Sometimes I write about obscure things that are hilarious only to myself, and this is absolutely one of those times.

This story begins with Mark Perry, who writes on economics for the American Enterprise Institute. Longtime readers know that I frequently disagree with Perry's energy writings due to his continued spreading of misinformation about Peak Oil over on his Carpe Diem blog. And I've written more than a few times about Perry's posts, his misrepresentations, and how he carefully presents data to highlight his preferred narrative.

Last month, Perry (apparently for the first time) discovered the term "energy slaves" by reading a blog post by Brian Wang. Later, Perry wrote about his discovery in a post titled "Each American has the energy-equivalent of nearly 600 full-time “human energy servants."

Think about it this way, what if we took away all our modern fuels and then asked ourselves how much human power would we need in order to produce the daily tasks we've all grown accustomed too? By one calculation, to replace the energy of just one gallon of gasoline in your car - a gallon that cost you less than the price of a cup of coffee - would take hundreds of energy slaves, and that's not too big a stretch when you think about what it would take if humans had to literally push and pull your car to take you on your daily commute.

In one stunning example, a 2009 BBC show placed an unsuspecting family in a new home for a normal day, while all the power for the home was being furiously provided by a "Human Power Station" in a building next door consisting of 100 bicycles. It took 24 cyclists to heat the oven and 11 to provide the energy just to make two slices of toast. In recalling the program Andrew Nikiforuk writes, "At the end of the day the slave masters literally dropped their jaws when a BBC television crew introduced them to the exhausted slaves that boiled their tea... At the end of the experiment many of the cyclists collapsed. Several couldn't walk for days. The peddlers actually consumed more energy in food than they generated by pedaling."

Perry sums up the findings this way: "It’s something of a miracle that the affordable energy enjoyed by even an average American today (total spending on energy is only about 4.4% of total consumer expenditures so far this year) is the energy equivalent of having nearly 600 full-time “human energy servants” to make our lives more comfortable, convenient and enjoyable."

The short version is that in the millions of years the Earth used to create fossil fuels, it managed to create substances of unparalleled energy density. And this is THE critical factor for the development of modern society over the past 150 years.

When you think about energy in terms of energy slaves, you realize that all of us live lives that ancient man would compare to kings or gods - invisible armies powering even the most mundane parts of our days.

The concept of energy slaves isn't anything new. Peak Oil educators have been talking about it for some time, especially in the context of energy return on invested (EROI). Colin Campbell once wrote that a drop of oil is equivalent to one day's hard human labor and that "today’s oil production is equivalent in energy terms to the work of 22 billion slaves."