The future is made of energy

Here’s a big secular trend that you’ve probably thought about, but maybe not as much as you should: over time our world is getting to be made more out of energy, and relatively less out of matter.
 
In the 1960s Coke came in glass bottles. Fragile melted sand. Today Coke comes in aluminum cans – a material that takes tremendously more energy to produce, but ends up being cleaner and cheaper and 40x lighter than glass holding the same amount of liquid^[1].
 
The same transformation has happened in almost every corner of our material lives. It has been happening for thousands of years and in every material category. Over time people have switched from mud to brick to cement, from wood to plastics to fiberglass to carbon fiber, from copper to bronze to steel to titanium, from leather to cotton to nylon, from smallholder to factory farms, from heaps of coal to thin wafers of solar PV, from vacuum tubes to specks of semiconductor, from highways to runways to Zoom. Energy intensity increases, materials get stronger and lighter, machines pack more power into smaller spaces. A signature element of modernity is how we’ve moved from materially-centered ways of doing things to energy-centered ways of doing things.
 
Some people call this trend ‘dematerialization’. But that’s misleading. The world today may be made relatively less of stuff, but for various growth and demographic and Jevons reasons overall there’s way more stuff than ever. So I think it’s best to think of it as our world being made more and more out of energy.

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A world made more and more of energy‍

‍One reason for this trend is that investing more energy gets us lighter and tougher materials^[2]:

Another piece of the trend is that more energy often gives us the flexibility to build what we want out of more plentiful stuff^[3].

Smelting, refining, structuring, purifying—almost everything we can do to give a material new properties takes energy. So it shouldn't be a surprise that our highest performing materials have become more energy intense over time^[4].

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...and relatively less of "stuff"

Lighter and stronger materials are an easy-to-see example of dematerialization. But the trend goes way farther than just our built environment. Across a wide range of human activities, as we've invested more energy we end up getting by with far less material. I’ll describe how I see this acting in a few major sectors—if you look around you’ll see it elsewhere too^[5].
 
Food
You can probably divide the history of food production into four or five phases:
1. Hunting and gathering. Huge land requirement for each person.
2. Early agriculture. Much less materially intensive (less land per person) but more energetically intensive (human labor, tilling, collecting waste as fertilizer)
3. Semi-mechanized agriculture before Haber-Bosch. Millions of tons of collected or mined fertilizer (e.g. guano or Chilean nitrates) decrease land intensity, increase energy use.
4. Modern agriculture. Fertilizer comes directly from copious (~25GJ/t) energy and abundant air. It takes ~6x less land and ~100x more energy to make a calorie of food than it did in 1900. But agriculture is still materially wasteful—severalfold more biomass is produced than ends up on our plates, and half the habitable land on the planet is in some way used for food production. Reading the trend, we should energize it further if we can^[6].
5. The Savor era? Some food can be made directly from energy and air….

Energy
Energy sources themselves have dematerialized, from biomass to fossil to renewables to (potentially) nuclear:
• Coal represented an enormous dematerialization from the previous era of biomass power. Contrast coal or petcoke and the era of charcoal-based steelmaking which required vastly more material input and annihilated forests in much of Europe.
• Solar PV cells are made of the second most abundant material in the earth’s crust, processed with copious energy to yield an energy converter that’s 2-3 orders of magnitude more mass-efficient than coal. As multi-junction PV rolls out, expect another 1/3rd or so reduction in the total material requirement and another doubling in the embodied energy for solar power.
• Nuclear fission of enriched uranium provides another 2-3 orders of magnitude more energy per mass than solar over a 20 year lifetime. Nuclear fusion if it’s ever useful (🤷‍♂️) would compound that by using a fuel that’s virtually limitless in the oceans^[7]. 
 
Getting around
Muscle-powered transport on grazing animals to combustion of fossil fuels to electrification. Roads (1/3 of all materials used in our world) to flight to Zoom. ^[8]
 
Semiconductors and computation
As logic elements have gotten smaller, computation is more energy passing through smaller and smaller bits of material. From vacuum tubes to FinFETs, our computers have gone down in material intensity and up in energy intensity with every Moore’s law doubling. And that’s happening as the semi substrate itself is also getting more energy intense--as we move to higher band gaps, we’re driven to lighter atoms which take more energy to purify.
 
Et cetera
You see it in other sectors too. Modern economies reorienting from goods to services. Cards or crypto over cash, life moving online, "Everything is computer". And of course the central meme of our time, AI augmenting then replacing humanity.
 
Frame it broadly enough and it's almost tautological. You can almost define invention as applying energy to make things nicer^[9]. That makes the trend feel inevitable—as long as we move forward technologically, of course everything will come to be made more and more out of energy.

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The opposing view

Strangely you don’t encounter this “the future is always made more and more of energy” view out there much. In fact, the mainstream perspective is basically the opposite. More like “the future should take less and less energy”.
 

Many people observe that energy use skyrockets as a country industrializes, but then flatlines or declines afterwards. Nations switch from mud and straw to cement and steel exactly once. Same when fields start getting fertilized, stuff starts getting wrapped in plastic, roads get paved and people get cars. Once that happens, material needs are mostly met. From that point, incentives point to efficiency and cleanliness—making the same stuff with less and less energy^[10].  
 
This view manifests as a kind of “End of History” attitude when it comes to the future of materials: just a few materials underpin the whole modern way of life, they are so essential and the way we make them has gotten so efficient over time that it’s hard to imagine we’ll ever build our world out of anything else. As Vaclav Smil writes, it’s Still the Iron Age—and may always be.

‍“Less and less” is probably a somewhat adaptive attitude. Here in 2025 we sit in the middle of a multi-century transition from a powerful but toxic energy source to new sources that will probably prove to be limitless but until recently have seemed weak and expensive. You get why people might not see “more and more energy” as the inevitable future.

But obviously I think it’s a mistake to look at things this way. Using more energy is almost definitionally how we unlock new capabilities, especially where materials are concerned. It seems clear that basically all the good things we associate with modernity came first by increasing embodied energy (often substituting new materials), and only later by whittling it back down (increasing efficiency and minimizing externalities)^[11].  
 
That makes me a conscientious objector to some parts of the decarbonization agenda. The “less and less” attitude has everyone in materials R&D focused on greening the end-of-history tech (steel, cement, plastic, fertilizer) or even moving backwards (biofuels, cell-based wood, low-yield organic ag etc.). It’s out of touch with the longer contours of history and the new materials and capabilities that people will actually want. It's even out of touch with what has most helped the earth. The biggest environmental triumphs of our time—obscured as they are beneath the backdrop of constant population growth—came by spending more energy, not less^[12].
 
Back in Cleantech 1.0, all the subsidy programs aimed at reinventing what we already had were failures (e.g. biofuels, solar thermal, CNG cars). Others that targeted categorically new and somewhat dematerialized energy (solar PV, big wind, some Li-ion) were derided at the time but look like victories now. I have no doubt a post-mortem on Cleantech 2.0 in a few years will show the same trend.
 
So I like stuff that follows the "more and more energy" trend instead. New alloys and ways of making them, new ceramics and composites, new ways moving around or making food etc^[13]. Obviously all of that is predicated on the view that we'll eventually have copious cheap energy, still a big "if". But that's prerequisite for the  'electrify everything' worldview anyway^[14].
 
That brings up the concern I mentioned earlier that all the free money for decarbonization might hold us back from the future we actually want. Programs like the IRA look progressive, but outside of removing one acid gas they mostly subsidize and entrench the end-of-history technologies we've had all our lives. E.g. if steel is the world’s main structural material in today’s economic equilibrium, but with innovation and an unsubsidized energy transition the global equilibrium would show Al, Mg, Ti as better-performing and lower-carbon alternatives in the future^[15], then subsidies for green steel make that future harder to achieve. There’s a risk that all the government and VC handouts for decarbonizing the status quo could lock us in the material economy of the 1950s for a long time.

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Having it both ways

Older sci-fi often had the feeling of “freedom through expansion”. Ever-growth, the expanding light of consciousness into the infinite frontier of space. You’ve probably noticed that newer sci-fi has felt different—dystopia, inequity, escape from subjugation or constraint.
 
Real science and technology have shifted the same way. The old goals were abundant energy and amazing materials, a world where human capabilities were meaningfully increased. For all my adult life, the new goals have been decarbonization, degrowth, atonement. Reinventing the old stuff without harmful externalities for the long end of history.
 
In the last year or so a piece of the old strain is back in ascendance. More and more new companies are pursuing a master morality of technology development. Decarbonized commodity startups are rebranding as critical mineral companies, climate VCs are pivoting to “abundance”. Some of this is protective coloration for entrepreneurs who still believe in climate and sustainability goals. But the tension is clear: one set of technologists wants immortality and Mars rockets and supersonic driverless planes, another still wants carbon-free cement and direct air capture.
 
What those two visions for the future have in common is that they both seem pretty fake without incredible new materials and copious new energy. The trick to having it both ways is the same as it has always been—more energy used to dematerialize our lives, our transport, our food, and to make lighter, stronger, better materials.
 
At Orca recently my favorite projects have all been about making the world more of energy, and they’re all still decarbonization-relevant. Light metals, composites, better purity, high-spec ceramics, parts engineered down to the μm scale for physical or electromagnetic properties. Stuff that will help things spin faster and hotter, last longer, use less material etc. Our new project Light Materials is almost the apotheosis of this vision—quickly and cheaply fabricating ultra-performant materials in beams of pure energy. It’s not tech that lets you peddle indulgences for supposedly mitigating GTs of CO2 this decade, but it feels good working on stuff that blows peoples minds and that can plausibly lead us to a future that’s both less of what we don’t want and more of what we do^[16]. 

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Contact: Ian at orcasciences.com