FROM SECOND WAVE TO THE THIRD WAVE

                                           THE SECOND WAVE

Alvin Toffler

Three hundred years ago, give or take a half-century, an explosion was heard that sent concussive shock waves racing across the earth, demolishing ancient societies and creating a wholly new civilization. This explosion was, of course, the industrial revolution. And the giant tidal force is set loose on the world--the Second Wave--collided with all the institutions of the past and changed the way of life of millions.

During the long millennia when First Wave civilization reigned supreme, the planet’s population could have been divided into two categories--the “primitive’ and the civilized.”The so-called primitive peoples, living in small bands and tribes and subsisting by gathering, hunting, or fishing, were those who had been passed over the agricultural revolution.

The “civilized” world, by contrast, was precisely that part of the planet on which most people worked the soil. For wherever agriculture arose, civilization took root. From China and India to Benin and Mexico, in Greece and Rome, civilizations rose and fell, fought and fused in endless, colorful admixture.

However, beneath their differences lay fundamental similarities. In all of them, land was the basis of economy, life, culture, family structure, and politics. In all of them life was organized around the village. In all of the, a simple division of labor reviled and few clearly defined castes and classes arose: nobility, priesthood, warriors, helots, slaves or serfs. In all of them, power was rigidly authoritarian. In all of them, the economy was decentralized, so that each community produced most of its own necessities.

There were exceptions--nothing is simple in history. There were commercial cultures whose sailors crossed the seas, and highly centralized kingdoms organized around giant irrigation systems. But despite such differences, we are justified in seeing all these seemingly distinctive civilization as special cases of a single phenomenon: agricultural civilization the civilization spread by the First Wave.

During its dominance there were occasional hints of things to come. There were embryonic mass-production factories in ancient Greece and Rome. Oil was drilled one of the Greek islands in 400 B.C. and in Burma A.D. 100.Vast bureaucracies florists in Baby like and Egypt. Great urban metropolis grew up in Asia and South America. There was money and exchange. Trade routes crisscrossed the deserts, oceans and mountains from Cathay to Calais Corporations and incipient nation’s existed. There was even in ancient Alexandria, a startling forerunner of the steam engine.

Yet nowhere was there anything that might remotely have been termed an industrial civilization. These glimpses of the future, so to speak, were mere oddities in history, scattered through different places and periods. They never were brought together into a coherent system, nor could they have been. Until 1650-1750, therefore, we can speak of a first Wave world. Despite patches of primitivism and hints of the industrial future, agricultural civilization dominated the planet and seemed destined to do so forever.

This was the world in which the industrial revolution erupted, launching the Second Wave and creating a strange, powerful, feverishly energetic counter civilization. Industrialism was more than smokestacks and assembly lines. It was a rich, many-sided social system that touches every aspect of human life and attacked every feature of the first Wave past. It produced the great Willow Run factory outside Detroit, but it also put the tractor on the farm, the typewriter in the office, the refrigerator in the kitchen. It produced the daily newspaper and the cinema, the subway and the DC-3. It gave us cubism and twelve-tone music. It gave us Bauhaus buildings and Barcelona chairs, sit-down strikes, vitamin pills, and lengthened life spans. It universalized the wristwatch and the ballot box. More important, it linked all these things together--assembled them, like a machine--to form the most powerful, cohesive and expansive social system the world had ever know: Second Wave civilization.

THIRD WAVE TECHNOLOGIES*

 Alvin Toffler

.....In the earsplitting clamor over the energy crisis [of 1973]..., so many plans, proposals, arguments, and counter-arguments have been hurled at us that it is difficult to make sensible choices. Governments are just as confused as the proverbial man in the street.

One way to cut through the murk is to look beyond the individual technologies and policies to the principles underlying them. Once we do, we find that certain proposals are designed to maintain or extend the Second Wave energy base as we have known it, while others rest on new principles. The result is a radical clarification of the entire energy issue.

The Second Wave energy base, we saw earlier, was premised on non-renewability; it drew from highly concentrated, exhaustible deposits; it relied on expensive, heavily centralized technologies; and it was no diversified, resting on a relatively few sources and methods. These were the main features of the energy base in all Second Wave nations throughout the industrial era.

Bearing these in mind, if we now look at the various plans and proposals generated by the oil crisis we can quickly tell which ones are mere extensions of the old and which are forerunners of something fundamentally new. And the basic question becomes not whether oil should sell at forty dollars per barrel or whether a nuclear should rise at Sea-brook or Grohnde. The larger question is whether any energy base designed for industrial society and premised on these Second Wave principles can survive. Once asked in this form, the answer is inescapable.

Through the past half-century, fully two thirds of the entire world's energy supply has come from oil and gas. Most observers today, from the most fanatic conservationists to the deposed Shah of Iran, from solar freaks and Saudi Sheikhs tote button-down, briefcase-carrying experts of many governments, agree that this dependency on fossil fuel cannot continue indefinitely, no matter how many new oilfields are discovered...

.....Whether the end comes in some climatic gurgle or, more likely, in succession of dizzyingly destabilizing shortages, temporary gluts, and deeper shortages, the oil epoch is ending. Iranians know this. Kuwaitis and Nigerians and Venezuelans know it. Saudi Arabians know it--which is why they are racing to build an economy based on something other than oil revenues. Petroleum companies know it-which is why they are scrambling to diversify out of oil...

.....However, the debate, over physical depletion is almost beside the point. For in today's world it is price, not physical supply, that has the most immediate and significant impact. And here, if anything, the facts point even more strongly to the same conclusion.

In a matter of decades energy may once more become abundant and cheap as a result of startling technological breakthroughs or economic swings. But whatever happens, the relative price of oil is likely continue its climb as we are forced to plumb deeper and deeper depths, to explore more remote regions, and to compete among buyers. OPEC aside, an historic turn has taken place over the past five years: despite skyrocketing prices, the actual amount of confirmed, commercially recoverable reserves of crude oil has shrunk, not grown -- reversing a trend that had lasted for decades. Further evidence, if needed, that the petrologic era is screeching to a halt.

Meanwhile, coal, which has supplied most of the remaining third of the world energy total, is in ample supply.  Any massive expansion of coal usage, however, entails the spread of dirty air, a possible hazard to the world's climate (through an increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere); in ravaging of the earth as well. Even if all these were accepted as necessary risks

over the decades to come, coal cannot fit into the tank of the automobile nor carry out many other tasks now performed by oil or gas. Plants to gasify or liquefy coal require staggering amounts of capital and water (much of it needed for agriculture and are so ultimately inefficient and costly that they too must be seen as no more than expensive, diversionary, and highly temporary expedients.

Nuclear technology presents even more formidable problems at its present stage of development. Conventional reactors rely on uranium, yet another exhaustible fuel, and carry safety risks that are extremely costly to overcome--if, indeed, they ever can do. No one has convincingly solved the problems of nuclear waste disposal, and nuclear costs are so high that until now government subsidies have been essential to make atomic power remotely competitive with other sources.

Fast breeder reactors are in a class by themselves. But while often presented to the uninformed public as perpetual motion machines because the plutonium they spew out can be used as a fuel, they, too, remain ultimately dependent upon the world’s small and non-renewable supply of uranium. They are not only highly centralized, incredibly costly, volatile, and dangerous; they also escalate the risks of nuclear war and terrorist capture of nuclear materials.

None of this means that we are going to be thrown back into the middle ages, or that further economic advance is impossible. But it surely means that we have reached the end of one line of development and must now start another. It means that the Second Wave energy base is unsustainable.

The rise of the Second Wave energy base was associated with society’s advance to a whole new stage of technological development. And while fossil fuels certainly accelerated technological growth, the exact reverse was also true. The invention of energy-thirsty, brute technology during the industrial era spurred the ever-more-rapid exploitation of those very fossil fuels. The development of the auto industry, for example, caused so radical an expansion of the oil business that at one time it was essentially a dependency of Detroit...

For the great overlooked fact is that the energy problem is not just one of quantity: it is one of structure as well. We not only need a certain amount of energy, but energy delivered in many more varied forms, in different (and changing) locations, at different times of the day, night, and year, and for undreamed- of purposes.

This, not simply OPEC's pricing decisions, explains why the world must search for alternatives to the old energy system. That search has been accelerated, and was now applying vast new resources of money and imagination to the problem. As a result we are taking a close look at many startling possibilities. While the shift from one energy base to the next will no doubt be darkened by economic and other upheavals, there is another, more positive aspect to it. For never in history have so many people plunged with such fervor into a search for energy --and never have we had so many novel and exciting potentials before us.

It is clearly impossible to know at this stage which combination of technologies will prove most useful or what tasks, but the array of tools and fuels available to us will surely be staggering, with more and more exotic possibilities becoming commercially plausible as oil prices climb.

In Stuttgart, Germany, hydrogen-powered bus built by Daimler Benz has cruise the city streets, while engineers at Lockheed California are working on a hydrogen-powered aircraft. So many new avenues are being explored, they are impossible to catalog in short space.

When we combine new energy generating technologies with new ways to store and transmit energy, the possibilities become even more far-reaching. General Motors has announced a new, more efficient automobile battery for use in electric cars. NASA researchers have come up with "Redox"--a storage system they believe can be produced for one third the cost of conventional lead acid batteries. With a longer time horizon we are exploring superconductivity and even--beyond the fringes of" respectable" science--teals waves as ways of beaming energy with minimal loss.

While most of these technologies are still in their early stages of development and many will no doubt prove zanily impractical, others are clearly on the edge of commercial application or will be within a decade or two. Most important is the neglected fact that big breakthroughs often come not from a single isolated technology but from imaginative juxtapositions or combinations of several. Thus we may see solar photovoltaic used to produce electricity which will, in turn, be used to release hydrogen from water so it can be used in cars. Today we are still at the pre-take off stage. Once we begin to combine these many new technologies, the number of more potent options will rise exponentially, and we will dramatically accelerate the construction of a Third Wave energy base.

This new base wills characteristics sharply different from those of the Second Wave period. For much of its supply will come from renewable, rather than exhaustible sources. Instead of being dependent upon highly concentrated fuels, it will draw on a variety of widely dispersed sources. Instead of depending so heavily on tightly centralized technologies, it will combine both centralized and decentralized energy production. And instead of being dangerously over-reliant on a handful of methods or sources, it will be radically diversified in form. This very diversity will make for less waste by allowing us to match the types and quality of energy produced to the increasingly varied needs.

In short, we can now see for the first time the outlines of an energy base that runs on principles almost diametrically opposed to those of the recent, three-hundred-year past. It is also clear that this Third Wave energy base will not come into being without a bitter fight.

In this war of ideas and money that is already raging in all the high-technology nations, it is possible to discern not two but three antagonists. To begin with, there are those with vested interests in the old, Second Wave energy base. They call for conventional energy sources and technologies--coal, oil, gas, nuclear power, and their various permutations. They fight, in effect, for an extension of the Second Wave statuesque. And because they are entrenched in the oil companies, utilities, nuclear commissions, mining corporations, and their associated trade unions, the Second Wave forces seem unassailably in charge.

By contrast, those who favor the advance to a Third Wave energy base--a combination of consumers, environmentalists, scientists, and entrepreneurs in the leading-edge industries, along with their various allies-seem scattered, underfinanced, and often politically inept. Second Wave propagandists regularly, picture them as naive, unconcerned with dollar realities, and bedazzled by blue-sky technology.

Worse yet, the Third Wave advocates are publicly confused with vocal fringe of what might best be termed First Wave forces--people who call not for an advance to a new, more intelligent, sustainable, and scientifically based energy system, but for a reversion to the pre-industrial past. In extreme form, their policies would eliminate most technology, restrict mobility, and cause cities to shrivel and die, and impose an ascetic culture in the name of conservation.

By lumping these two groups together the Second Wave lobbyists, public relations experts, and politicians deepen the public confusion and keep the Third Wave forces on the defensive.

Nevertheless, supporters of neither First nor Second Wave policies can win in the end. The former are devoted to a fantasy, and the latter are attempting to maintain an energy base whose problems are intractable--in fact, insuperable.

The relentlessly rising cost of Second Wave fuels works strongly against the Second Wave interests. The skyrocketing capital cost of Second Wave energy technologies works against them. The fact that Second Wave methods of ten require heavy inputs of energy to take out relatively small increments of new "net “energy works against them. The escalating problems of pollution work against them. The nuclear risk works against them. The willingness of thousands in many countries to battle the police in order to stop nuclear reactors or strip mines or giant generating plants work against them.