Termination

In early 2014, people in the simulated worlds I call "Green" and "Hikeyay" began entering the Termination phase, and external impacts started to drive available resources down. Green is what I consider the best match to our real world, and Hikeyay is the world portrayed in my fictional Simulated News blog. Termination is marked statistically by high age and no life expectancy, ending in the Death phase a few years later. 

By early 2020, half of Green's population will be in the Termination phase, and people will be in the Death phase by 2026. I chose a different path for Hikeyay by essentially reversing the drivers of extinction: stopping population growth; reducing per-capita consumption; and using technology to eliminate both waste and the external impacts. The timing of Hikeyay's global strategy (especially the new version that was recently "approved") is determined by the simulations, which are based on correlations between variables and trends identified in the historical record, and is consistent with recommendations from people who have studied the range of possibilities in far greater depth than I have.

I have been attempting to add higher resolution to the simulations that could ideally guide actions by groups and individuals to reduce the number of people in the Termination phase (from whatever that number might actually be). The results are being presented in all my venues – especially this blog, the Simulated News blog, Twitter posts, and Patreon posts. 

For example, since my last post here I have identified two major groups within the global population whose constant merging may help to explain political preferences within the actual population: one of them embodies the past and the other embodies the future; and their relative population sizes tantalizingly correspond in percentage to those of U.S. conservatives and liberals. I have also derived population-level phases and how many people might be supported in each nation if the world has a healthy overall phase distribution determined by total consumption. 

Just recently, I had an insight into the interactions between people in different phases that prompted a new way of visualizing their relative amounts of population and consumption. It is based on the trading of resources from high to low phases that best matches historical data, and accounts for the counterintuitive observation that those people who consume the most have the highest ratio of natural resources to resources used for basic needs (are at the lowest phase). Essentially: the majority in settled territory is converting raw resources to processed resources, and trading them with "colonizers" who are exploring and preparing new territory and its resources that are becoming so scarce that they will become processors right after people begin entering the Death phase at the population peak (five years from now in simulated world Green).