Past the Point of No Return
George Mobus
2/13/11
For the Global Population Speak Out
A Warning to Readers
This work has caused me a great deal of anguish. Over the years I have tried to consider the global challenges that have been rapidly emerging in our time. My considerations are from a systems perspective — I seek to understand how everything is connected and influences every other thing. Invariably I keep coming back to two factors which seem to lay at the heart of the matter. The first is the fact of biophysical growth in a finite world, specifically the human population and our propensity to consume more resources per individual over time. The second is actually even more so at the root of the first. That is the stunting of the one capacity that we humans evolved that could have made us able to transcend our ordinary biology (causes of the first issue) and learn to live in balance with nature. The capacity I refer to is sapience (below). Human evolution produced a nascent capacity for making good, wide-scaling judgments in complex, especially social, domains — that is our sapience. Unfortunately, today, I think the evidence suggests that that capacity never developed further. Indeed, it seems that it is now almost vestigial, like the little toe or the appendix. Today, the average human being is not very good at making sound judgments of high moral quality. In any case, when you take into account all of the various contributing factors, biological, physical, sociological, psychological, etc. it appears that we have gotten ourselves into a terrible predicament. After spending years thinking about, and searching for solutions that are acceptable in light of all of those factors, I'm afraid I come up empty handed.
What I have written below gives absolutely no pleasure whatever. I am not a doomer or a survivalist. I do not hate humanity and want to see the end. I have children and friends whom I would love to see have happy lives. But what I hope I am, if nothing else, is intellectually honest. If my work has brought me to this point I cannot go on writing as if these conclusions didn't exist.
Population
For several years now I have been writing a contribution to the Global Population Speak Out (GPSO). See: “The Hardest Moral Dilemma of All”. A larger number of people have been writing profusely about the subject of overpopulation and the consequences. And nothing has happened. This is not because these many people have not had worthwhile things to say, suggestions about what might be done, but because the messages fall on deaf ears. The majority of people in this world are either not able to hear the message or they are hostile, for ideological reasons, to the implications of the claims for overpopulation.
I have been thinking about this for several years and have been building the arguments for why what I am about to say is actually the only real solution that could result in the survival of enough representatives of Homo sapiens to ensure that the genus is still around one million years from now. No one is going to like this. I suspect that many people in the anti-growth community are not going to like what I have to say, thinking, perhaps, that my message will damage their own credibility. Believe me when I tell you that I don't like it. But my feeling is that it needs to be said. Even while there are a growing number of people in the world who have gotten the messages and are now aware of the problems, there simply aren't enough, nor do they actually understand the full implications of what is happening.
All I ask is that you not sacrifice the messenger!
The Problem — We Are in Overshoot
Is there any doubt that this statement is true? The world stands on the brink of a human population of seven billion people. Way too many of the current population are living in abject poverty and too many are underfed if not outright starving. Water supplies are in jeopardy, both for drinking and for agriculture. Documented extinction rates are going up due to the human footprint destroying habitat for other species. The climate is already showing severe instability and the worst case models suggest that things are going to get much worse. Sea levels are rising and the threat is that those levels are going to be high enough to threaten a huge fraction of the world's population that live in coastal areas. Finite resources, especially fossil fuels, have been depleted to the point that the cost of extraction of the next unit of the resource has reached diminishing returns. See my take on overpopulation and its implications in my book review of William Catton's, Bottleneck, “Humanity's impending impasse”.
In systems ecological terms the human population shows (empirically) all the signs of being in overshoot. The population is simply too large for the long-term carrying capacity of the planet. We have gotten here through two basic factors. The first is the incredible inventiveness of the human mind and the technologies that have allowed humans to colonize almost the whole planet, “conquer nature”, and escape the ordinary biological selection mechanisms, like diseases and genetic defects. The second is the most amazing bequeath of nature in the form of incredibly energy-dense fossil fuels (actually fossil sunshine) that have allowed the human population to substitute machine work for human labor, at least in the developing areas of the world. The industrial revolution was largely about the interactions of these two factors permitting growth of the population and growth of the per capita consumption of resources in those sub-populations that got lucky. Energy and technology go hand in hand in accounting for the major trajectories of history. Human ingenuity certainly played a role, but, if we are honest with ourselves, that role is more as discovery and exploitation (for hedonic reasons) rather than intentional invention. We were just lucky recipients of the laws of nature when the energy bank account was full. Now that the bank is running dry and we may have reached the limits of invention, things have changed completely. We are in the Wiley Coyote moment (when he runs off the cliff and realizes that he has no support). We have no way to keep the overshot population supported as is.
This essay addresses a simple but profound observation. There is no feasible solution to the problem of population overshoot if stated thusly:
“ We need to find a way to reduce the population to a level that is sustainable in the long run and minimally impactful (in the negative sense) on the environment. And we want it to be accomplished in a humane manner. And, oh yes, we want everyone in the population to live the good life (no sacrifices); we want “sustainable economic growth”!
Put this way, many people think of humane population reduction as some relatively non-coercive process where, perhaps, suddenly everybody gets it, including those of the various religious faiths that now preach being fruitful, and practices contraception. Problem solved. This vision maintains that if a substantial proportion of the Earth's population practices family planning then the above result will follow. Then the sub-problem simply becomes one of convincing everyone to practice family planning.
Even aside from the infeasibility of getting everyone to agree that family planning is a good thing to do, I claim that the gradual reduction in the population that could conceivably result would still not be a solution to the problem. As I will argue later, the rate of decline simply would not be great enough. We are facing a complete population crash simply due to the fact that we have entered an energy decline phase that humanity has never faced before in its entire history, at least not on a global scale. This claim pivots on the notion of what constitutes a ‘feasible’ solution to a specified problem.
Feasible Solution Space
A problem is said to have a feasible solution when there exists a volume in a multi-dimensional parameter space where all of the requirements are met and all of the constraints are satisfied and the objective is fulfilled. When constraints are tight or requirements are narrow that volume might be very small. Or, alternatively, if the constraints are loose or the requirements wide the volume might be quite large. Moreover, there may be many pathways by which the requirements might be met while not violating any constraints. Such problems are well defined and are at least soluble in principle.
Figure 1. A feasible solution exists in the problem space when there is some region (volume) in which all requirements can be met while not violating any constraints. Abstractly, the constraints and requirements (appropriately scaled) can be mapped onto a problem space to see if there is any such region where all of these intersect.
Many more kinds of problems, especially complex social problems where inherent conflicts permeate the problem space, cannot be solved, even in principle. As shown in Fig. 2, if even one requirement cannot be found to map in overlap with other requirements, then no feasible region exists and nothing can be done to solve the problem other than to ignore the requirement(s). But then you have just solved a different problem, by definition.
Figure 2. If only one requirement does not map to overlap with the others then no feasible solution exists for the problem as defined.
Even more generally, not all constraints and requirements are actually specified so that one cannot know if a feasible solution might exist or not. Figure 3 depicts a more ordinary sort of social problem (or what is known as a ‘Wicked Problem’.
Figure 3. The worst-case situation for problem definition is when the problem is wicked. The problem is under specified in that not all constraints and requirements are actually known when trying to find a solution volume. Poorly defined problems such as the overpopulation problem easily fall into this category. They are unsolvable in principle and practice.
In real life social problems it is almost always the case that not all the requirements or constraints can even be specified let alone matched up in such a way as to provide a solution. What more typically happens in cases where some kind of “solution” seems to have been found, is that some hidden constraints or misunderstood requirements are simply not specified (as in Fig. 3). Implementation of the solution then either runs into the formerly hidden difficulty, or may be completed but the solution ends up creating more problems. The infamous unintended consequences of supposed solutions is more often the rule than the exception.
Overpopulation is, arguably, the most difficult and under specified social problem of all. Difficult for the obvious reasons that the vast majority of people in this world are compelled by biology to procreate, think it is their god-given right to do so, and mostly don't realize what the global consequences are. It is under specified in the sense that we really don't know all of the factors that shape the population growth rate. For example, not very long ago, population scientists (mostly social scientists with some help of biologists) were proclaiming that the problem would solve itself owing to the demographic transition, the observation that as countries became wealthier (more developed) the fertility rate declined (as in the average number of babies per child-bearing aged woman). In theory, the global population size would top out at say nine billion people and then even start to decline. Everyone could breathe a sigh of relief and go on with BAU. The UN wants to push ahead with the Millennium Development Goals so as to enrich every nation and thereby (through the demographic transition) stabilize the population. In other words, they think making everyone richer will solve the problem. What they have not accounted for, of course, is that making everyone richer means consuming even more resources! And, actually some scientists and governments (whose tax bases are associated with the number of people in the work force) have started worrying about the opposite problem — too few people — as it would affect the economics of the country.
Now comes new evidence that suggests the demographic transition is not a one-way phenomenon. Rather after reaching a certain level of development fertility rates stop declining and even start climbing again. The jury is still out on this but there are other reasons to believe that faith in the demographic transition phenomenon is a poor strategy for solving the problem of overshoot. But the point is that we just do not know all there is to know about population dynamics to take any comfort in an observation like this.
For one thing, even if the transition phenomenon were shown to be effective after all, it still relies on the economic development of the poorer nations where, it turns out, the fertility rate is still high. In a perfect world where there is unlimited energy and the wastes we humans produce would magically disappear that might be fine. But we don't live in that world. We live in a world where the energy needed to produce wealth is peaking and going into its own transition downward (see below). We live in a world in which the garbage and pollutants we produce in living the good life are accumulating at a rate much faster than nature can handle. Global warming due to accumulations of CO2 in the atmosphere and ocean acidification due to its accumulation in the oceans are two instances of unintended consequences of us clever humans solving the problem of how to live the good life and avoid the nastier forms of natural selection. And here is the point: The rate of the bad consequences developing into catastrophes is much greater than the rate of demographic transition. Indeed, without the energy supplies to drive that transition, it won't happen at all in what would have been the developing world.
Nature alone holds the secrets of the population problem in terms of establishing the biophysical constraints and the biological requirements. Natural systems have been pursuing the feasible solution spaces since life began on the planet. I say pursuing because any change (say a mutation) in one part of the system invariably leads to changes in other parts and changes in the original constraints/requirements sets. That is what drives evolution.
In fact, I claim evolution is the only feasible way to find a solution to the overpopulation problem. That is what I will outline below. Again, no one is going to like it. But I suspect the dinosaurs were not liking things around 65 million years ago either.
No Real Solution to the Problem As Defined By We Humans
The human defined problem does not admit to a population crash as a solution. The human defined problem looks to have our cake and eat it too. The human defined problem simply ignores the evidence in favor of things like satisfying the constraints of energy flow by some miraculous technology that will bypass the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The requirement that no one suffer while the population decrease takes place cannot be mapped onto a volume that simultaneously satisfies our many other requirements and does not violate any of the real physical constraints.
If nothing is done to radically alter our current course (business as usual with respect to reproduction and consumption of natural resources) there will be a major population crash. This crash will be felt by every single person on the planet. Admittedly some less developed populations may feel the intensity or immediacy much less than populations in the developed world, but there is no way they will escape the ultimate impacts. People often imagine that more primitive tribes (such as the one recently “discovered” in the Amazon) will escape the wrath of a population crash and go on surviving as they have for millennia. This ignores the simple fact that many of the fruits of civilization actually do find their ways into many of these sub-populations. In many cases food imports are necessary to keep the population even in steady state. Furthermore, climate change may have more extreme effects in some of the areas where less developed populations currently live. Nor should we think that some populations will simply migrate from unlivable areas to more livable ones as a result of climate destabilization as, for example, was the case in the several mass movements out of Africa as primitive Homo sapiens expanded into Europe, Asia, and Polynesia. Even though the major pulses of those movements appear to have been motivated by climate change (ice age glaciations and drying in central Africa), that climate change had greater directionality (less chaotic with a definitive trajectory) and took place over many centuries. The current climate shifts are looking more and more the case of potentially rapid and unpredictable shifts, on the order of decades, that will lead to a much more chaotic weather, greater extremes and locally unusual storms (e.g. the snow and cold in southern states several weeks ago).
Nature, if it were sentient (I personally can't say it isn't!), would define the problem quite differently from what humans have. Nature's problem definition might go like this:
“ This cancerous species (humans) is creating a global environment in which many species will be driven to extinction. But that is also the environment that they will have to occupy. And the selective forces generated by that environment are not conducive to the sustainability of that species. So the solution is either that the species radically evolve to become benign or the significant disruption of the body (the Ecos) will kill the species, and with it the genus, since there is only one species within that genus extant.
Our requirements are that we don't want to sacrifice anything. We want the process to be painless. The constraints are those imposed by nature, but we also want to bypass those (or some of them) by inventing something that ensures that our two requirements, in all their various forms, will be met. No inconveniences for us. “Surely there is some technology that will help us solve the problem as we have defined it. Surely there is some way to make more usable energy from sunlight — there just has to be.”
Currently we go along as if that technology must be right on the horizon. We don't think about the counterfactual situation (we're actually not wired to do so). What if no great magical technology comes along in time? Then what do we do? For example, the official policy of the US government is that we ‘pursue’ investment in technology and entrepreneurs to commercialize it. President Obama still insists that there is something called ‘clean coal’, by which he means coal-fired electrical generation that produces much less CO2 gas than ordinary plants. He never took a physics course, I suppose, since he doesn't seem to get that the energy cost of capturing and sequestering CO2 will reduce the net energy production to less than two thirds of an ordinary plant. And that doesn't even address the issue of storing the CO2 (available volume, safety, etc.)
While the president is spouting this delusion everyone else is feeling like we don't have to worry about anything. We don't have to really do anything because the brilliant boys in the backroom will invent the right stuff.
Meanwhile nothing is done. The political solution to the overpopulation problem is to simply ignore it (or deny it if someone dares to bring it up). Don't worry. Be happy (and go out and consume so we can boost the economy). Unfortunately, Nature has a different solution.
What the Numbers Say
As I have written often in these blogs, energy is the key to everything (see: “Economic dynamics and the real danger”). That is, it takes energy flow to build and maintain all physical artifacts and biomass. It takes mechanical and chemical work to make matter into the forms we want it. So without energy flow the entropy version of the Second Law of Thermodynamics takes over and everything turns to dust.
This is the crux of the problem. Our consumption of fossil fuels has permitted us to construct an incredible physical world that has effectively (but only seemingly and only temporarily) insulated us from the vagaries of nature. It has allowed us to produce copious amounts of food and thus allowing us to produce copious amounts of biomass. Our population numbers today are a direct result of the abundance of energy flow from fossil fuels. And unhappily, we are now at the stage where the extraction rates of those fuels are beginning to decline. We have already passed the peak of production of conventional oil on a global basis. Given the role of oil in the extraction work of the other fuels as well as transportation of goods over long distances, we may effectively be on the verge of the peak of production of all fossil fuel energies.
More importantly, the net energy available, which is the net of the gross amount of energy extracted less the energy required in its extraction, is already in decline. I have written extensively about this so I will not repeat the arguments here. But it is becoming increasingly clear that our global economy is feeling the effects of declining net energy as the captains of industry (including the Chinese) scramble to find new solutions to more costly energy. Lately the price of food has been going up steadily as a result of the increased cost of energy. This is an inescapable law of physics — one unknown and unimagined by the economists and politicians in the world.
Below is a graph from one of my models of the biophysical economy, that is the economy of energy flow through the human built world and the supported biomass (sharp readers will note the similarities between this model and The Limits to Growth model of resource depletion — the difference is that I have focused on energy as the primary resource). These are all aggregated under the concept of assets. People are as much considered assets as buildings and cars and roads. All assets can be measured in terms of their embodied energy, or how much energy was consumed in creating and maintaining the assets over their life time. When assets decay (or people die) their physical embodied energy is removed from the books, so to speak. Under historical conditions of growth in net energy flow, total assets have been growing. This reflects the increase in population (and to some degree girth) and consumption of goods and services per individual. The graph shows that as net energy grew throughout the industrial, green, and information revolutions the total assets of the biophysical economy grew as well.
Figure 4. Population/economic dynamics are defined by the amount of net energy available to do real work (construction and maintenance of the built world and biomass, e.g. human beings). This graph includes the effects of a sustainable alternative energy revolution due to a crash program (e.g. WWII mobilization) to build alternative energy infrastructure. This was included to show that even with this effort a crash is unavoidable. Total Gross refers to the total amount of raw energy captured, either fossil fuels extracted or sunlight captured (pre-conversion). Net FF is the net fossil fuels after conversion to usable fuels like gasoline. Net Alt. is the net energy derived from alternative sources like solar or wind. Total Net is the sum of net from fossil fuels and alternative sources. Total Assets are all assets produced from net energy measured in embodied energy units (also called emergy).
The red trace shows the growth and decline of net energy from fossil fuels. The green trace at the bottom shows, first, the level of energy from real-time solar inputs, such as food production. It is augmented by a sudden increase in alternative energy after a massive marshalling of resources to build out an alternative energy infrastructure. This infrastructure must be capable of self-sustaining production, i.e. it must replace itself over time without inputs from fossil fuels. The dark blue trace at the top is the total gross energy extracted either in fossil fuels or in alternative forms equivalent to the energy from fossil fuels, e.g. electricity. The purple trace, total net energy, is what society has to work with to produce and maintain assets. You can see by this the effects of adding alternative energies to the net from fossil fuels.
Finally, the light blue line traces total assets being produced by the availability of net energy. This aggregation covers long-term assets like buildings and roads, intermediate-term assets like heavy equipment and automobiles, and short-term assets and consumables. It also represents non-farm biomass assets, namely people, pets, and ornamental plants. What this does not include is unconverted, or natural resources, such as timber, that require work to be done in order to extract a usable product, such as lumber. Everything is measured in energy units required to construct and maintain the assets. For people, of course, this includes all energies expended to grow and keep kids healthy and the energy of food needed to keep people alive. It doesn't take an Einstein to know what happens if you take away the food.
As you can see the dynamics are not favorable. As fossil fuels diminish, after the peak in the red trace, everything starts to diminish, and rapidly. The time scale in the graph from the peak of fossil fuels is roughly one hundred years. That really isn't a long time, even in terms of human history.
The inclusion of alternative energies here is for two purposes. One is to show the scale and rate problems associated with bringing alternatives on-line. So little energy is gotten from these sources now that a scale up even half of what is implied in the graph seems totally unrealistic (in spite of what you might have heard in the main stream media). The resources that would have to be diverted to accomplish this marshalling would be considerable, requiring sacrifices from everyone in terms of their material lifestyles. Some of my results suggest that the average American citizen will have to give up two-thirds of current income (like a flat tax rate) to support the scale of this kind of effort. But even if we all agreed to do it, to make the necessary sacrifices, it doesn't really change much. The population will still crash, our assets will still crumble down to the point at which we learn to live only on alternative sources (and remember this requires that they be self-sustaining into the indefinite future). The situation shown in the graph is overly optimistic in my view. It assumes not only a very rapid rise in technologies like solar and wind (roughly 25% growth per year for 40 years followed by 10% per year for another 150 years) but that we could sustain that increase over several centuries. And that just gets us to an economy that is roughly one quarter of what we have today. That does not provide wealth production for would-be developing countries I'm afraid. Everyone living in that economy will be very much poorer in terms of material wealth than the average Eastern European is today.
I've included the outline of some results of other models that do not include such a massive build up of alternative energies. The black line shows the complete plummet of assets when all fossil fuels run out. For those clinging to the belief that we would still have hydroelectric dams and nuclear power plants, think again. Those facilities are also highly dependent on fossil fuels for maintenance. Shut off the fuels and we would see the end of all technological energy within fifty years. At which time the only sources of energy will be the ancient ones, real-time solar and woody biomass. I suspect the negative impacts of such catastrophic collapse will have serious repercussions on the human psychology that will propel what survivors might remain to acts of unspeakable horror in a vain attempt to survive just a little longer. That is why the black line craters without leveling off. My concern for the latter is that once a collapse starts in earnest there will be a runaway effect that will build such momentum that no human being will be able to survive. Think Cormac McCarthy's novel, The Road, only much worse. McCarthy still allowed a glimmer of hope at the end (same with David Brin's The Postman). In most of these post apocalyptic stories, there is always the assumption that someone survives and the human species goes on into the future. That may be due to our human-exceptionalism bias, or we just can't imagine a world without us (an exception is Alan Weisman's non-fiction book The World Without Us). But population crashes have usually been unkind to most other species throughout the history of Earth. From a purely biological perspective there isn't any reason to believe that there isn't some kind of crash situation that wouldn't take us out. Most of the readers will, I'm sure, cling to the belief that someone will survive, surely. But ask yourself on what basis do you believe that? Do you have a carefully thought out rational justification, or are you simply rationalizing? Use critical thinking on your own thinking.
The solid blue line, on the other hand, depicts what could happen if the crash of population is managed and the survivors are the wisest of our kind. Natural energy flows can and will sustain a small population indefinitely. The key is to prepare for that future as best we can. I have indicated that ark colonies based on permaculture practices stand the best chance of survival and do not necessarily have to be based on subsistence living (see “What is a feasible living situation for future humans?” for example).
A Feasible Solution (Just Not the One We Would Have Wanted)
If we redefine the problem, for the benefit of the human genus, not ignoring Nature's definition but trying to find a compromise, might we find a feasible solution volume?
I think the answer is yes. Put very succinctly, if we define the problem as:
“ We want to reduce the current population of humanity down to the carrying capacity that is reality, at a rate that will put us on track to achieve that goal before we do any more harm to the environment, with minimal pain and suffering, accepting great sacrifices as needed, for the purpose of ensuring that humans will not go extinct.
Then, I believe there is a way to solve this problem. Long-time readers will have already recognized the arc of my arguments from my previous blogs.
I believe there is a solution to this problem. And I believe it involves human choices and intervention in the evolutionary process that brought us into existence.
This section is not what I originally wrote re: what is a feasible solution. My readers will guess what might have been in this section. I sent an early draft to a number of people in the no- or negative-growth community, people who fully get that we have a serious problem. But a large number of those people were extremely uncomfortable with my feasible solution! Most granted that my arguments are basically sound regarding the fate of the human species if a solution cannot be found. But few were willing to accept the conclusions. My solution, to the modified problem statement, includes a maximally coercive action that is politically unacceptable (or at least politically incorrect!). The need, remember, is to find a way to reduce the population at a rate that will exceed the rate of decline of the carrying capacity. Most people in the ‘population reduction’ movement are queasy over what that will take (look carefully at the graph above and derive your own inferences).
I think I know what will work. It doesn't involve overtly killing anyone. It does seek to minimize pain and suffering. But it baldly admits to a stark reality. I may be alone in a willingness to face that reality. I'm not clear as to why that is the case. But I have no wish to offend the masses. That won't help anyone. So let me just say that the feasible solution is only for the least faint of heart. Of course, if I'm the only one to accept this reality, it won't matter. The worst will come to pass.
Leaving on a Hopeful Note
I am told by several friends who have known my work that I have to leave people with some hope. I'll leave you with two kinds of hope!
First you may seek solace in the knowledge that my claims are based on computer models, which, like statistics, can be rigged to tell you anything you want them to. Or even if you don't accuse me of rigging the model to get the results I want, you could at least believe that computer models are fallible. The programmer is fallible. This is certainly true. So let us hope that I am mistaken and the models are the result of unintentional biases. Because I am only human, they do not depict a realistic scenario nor do they do a good job of predicting the future trends. Believe it or not I am right there with you on this one. I hope I am way off. Nothing would please me more than discovering a flaw in my models and/or other models demonstrate (flawlessly) that the world will merely enter some kind of steady state condition leaving us all happy and prosperous (and all having ‘green’ jobs).
But the other kind of hope, the one that dominates my thinking now, is that humanity will exercise some sensibility, some good judgment, and recognize the need to bow out gracefully. The actions taken thereafter might just increase the odds for a humanity in the future. Not unlike the man who seeks redemption while dying, perhaps humanity will exercise wisdom as a last act. There is a way to make this work.
Paul,
Would that it were so! I believe most of the readers here are grownups. But you should see my less-than-cordial e-mail over some of the subjects I write about.
Many long-time readers will have envisioned programs similar to what you have.
Bear in mind that I am not talking about a particularly actionable plan, but rather a feasible solution to the problem of how to ensure Homo survives in the future. There are probably many paths that could be followed to get there.
For one, I suspect that truly high sapient individuals are already taking action to secure their future since they are more likely the ones who have seen the likelihood of the future!
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foolmetwice,
Have to agree about the voluntary aspect. I said the solution might involve maximally coercive action (but not active attempts to increase death rates). As to the 'loose overlay' that is certainly true for the average level of sapience, which is, as I have said, is quite low. From my reading on wisdom (and consequently inferred for strong sapience) the 'overlay' is much stronger among such people. Ergo, the wisest among us would be far more cooperative than the average person.
If the majority of the population that survives the bottleneck event were of greater sapience, I think the potential for survival owing to cooperative behaviors will be substantially greater.
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Manoel,
I did mention the interplay between numbers and consumption per individual. I follow a version of the IPAT formula in my modeling.
I did take falling EROI into account. That is how I get the decline in net energy. Dave Murphy's model is called the net Hubbert and is based on a different modeling technique than mine. I try to keep to first principles whereas the Hubbert model is based on curve fitting and a hypothetical mathematical model of the down side of the peak. Take another look at the graph in the piece.
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Mikkel,
My model doesn't help tell us what the 'more' worst-case scenarios might be because it doesn't factor in political and second-order financial difficulties. It simply tells us the maximum possible, and, more importantly, the real dynamics of the system. The time scales I'm suggesting could be greatly foreshortened by politics or financial collapse.
But on the issue of going to war with 7-8 EROI oil, where did you get the estimates for how much volume there will be left (what quality, is your model linear)? Military operations, especially geared for tactical control of oil-producing regions to keep the flow going, are logistical nightmares. Witness what has happened in Iraq. All out war to wipe out other civilizations is quite different (and indiscriminate) from an action designed to keep the 'spice' flowing!
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Phil,
Could you outline how this plays out in, say, the global warming arguments. It seems to me that it is easy to check the basis of claims made (people have done it already), the science is actually pretty clear, but people are still arguing.
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GaryA,
But, if the CIA or Homeland Security is reading this, note that I am not talking about methods of 'killing' people (via a disease) but simply preventing new births and easing pain of the decline in population resulting!
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Mikkel said:
My vision is of a community (in the future) in which every person has the opportunity to achieve self-actualization.
George
Posted by: George Mobus | February 21, 2011 at 01:15 PM
George -
Well done. A great article. I've followed a similar trail of understanding of this issue, and reached similar conclusions. I've also, similarly, stopped talking about it directly.
At least I can feel some solidarity that others have had the same thoughts. But I fear the solution will not be chosen by us. Humans will await the solution choosing itself, though we are hastening that moment of choice and reducing the options available.
Which makes me curious about the timelines involved in such choices. It would seem that the available choices will be further constrained over time. Eventually, when there is only one choice left, that is what will be chosen (if the history of the species is any guide).
I'd like to be wrong, though.
Posted by: Mark Twain | February 21, 2011 at 02:05 PM
GaryA, I pity Pianka, for sure, but I don't think the notorious viral spread of false information driven by extremists with hate messages is the whole problem.
Milder examples may be greater threats. I was talking about how social relationships get built around beliefs you can't check, like people believing that making growth more efficient can reduce resource use. There's also how scientists notoriously fail to adopt the new paradigm, since scientific paradigms are social systems with no way to check themselves or incorporate the new questions of new paradigms.
That a scientific paradigm is a "belief system you can't check" becomes a major barrier to learning, creating all the academic barriers actually as each discipline defines reality in terms of their own social language. New ways of understanding nature's complexity then have to go through years, decades or lifetimes of repression before they somehow leak out. We really really need a solution, or a "work around" of some sort for that!
I approached it as "Simple facts... and hard memes" in a blog post today, about signs of emerging knowledge we need to be drawn to rather than repelled by. http://synapse9.com/blog/2011/02/21/simple-facts-and-hard-memes-why-greening-doesnt-work/
Posted by: Phil Henshaw | February 21, 2011 at 02:39 PM
I'm delighted to see someone besides myself express serious doubts about demographic transition theory.
"Educate and empower women, and population growth stops." Yea, right.
Correlation is not causation! What happens is that as women get more educated and empowered, they become more affluent, which I define as greater access to energy.
Think about it. A woman in a poor African village must walk five miles for potable water. She knows she won't be able to make the trek when she's old, so she produces a slave to get her water for her. Or, some humanitarian group comes in, "educates" her and gives her free condoms, and "empowers" her by bringing in electricity to run a pumped well. Bingo! Education and empowerment works -- as long as you add energy to the equation!
No amount of education and empowerment is going to stop people from breeding a slave labour force and their retirement fund if they can't get the "energy slaves" to do what breeding human slaves would do.
Going back to the WORLD3 computer models used by Meadows (et. al.) in Limits to Growth, if you look at the graphs, you can clearly see birth rate climbing as energy access goes down! This is not new stuff, folks!
So the next time someone talks to you about "empowering" women in order to reduce population, ask them if they understand what the "power" part of "empowering" really means.
Posted by: Jan Steinman | February 21, 2011 at 04:10 PM
I decided in 1975 not to bear children, after reading the Population Bomb. So I don’t have any sapient children to join George’s lifeboat project :^)
I bought my last car in 1993, and it has only 41,000 miles. [I’ve bicycled over 150,000 miles, at least.] All I ever wanted to do since I was 7 was to grow my own food. We moved to our farm in 1998 and have been growing all but grains, olive oil and spices. We splurge on coffee, Balsamic vinegar and Reggiano.... Heat with wood. I decided this week that if I had the decision to make over again, I would not put the solar panels on the roof. I doubt our 4KW system really makes much difference, and how long will it serve after our rural electric cooperative folds? Or how many charges would we have left on the batteries? Spare parts?
Humans are not anatomiclly adapted to agriculture: it wrecks one’s back in a few years, such that it is agonizing to return to upright posture when planting, weeding, harvesting. Or maybe this was just the last straw after so many miles on my ten-speed.
I came to the conclusion that we are in overshoot and there’s nothing to be done about it due to politics a few years ago, about the time I read Elizabeth Kolbert’s New Yorker article about the Greenland ice cores and learned that the climate can flip within a decade, and decided that the climate is probably flipping now. More recent data seems to confirm.
I don’t expect to live as long as my parents (85 & 93) even with my ‘healthy lifestyle’. I think we have at most 20 years, although current events in the Middle East and Northern Africa may accelerate the collapse of the petro-dollar regime, which will be very bad for the US. Though not undeserved.
I don’t think there’s anything we can do except prepare within our own communities and hope our idiocratic neighbors recognize they’re better off cooperating with us rather than killing us for one year’s supply of vegetables they probably wouldn’t know how to cook.
Our nearby town began a Transition ‘Study Group’ in December and the fourth meeting was to have been this evening but was called off due to snow. I had already determined that ‘studying’ Transition is a waste of time. I’m thinking more in terms now of stocking up on basic hand tools, more seeds, dome lids, etc. and barterable items, and working with the few who really ‘get it.’ Among our friends who already are growing much of their own food, there’s only one other person who isn’t totally freaked out at, or in denial of reality. Only a couple of us in the TSG have made any life changes towards Transition.
George: I think that we are plenty sapient enough for the natural world. Industrial civilization is but a blip. If it were not for the fact that we managed to destroy the Holocene climate and the majority of the Earth’s environments, I think we’d have no problem adapting back to nature. And it’s my conclusion that the scarcity of nature is the environment for which we are best suited. What we lack in the way of sapience requisite for navigating industrial civilization is that needed to solve the other ‘Hardest Moral Dilemma of All’: the wisdom to kill the psychopaths in our midst. The Hammurabi Code prescribed the death penalty for most crimes. I wonder if our ancestors knew that the survival of the band necessitated doing away with those who were parasitic and sowed discord.
Mikkel: I read the Naked Capitalism post about lame liberals. I was raised in a liberal family and until recently considered myself a liberal. But this other comment left at that blog speaks to my current thinking:
“The general point is that liberals seem to always bring a knife to a gun fight and never ever seem to understand that they are dealing with people who not only don’t act in good faith, but seek to completely dominate, destroy or eliminate their opposition. You cannot bargain with people who want to eliminate you, you simply have to fight them with every weapon available until they quit or are themselves eliminated. This is a death match”
Liberals’ mistake is believing that human nature is basically good, and expecting people to behave better if given a second chance. (But I don’t believe in the death penalty because our injustice system convicts many innocent people.) In any event, it’s totally clear at this point that the psychopaths have taken total control of the levers of power (anyone who reads Naked Capitalism knows).
Thanks Manoel for the Ted Trainer link. I’ll go about learning about others’ anarchist lifeboat community concepts. That seems to be where I’m leaning.
George: Thanks for sharing your knowledge and questions with us. When I was in grade school I was sent to the principal’s office almost weekly for asking too many questions. It’s what makes life endlessly interesting and worth living.
I haven’t found if you’ve ever considered addiction (not ‘oil addiction’) as part of your model for how our brains function, and how that interferes with sapience, and why our environment of surplus energy may be the reason for addiction’s hindrance of most people’s ability to achieve wisdom. Adam Curtis’ ‘Century of the Self’ seems to show that the captains of capitalism have purposely engineered a society in which addiction is the model for consumption, which best enriches the industrialists. Not to mention controlling/anaesthetizing the populace.
Have you ever considered psychopathy as evidence of abnormal brain structure, perhaps a lack of mirror neurons or the ability to modulate emotions too much? Is it possible that industrial civilization actually selects for psychopathy, and that this may be the ‘superman’ gone too far? In any event, psychopaths are parasites and could only have gained the upper hand when there is energy surplus and overpopulation. Their increasing dominance seems to have paralleled the accelarating demand for oil.
In short: our surplus energy environment selects for the worst aspects of human brain potential: psychopathy and addiction. We know that scarcity selected for cooperation and enough wisdom to assure survival, such that we could shed our fur and use tools to enable us to inhabit every environment on the planet. Perhaps had it not been for fossil fuels the wisest ones would have prevailed and lead us to permacuture.
Apologies for the disjointedness, and throwing out so many different things in this comment. The past 9 days of reading dozens of George’s blog posts has helped me to coalesce and organize much of my thought into somewhat of a unified theory that explains the world as I understand it.
Posted by: AR | February 21, 2011 at 07:32 PM
George,
I'm glad to see you take on our population predicament so directly. I've taught and wrote about population issues since around 1970. That I've had no impact is apparent when you consider that since then the world has grown by more than 3 billion people. Despite what you or anyone else might write, barring some colossal catastrophe Earth's population will grow by more than 80 million in 2011. We will probably reach 7 billion before the year is over, nearly four times the population in 1900.
Any one alive today has lived in a world characterized by population growth, so it is hard to contemplate a different world. Though population decline is already occurring in a number of nations, including Japan, Germany, and Russia, growth remains the worldwide situation.
Both of us know that severe problems are going to test humanity in the future, including climate change from our extravagant use of fossil fuels and rising energy prices as we reach, then move beyond, peak oil. We're currently seeing reflections of these in rising food prices, which I wrote about recently on Gail Tverberg's blog, Our Finite World.
If on top of this you throw in some realpolitik considerations about global geopolitics, it seems clear to me that shrinking the world's population just isn't in the cards unless or until we truly reach a ceiling imposed by various limits to growth, especially energy.
As much as I would like to see a more humane way to solve the world's population predicament, and have long argued for a much greater effort to control population, from where I sit it looks like efforts to sustain growth, of both populations and economies, will continue until forces beyond human control bring our population back into balance with what Earth can sustain. As John Greer has suggested more than once, those four horsemen may already be saddling up. As John Boehner might say, "So be it."
Posted by: Gary Peters | February 21, 2011 at 07:56 PM
Oh, Now I see it George, your reply was snuggled in on p2 of the comments. Yes, I've explored the problem of people not being able to confront clear evidence that conflicts with their beliefs for global warming. You won't like what I found, though.
For the question of global warming the clear evidence is that GHG's are defined as reducing energy transfer by radiation, and directly measurable cooling of the outer atmosphere indicates decreasing radiation to space and atmospheric warming as a result. That implies a greater temperature gradient in the atmosphere and an intensification of convection as a heat transport mechanism, and as a global effect, and so then necessarily responsible for intensifying convection globally, to confirm the anecdotal evidence. The problem is I can't find any scientists willing to explain it simply that way! I've been trying for 20 years actually, never got anyone to say, WOW people would actually understand that!!! Everyone wants the public to believe the amazingly complex models that are the pride and joy of the climate scientists, and cause all the confusion.
Now take the result far worse than failing to communicate with the cynics. The largest GHG effect seems to be from CO2, but our economic system multiplies CO2, has consistently from the start. All the green movements accept the OECD precondition for correcting it of maintaining an ever growing economy to pay for it. At present the data shows very clearly that there is a 0% effect in the past 40 years in changing how the economy multiplies energy use, or reduces the proportion of fossil fuels.
It's as if the only thing the development of alternative energy sources is achieving is the continued multiplication of CO2, and making everyone think they have a strategy that surely must be working... When I show people the simple and clear evidence they consistently can't fathom what I'm showing them! What do you think of that???
http://synapse9.com/blog/2011/02/21/simple-facts-and-hard-memes-why-greening-doesnt-work/
Posted by: Phil Henshaw | February 21, 2011 at 09:41 PM
Haha yeah AR, I have come to the exact same conclusions about psycho/sociopaths. I have spent many hours talking with friends about how their existence guarantees the failure of any idealized system as a fundamental Truth.
You no doubt know that there are MRI studies supporting a biological marker for such people although it's disputed how much of that is causal instead of correlative.
Posted by: mikkel | February 21, 2011 at 10:44 PM
Phil my views are tainted by working too close to climatologists (well oceanographers but same diff) but I feel they do a very good job of explaining that greenhouse effect. The problem is that then people came back and said "well what's this mean? That'll just make it warmer and then things will be nicer right? And even if not then it's not like CO2 can drive the climate that much based on its own."
That is where the climate models and historical cores prove invaluable.
The fact is that AGW has been recognized as a possibility since the turn of the 20th century and as a certainty by the middle of that century. I have a book with Edward Teller describing the need to go to fast breeder reactors because otherwise GHGs would kill us all with climate change and light water reactors would cause us to run out of uranium and create tons of waste. That was in 1960.
I think the issue is that the problem got framed as responding to the real (intellectually honest) skeptics and then they never did a transform back to influencing public opinion until it was too late.
Posted by: mikkel | February 21, 2011 at 10:59 PM
Sorry, but I have one more comment to Phil. It astounds me how people can be so captured to ideology to make absurd statements to describe the graph like in your post.
For instance ClimateProgress had a post "disproving" Jevons' Paradox. Not withstanding it only attacked it from a neoclassical perspective, there is a greater problem that is explicitly stated: the neoclassical idea that growth is a fundamental unstoppable law with "natural" dynamics.
Of course this is an absurd postulate that enfeebles even otherwise great minds like Paul Krugman...and completely destroys any interpretation from a biophysical standpoint.
In response I wrote:
JR is Joe Romm, a physicist that's been in this game for two decades.
The post says that Jevons' paradox is not true and that energy use will go down with more efficiency. I link to a per capita energy graph showing it has been flat since 1970 so obviously there is a contradiction in that statement since we've had great efficiency increases and his response is that it doesn't count because that was just "natural" and that what they are talking about is super duper different because they'll do it harder and faster.
If your view is based on steady state with random fluctuations then life is easy: you fit the curves, declare it natural and then say that you step on the pedal or brake as needed. There is no use to figure out why or follow feedback loops. My (poorly worded) suggestion was that you should close the loop by having a rising energy tax that was designed to ensure the efficiency gains led to consumption reduction. Of course that'd destroy economic growth models so then you'd have all sorts of other problems.
Which is really the issue isn't it? Everything we're talking about suggests we need radical change in how society is structured at every level in order for the feedback loops to work. That is the reason why people refuse to fathom it and a scientific training isn't enough to necessarily make them see this point.
Posted by: mikkel | February 21, 2011 at 11:47 PM
Mikkel, Well you seem to be starting to see it as I do, that these people are trapped in their belief systems, and speaking to them in yours doesn't help. I added a lead pp on my synapse9.com site today.
I certainly find the climate model predictions useful, mind you, but the scientists defending them show a serious misunderstanding of the problem in two critical ways. They try to persuade the skeptics by flooding them with complex theories to "clarify" the simple evidence and principles. All it does is invite verbal combat when speaking to people who don't understand the basic foundations of the argument.
What really jumps out, though, is the commitment of all the climate scientists (that I know of anyway) to eliminate CO2 by indefinitely perpetuating the physical process, economic growth, that is multiplying our consumption of fossil fuels... They demonstrably don't see their job as extending beyond their theory, and as they have no theory at all for how money connects to nature, they act blissfully ignorant of the extreme violation of their own purposes... It'd be perfectly rational to say they're much more irrational that the skeptics who are in their face!
Isn't that curious??? I think people better find a way to check their world views with their world or we definitely are just burnt toast, fairly shortly.
Posted by: Phil Henshaw | February 22, 2011 at 05:31 AM
Well Phil what you are saying is absolutely correct but I think it's fundamental that you have to have abstract frameworks for relating to the natural world. So many philosophers have written about this that it's not worth expounding on.
Are you aware of Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions? I do not think that the issue is the inherent artifice of paradigms in general, but the fact that society is using the wrong paradigm in particular. Systems theory is no more "real" than any other, it is just more generally explanatory so I think it should be preferred. On the other hand it is less predictive than steady state approximations the majority of the time so it is difficult to show utility.
Indeed, in my attempt to push it more into biology we are finding that everyone agrees that what we are saying seems Correct, but say "come back when you show immense functional advantage over the current models." I believe we will eventually but it is proving difficult. [And on this our group is even more "dirty" than the physicists and mathematicians that are certain we need a whole new math and logic to make an even purer form of systems theory...even though they readily accept that it would have even less specific predictive utility.]
Part of the issue is that the proper mentality in a steady state world view is to decide what you want and try to push the system into that state; while in a systems perspective you instead explore state spaces in order to determine boundary conditions and try to keep things from moving out of it a region if you like what's going on and into a different region if you don't, but otherwise letting the trajectory run free. This is a subtle but seismic shift in our relationship to Reality, one I see you understand from your website: "It let me investigate how individual complex environmental systems developed their unique forms, things like individual air currents, swarms of group behavior, cultures or economies, all those things of that kind that invent and take care of themselves somehow and have so mystified people for ages. It destroyed my chance for a normal career in science, though, because just asking that question violates the basic precept of modern science that nature behaves according to our theories."
I'd say that back then "our" theories were still giving too much credit to the inherent knowability of reality (both deterministically and statistically). This is not universally true anymore: more and more people are making their careers in the very world view you are listing, particularly in biology. Even more to the point, many people my age (under 30) intuitively understand this very thing. I am not sure why there is such an age gap -- perhaps due to the internet's embrace of spontaneous self organization -- but I have found that a good number of young people that have any scientific aptitude just need the information put in front of them and they can easily grasp the implications. Whether that's a function of age or mindset I don't know, but it is a reason why I'm not so pessimistic as some.
I know a lot of people that get it but feel constrained because the powers that be are so strong and we don't have the resources to work against it. But we are building them up and I'm trying to tap into the larger air of existential angst that my generation has about the future in order to unlock those resources in a self organizing way. I don't pretend this will be enough to stop anything, but it will perhaps be enough to give something to live towards and well, there's nothing better to do.
Basically I'm hoping that I won't find myself as desolate as you did in pursuing these truths. Perhaps that is self delusion but that's life. Anyway I'm going to shut up before George bans me from commenting more.
Posted by: mikkel | February 22, 2011 at 11:35 AM
I think the article title is far more realistic than the optimism of the last couple of paragraphs. Occam's razor always cuts clean through. The species is a dead man walking.
Posted by: Bill | February 23, 2011 at 02:46 PM
Meanwhile events are moving quickly. I'm expecting a blog from George on the repercussions of events in the middled east.
It occured to me last night that this whole middle eastern uprising is a superb example of the butterfly effect
December 17, 2010; A desperate 26 year old tunisian man, Mohammed Al Bouazizi, doused himself in petrol and lit a match in front of a government building, also igniting a whole sequence of events which would lead to a massive insurrection, the fall of dictators and shock waves across the globe, an oil price spike which could even lead to another global economic collapse.
What would have been just another suicide, because he was in the right place at the right time, had a devestating affect across the globe and probably world history (there is a wiki entry and statues are being errected in his honour already)
Of course the cayalyst in all this has been the internet, mobile phone communications, bloggers and the near impossibility of controlling information despite the regimes attempts.
On the one hand the interconnectedness of the world, makes everyone eventually vulnerable to knock on negative economic/resource/climate events but on the other hand the same connections make bottom up revolts and insurrections much more likley to spread and inflintely harder to control...the ying and the yang, I'm sure a few of you can sense where I'm going with this....?
We can also bet governments will have noticed all this and it will be a gee-up call to find some way of controlling the internet and preventing this kind of thing ever kicking off in western states.
Posted by: GaryA | February 24, 2011 at 01:13 AM
mikkel, You say
I think that does accurately reflect the "best intelligence" generally found on the subject. It also hides a grave error, though. Nature is not a product of intelligence, is the problem...For some reason when I first heard Neils Bohr’s “pretty idea” that (paraphrasing) “science has to treat data as being reality because science is a study of information”, I practically jumped out of my shoes! It’s such a glaring conceit.
Intelligence is what we "look with", not what we "look at". So who would be surprised if what we construct for ourselves in our minds would be variously different from the subjects we attempt to interpret. What non-intellectuals are rather surprised by is that that this is simple mind/body relation is even a question, of course. Those confused by it seem very largely the people whose emotional drive is to represent their own mental abstractions as defining the world around them.
So the question is not really whether our abstract thinking is useful or not. It's clearly useful. The question is whether it is a serious trap that greatly misleads us too. I think it clearly is.
It's a wonderful subject to explore, actually, if you can keep it straight. The tragedy is that the people who are driven to see their abstraction as the world they live in are also pushed into reinforcing that belief by people, say like me, pointing out the useful differences between our cognition and the material processes of open environments.
So today I seem to have reached another impasse, with yet another large wave of people I care about and once had hope for, actively closing their minds in response to my pointing to the wide openings for connecting with a more solid world, they had not previously seen in their closed way of thinking.... So, like you, I'm not sure what to do then. I think the world is about to snap.
A very small compensation is that, given it most certainly would have had to snap *somewhere* on its mad spiral, my helping to make rigid thinking people more rigid may have shortened the course some small amount. Not much to be proud of, is it?!
Posted by: Phil Henshaw | February 24, 2011 at 10:34 AM
Gary, I personally feel that communication technology just defines timescales not necessarily underlying dynamics, which are more driven by economic (and by extension intellectual) connectivity.
It is impressive to watch though: what is taking days to unfold on the country level used to take months or years; on the regional level what is taking months took years to unfold just a couple decades ago, years at the beginning of last century, decades during the new world expansion period and centuries before that!
Of course I think that collapse will be accelerated along the same timescales...
Posted by: mikkel | February 24, 2011 at 11:15 AM
Phil:
"The unnamable is the eternally real.
Naming is the origin
of all particular things.
The Master leads
by emptying people's minds
and filling their cores,
by weakening their ambition
and toughening their resolve.
He helps people lose everything
they know, everything they desire,
and creates confusion
in those who think that they know.
We work with being,
but non-being is what we use.
The Master observes the world
but trusts his inner vision.
He allows things to come and go.
His heart is open as the sky.
Do you have the patience to wait
till your mud settles and the water is clear?
Can you remain unmoving
till the right action arises by itself?
The Master doesn't seek fulfillment.
Not seeking, not expecting,
she is present, and can welcome all things."
And so forth. I find that the great minds that understand this like Sagan and Oppenheimer and Fuller are the most sapient of all mankind, but alas, in my experience scientists are no more likely as a group to be wise than any other.
Posted by: mikkel | February 24, 2011 at 11:39 AM
Mikkel, What I notice are curiously telling similarities between the organization of natural systems and how our minds represent them, like with equations. In environmental net-energy systems like businesses or organisms or cultures, etc, the system as a physical thing is composed of matched animate and inanimate parts. That may be a pairing of machine & operator or a pairing of DNA & metabolic processes. Physical behavior needs both to occur, both an active process and inactive parts to be employed by the process.
What science uses instead is equations, where you have the same pairing of animate and inanimate, sort of, with controlled variables as the inanimate parts and the operators defining relationships between them as the animating part. That, though, does clearly define how our minds conceive of nature, and how science interprets the relation between animate & inanimate things that make nature function. The question is: Are there differences between what we think and how nature works? Could those differences result in characteristic misunderstandings for which there is observable evidence?
So I think scientists, even Sagan, Oppenheimer and Fuller, have a great ideological handicap that interferes with their perception, coming from representing natural net-energy processes as operating by logical constructs. How severe the handicap is appears to be sort of optional, though. The severity of the handicap can be far less IF, they don’t equate their ideology with the world, but instead go the extra step of discovering how to explore their world with their ideology.
I think it actually takes no more guts than learning to swim, really, taking the chance to first duck your head under water and such. Learning to overcome that fear of the unknown, and upset our mind’s mono-cultural obsession, to find that nature is just full of different ways of making things work, actually isn’t all that risky. To me, it doesn't seem to eliminate any mental reality but the self-imposed and rather impractical restriction, in a rich world of differently organized things, to being able to understand only one. I guess the one big benefit of only being able to understand one ideology is that it makes that ideology seem like the center of the universe… conveniently located where it’s completely under each person’s individual control… ;-) Such a deal!!
Posted by: Phil Henshaw | February 24, 2011 at 03:22 PM
insightful, interesting, concise and very well researched. May I direct you to this link? http://www.onebyonethemovie.co.uk/
I think there may be something of interest to you here. Yes it is a media link but don't be put off. I'm part of a team who like to "question everything" and your blog has really influenced the way I think and the way I approach life. I thought I'd share this with you. Please have a look and let me know what you think about it.
Posted by: Naomi BFF | February 25, 2011 at 06:02 AM
Good frank discussion Dr. Mobus.
I appreciate you taking you time to create models and graphs to help the audience understand your points.
While at first if we look at the problems our species faces today, it seems to sadden one due to our attachment to the ‘reality’ that we are used to. However, it is only a negative thing from the reference frame of human existence.
I’ve come to realize that we are biological system which has evolved to be very clever. In-fact most biological systems tend consume and reproduce indefinitely, but there are natural controls in place in our ecosystem limiting their growth. However, like you mention, we humans are so clever we exploited the earth (especially fossil fuel reserves) and used the external input of energy to make other systems to help us grow food, cure diseases and perform manual labor. All these system perhaps helped us grow out of the natural limits of earth.
I think you are right in that our cleverness has taken us far, but it has also gotten us into this mess, and that human beings do not have what it takes to get us out of the mess we created for ourselves.
The universe is in constant change at all times, it is systems of matter and energy interacting with each other. What seems to be destruction at one point, can actually be seen as a creation of something new ( i.e. a star explodes, planets form from the aftermath). One can look at the destruction of humanity as a simple natural phenomenon, from our reference frame it’s a problem that we created, but from another reference frame its simply the earth going through its cycle of destruction and re-creation.
I’m not saying that this is an excuse to keep on living like we have, those of us who understand what is happening should try to live in a balance with what is going on, but I think it’s a futile effort to try to change the perception of the masses.
I wonder what you think about the philosophical implications of what is happening, and I wish I could be a fly on the wall when you and Kalton discuss some of the big questions. :)
Keep up the good work, take care.
Posted by: Sukhbir | February 25, 2011 at 12:46 PM