned to a strange, black, smelly rock that bubbled up from the ground: coal. in search of energy

You will tell them about the ancient swamps that became coal. You will tell them about the frantic scramble for the last drops of oil. And you will tell them about the day we finally learned to catch a star. It is the invisible ghost inside every lightbulb,

The real frontier, some philosophers argue, is not out there in the oil fields or the tokamak reactors. It is inside us. Epilogue: The Next Well In 2050, your great-grandchild might ask: Where did you get your energy? The first great energy crisis came in 16th-century England

For 200,000 years, humans lived on a bare-bones energy budget: the food we ate (400-600 calories of manual labor per day) and the wood we burned (a few kilowatt-hours for warmth). Today, a single person in a modern city commands the equivalent of 100 “energy slaves” working 24/7—from the fossil fuels in a car tank to the uranium in a reactor core.