# The End of the World is Just the Beginning ## Metadata * Author: [Peter Zeihan](https://www.amazon.comundefined) * ASIN: B09C65JNPF * ISBN: 006323047X * Reference: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09C65JNPF * [Kindle link](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B09C65JNPF) ## Highlights The laptop I’m tapping this down on has more memory than the combined total of all computers globally in the late 1960s. — location: [70](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B09C65JNPF&location=70) ^ref-64508 --- The world’s dominant political unit rapidly evolved from sequestered agricultural communities to globe-spanning, trade-based deepwater empires. — location: [342](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B09C65JNPF&location=342) ^ref-29329 --- This did more than give rise to the world’s first megacities. It created urban centers where no one was involved in agriculture. Where everyone was engaged in value-added labor. — location: [348](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B09C65JNPF&location=348) ^ref-14042 --- Less than two centuries into its deepwater era, London—a city as far away from the trade hubs of the Silk Roads as is possible in Eurasia—became the world’s largest, richest, and best-educated city. — location: [350](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B09C65JNPF&location=350) ^ref-4968 --- “recently” as 1700, all energy used by humans fell into one of three buckets: muscle, water, or wind. The previous thirteen millennia can be summed up as humanity’s effort to capture the three forces in larger volumes and with better efficiencies, but in the end if the wind didn’t blow or the water didn’t flow or the meat wasn’t fed and rested, nothing was going to get done. — location: [356](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B09C65JNPF&location=356) ^ref-7672 --- Increasing the strength and precision of energy application by two orders of magnitude redefined industries as broadly arrayed as mining and metallurgy, construction and medicine, education and warfare, manufacturing and agriculture—each generating its own technological suite, which in turn transformed the human experience. — location: [361](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B09C65JNPF&location=361) ^ref-38798 --- development of dyes didn’t just spawn a chemicals industry, it directly led to fertilizers that increased agricultural output by a factor of four. — location: [365](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B09C65JNPF&location=365) ^ref-17019 --- The biggest restriction of this new industrial era was no longer muscle, water, or wind—or even energy in general—but instead capital. Everything about this new era—whether it be railroads or highways or assembly lines or skyscrapers or battleships—was, well, new. It replaced the infrastructure of the previous millennia with something lighter, stronger, faster, better . . . and that had to be built up from scratch. That required money, and lots of it. The demands of industrialized infrastructure necessitated new methods of mobilizing capital: capitalism, communism, and fascism all emerged. — location: [371](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B09C65JNPF&location=371) ^ref-43014 --- The American story is the story of the perfect Geography of Success. That geography determines not only American power, but also America’s role in the world. — location: [409](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B09C65JNPF&location=409) ^ref-60905 --- Inventions built upon inventions to the point that in the early 1800s, cotton goods accounted for 40 percent of the value of British exports. — location: [677](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B09C65JNPF&location=677) ^ref-42352 --- once. Take the power loom, which is generally credited as being the most significant of the early breakthroughs, increasing output per worker hour by a factor of fifty. The first prototype was built in 1785, but it ultimately went through five decades of refinement in seventeen distinct phases. — location: [713](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B09C65JNPF&location=713) ^ref-31650 --- In 2019 the Earth for the first time in history had more people aged sixty-five and over than five and under. By 2030 there will be twice as many retirees, in relative terms. — location: [1085](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B09C65JNPF&location=1085) ^ref-29509 --- On the other side of the equation, Mexican-Americans are turning nativist. The demographic in the United States that consistently polls the most anti-migration is not white Americans, but instead (non-first-generation) Mexican-Americans. They want family reunification, but only for their own families. — location: [1513](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B09C65JNPF&location=1513) ^ref-4534 --- Most technologies do not fundamentally change us. Consider the contemporary smartphone. It’s a flashlight, a music player, a camera, a game console, a fare card, a remote control, a library, a television, a cookbook, a computer—all in one. It hasn’t enabled us to do much that’s fundamentally new, but it has combined more than a dozen preexisting devices into one, increasing efficiency and access. Important? Ridiculously. But such improvement-based techs do not fundamentally change who we are. Transport technologies, on the other hand, profoundly alter our relationship with our geography. Today you can jump continents in a few hours. It wasn’t always this way. In fact, it was almost never this way. — location: [1579](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B09C65JNPF&location=1579) ^ref-1774 --- While a camel could move a quarter ton and ox-drawn carts around a ton, even the earliest bulk ships could move several hundred tons at a fraction of the price per ton. — location: [1614](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B09C65JNPF&location=1614) ^ref-21002 --- For the first time, true international trade in bulk goods was possible. Between 1825 and 1910, inflation-adjusted prices for freighting cotton and wheat fell by 94 percent. Between 1880 and 1910, the cost component of transport for wheat being shipped from the United States to Europe fell from 18 percent to 8 percent. Now that transport issues had gone from straitjacket to springboard, no one in Britain who had the option would keep eating local foodstuffs. Between 1850 and 1880, the proportion of British cereals in the average British diet fell from three-fifths to one-fifth. — location: [1739](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B09C65JNPF&location=1739) ^ref-59727 --- Global trade before the modern era was a trickling dribble, barely a rounding error by the standards of the early twenty-first century. The East India Company traded about 50 tons of tea a year at the start of the nineteenth century and 15,000 toward the end of it. Today that same 15,000 tons is loaded or unloaded somewhere in the world every forty-five seconds or so. — location: [1765](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B09C65JNPF&location=1765) ^ref-18256 --- By modern standards that’s not even very accomplished. Relative to 1945 standards, modern container ships are sixteen times the size while modern crude carriers are over forty times. — location: [1805](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B09C65JNPF&location=1805) ^ref-36114 ---