Seven Elements That Have Changed the World

by John Browne

  To find out the important news of the day, you no longer have to go to the Rialto; you just simply reach into your pocket. Silicon has enhanced our ability to understand the world, doing for the human brain what carbon and iron did for human muscle.

  The futurologist Ray Kurzweil points to ‘a future period during which the pace of technological change will be so rapid, its impact so deep, that human life will be irreversibly transformed’.87 At this point, humans, machines, physical reality and virtual reality will be melded together. Computers, he believes, will free us from the processing constraints of our biological brains, opening up the frontiers of human knowledge. They are, though, not yet as powerful as the human brain, which carries out around 100 to 10,000 trillion instructions per second. Nor may we ever be able to construct a silicon machine that could work in the same way as a human brain, for example, handling the frequent ambiguities of life.88 However, Kurzweil believes this watershed could be reached by 2025. There might not be a single grain of sense in all these incredible speculations, but it is grains of silicon that have caused them. Using readily available sand, the human mind has created something that might one day exceed itself. But we need to be very careful not to exaggerate the potential of current technologies. As Gordon Moore said: ‘I do not see an end in sight [to Moore’s law], with the caveat that I can only see a decade or so ahead.’89 So what can we expect in the next decade? At Intel, one silicon innovation is already coming to fruition.

  Silicon photonics

  In May 2012, Mario Paniccia, a researcher at Intel, led me through a maze of office cells at the company’s headquarters in Santa Clara, California. We reached his desk, the same size as all the others, in the far corner of the room. ‘The bosses get the windows,’ he explained. While I waited for him to find the small silicon device I had come to see, I looked at the photographs on his wall. Next to the portraits of his family and friends, Paniccia was pictured several times with a man I recognised from the ten years I had spent on Intel’s board: Gordon Moore. ‘We finally got to play the full eighteen holes,’ he said pointing to a picture of him standing side by side with Moore, dressed in golfing gear. Moore has clearly been an inspiration to Paniccia, one of a new wave of innovators pushing the limits of silicon technology. His current research is attempting to extend the exponential trend of Moore’s law to the technology of data transmission. Having at last found what he was looking for, he opened a box and took out two small silicon chips connected with a cheese-wire-thin translucent optical fibre. ‘This,’ he said, ‘is the future of communication.’

  Optical fibres can carry more data faster and further than copper wires, yet they are rarely used. The fibre itself is made from glass, and so is cheap, but the lasers used to generate the light signals sent down the fibre are expensive. So, too, are the light boosters placed periodically along the fibre and the light decoders at the receiving end. These components cannot be mass-produced, and the system cannot be mass-assembled, making silicon communication a costly alternative to copper wires. The use of optical fibres has generally been restricted to the giant ‘information highways’ that link continents and countries, and which every second carry tens of terabytes of data (about one hundred times the information stored on your computer hard drive). Each connection can cost hundreds of millions of dollars.

  Paniccia believes all that is about to change. The tiny ‘silicon photonics’ device he handed me could soon make high-performance optical fibres affordable everywhere, from big data centres to personal computers.90 Reminiscent of Jack Kilby and Robert Noyce’s breakthrough with the integrated circuit, the way to do this is to make the equipment almost entirely of silicon. Doing so enables the entire optical communication system to be mass-produced cheaply, building on fifty years of silicon manufacturing technology. Paniccia’s device can carry 50 gigabytes every second, fast enough to download a high-definition movie in less than a second. His team is now working towards a one terabyte per second link, which could download the entire printed collection of the Library of Congress in about ninety seconds.

  These silicon photonic devices are the latest inventions to be added to the complex infrastructure that supports our computation and communication needs. They combine silicon’s interactions with light and electrons to produce a high-speed communication connection that can be cheaply mass-produced. Silicon has reinvented itself once again. This is the technology of tomorrow, but what about the day after? Just over the horizon one possibility seems particularly exciting, and it comes once again from carbon.

  CARBON REVISITED: GRAPHENE

  A new substance, looking like a piece of futuristic chicken wire, has the potential to be a miracle material for the twenty-first century, with the power to transform that might exceed silicon’s. Unlike silicon, its development is not a story of glamorous entrepreneurs in sunny California, but one of pencils and sticky tape in the rainy north of England. At the start of the millennium, Russian-born professor Andre Geim and his student Konstantin Novoselov were working at the University of Manchester, investigating a new kind of transistor, made not from a semiconductor like silicon but from a conductor. They hoped to produce a device that was even smaller, faster and used less energy than anything currently available. They began to experiment with graphite, which consists of thin layers of carbon atoms stacked on each other, and from which pencil lead is made. As you write, pressure is applied to the tip of a pencil and the thin carbon layers of the graphite slide over each other to form the words on the page.

  For many years, scientists had been investigating the unusual properties of structures made of pure carbon. Carbon’s ability to bond with itself allows a great diversity of carbon molecules, including the long chains and rings that form the backbone of hydrocarbon fuels. In 1985, Harry Kroto’s research team at Rice University in Houston, Texas, created a football-like cage of sixty carbon atoms called Buckminsterfullerene.91 Several years later, hollow cylindrical carbon nanotubes became the ‘wonder material’ of the 1990s. Along the same lines, scientists wondered whether a thin sheet of carbon atoms could be made; most thought that a sheet would be unstable and crumple up when it got to the thickness of a single atom.

  However, as they were investigating the properties of thin graphite layers, Geim and his student at Manchester made a startling discovery. Using ordinary sticky tape to peel flakes off a graphite block, they were able to create thinner and thinner sheets, reducing the thickness to only a few atoms. Eventually, as they looked through a microscope, they realised they had achieved what many had thought impossible: a sheet of carbon just one atom thick. They had made graphene. They began to explore the properties of this novel material, and the surprises continued. They discovered that it was the world’s strongest material, three hundred times stronger than steel.92 According to one calculation, it would take an elephant balancing on a pencil to break through layers of graphene the thickness of clingfilm. It combines that strength with very high flexibility and conductivity. It may be the world’s best conductor of heat and electricity, better than both copper and silver, with virtually no electrical resistance at room temperature.93 To top it off, it was also the most transparent material in existence. It was very unusual,’ says Novoselov. ‘Each time we worked with it we found something new and interesting: the optical properties, the electrical properties, the mechanical properties were all remarkable.’94

  The initial findings were published in 2004 and they have continued to generate great scientific and commercial interest.95 In 2010, only six years later, Geim and Novoselov were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics. In its announcement, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said: ‘Carbon, the basis of all known life on earth, has surprised us once again.’96 Carbon is the most versatile of the chemical elements. In the form of fossil fuels it developed the world, powering manufacturing, trade and communication; in the form of carbon dioxide it may transform the world again, permanently altering our climate and our way of life; in the form of graphene, it may
revolutionise many of the products that make our lives better. Its transparency and conductivity could be used in solar cells and touch screens, its strength and flexibility in ships’ hulls and space ships, and its semi-permeability in antibacterial bandages and water filters.97 Lithium ion batteries made with graphene anodes might have ten times the storage capacity and recharge many times faster than current ones. Devices, such as phones, made with graphene transistors might be so thin that they could be rolled up and put behind your ear.

  The potential for graphene is enormous but often the benefits of newly discovered materials are much exaggerated.98 I am reminded of the technological optimism of the 1950s. Popular science magazines and comics predicted a future in which uranium would supply all our energy needs, heating homes, powering cars and even controlling the Earth’s climate at the flick of a switch. Titanium, stronger, lighter and more corrosion-resistant than steel, was predicted to become as integral to modern life as iron. And graphene’s sister material, Buckminsterfullerene, found few practical applications, and carbon nanotubes have yet to make a significant impact on industry.

  Graphene has proved its potential in the laboratory. Whether it forms the basis of a revolution in products is a question of economics and engineering rather than science; commercialising a new material takes time, effort and money. It looks likely that its first commercial applications will be in thin-film touch screens and electronic paper, but for some of its more extraordinary applications we will probably have to wait for decades, if they arrive at all.99 Graphene, though, is a perfect example of how the elements, probed with human curiosity and applied by human ingenuity, can surprise us time and time again, revealing new properties and powers that go on to transform the world.

  Power, Progress and Destruction

  I SUSPECT THAT EVERY generation in every place believes that their moment in history is moving more quickly than that of previous generations. They may be right. Today, everything, from technological advances to the growth in population, seems to be moving faster. Decisions are made rapidly, communicated more widely and their impact felt more broadly. What we do today has a far greater impact on humankind than what was done yesterday. Underlying what will be done is the way humankind uses the elements. Agricola cautioned us in the sixteenth century that ‘good men employ them for good and to them they are useful. The wicked use them badly and to them they are harmful.’1 I wonder what his practical and realistic advice to us today would be. Here is my view.

  First, all of us need to be aware of not only the good things we get from using the elements, but also their negative consequences. You can see that in carbon and its impact on the global climate, or uranium and its use in a weapon of mass destruction. To foster an understanding of these dangers will take a great commitment to education. It will also take an enormous amount of communication, not least to overcome the voices of those with vested interests who want to be blind to the negative.

  Second, while all those who have predicted that we will run out of one or another element, mineral or commodity have so far been wrong, they may eventually be right. We need to keep investing in the technologies that make our use of these exhaustible reserves more productive. And we should not prejudge which of these technologies to use but to decide on the evidence of their overall merits. Short-run considerations of supply and demand will not provide the right basis to do the research and development needed for the future. Leaders are needed to take the risk of looking to and acting for the long run.

  Third, we need to take a fresh look at the age-old human characteristic of greed. The seven elements have always inspired greed; their utility and power appeal to the self-interest in all of us. Many people are captivated by the idea of being rich and are prepared to do terrible things to get there. They have fought to control land, they have knowingly polluted, they have exploited labour and they have used their wealth to do the same all over again.

  Greed cannot be eliminated, but it can be controlled and directed for good. Society can make laws that forbid exploitation of people and the environment. Around the world, where the law is enforced, companies or individuals buy land rather than steal it, employ workers rather than enslave them, and protect ecosystems rather than destroy them. The law does this by prohibiting the use of force, compelling people to act within defined boundaries. Among other things, the good laws create a marketplace, founded on mutual consent, and thereby align self-interest with the interests of all involved. They place a harness on greed, directing its force to the service of humanity.

  In most cases, the law takes effect through regulations, which, at their most basic level, prohibit activities that are harmful to society. Society forbids the use of iron swords for murder or the use of slaves in the pursuit of gold. But often what is needed requires a more complex construction. Our use of carbon energy to raise the living standards of billions has come about hand in hand with the loss of human life and pollution of our land, air and water. Effective regulation requires a balancing act between providing the energy needed for economic development and minimising the harm to people and the environment.

  Today, it is most difficult, and indeed most important, to achieve this balance in making regulations to reduce the risk of climate change. Governments have to think carefully about how they design the rules of the game; they cannot simply forbid the use of carbon fuels. Developed economies would crash and developing economies would stand still. Rather, they must design mechanisms that direct self-interest towards reducing energy use, decarbonising energy production and capturing carbon. The theoretical ideal is a global carbon tax that forces polluters to take account of the damage caused by carbon dioxide. In practice, international and domestic politics make that impossible and so we must make do with a complex collection of subsidies, regulations, taxes and carbon pricing. It is a messy and inefficient process, but it is society’s way of curbing carbon’s potentially destructive potential. I am optimistic that it will work eventually.

  Intelligent regulation not only protects citizens and the environment but also companies. For example, bad practice, by a few operators, in the way in which wells were completed to produce gas from shale led to problems that gave the industry a bad name. Regulation must prevent the few from damaging the many as well as encourage competition. Only when the powerful grip of Standard Oil was removed with its dissolution in 1911 could other US oil companies begin to thrive. Regulation was used to restrain the greed of Standard Oil while fostering the aspirations of smaller market players. I saw a similar situation in Russia in the 1990s, where bribes, threats and fraud were the norm in business. The legal system had been twisted by a powerful few for their own benefit. There were many rules, but they were applied selectively in the interests of those with political power.

  There remain many other countries in which society is left stranded as the apparatus of the state turns a blind eye to, or, worse still, is complicit in, the destructive extraction of the elements. Africa is the home of vast and untapped resource wealth, yet much of that revenue is vulnerable to corruption, and ends up in the pockets of the elite. As I look back, it is clear to me that the most powerful force for change in those countries is to push governments, by applying International pressure, to disclose payments from resource development and their general expenditures. That would allow citizens to hold them to account. And it would compel change in the enforcement of internal laws designed to prevent corruption.

  Through my involvement in the Extractive Industry Transparency Initiative I have seen how the bright light of transparency can ensure that oil wealth reaches the hands of the citizens to whom it belongs. Across the world of business, transparency is becoming less of an option. More instant and extensive communication enables citizens and NGOs to observe almost every activity of a business, to rally opposition against it and to launch powerful global campaigns very quickly at virtually no cost.

  Laws today are stronger, and the greed of individuals better confined, than at any point i
n history. As societies develop, aided by the force of transparency, they demand better working practices and a greater respect for the environment. Transparency does not solve everything, but where it is practically applied it seems to be making a difference.

  Fourth, we need to celebrate philanthropy. Laws are a vital mechanism to direct the use of the elements for the good of humanity. This, however, is not enough. Even when the elements are used to foster human progress and prosperity, they can also create great inequality. We saw this in the stories of Carnegie and Rockefeller. But by giving away the fortunes they had made in the production of steel and oil, they went some way in reducing the gap between rich and poor in the society of their age. The evidence suggests their philanthropy was driven by a series of motives. Clearly, they wanted to leave a legacy, to be immortalised with their names associated with great institutions like Carnegie Hall and Rockefeller University. They recognised that great businesses are transient in comparison with great institutions. They were also probably motivated by guilt. Carnegie and Rockefeller were both criticised during their lifetimes as ‘robber barons’ who trampled on competition and mistreated their workforce. I doubt they would have been so generous were it not for the scandals of the Homestead strike and the Ida Tarbell exposé.