Worldbuilding 203: Energy and Power
Greetings and Spower! What’s that, you say? Iunno, but we have ALL THE SPOWER! Power and energy are important in all civilisations and always have been since the beginning of time. I, Vivian, your favourite Limax, will tell you everything you need to know to energise your world!
What is power and energy?
Let’s start with energy: what is it? The ability to do work! ...But what is work?
Energy, and thus work, is the amount of ability to change the state of a physical system.
Things change, and that takes energy, which is easy enough to understand. You want light? You have to use energy to generate it because you are changing the system by having it not in its natural state, namely dark as shit. So then, what is power?
How much energy/work one is able to produce per unit of time.
So energy is the amount of ability to change things, and power is how fast you can do it (roughly speaking).
Entropy
This will be a side note, but entropy is a deeply confused subject. Entropy can be roughly described as “The amount of energy unavailable to do work.” That is, energy that exists and is changing states of small systems but is fundamentally unavailable for larger systems to use to change themselves. As entropy increases, more and more energy becomes unavailable for ever larger systemic changes. This is something so fundamental to physics that anything that goes against it is dead on arrival. There is a reason I bring this up that will come later.
Energy sources
An energy source is… Okay, not gonna use the obvious statement. But for something to be an energy source, you need one fundamental thing: a disparity between the current energy state and the future one. For example, when it comes to water power plants, they build this disparity up by prohibiting water from going down the energy gradient due to gravity. Then it is released in small portions and used to turn turbines that will generate electricity (which is a transfer of power, not an energy type).
Similarly, when it comes to nuclear, fission, and even combustion, energy is released because the products have less energy than the original components. In the fusion/fission case, it is all due to the strong nuclear force, and in combustion, it is chemical energy in bonds. As you may notice, any form of energy also involves a force of some sort, and this is not a coincidence because energy is equal to Newton Meter! That is a force times a distance.
Real energy sources
There are several in the world that are quite useful, so let’s check them out!
Combustion
You burn shit, simple as that. Combustion is organic matter that is burnt, and heat is released that drives turbines. Easy to control, it’s cheap, all dandy.
Wind
You use wind to drive blades that spin the turbine; they take lots of space and are massive hassles, so not something you bring along for adventures easily!
Water
You let water build up, then let gravity move it to drive a turbine.
Solar
You use a mechanical version of what green plants do that turns sunlight into electricity to be used.
Fission
You take heavy elements like Uranium or Plutonium and smash them apart into pieces (usually 2 smaller nuclei) and out comes energy!
Fusion
The reverse! You take small atoms and smash them together to release energy!
As you can see, there are a few to choose from, but few are useful in all settings and situations.
Hypothetical energy sources
There are also some hypothetical sources that might be used in the future.
Antimatter
Antimatter has the opposite charge of normal matter. Electrons are positive (also called positrons), protons are negative. When antimatter meets normal matter, it annihilates it and turns into PURE ENERGY! The thing is… antimatter does not naturally exist in large quantities to really be useful as a source. So antimatter is best viewed as a storage of energy rather than a source of energy.
Black holes
How can these be used for energy harvesting!? It can! Because when matter falls in, just like with water, it loses potential energy, and it is turned into kinetic energy. But how can it be harvested? It heats up due to friction in the accretion disk, and all that radiation can be collected and turned into useful energy. It is also quite efficient! About half of matter is turned into kinetic energy that can then be harvested.
Zero-point energy
Even the emptiness of space is not nearly as empty as we think. Sure, there are hydrogen atoms sprinkled all over the place, but there is a non-zero amount of energy in every cubic metre. This is called zero-point energy… It is not zero, but gets called zero as that is the baseline energy amount in space, and it can’t go lower. Remember how I said to harvest energy you need a difference? How can you harvest this if there is nothing that can make it go lower?
And that is the thing: you can’t, then. Which is why a lot of scifi writers use other spaces and dimensions that have a higher zero point energy level which can then be harvested, as ours is lower. But this might cause the end of the universe if it causes the Higgs field to collapse, and all of reality gets rewritten with new laws and expands at the speed of light! But no need to worry about destroying the universe in fiction 😀
Fictional energy sources
Now let’s make some up! The exact nature of how these work and how energy is extracted and why is up to the worldbuilder. As long as it goes from a higher energy state to a lower one, you’ve got your energy source!
Souls
This one is quite common in a lot of fantasy. The soul of a person is often quite potent in energy to be used. This is often done to show the incredible value of a single human life, and besides, it makes for a great moral in a story! How much good does it need to do to justify killing people for it? If I lose the internet, I’ll definitely go for this energy solution if it is available!
Magic
Abra kadabra! Magic can do lots! So why not extract energy from it? It sure seems to require much less effort on the human part than all the work it can do. The Legend of Korra did this well where fire benders can use lightning to electrify the entire city. Would be fun to see more people use magic like this and explore how an industrial revolution would be done with magic as an energy source.
Phlebotinum
You make up a substance and from it Abra Annedabra and tada! We got energy! What the rules here are is entirely up for you. You can mimic pre-existing ones or make up your entirely own fantastical way it works. The one thing to remember is that you still have it go from high energy (and low entropy) to low energy (and high entropy).
Designing an energy source
Okay, you want to design your own energy source for your people to use! ...How do you do it? No need to worry, Vivian is here to save the day! As I have explained, energy sources essentially go from a high energy state to a low energy state (and opposite for entropy). Even wind does this because wind is the method by which two regions, one with more energy (higher temperatures) transfers its energy to low energy (colder areas), and entropy increases.
So what can we do about this? Well, if you have fantasy, you have magic! See Anne’s post on magic systems. And in these cases, you can easily treat “lots of mana/magic” areas as having high energy and low places as the opposite so you can extract energy. Or you can do like Avatar the Last Airbender did where fire generation is in and of itself a source of energy that they use for both steam engines and generating electricity!
But Anne can drop in on that if she so chooses, I am scifi so let's imagine what we can do there! In my post on struos I came up with ways to make new substances and such, so you can of course have them existing all around the place to use. This Winchellium crystal can be used for energy! And of course something has had to put it at a high energy level, but let’s be honest, there is a lot of energy to go around in the universe. When supernovas go kablooey, they release so much energy that substances beyond nickel come to exist despite them taking energy and not producing any, which can later be used for energy! So having it lying around randomly as a scifi kind of oil is perfectly acceptable. It gives you all DAH POWAH! to decide how anything works.
But of course, if you want to go even more nuts like yours truly (I am stark raving mad 🤪), we want even more–MOAR! Other than for energy density, different natural sources, like the wind, will need you to create an additional force of nature to create an energy source in most cases (but not all). We have the four regular forces for energy sources that we all know of …What do you mean you don’t know those!? Urgh! Fine! Gravity, which does water power. Electromagnetism, which does solar and combustion entirely alone and helps in Fission and Fusion. And Strong Nuclear force which does most of the work for fission and fusion but needs electromagnetism to work too. As you may notice, there is one left, the Weak Nuclear force. That is why there is an extra word and not just “nuclear force”! While it is definitely important in life, it is not relevant to our discussion here (much).
Now we make up a force: does it operate on a large scale like gravity does (where it is negligible at atomic scales), medium scale (electromagnetism), or small scale (nuclear forces and sometimes electromagnetism). This matters, as it will determine how one can possibly get energy from it.
If it is more on the atomic scale, it will either be similar to chemical combustion where “bonds” of whatever you’ve made up contain the higher energy level. If it is subatomic, it will be more similar to the strong nuclear force where it will include transmogrification of elements into new ones. This can either be forced like fission and fusion or passive the way radioisotope reactors work where the natural heat of radioactive decay is used to generate useful energy forms. If it is large scale only, it will be similar to gravity in that large quantities are required, but one could make it more efficient by, for example, having “different charges.” Think like magnetic poles, or positive and negative in electricity. Technically, electricity is also a long distance force, which I’m using interchangeably with large scale right now, but because it is constantly neutralised by opposite charges, it is essentially 0 for long distances, and thus not a force like we need. But of course you as the creator do not need to have it so they cancel each other out!
Kardeshev scale
The Kardeshev scale is a scale that essentially describes how much energy a civilization uses. Throughout human history, there has been a strong correlation between energy usage and technological sophistication. You might think it would be one where less and less energy is used over time as technology progresses, but nope! The more advanced they get, the more energy they use per person. This seems to be primarily because of two things: the first one is that energy becomes easier to extract as it gets easier to build more things that can extract even more energy. The second is that the more energy people have available, the more they will use to fill all their daily needs like smartphoning and stuff!
Roughly speaking, a type 1 Kardeshev scale civilization has control over all energy that their world receives from their local star(s), which for Earth might be around or less than 1% or so of the energy from the sun. Type 1 Kardeshev scale civilizations are also called K1 civilizations; type 2, or K2,can harvest their entire sun's energy production. K3 can harvest energy from their entire galaxy, and K4 can harvest from the entire local galaxy cluster. Type Omega is entirely hypothetical and would be controlling all the energy of the entire universe.
Notice here how the amount of energy is growing exponentially, and they are becoming ever more powerful. A K2 civilization can do things unimaginable to a K1 civilization. And keep in mind, humanity is around K0.75. Still got a long way to go before even a K1, but you’ll get there! One thing to remember is that each step up is like gods looking down on ants. You can imagine a K1 as you are almost there, but K2 has so much energy that they can start reshaping the entire solar system. K3 will remodel the galaxy to fit their needs and desires. What will their desires and motivations be like? Can they even perceive anything below themselves as significant enough to care about? How much do you care if you disrupt a pathetic insignificant anthill?
This is something to keep in mind. Because it is so incomprehensible, any attempt to make them familiar shows your own ignorance; they possess so much energy and power at their hands that you cannot imagine let alone hope to understand them. That is why I, personally, settle for K1 to K1.5. They are close enough that they can be like normal people to us, yet still seem so powerful. K2 and beyond, and you are asking for trouble.
Usages and development
We have discussed the Kardeshev scale and how it roughly translates to technological development, but how does it work and why? Well, in the early days of humanity, there was only one source of energy: humans! Human muscle power, and that is not very efficient; have you ever heard them complain about having to do work? 🙄 Totally unworkable! So people figured out how to get animals to do work. You can have more animals than people doing lots of heavy work, especially if they are larger than humans!
But did you notice what happened there? By separating it from humans, it meant you humans could use more sources–animals–to produce more work! And this is a huge contributing factor in energy growth, but for now, you are bound by the amount of animals. As they are now a huge part of energy production, they become highly valued (albeit people back in the day did not think of them as energy sources). This is also the stage where slavery is valuable (see blogpost) as some jobs require intelligence to be done. Ever tried having a horse harvest sugar cane? Yeah.
After that comes mechanical sources, namely wind and water. People realise if they can build wooden structures that can rotate, they can get it to do fairly menial tasks like grinding grains. It is a laborious and boring thing, so if machines can do it and you can sit back watching, it means it is great! But notice again, you can technically build these structures all over the place, but because they need to be extremely large to get enough energy to warrant the labour input, they are not mass constructed. Most villages generally get one that everyone can go to; you don’t need to grind grain that often. Fun fact, in 🇸🇪 we say “Först till kvarn,” first to mill, to mean “First come, first served.”
And for a long time, this was it, with minor mechanical improvements that reduced losses and constantly having to replace parts that were handmade. But an important development during this long time was the development of steel and methods to make it more precisely, and this is crucial for the next step. People had figured out that boiled steam can do work, but the temperatures involved and constant work will grind iron down fast and hard. So steel was crucial to get the steam engine. It could endure forces and temperatures much better and not constantly break down.
The big benefit of these engines is that unlike windmills and watermills, they can be built anywhere and fed coal, so they were built everywhere they could do work. So there was now a huge incentive to figure out how to turn the circular motion into ways to do ever more diverse jobs. As you can see, the amount of energy being used is exploding because it is being built everywhere doing more and more different kinds of jobs.
After this, did it stop? Nope, internal combustion engines showed to be even smaller and could be used easily everywhere, so once they were developed, along with how to process oil, the amount of energy exploded again. And then it happened again as the electric net was expanded. Now everyone everywhere can access power and energy with the flick of a switch, fill the homes with light, build ways to entertain. MORE POWER!
As you can see, each new device to make energy extraction easier explodes because people turn their heads and look at it and go, “You know, that is worth using now! Let’s get one too!” And that is one of the fundamental reasons why energy usage grows fast with technological development. So if you have magic or fancy sources, think on where they would be using it, because they will use it for anything they can! Work has to be done; why not use something else for it that does it better?
Summa summarum
So lots of talk about energy and power, UNLIMITED POWER!
Jokes aside, I hope this gets you thinking about how energy genuinely affects the world and how it is used. Energy and power generation are very important and affect how society works, as it will dictate what they can do. A thing I didn’t bring up is that slavery actually stalls a lot of development due to how easy it is to get for a long time. But once that stops, the rest of my story continues on. I will be doing a practicum on my own energy and power systems from my universe later. Good luck to all!
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Copyright ©️ 2024 Vivian Sayan. Original ideas belong to the respective authors. Generic concepts such as the types of power and the Kardeshev scale are copyrighted under Creative Commons with attribution, and any derivatives must also be Creative Commons. However, specific ideas such as Winchellium and all language or exact phrasing are individually copyrighted by the respective authors. Contact them for information on usage and questions if uncertain what falls under Creative Commons. We’re almost always happy to give permission. Please contact the authors through this website’s contact page.
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