USS Clueless Stardate 20010817.2337

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Stardate 20010817.2337 (On Screen): Brian Carnell glories in his ability to use electricity to make his life easier. I must admit that I do some of that, myself. I don't necessarily go out of my way to waste power, but for instance there are three computers here which stay on 24 hours. (One of them is the web server on which you're reading this.)

But it brings up an interesting point. The word power has a lot of meanings, but two in particular. First, there's the way an engineer uses it, to mean the ability to produce energy at a constant rate. The unit of measure of power is the watt, which is a generation capability of one joule per second.

The other meaning of the term is more or less "influence and control", and refers to the ability to get what you want in life without begging for it (which is why money is power). In political terms the level of power of a nation is the extent to which it can prevail in trade and diplomatic negotiations. With regards to nations, I guess we can call this "political power".

The interesting thing about the two is that though they would seem to be unrelated, in fact they closely correlate throughout history. As a general rule, if you evaluate the situation in the world at any given instant, the large nation (i.e. not Lichtenstein) which has the highest per-capita engineering-power utilization capacity will also have the most political power, and if you rank large nations on each scale they'll have nearly the same position on both lists. I know of no exceptions to this. (Well, actually, one: some nations can temporarily enhance their political power for a few years or even decades, but only by destroying their economies and sinking like a stone later. The USSR was an example of this, where its political power greatly exceeded what would have been justified by its actual ability to generate engineering power, but it didn't last because its economy collapsed. That's because it ran its peacetime economy on what amounted to a war-footing, which isn't sustainable. The other cases of which I'm aware were equally temporary and equally ended in disaster.)

If you think about it, this correlation really does make sense. Engineering-power is the driving force behind the economy of a nation, and generally the more power the more wealth and goods the economy can turn out (and the more taxes it can pay, and the larger the military it can support). Engineering-power is a multiplier which makes it possible for each worker to produce more. (One man with a stamping machine can work more metal than fifty men with hammers, but only because there's power to run the machine.) And GDP, driven by engineering-power, generally correlates with political power. So the correlation is real, not coincidental. And I think there is a real causation relationship.

I certainly can't claim that there is an invariant correlation between the two, but I do have to wonder: if a nation decides to reduce it's production and consumption of engineering-power, will it also lose political power? I know of several cases where nations have reduced engineering-power, for one reason or another (sometimes involuntarily), and in all the cases of which I'm aware political-power was also reduced. Isn't that interesting? It does make me wonder if a decision to embark big-time on energy conservation also represent political suicide for a nation. (discuss)

Update: Actually, this correlation is fast responding, too, and military men have known about it for a long time. During WWII, one of the major targets for the strategic bombing of Germany was its petrochemical industry. The goal was to restrict the amount of petroleum it could refine and ship and utilize in order to reduce its political power to wage war. And it worked, too. Engineering power available to a soldier is also a multiplier, and without it he's much less formidable. And in those days by far the most important source of engineering power available to a soldier was gasoline. (The second was high explosives.) Equally, in the Pacific one of the top targets for the US submarine blockade was oil tankers, to reduce Japan's ability to import fuel with which to generate engineering power, so as to reduce Japan's political power. It worked there, too. The Japanese Navy and air forces were emasculated by lack of fuel, leading to successive massacres which wiped them out as effective forces. On the other hand, the German U-boats tried to do the same thing to England in the Battle of the Atlantic and didn't pull it off (fortunately). Attempts to interdict an enemy's flow of energy has been a common tactic in war in the last fifty years. Some of the Tomahawks fired at Iraq in 1990 targeted electrical generation plants. And when Serbia was bombed, electrical generation plants were deliberately hit there, too. Interesting, no?

Captured by MemoWeb from http://denbeste.nu/entries/00000532.shtml on 9/16/2004