Even searching for a healthy, kind, intelligent, attractive and honest mate for reproduction purpose is couched in economic terms and Shakespeare rightly and realistically reminds the need for marriage as an investment that earns compound interest in the form of children. A good reminder to the affluent North or West or select East undergoing an adverse demographic profile not having an adequate young working force.
To drive home this point, Prof Turner makes recourse to science of thermodynamics, catalytic chemistry, the chaotic mixing process, and the wonder child, the silicon chip. The Industrial Revolution was wrought by a framework fashioned in thermodynamic terms more akin to foetal bird in the egg drawing sustenance and energy from steam generated by fossil fuels, high grade ores, possibly ably assisted by peoples who had accumulated cultural discipline — moral/aesthetic tradition.
To explain Chaos theory, the cleanest example that comes to a mind of a non-expert is that beating of a butterfly does not influence weather conditions immediately but it does affect weather thousands of miles away, far into the distant future. Monitoring the movement of each butterfly and predicting weather conditions will, therefore, be a surprise; knowledge of industrial chemistry and Chaos theory amply prove that only a small change of temperature, light, chemistry or pressure can produce large results.
The raw materials of new technology are plentiful and easy to extract: Carbon, sand to make silicon chips, air and water. Biotechnology may one day develop perennial cereal crops that will not need tractors to plough them or, even perhaps, petrochemical fertilisers and pesticides. It took a huge expense of coal and oil and iron ore to develop cybernetic control systems that now require only a few ounces of silicon and a tiny flow of current to maintain and which are, in turn, radically diminishing our need for fossil fuels and ores.
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