Tom Murphy began his passionate pursuit of astrophysics as a high school student in Tennessee when Halley's Comet appeared in 1985, building a 10-inch telescope to better explore the cosmos. He studied physics at Georgia Tech while working at the Naval Research Laboratory on optical communications, then upgraded to five- and ten-meter telescopes as a PhD student at Caltech. He co-initiated a project to test General Relativity via lunar laser ranging as a postdoc at the University of Washington, before assuming leadership of the project as a professor at UC San Diego. While the apparatus he built quickly became the best of its sort in the world, achieving millimeter range accuracy, an undercurrent operated the whole time concerning physical challenges facing the human endeavor in the context of growth, energy, and adaptation. Quantitative versatility and technological experimentation produced perspectives that he began to share in 2011 on the Do the Math blog. The textbook Energy and Human Ambitions on a Finite Planet reflects this deep interest in the long-term trajectory of civilization, and a keen desire to guarantee preservation of the precious knowledge and understanding we have worked hard to acquire during the past few centuries.