Vaclav Smil

Vaclav Smil (1943–) is a Czech-Canadian scientist who has written over 40 books on energy, environment, food, and technical civilization. Bill Gates calls him his favorite author. His style is fundamentally anti-hype.

Smil prefers constraints, physical realities, and historical baselines to speculation. He refuses to forecast — forecasting is an ever-failing endeavor. Instead, he quantifies: how much energy, how much material, how much time. The numbers constrain what’s possible before opinions enter.

His writing embodies constraint-first thinking: this is what physics allows; this is what history suggests; here’s the order of magnitude. Vibes get cut; joules remain.

He’s not cynical but sober. Transitions take decades rather than years. Scale matters more than prototypes. What seems imminent is usually distant. The world runs on materials.

Related: [[compression]], [[constraints]], [[explanatory-writing]]