FUTURE SHOCK THE THIRD WAVE

Posted by admin_akashic on Aug 7th, 2022 in Civilization, Prophecy

THE ARCHITECTURE OF CIVILIZATION

lures. Indeed, beneath the well-known differences lies a hidden bedrock of similiarity.

And to understand today’s colliding waves of change who must be able to identify clearly the parallel structures of all industrial nations—the hidden framework of Second Wave civilization. For it is this industrial framework itself that is now being shattered.

LIVING BATTERIES

The precondition of any civilization, old or new, is energy. First Wave societies drew their energy from “living batteries”—human and animal muscle-power—or from sun, wind, and water. Forests were cut for cooking and heating. Waterwheels, some of them using tidal power, turned millstones. Windmills creaked in the fields. Animals pulled the plow. As late as the French Revolution, it has been estimated, Europe drew energy from an estimated 14 million horses and 24 million oxen. All First Wave societies thus exploited energy sources that were renewable. Nature could eventually replenish the forests they cut, the wind that filled their sails, the rivers that turned then* paddle wheels. Even animals and people were replaceable “energy slaves.*’

All Second Wave societies, by contrast, began to draw their energy from coal, gas, and oil—from irreplaceable fossil fuels. This revolutionary shift, coming after Newcomen invented a workable steam engine in 1712, meant that for the first time a civilization was eating into nature’s capital rather than merely living off the interest it provided.

This dipping into the earth’s energy reserves provided a hidden subsidy for industrial civilization, vastly accelerating its economic growth. And from that day to this, wherever the Second Wave passed, nations built towering technological and economic structures on the assumption that cheap fossil fuels would be endlessly available. In capitalist and communist industrial societies alike, in East and West, this same shift has been apparent—from dispersed to concentrated energy, from renewable to non-renewable, from many different sources and fuels to a few. Fossil fuels formed the energy base of all Second Wave societies.