Since
November I have continued to struggle with the "Rabbit
Hole," with a little more success. That success is, in part,
due to a decision to give in to my troubleshooting instincts and
follow a process that served me well as a test engineer: simulating
the system under test, and then using that simulation to reproduce a
problem in order to identify its cause and potential solutions. The
fact that there are multiple problems made this approach even more
attractive. Having done so, I am ready to share what I learned.
The
main problem, as it's always been, is the limitation of humanity's
population growth and collective lifetime due to unavailability of
resources critical to survival. The other problems have to do with
limitations to maintenance and growth of the quality of life for the
people in that population, not to mention the ultimate consequence of
our definition of members of other species as "resources":
their dying to the point of extinction. Evidence for these problems
is found in the news, results of scientific research, and personal
experience that people share (as well as my own). One of the most
obvious consequences is stress from growing uncertainty about our own
fate and the fate of those we care about, and lack of trust in the
people and institutions that we've counted on to reduce that
uncertainty.
For
me, understanding is a remedy for uncertainty, even if that
uncertainty can only be measured. I already had a good start on
addressing that. The "population-consumption model" I've
been working on for more than a decade has yielded some interesting
insights, which have been the basis of much of my writing over that
period. To be useful as a troubleshooting tool, though, it needed a
lot more refinement. It especially had to be able to address specific
behaviors of people, which I considered one of its main deficiencies.
It also had to better match the historical data, which was helped by
the addition of more data about ecological impact as a proxy for
consumption, along with economic activity.
The
most basic output of the model was a presentation of the past and
most likely future of global population and consumption, similar to
what I generated with previous versions. This time, though, I chose
to focus on types of consumption, needs and wants, and a new type of
impact – waste. Needs are the resources consumed to maintain
the most basic survival, while wants are additional resources
directly used by people, and waste is everything else that was
part of overall impact. I also tracked what is left to consume –
mainly members of other species (nature) and what they
produce.
Unlike
previous attempts, though, I left open the possibility of simulating
timelines of history that didn't necessarily match with real
experience: thought experiments describing what might be in other
universes whose past, present, and future look significantly
different from our own. This appealed to me because it could provide
valuable context what we observe in our daily lives; and it could
suggest actions we might not have anticipated by sticking strictly to
reality. It also would inherently reduce confusion between real
history and simulated history in my discussions, as I referred to
timelines rather than actual events.
The
first timeline
I simulated, arbitrarily called "Timeline 1," was my best
match to reality based on personal judgement about the variables and
methods used, as well as tracking of differences between my source
data and the outputs. By contrast, the source data represents
"Timeline 0," which is essentially reality, though subject
to change as more data is added – especially about future events.
In Timeline 1, humanity is producing vastly more waste than wants,
leading to peak population in 2020, peak economic activity in 2025,
and extinction by 2037 as nature is depleted to a point where needs
can no longer be met. This is accompanied by, and facilitated by,
individual economic reward for waste that is equivalent to reward for
meeting needs and wants, along with what the model shows is an
inevitable and increasing unequal trade of waste for wants.
I
will be adding more detail later, but the main points I just outlined
for Timeline 1 are very consistent with the lessons I've learned from
the bulk of my research, which is an argument for its usefulness in
troubleshooting the real problems the model was created to simulate.
Since Timeline 1 is based on human activity and does not include the
potential influence of external changes to the environment such as
self-sustaining climate feedbacks, it can mainly suggest actions we
can take to delay, if not stop, our extinction in the absence of
those changes. For example, one such action would be to reduce or
remove reward for waste, beginning with calling it out for what it
is.
One
of the discoveries I made in preparing the new version of the model
is a mathematical relationship between ecological impact and economic
activity. If it's correct, then the residents of Timeline 1 can't
just redefine how economic activity is distributed throughout the
population without factoring out the waste they produce. Such a
redefinition would, however, alleviate the grossly unequal quality of
life that is among the other problems some of them – and some of us
– might want to address, and may be a feature of another timeline.
