The next source, which Homo sapiens employs when implementing his definitive capability are living beings, plants and animals. A significant part of additional energy that people use above their physiological needs they retrieve from the objects of inanimate nature, such as firewood, coal, or other burnable materials. Alive objects, plants and animals, provide people with food, thus satisfying their physiological needs, but humans had mastered to employ various living beings not only as food but also for getting from them additional energy for other purposes. Retrieving additional energy from living objects is linked with some peculiarities, however. All living organisms possess powerful mechanisms of self-preservation due to which they actively resist to external influences. Therefore living organisms cannot be coerced to do something for humans for nothing, inasmuch as they, in contrast to Homo sapiens, are incapable of using energy above their physiological requirements. In striving to acquire additional energy from plants or animals people have no other way but to enter with them into a kind of symbiotic relationship. People have to facilitate the life of their symbionts either providing them with additional feed, оr safeguarding from biological competitors, etc. Only under such condition a certain left-over of the energy reserve of symbionts can appear and people can reckon on getting it for their purposes. Domestication of plants and animals and formation of a specific sphere of human activity, the agriculture, in which more than a half of the world population is engaged even now, is just the realization of such symbiosis in a wide scale. This channel provides humankind mainly, but not only, with energy needed to cover its physiological requirements. The total capacity of this channel of energy supply correlates, with some degree of certainty, with the population of Earth.
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Humankind evolves due to dissipation of Energy
At the very end of the eighteenth century Thomas Malthus had specified the expected difficulties of maintenance the mankind, growing in number, with food. He was denounced since as a reactionary and pessimist, though was neither in fact. He was a sound scholar free from overly optimistic illusions. His warnings have not subsequently proved right not because they were false in principle, but because he could not foresee all the long-term consequences of the Industrial Revolution at its very beginning. Meanwhile the Watt’s steam engine had already been in use for about 30 years, its industrial application swiftly expanding. Thus, the mankind has already entered the new phase of its development characterized with rapid growth of consumption of technological energy. The use of increasing amounts of technological energy allowed overcoming the threat predicted by Malthus, but now, two centuries later, it engenders a lot of new threats for further well-being of humankind. Energy plays undoubtedly a very significant role in the contemporary life of humankind. Anyhow the sharpest political collisions are connected with the problems of energy; trading wars and rather often even the real, “hot” ones, are waging for energy. And all this happens now, in our age of humanity and democracy.
Thus, the analysis of the interrelation between two essences – Energy and Humankind – seems to be relevant. The problem is strongly aggravated, however, because these two essences are the subjects of two different branches of human knowledge, so distant from each other in the ideological and methodological respect that mutual understanding becomes rather difficult. Energy refers to the sphere of natural sciences (physics), whereas Humankind to that of human sciences. In these domains of knowledge, however, people speak in different languages and this is a formidable obstacle. There are the disciplines among the human sciences and the humanities which critically reflect upon the assumptions and principles of natural sciences, considering that their action does not extend into the humanitarian sphere.
It is quite obvious that any attempt to solve the tangle of interrelations in the pair “Energy - Humankind” entails a lot of accompanying questions, which should be cleared preliminary. A list of such questions, by no means a complete one, can be proposed for the beginning as follows:
1. What is Human? What is his fundamental distinction from our animal ancestors?
2. What follows from this distinction?
3. Why humans haven’t succeeded in finding an adequate answer to the first question within more than two millennia?
4. What are the roots of incompatibility of the ways of thinking in the natural sciences and the humanities?
5. What is money?
6. Are the economic processes subject to the laws of thermodynamics?
7. Is Energy the motive power of life of Humankind or Humankind becomes the working substance of a global energy transforming machine that generates entropy?
8. .......
In the book shown at the side strip some of these questions are touched upon.
Thus, the analysis of the interrelation between two essences – Energy and Humankind – seems to be relevant. The problem is strongly aggravated, however, because these two essences are the subjects of two different branches of human knowledge, so distant from each other in the ideological and methodological respect that mutual understanding becomes rather difficult. Energy refers to the sphere of natural sciences (physics), whereas Humankind to that of human sciences. In these domains of knowledge, however, people speak in different languages and this is a formidable obstacle. There are the disciplines among the human sciences and the humanities which critically reflect upon the assumptions and principles of natural sciences, considering that their action does not extend into the humanitarian sphere.
It is quite obvious that any attempt to solve the tangle of interrelations in the pair “Energy - Humankind” entails a lot of accompanying questions, which should be cleared preliminary. A list of such questions, by no means a complete one, can be proposed for the beginning as follows:
1. What is Human? What is his fundamental distinction from our animal ancestors?
2. What follows from this distinction?
3. Why humans haven’t succeeded in finding an adequate answer to the first question within more than two millennia?
4. What are the roots of incompatibility of the ways of thinking in the natural sciences and the humanities?
5. What is money?
6. Are the economic processes subject to the laws of thermodynamics?
7. Is Energy the motive power of life of Humankind or Humankind becomes the working substance of a global energy transforming machine that generates entropy?
8. .......
In the book shown at the side strip some of these questions are touched upon.
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