After dealing with the very recent history of Moore's law in the previous issue of IEEE Industrial Electronics Magazine, I will jump far back into the past for this issue, taking the opportunity given by a present-world economic event. The recent collapse in oil prices to around US$30/barrel, after it soared in 2008 to peak at US$140/barrel, was welcomed by drivers, airlines, and transportation companies, but it is not beneficial from all points of view. The collapse causes major stresses in the financial world and weakens the awareness of the finiteness of fossil reserves and of the need for switching to renewable nonpolluting resources. Prospects such as these are not new. Nevertheless, despite the warnings launched decades ago by the models developed by several groups, starting with the System Dynamics Group of Jay Forrester at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1971) and by the Club of Rome with the Meadows' Report (1972) [1], the industrialized world has long delayed realizing the weakness of its dependence on nonrenewable resources and, more generally, on the limited availability of raw materials. The extraordinary industrial development in the United States during the two postwar periods depended, to a major extent, on the wide availability of oil at a very low cost, after geological exploration in the 1930s revealed immense oil fields in Asia (e.g., the Persian Gulf, Iran, etc.). The European choice of coal, formalized early after World War II with the institution of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), pointed to a less valuable, although important, energy source. More recently, the new strong Eastern economies, notably those of China and India, have resulted a dramatic rise in oil demand that called for a keener evaluation of the limits of existing reserves. During the last few years, several governments have undertaken steady policies in support of technological research for the replacement of fossil fuels and the reduction of pollution. These plans have a central role in the European Union (EU) Horizon 2020 program, with the objective of covering 20% of energy demand by means of renewable sources and reducing pollution by 20% from the 1990 level by 2020. The U.S. Department of Energy under the Obama administration conceived a US$15 billion per year plan to develop renewable sources for reducing emissions by 80% by 2050. We are confident that these measures will be timely and appropriate because we rely positively on the human ability to find new solutions capable of promoting progress. Nevertheless, such evolution should not necessarily be taken for granted. In fact, the depletion of energy resources and raw materials is not a specific problem of postindustrial economies. Similar circumstances occurred several times in the past and successful solutions were not always found.