The Science of Discworld Revised Edition

because life is clearly much more interesting than physics.
    The correct message is very different: be careful what tacit assumptions you make when you do that kind of calculation. Take that kangaroo, for instance. You can work out how much energy a kangaroo uses when it makes a jump, count how many jumps it makes in a day, and deduce a lower limit on its daily energy requirements. During a jump, the kangaroo leaves the ground, rises, and drops back down again, so the calculation is just like that for a space rocket. Do the sums, and you find that the kangaroo’s daily energy requirement is about ten times as big as anything it can get from its food. Conclusion: kangaroos can’t jump. Since they can’t jump, they can’t find food, so they’re all dead.
    Strangely, Australia is positively teeming with kangaroos, who fortunately cannot do physics.
    What’s the mistake? The calculation models a kangaroo as if it were a sack of potatoes. Instead of a thousand kangaroo leaps per day (say), it works out the energy required to lift a sack of potatoes off the ground and drop it back down, 1000 times. But if you look at a slow-motion film of a kangaroo bounding across the Australian outback, it doesn’t look like a sack of potatoes. A kangaroo
bounces
, lolloping along like a huge rubber spring. As its legs go up, its head and tail go down, storing energy in its muscles. Then, as the feet hit the ground, that energy is released to trigger the next leap. Because most of the energy is borrowed and paid back, the energy cost per leap is tiny.
    Here’s an association test for you. ‘Sack of potatoes’ is to ‘kangaroo’ as ‘rocket’ is to –
what
? One possible answer is a space elevator . In the October 1945 issue of
Wireless World
the science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke invented the concept of a geostationary orbit, now the basis of virtually all communications satellites. At a particular height – about 22,000 miles (35,000 km) above the ground – a satellite will go round the Earth exactly in synchrony with the Earth’s rotation. So from the ground it will look as though the satellite isn’t moving. This is useful for communications: you can point your satellite dish in a fixed direction and always get coherent, intelligent signals or, failing that, MTV.
    Nearly thirty years later Clarke popularized a concept with far greater potential for technological change. Put up a satellite in geostationary orbit and drop a long cable down to the ground. It has to be an amazingly strong cable: we don’t yet have the technology but ‘carbon nanotubes’ now being created in the laboratory come close. If you get the engineering right, you can build an elevator 22,000 miles high. The cost would be enormous, but you could then haul stuff into space just by pulling on the cable from above.
    Ah, but you can’t beat physics. The energy required would be exactly the same as if you used a rocket.
    Of course. Just as the energy required to lift a kangaroo is exactly the same as that required to lift a sack of potatoes.
    The trick is to find a way to borrow energy and pay it back. The point is that once the space elevator is in place, after a while there’s just as much stuff coming down it as there is going up. Indeed, if you’re mining the Moon or the asteroids for metals, there will soon be
more
stuff coming down than goes up. The materials going down provide the lifting energy for those going up. Unlike a rocket, which gets used up every time you fire it, a space elevator is self-sustaining.
    Life is like a space elevator. What life self-sustains is not energy, but organization. Once you have a system that is so highly organized that it can reliably make copies of itself, that degree of organization is no longer ‘expensive’. The initial investment may have been huge, as for a space elevator, but once the investment has been made, everything else is free.
    If you want to understand biology, it is the physics of space elevators that you need, not the physics of rockets.
    How can Discworld’s magic illuminate Roundworld’s science? Just as the gulf between the physical and biological sciences is turning out to be far narrower than we used to think, so the gulf between science and magic is also becoming smaller. The more advanced our technologies become, the less possible it is for the everyday user to have any idea of how they work. As a result, they look more and more like magic. As Clarke realized, this