A
few years ago, I explored
the idea that people's behavior could be described in terms of
personality traits interacting with associated environmental
variables, directed by knowledge and enabled by power, with the goal
of finding the best match that would manifest as maximum attainable
happiness. Because, in aggregate, a population's happiness increases
logarithmically with ecological footprint, the price of continually
growing happiness is faster depletion of ecological "resources"
– including other species that provide basic services that keep the
planet habitable. Population size multiplies this effect, and
exponentially increasing population accelerates our approach to a
critical point where habitability can no longer be maintained.
My
projections have shown that this point will likely be reached by
2030. As it approaches, the world will get harder to live in as
resources become degraded and harder to find and use. But we will
keep trying, because more happiness and life expectancy are what
drives us. After that point, deaths will exceed births, and our
population will drop to zero by 2075, which I now understand will
likely be due to our ecological impact having grown due to
self-sustained global warming. According to my calculations, the
difference in global average temperature from pre-industrial times
will climb past 3.3°C, and the
world will be uninhabitable.
Using
the Big
Five personality traits (OCEAN: openness, conscientiousness,
extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism), we can guess how
groups of people will both perceive and want to act as this nightmare
scenario unfolds. Power and knowledge can be expressed as efficiency
in achieving total happiness, where efficiency is
a fraction of the happiness someone doesn't have, which can be
achieved in the amount of time it would ideally take to get from 0%
to 100% happiness. Using efficiency, we can estimate change in
happiness over time. Using the relationship between happiness and
ecological footprint, we can tell how people's ecological impact will
change over time. Assuming a statistical distribution of
personalities among people, we can also estimate how many people will
act in a given way.
I
expect that the openness, conscientiousness, and extraversion traits
correspond to variability in the environment. The more variable it
is, the more a person with high openness prefers it. Because a
rapidly changing environment can't be easily planned for, people with
low conscientiousness will prefer it. Extraverts will like the
excitement of rapid change, and be more inclined to be active parts
of communities that must react to the change and share resources. I
estimate that maybe 1% of the population would (initially) benefit
from large variability.
The
cooperation/competition dynamic inherent in the agreeableness trait
would correspond to the distribution of resources among people, as
well as the amount of social order and violence that accompanies its
breakdown. People with high agreeableness (around 17%) would prefer
to share resources and avoid conflict, while those with low
agreeableness would do the opposite.
A
high amount of neuroticism would translate into increased stress as
deviation from preferred conditions for the other traits increases
uncontrollably and inescapably. Stress leads to more disease and
death, and ultimately may kill off the most people, even those with
low neuroticism (17% of the population), before environmental
conditions do.
Climate
change due to global warming is perhaps the best example of how
humanity's influence on the world's physical systems is changing the
range of environmental conditions. In the case of temperature, the
range has shifted significantly from what we depend on, and will
continue to do so (such as in
Australia this past summer). As some conditions become less
likely, those people who are best adapted to them (and are happiest
when experiencing them) will find it harder, and eventually next to
impossible, to meet their desires and then their needs, mirroring
what is already happening to other species whose ecological niches
are disappearing. If the shift happened slow enough, our population
(and those of other species) might be able to change its preferences
through evolution so that more members would be adapted to the new
conditions, or new species would do so in our place, but climate
change in particular is happening far
too fast.
Technology
and social behavior have enabled people to adapt to different
conditions, and can be expected to do so in the future – up to a
point. My calculations indicate that they enabled our efficiency at
achieving happiness to increase by several orders of magnitude until
the 1950s, when it spiked due to immense technological progress.
Efficiency achieved a minor peak in the late 1980s and has been
declining since then. Notably, that last peak occurred less than a
decade after the world's annual ecological impact exceeded what
ecosystems could offset in production and processing our waste.
Using
our highly complex civilization as a base, we can now support keeping
small numbers of people reasonably comfortable in space for limited
periods of time. With a moderate amount of additional development,
artificial habitats might be able to support a dozen or more people
over a lifetime on a planet like Mars. By my crude estimates based
on personality, around 220,000 people would find our rapidly
deteriorating world acceptable, and only 300 of them could have
enough power to prepare for its physical consequences. It is
conceivable that such a minority (curiously close to the actual
number of extremely rich people) would attempt to outlast the rest of
us just as Mars settlers would eventually be forced to do.
