Increasing complexity and control of energy in human history.

 In fact, we can see

the buildup of that complexity in the course of human history, by looking at how
humans have increased their capacity to control energy flows at the surface of the
earth. Indeed, the ways humans have done this must surely count as one of the
dominant shaping forces in world history. While Paleolithic societies seem to have
mobilized about 5,000 Calories per person per day, early agrarian societies probably
mobilized about 12 C., more advanced agricultural societies mobilized about 26 C.,
early industrial societies about 77 C., and modern industrial societies can mobilize
about 230 C. As human populations have multiplied by at least 1,000 times in the
last 10,000 years, this means that the total amount of energy mobilized by our
species as a whole has increased by a factor of almost 50,000 times.

Increasing control of energy shows up in the very earliest phases of human history,
in the migrations that allowed humans to settle all parts of the world by learning how
to extract energy and resources from many different types of environment.
Eventually, increasing control of energy allowed human populations to increase, and
as they increased their interrelations became more complex. This was particularly
apparent when humans first began to practice agriculture from about 10,000 years
ago. This sudden increase in the ability of humans to divert energy to their own uses
led to accelerated population growth, which eventually led to the appearance of the
larger concentrations of humans we describe as cities. Within cities, social relations
became vastly more complex than they had been in the smaller and simpler
societies of the Paleolithic era. Then, in the modern era, there was another sharp
acceleration in human control of energy. This was associated with what is often
called the "Fossil Fuels Revolution." By some estimates, humans now control
between 25% and 40% of all the energy that enters the biosphere through
photosynthesis. Clearly, if one species controls this much energy, other species may
feel the pinch. And indeed they do. Extinction rates of other species are currently as
high as they have been during the 5 or 6 periods of most rapid extinctions during the
last billion years.

How complex is modern human society? Seen in this way, modern human society,
the thing that most historians study, begins to look much more interesting. It begins
to look like one of the most complex things in our universe. There's an interesting
line of argument, linked to the physicist, Enrico Fermi, that suggests that we may be
uniquely complex, even perhaps on cosmological scales. His argument was that if
creating societies such as ours was easy, then there ought to be lots of these
societies around, and we ought to have picked up traces of them, because some
must have existed for millions of years and must have had technologies much more
advanced than ours which would allow them to send signals and objects into space.
At our (presumably relatively puny) level of technological power, we are already
sending signals and objects into space. (The first human made object to leave the
solar system, Voyager 1, crossed the border, according to some estimates, in
December 2004.) So there ought to be a lot of electronic and physical junk out there.
But in thirty years of looking we haven't yet detected any. To Fermi, and to many
others, the absence of any clear evidence for the existence of other species capable
of generating civilizations like ours suggested that we may be unique within the
galaxy as a whole, and perhaps even on the scale of the universe.