Dec 21, 2025

While reading “Material World” by Ed Conway, I many times thought about Oxygen Not Included, which is a cartoonistic survival game about a settlement deep underground. Being deep means they don’t get free solar and wind power, no access to virtually unlimited fresh water, and, as the title suggests, no oxygen. Such hermetic setup forces player into constant mining of resources (they made up oxylite, a stone that produces oxygen). As population grows, you need more and more resources, that progressively become hard to get. Fun game, totally recommend. Another thought, that I keep coming back to again and again after finishing the book, is that even farming depends on fossil fuels. Sometimes in mass media you can get an idea, that global warming and rising CO2 levels are due to the greed of filthy crude oil oligarhs. But the we need fossil fuels to produce fertilisers, without which it would be impossible to grow enough food to feed the evergrowing population of Earth. Building a single windmill power generator requires vast amounts of concrete and steel, producing which takes about a year worth of eletricity that windmill generates. It’s a great book, and I totally recommend it as well.