This blog post was thought-provoking: https://www.orcasciences.com/articles/the-future-is-made-of-energy It centers around "dematerialization": Materials with better performance tend to require more energy to make but allow us to use less raw material to make superior products, creating a trend where products become less "matter-intensive" and more energy-intensive. "In the 1960s Coke came in glass bottles. Fragile melted sand. Today Coke comes in aluminum cans – a material that takes tremendously more energy to produce, but ends up being cleaner and cheaper and 40x lighter than glass holding the same amount of liquid. The same transformation has happened in almost every corner of our material lives." Looking at the most important modern materials we use (e.g. steel) from this perspective, and trying to extrapolate from there takes you interesting places.