The Cascade

We live in the cascade. It has given us everything, civilisation, wealth, knowledge, health and long lives. The cascade is all around us and yet we hardly notice it as it makes our lives better.

So what is the cascade? It is the flow of intelligence in the world. It isn’t something we own, all species have intelligence to a greater or lesser extent, but in us it is particularly strong, the reason we survive and thrive.

We learnt to embed intelligence in base matter and the result was civilisation, technology, the ability to reach beyond our world. We learnt how to pass intelligence to the generations to come and the result was accelerating growth. The cascade taught us how to make matter that stores thought, plays music, captures sunshine and shines it into living rooms on the far side of the world. And now we are learning how to make matter that thinks, matter that can join us in the cascade.

We harness energy to embed intelligence in matter to make civilisations, to build wealth greater than anything that kings and emperors in the past could have dreamed of. Without energy we can build nothing. Without energy the human cascade would be an unrealised dream. A dream of intelligence harnessing energy, to bringing order where there was chaos.

And where there is energy there is entropy, the continual fall back towards chaos, the universe claiming back the oasis the cascade creates. So we fight an unending battle against entropy, every generation building more order from chaos, creating more from less with ever greater efficiency, ever greater scale.

This is what true progress is. The cascade, intelligence flowing through energy to act in the world and beyond.

This is wealth.