This is a love letter to builders, written for the Dawn section of Seattle Solstice 2025. It draws heavily from three works that have shaped my thinking on progress:
This went through extensive revision with feedback from the Seattle community. Thanks especially to Octavia and Jade for critiquing the early drafts, as well as Claude 4.5 Opus for researching, brainstorming, and advising me throughout.
The universe did not greet us with warmth.
The earth did not offer us comfort.
Nature gave us darkness, and we were afraid. It gave us cold, and we shivered and died. It gave us hunger, and we starved. It gave us disease, invisible and merciless, cutting down our children before they could speak. It gave us distance, vast and impassable, separating us from one another. It gave us storms and wildfires and filled the night with natural predators.
This is what we were given: challenges. Only challenges.
Everything else, everything that makes life worth living, we built.
The warmth you feel right now is technology. Not just the heater—though that too—but the very concept of heat and the idea that humans could contain, direct, and control it. Long before agriculture, long before cities, we were already builders. The first hunter-gatherer who kept a fire burning through the night was a scientist. The first person who piled stones to keep the wind out was an engineer. The first person who stitched animal skins into clothing was an industrialist, taking raw materials and transforming them into something that did not exist in Nature: protection.
There are no naturally heated houses waiting for humans. We built them all.
The light you see by is technology. Not just the bulb itself—though that too is a triumph—but the idea that darkness is optional. That night is not a command but a problem to be solved. For most of human history, darkness was sovereign. When the sun set, human activity ceased. We were prisoners of this cycle, our lives dictated by an astronomical accident.
Fire was our first refusal, our first declaration that we would decide when we could see. Then came candles, gas lamps, the electric LED—each one a triumph of extraction and refinement and engineering. We took the ancient sunlight locked in the earth and resurrected it. We took falling water and turned it into brilliance. We took the very photons themselves and made them dance at our whim.
Nature's night offers nothing but darkness. We made every hour of light that exists after sunset.
The food you ate today is technology. Not just the fridge that preserved it or the truck that delivered it—though those too are marvels that would make our ancestors weep with joy. But the food itself. Every grain of wheat is a technology shaped by ten thousand years of selection and breeding. Every bite of fruit you have ever taken is the product of grafting, fertilization, and irrigation. There is no such thing as "natural" food. There is only wild food, scarce and often poisonous, and there is domesticated food, abundant and safe, which exists only because someone bent their will towards the project of making it so.
And it is not enough to say that we domesticated plants. We domesticated the soil itself. We transformed deserts into gardens and swamps into fields. We built terraces up mountainsides and brought water across continents. We harvested fertilizer from the air and built it into the very chemistry of life. We took a planet that might have fed a few million humans and built it into one that feeds eight billion.
Food is not natural. It is the greatest technology ever invented.
But warmth and light and food are only the beginning. Everything else we needed was bound up in rock and rust and ancient death. Iron was devoured by bacteria billions of years before we existed, then rusted by the oxygen they released. Silicon and aluminum were bound into oxides from the moment Earth cooled. The chemistry that made us possible also made the raw materials of civilization inaccessible.
Even so, we got lucky in a few ways. Flint on the ground, already hard and sharp. Gold too inert to corrode. Native copper not yet reacted into beautiful green malachite. But luck alone can never build a civilization. Even copper required energy to refine from ore before we had enough to make tools.
So we paid that energy cost. A potter, perhaps, heated rocks for glaze and noticed metal pooling at the bottom of the kiln. The Bronze Age began. Higher temperatures. Better furnaces. Purer metals. Someone looked at bronze and thought: not good enough. Someone else made fire hot enough to smelt iron. Charcoal gave way to coke. Furnaces grew hotter, larger. Then came electric arcs. Each generation saw what had been accomplished and refused to stop there.
Every metal in every machine around you is the product of that chain—thousands of years of not good enough, thousands of years of what if we tried this instead. Every plastic exists because someone looked at carbon sludge and saw more than industrial waste. Every silicon chip exists because the work of glassblowers became the work of chemists became the work of engineers became the work of fabricators, each generation solving problems the previous could not have imagined.
We are so deep inside this inheritance that we cannot see its edges. It is invisible, hidden in the water we drink, the diseases we no longer die of, the sewage that disappears beneath our feet.
The clothes we wear were woven by machines from fibers grown on farms that couldn't exist without synthetic fertilizer. The glass in these windows—flat, clear, holding back the cold while letting in the light—is an engineering miracle that once would have been worth more than gold. The chair beneath you required a steel mill, a plastics plant, a global shipping network, and ten thousand years of accumulated knowledge. It cost almost nothing. You didn't even think about it when you sat down.
All of it—every object, every comfort, every miracle you stopped noticing—runs on energy. Energy is life itself. Without energy, we have darkness, cold, starvation, and death. With energy, we have light, warmth, plenty, and possibility.
We should not feel ashamed of using energy. We should glory in it. Every watt we generate is a small victory over an indifferent universe. Every kilowatt-hour is a gift to human flourishing.
We used to burn wood and pray for rain. Now we command rivers, harvest sunlight, and split the very atoms themselves. We went from megawatts to gigawatts to terawatts and we should not stop until we reach petawatts and beyond. We should multiply our energy abundance by a thousand, and then multiply it by a thousand again.
Because energy is the currency of creation. With sufficient energy, we can solve anything.
We can desalinate oceans and make drought obsolete. We can extract every metal from seawater and common clay. We can synthesize any molecule we desire. We can terraform the deserts and reverse the damage of climate change. We can even launch ourselves to the stars.
All of this and more can be built by us. Not by Nature, nor God, nor cosmic destiny—humans, with our hands and minds and endless appetite for better.
The question has never been whether we have enough resources. The question has always been whether we have enough energy to unlock them. And the answer is not to use less—it is to build more.
There are always those who see past what is to what could be. The scientist who looks at an unknown and rejects ignorance. The engineer who looks at an impossibility and begins to calculate. The inventor who looks at a constraint and sees a design problem. The founder who looks at an idea and builds an institution to make it real.
These are the heroes now. Not the warrior who destroys, but the builder who creates. Not the conqueror who takes, but the founder who generates. Not the king who commands, but the scientist who discovers.
They face problems no one has solved, questions no one can answer, territory no one has mapped. They work for years not knowing if an answer even exists. They endure skepticism and mockery and failure, again and again. Sometimes the problem wins for a time, or the solution creates a new problem. That too is part of progress. And yet—
When Norman Borlaug bred wheat that could feed a billion people, he saved more lives than any general ever could.
When Enrico Fermi lit the first nuclear fire beneath a Chicago stadium, he unlocked the densest energy source we have ever known.
When Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman pioneered mRNA vaccines, they gave us the power to reprogram our own biology.
And when the founders of countless companies built the institutions to synthesize antibiotics, generate electricity, pump clean water, transmit information at the speed of light—they built the foundation of modern life itself.
This is the work that matters. This is the work that moves humanity forward.
It is a grand project, the grandest we have. It is not complete. It will never be complete. Every solution creates new problems, and every triumph reveals new challenges. That is not failure, but the jagged edge of progress. There is no end to what we can build, no limit to what we can improve, no final form of human flourishing.
There are still diseases we have not cured. There are still deaths we have not prevented. There is still poverty we have not abolished. There are still people freezing, starving, dying because we do not yet have the technology to save them, or because we have not yet deployed it at sufficient scale.
There is still energy we have not harnessed. We use a hundredth of a percent of the sunlight that falls on Earth. We have barely begun to tap the power of the atom. We stand on the edge of fusion—the power of stars, available on demand—and we have not yet taken it. When we do, we can lift all of humanity to abundance.
The work continues because there are still problems unsolved, questions unanswered, technologies not yet invented, energy not yet generated, resources not yet unlocked.
The work continues because we are not done building.
The universe will not do this for us. Nature is not our friend or our partner. It is the default state we are trying to escape: the cold, the dark, the scarcity, the death. We were born on a hostile planet in an indifferent universe. There is only matter and energy and time—and us, deciding what to make of them.
This, then, is the grand project, and it calls for heroes.
If you do this work—if you are building something, creating something, figuring something out—then you are part of the oldest and greatest human tradition. You are carrying the light ever onwards against the darkness.
The dawn is breaking. The light is returning. So go forth. Look at a problem and solve it. Look at the raw resources of the universe and extract them. Look at scarcity and create abundance. Look at what is, judge it unacceptable, and build something better in its place.
Build the energy systems that will power abundance. Build the medical technologies that will end aging. Build the aligned artificial intelligence that will expand our minds. Build the cities and the spacecraft and the new institutions we need. Build something beautiful, something useful, something that didn't exist until you decided to make it real.