World System Energetics
Discussion
Leonid E. Grinin, Tessaleno C. Devezas,and Andrey V. Korotayev:
"Stephen I. Ternyik (‘World System Energetics’) notes that human societies are evolving as energy transduction systems and the biophysical flow of energy in a socio-economic system ‘quantizes’ the flow of time and drives temporal acceleration. The decisive role of money in a monetary production economy is highlighted as temporal access to energy. The greater the natural energy input for productive output, the higher the economic wave frequency and the shorter the wave length. A singularization of human history, which is a replacement of long wave patterns, depends in the nearest future on the technical achievement of a relatively constant energy input. According to the basic formulae of the Snooks – Panov curve, a significant quantum change of the temporal flow will take place in the next decade; it is an open mathematical guess and an ongoing human intelligence test, if this temporal turning point is of discrete or continuous nature,"