Complex communication is one of humanity’s fundamental capabilities. With it, we organized and vanquished other species. With it, we improved our society. By talking we convey emotional feelings as adroitly as the fundamentals of nuclear physics. All this is achieved while expanding very little energy. Making noise for communication is something people readily and effectively accomplish.

At one time, we were limited in range by the volume of our voice, the strength of our vocal chords. Then along came telecommunications. Now we effortlessly talk with other people almost anywhere on Earth. And well above our planet too. Mechanical devices aid us in this. Often it’s the mobile telephone together with all its infrastructure like cell towers and fibre optic cables. With these and very little energy, our voices get encoded into digital data which gets transported to the listener and decoded back into words. Now there is no real limit to the range of our voices.

Mechanical devices like the mobile telephone, or cellphone, appeared in about 1973. And they flourished. Current estimates are that active mobile telephones now outnumber people. And these portable phones need energy. This comes from their internal battery. Assuming each phone uses a lithium ion battery which can store 0.8MJ per kg and each battery is 2 grams then over one year all the cell phones use +2.2E15 Joules to operate. That’s a large number. Additional energy is needed to support and operate the infrastructure. Hence, like all assistive mechanical devices, these aid but at an energy cost. A cost that appeared less than a lifetime ago.

With unlimited energy cellphones are an obvious boon. Will we still want or need to increase the range of our voices when energy supplies falter? In other words is this mechanical aid a base need of humanity? Would our society continue when we could only communicate with the people that we could see around us? Time will tell.