Mark Mills reminds us of the fundamental physics of energy and why the difference between atoms, electrons, and photons is so important.
But in the world of atoms and aircraft, not bits and YouTube, things tend to expand, not shrink. The energy needed to move a ton of people, or heat a ton of steel (or silicon), is fixed by properties of Mother Nature. Moving 1,000 pounds 1,000 miles at 50 or 500 mph has a specific, knowable, and immutable minimum energy requirement, dictated by laws of gravity, inertia, friction, mass, heat transfer, and the like. An aircraft’s or car’s engine is not about to shrink in size a thousand-fold and be etched onto a sliver of silicon, or increase in power similarly.
