PREDICTIONS – 10 Years Later - Santa Fe Institute

8. A COSMIC HEARTBEAT
compare the data to the trend line. It again reveals a cyclical pattern that
closely follows the energy consumption cycle. This may not come as a
surprise. If Americans are consuming energy excessively at times, the
use of horsepower will be excessive at the same times since a large fraction
of primary energy goes into horsepower machines. What is less
obvious is which one comes first. Does an excess in available energy
result in the use of extra horsepower, or does an increase in greed for
horsepower provoke an excess in energy consumption?
The fact that the peak in horsepower use comes ten to fifteen years
after the peak in energy consumption argues that it couldn’t be horsepower
use, which triggers energy consumption. Contrary to intuition, it
seems that we don’t spend energy because we need to do something but
rather that we do something because there is energy that must be consumed!
However, looking at the other phenomena described below that
resonate with the same rhythm, we will also consider the possibility that
cause and effect may not always be disentangled. Two resonating phenomena
may not be responsible for each other’s existence but simply
responding to a common external stimulus.
As a second example we can take the clustering of basic innovations
discussed in Chapter Seven. Still, in Figure 8.2, we see that the peaks
in innovation coincide with the valleys in energy consumption. It may
be out of phase, but energy consumption is resonating with making basic
innovations. Are innovations linked in some way to the amount of
energy consumed? They are certainly linked to discoveries, and the
discovery of stable elements—the next graph shown in the figure—also
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FIGURE 8.2 (next page) On the top, an idealized energy consumption cycle is
used as a clock. The data concerning the use of machines represent once again
the percent deviation from the fitted trend. Innovations and stable element discoveries
are reported as occurrences per decade. There are two sets of data for
innovations. Before 1960 the data come from Gerhard Mensch’s book Stalemate
in Technology. The update points (black dots) refer to the appearance of
patents, and in particular, to percent deviation from the growing trend of patents.
There are three sets of data for bank failures: bank suspensions before
1933, banks closed due to financial difficulties between 1940-1985, and percentage
of banks loosing money for the period 1990-1999 (black dots).
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