The
depressing news about climate change, other pollution, and resource
depletion finally got to me a couple of weeks ago, despite my
high tolerance for such things. Predictions of the impending end
of the world, including
my own, were too hard to take without some hope of proving them
wrong; yet wherever I looked, things just looked worse. Whenever
facing a seemingly intractable problem, I've tended to double-down
and get more creative. To me, that's the ultimate benefit to
"thinking outside the box": if the box is about to get
crushed, it's time to look for another box.
Realizing
that most of us won't have the luxury of settling other planets in
the short time we likely have left before catastrophe strikes, I
decided to try a combination thought experiment and mode of denial:
I wrote short fictional
news articles reporting good news, as a foil to the bad news I
was reading. There have only been a few so far, and it felt good
imagining what a better world might look like, but I needed something
more substantial – a set of "worlds" that we might
realistically be able to make our own.
Then
I realized that I already had a tool for exploring more practical
options. The "Population-consumption model" I've been
updating since December was originally intended as a tool for
forecasting our future and reinterpreting history based on new
insights; it could also be used to search for specific alternatives
that were not tied to our past. I began running random simulations,
a scattershot approach to identifying the possibilities that I had
found useful as a test engineer when a system was too complex for
simple solutions to be derived.
In
the previous version of the model, I discovered what appeared to be a
clear relationship between how much ecological resources we consume
and the populations of other species: the more we use, the less of
them there are. I adapted that relationship to my new data, and used
it as a proxy for the maximum amount of resources. Since any given
"world" is defined by having a certain amount of resources,
it will only exist when that amount is available. As history has
progressed, humanity has moved from one world to another, and
effectively destroyed many other alternatives that required more
resources than we had left. My simulation showed that, since
civilization began over 12,000 years ago, we've probably "destroyed"
98% of the alternative worlds that we could realistically inhabit
over that period, leaving our current options extremely limited.
Only
one of over 7,000 simulated worlds would support a population at
least as large as what it was in 2013 and provide at least the
amount of life satisfaction (happiness) we enjoyed then. If change
occurs at historical rates, we could reach that alternative within
two years, about the time my previous attempts at projecting the
future showed that our population would peak and begin to decline.
The basic premise of the model is that humanity is seeking out
greater happiness by creating "environments" that best suit
us; this involves seeking resources, distributing environments among
us, and changing the number of people to get better use of what we
have. On that basis, we can be expected to try to "move"
toward alternative worlds that have more happiness than the one we
inhabit. Unfortunately, the remaining alternatives with greater
happiness have fewer people. There are a few alternatives with less
happiness and no loss of people, but they also have lower
consumption, which is correlated with lower life expectancy; we will
therefore be forced to make a horrible choice.
What's
worse, this is probably an optimistic scenario. There is ample
evidence that we've already crippled our planet's life support system
to the point where its habitability is at risk. Ideally, we should
use fewer resources so other species can recover some of their
numbers (a healthy fraction would be half what we used in 2013); the
probability of us doing so is low enough that its alternative worlds
don't show up in my simulation.
Looming
as an even greater problem is climate change. If it isn't already
self-sustaining, it may be soon, and will reduce the amount of
available resources independent of whatever we do. All of the
alternative worlds would be gone if we increased our consumption
(ecological footprint) by half; it's conceivable that climate change
will have such an impact all on its own.
So
far, my search for better worlds appears to have turned up more
evidence that we're on or near a peak in population, and what's
better is between us and where the peak ends.