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 search continues. The sun will rise tomorrow. The wind will blow. The uranium will decay. But for now, the most valuable real estate in the universe is not a gold mine or an oil field.
No one liked it. It was dirty. It was cursed by clerics as “the devil’s excrement.” But it worked. And it unlocked the Industrial Revolution. The search for energy moved underground. Then came the black gold. In 1859, Edwin Drake drilled a 69-foot hole in Titusville, Pennsylvania. He wasn’t looking for fuel; he was looking for kerosene to light lamps. But when the gasoline fraction (a volatile waste product) was thrown away into rivers, someone noticed it burned with a furious energy.
In labs from California to China, scientists are looking at the vacuum of space (zero-point energy), harvesting radio waves from the air, and even drilling into superhot geothermal rocks that exist at the edge of magma chambers. Some ideas sound like magic. But so did splitting the atom in 1900. The Paradox of the Hunt Here is the cruel irony: Every time we find a new source of energy, we don’t use less of the old sources. We use more of everything. This is called Jevons Paradox —the more efficient we get at using coal, the more coal we burn.
Or you might tell them a sadder story. That we searched everywhere—under the seabed, inside the atom, up in the solar wind—but we never learned to live within the budget of a single planet.
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.