Capital is Sufficient (Part 3): Pressure and Light

More on how we are not constrained by capital in meeting our needs. The previous post covered discharge (yuck) and temperature. All of this is part of the continued rewrite of the Appendix of my book The World After Capital. 

Pressure. Anybody who has gone diving will be aware that our bodies do not handle increased pressure very well. The same goes for decreased pressure, which is one of the reasons why we find air travel exhausting (airplane cabins maintain pressure similar to being at the top of an eight-thousand-foot mountain).

Thankfully we need minimal capital to meet our pressure needs. One might at first assume that we do not need any capital, but that’s not correct. For example, pretty much all commercial flights are in altitudes that require pressurized cabins and hence extra capital above and beyond what would be required for an unpressurized plane. For instance, at just 12 km of altitude pressure falls to 0.2 bar. At such a low pressure it is not just a lack of oxygen that would be fatal, but also decompression sickness may occur where gases that have been dissolved in the bloodstream may gas out resulting in sickness and even death.  As noted earlier, we cannot take the existence of the Earth’s atmosphere for granted. So in addition to giving thought on how to create a livable atmosphere on planets such as Mars that we may eventually want to settle, we need to pay attention to the various forces that could damage or even destroy the Earth’s atmosphere.

Light. Most humans would be hard-pressed to achieve much in complete darkness. For a long time, our need for light was met mainly by sunlight, but much human ingenuity has gone into the creation of artificial light sources.

Our ability to make artificial light is one of the great human achievements and also a story of ongoing progress. We are the only species that has the knowledge to make fire, a capability attributed in Greek mythology to Prometheus who stole fire from the gods. Capital is essential to making light, from the earliest time of gathering wood to the modern creation of light emitting diodes (LEDs). This progress has meant that light has become incredibly affordable in most parts of the world and consumption has gone up accordingly (for example, in the UK by four orders of magnitude over the last two hundred years). Even in extremely poor countries that lack electrical infrastructure, so-called “offgrid solar” is revolutionizing the availability of light, replacing the burning of kerosene and other dangerous fuels. In summary we are definitely not constrained by capital when it comes to our need for light.