Distributions

People are organized into communities that enable the acquisition, movement, manipulation, and use of resources in order to maximize the quantity and quality of what they value. Each community has its own strategy for doing so based on its values, its abilities and the composition of its environment.

Averaged over the world population for more than 70 years, my simulations show that the annual distributions among people of biologically useful resources have maintained a common pattern, with communities changing what parts of the pattern they occupy and the parts they interact with. The primary distributions are people, habitat (resources composed of, and used by, other species), and waste (resources converted by humans into forms that are not biologically useful). 

Processed to display how their amounts change relative each other, the distributions can be used to indicate how much different parts of the world’s population value people, natural environments (habitat), and created environments (waste). As the number of people is added up in order of increasing habitat density (people per unit of habitat), the value of people rises; the value of created environments drops; and the value of natural environments climbs to a peak and then falls. This is shown below.

There are three distinct groups defined by the intersections of the trends. The smallest, amounting to 1% of the population, is dominated by the value of waste over habitat and people. The second, amounting to 24%, is dominated by the value of habitat over the rest. The third and largest group, 75% of the population, is dominated by the value of people. Based upon my simulations, any isolated population with limited resources (embodied by habitat), that is not consuming more than a critical amount of them, will have these characteristics. 

Consuming more than two-thirds (67%) of total resources results in the first group growing at the expense of the other two until the amount of remaining resources is less than the total number of people - who will be in just one group that values everything equally. My simulation that best matches history shows that this year humanity will be consuming more than the critical amount, as shown below, and will reach the end point bordering on extinction by 2040.

 

Values and Responsibilities

Next month will mark three years since I quit my job to work full time on completing decades of research into how actions serve values and translate into global consequences. Beginning with the primary value of survival (because without survival there can be no other values) I had focused on how many people can exist, for how long, and under what conditions. The scope broadened to include life satisfaction, or happiness, which correlates strongly with the number of resources people consume that are provided by other species. Statistical analysis of historical data for population, life expectancy, economic activity, and other variables revealed other correlations that tracked consistently throughout the data and suggested a theoretical framework that linked them together.

Translation of the resulting mathematical model into experiences of individuals and groups enabled testing by comparison with events and stories from the past and present, along with projections of potential futures. The potential futures were extremely disturbing, since they indicated a high probability of an extinction-level population crash in the near future. Because of this, I worked mostly on deriving alternatives and actions that would enable them, much as I had used models of equipment and conditions to troubleshoot problems that I found during my career as a test engineer. I concluded that effort last year after simulations incorporating global warming variables and the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic converged on a narrow range of actions that might significantly delay catastrophe.

With my savings starting to run out and hardly any income from the writing business I hoped could support my efforts, I spent more time searching for another paying job. This experience has been both a necessity and a test case for how to live based on what I learned. Reading hundreds of job descriptions has reinforced a lesson learned during past job hunts and embedded in my model: money flows toward those taking risks to find, exploit, and trade resources that can be used for future growth. Servicing those people or becoming one of them is increasingly a key to individual survival; it is also a surefire way to help decrease the longevity of civilization by eliminating other species that we depend upon for our collective survival because there are no new ecosystems that can sustain us. The fastest and most direct way to extend our lifetimes is to clean up and leave habitat we have taken from use by other life, which is the opposite of what our economy rewards.

Hunting for income triggered an evaluation of successes and failures in past jobs so I could find better matches in the future. Defining success as the meeting of my expectations and my employer’s expectations with minimal difficulty for both of us, I realized that success for me depends on matching my responsibilities with my values. Ability is another factor, but I’ve been able to learn and adapt quickly enough in most situations to keep it from being a major one. Failure, when I experienced it, was typically associated with a conflict between an employer’s expectations and one or more of my values which couldn’t be remedied to the satisfaction of both of us. 

This insight about employment suggested a new way to characterize the results of my research, which I was coincidentally starting to formalize as a scientific paper that could be reviewed by academics and others for strengths, flaws, and potential use in further research. A person in any of three relationships with their environment (growth, overshoot, loss) focuses on attaining one or more states of being (survival, happiness, longevity) for one or more groups (self, other people, all people and other species). Values and responsibilities can both be categorized by focus, which usually includes self-survival, self-happiness, and self-longevity. 

 

Relationships to environments tend to predispose the people in them to get what they don’t have enough of, so the relationships can be used as proxies for common sets of values and responsibilities. In general, everyone prefers to be in the overshoot relationship - every person that is, since overshoot involves our consuming more than other species can replenish and therefore depends on them dying off. The inevitable decline in resource availability reduces how long the population can survive (its longevity), which is felt by individuals who are forced into the loss relationship and therefore value reversing what caused it. Meanwhile, people in the growth relationship value survival of themselves and people in their closest groups; this drives population growth along with individual consumption that increases happiness by enabling creation of personalized artificial environments.

Although most of my life has been spent in overshoot, I was strongly influenced by a culture of growth. I also experienced loss and have accepted its all-inclusive values. I’ve been questioning the wisdom of unlimited consumption and its impact on longevity since I was 16 years old; and for various reasons I avoided situations where I might have children until it was practically too late. As an older adult facing loss again while trying to maintain a hold on overshoot, I know from my research that the world as a system is about at the same point and is on the verge of moving every person and other species into the loss relationship either by choice or by force.

The scenarios that I derived for delaying catastrophe are simply summarized by one rule: Avoid loss. Keeping everyone from being in the loss relationship with the environment starts with freeing up habitat for those already there, which my most-likely scenario estimates could be 5/6 of the world’s population by mid-year. Completing that move by the end of this decade could also keep global warming from making parts of the world uninhabitable while we develop ways to reclaim even more habitat and learn to live with the result. Notably the (simulated) last time no one was in the loss relationship was in 2001, and the last time no one was in overshoot was in 1949, which provides some historical context for what we might expect.

As improbable as that scenario is, I suspect another one may be emerging that could be considered just another version of catastrophe by those valuing all life. Humanity’s ability to consume more than what other species can provide without harm (thus “overshoot”) is a consequence of large-scale replacement of natural habitat with artificial environments that contribute to happiness and together can be considered artificial habitat. In the new admittedly speculative scenario, attempts to escape the deathtrap caused by reducing the amount of remaining natural habitat are enlisting molecular engineering and machine intelligence to create a new biology that totally redefines what and who we value, including ourselves and our needs. Time is running out for this scenario to play out: my model projects that, on the current trajectory of consumption, people will start dying from lack of habitat by 2026 and humanity will be extinct by 2057. For the new scenario to match the expected one (and what I consider a reasonable timeline for new technology rollout), this may be a manifestation of how the rest of the population transitions from growth through overshoot over the period 2028-2044 while so many others are dying.

The next two decades will either validate or invalidate the concepts I developed over the past two decades. Since exploration is a process and not an endpoint, I expect that if I’m alive then I will have asked many more questions than I answered while helping to more effectively find other answers; and I will be happy to have done so. To the extent that my efforts, whatever they are, contribute to creating a longer and better past for those whose lives I affect directly and indirectly, my life will have served my values. By that standard, I intend to increase my overall positive impact until I can’t, choosing appropriate responsibilities along the way.

Waste Age

A new version of my Timelines model introduces a simulated history, Timeline 2, that is a better match to real history than the previous one (Timeline 1) and includes more variables. The following discussion is based on that timeline with reference to events in our own past. References to years after 2013 are entirely based on projections for Timeline 2.

In the second decade of the twentieth century, science and technology was undergoing revolutionary innovation, especially in the areas of physics, medicine, and transportation. They both aided, and were aided by, the conversion of energy, material, and other life into forms that humans could not directly consume in the wild ("waste"), whose yearly impact on natural ecosystems for the first time in history exceeded what the entire population needed for basic survival.

Three decades and two world wars later, that innovation along with global awareness and social innovation was coming to terms with the consequences of that waste. Among the benefits was an increase in life expectancy (when the death toll of war was excluded) and increased potential to customize people's individual environments, reflected in life satisfaction (happiness). Costs included the potential for a few people to inflict harm and death on a large fraction of the world's population, intentionally or by accident.

By the 1950s, waste was more than double the amount humanity consumed to survive, and that ratio grew faster than it would any other time before 2020. By itself, our timeline's waste was one-eighth of all life-related resources on our timeline, while Timeline 2's waste was one-seventh of its resources. This included both reusable resources and the creatures that produced them; but the fractions of just reusable resources were three times as much.

The limit of reusable resources was passed on both timelines in the early 1970s, with each converting more than three times as many resources into waste as were consumed for basic survival. By then, it was glaringly obvious that the environment was deteriorating on a global scale, especially in response to pollution. At the same time, supplies of fossil fuels that had enabled much of the previous years' growth were becoming harder to find and economically extract. 

Scientific and technological research focused in response on increasing energy and material efficiency to reduce the speed of resource use and the harmful and costly impacts of continuing the lifestyle that waste had enabled. It also also turned toward repair of the damage already done and identifying how humanity could survive if the situation got worse. Biotechnology explored the alteration of biological systems, including food sources and ultimately humans, so that a variety of different resources could be used and harsher environmental conditions could be tolerated. Space exploration, initiated in the 1950s in tandem with mini-wars and rivalries that barely avoided devastating scenarios enabled by the last world war, served as a test bed for technologies that might help people escape Earth and survive in the most inhospitable of environments.

These developments were accompanied by a reduction and leveling off of the waste-to-needs ratio, which was a result of growth in population (and its associated needs-consumption) exceeding the growth of waste production. That waste, by 1998 in Timeline 2 and 2003 in our timeline, itself took up an amount of resources equal to the reusable resources (technically, an ecological footprint of one Earth per year), with needs taking up one-third as much. 

Until 2005 in both timelines, life expectancy could be expected to increase along with waste-driven economic activity. After that year, though, that advantage became a statistical disadvantage and then a liability. More affluent people were able to live longer, so the fraction of children (people younger than 20) fell for what was already a small part of the population to a level where life expectancy became effectively zero for the richest in 2016. Life expectancy continued to increase for the younger and less affluent, driving the population average upward as more people gained access to the technology embedded in the still-growing waste. 

By 2020, waste will have rendered dead or unusable half of the entire world's life-based resources. This would coincide with a peak in total human population, two-thirds of them adults, consuming enough in needs and wants to leave only one-third of the world's original resources intact for planetary life and life support. 

The urge to grow older might be behind what is likely to come next, if a series of possible natural catastrophes, perhaps related to climate change, doesn't reduce the remaining resources on their own. Continuing growth in waste that enables survivors to grow older will by 2022 cause the growth in life expectancy to stop for the average person in the population and decrease after that. This might be perceived as increasing protection of the younger people more likely to have children, but with more people dying than being born this will be a fleeting advantage at best.

The world economy, measured in Gross World Product and wealth, based on transactions of products and services mostly consisting of waste, will continue to grow until 2025 and then fall as the loss of people able to make transactions offsets the growth in waste.

Average life expectancy will be zero in 2031, followed by population (and of course, the economy) in 2038. The waste created by humanity will persist longer, such as greenhouse gases that could still be warming the atmosphere for thousands of years. After we have briefly benefitted from it, it and the destruction it has caused will be our most consequential legacy.

Earl's Myth

In the latest installment of a novel I'm writing in parts, a fictional industrialist named Earl recalls a myth he used to finance his nascent company. The myth was based on an ecological interpretation of businesses within an economy which in reality I made up while writing about it:

Economies functioned much like biomes, with companies acting like organisms, industries functioning as populations of species, and economic activity joining them in communities that, together with the physical resources such as people and materials that they collected and processed, functioned as ecosystems.

Of course, economies are artificial, but I wonder if most of us tend to expect similar things from both our artificial and natural environments. Evolution has shaped us to get what we need from natural environments if we follow certain instinctive behaviors, and to penalize us if we don't. Education serves a related function in relating to civilization by priming both our skills and our expectations so we can survive and thrive to the extent that we occupy useful niches within our artificial environment.

For the analogy to work, people must be equivalent to organisms in both types of environment, but there are many indications that it is no longer working. Perhaps the most obvious indication is the huge amount of wealth inequality in the world today, the equivalent of which would, I suspect, never occur in a natural system that wasn't about to include at least one population collapse. Instead, as Earl's myth described, we have organizations that are functioning as organisms, and people have been relegated to the role of "resources."

For the most part, the few people who have mastered control of the artificial organisms, through the acquiescence of their fellows and the illusion of embodied energy in money, still function as organisms themselves, and receive rewards commensurate with their occupation of the new niches demanded by the artificial world. The rest of us are simply used, then discarded, and perhaps recycled eventually (after extended periods of unemployment) while others are "consumed," all the while thinking that the work and personal degradation is an appropriate sacrifice for a better world created by the super-organisms (some of whom are still like us) that will eventually meet our wants and needs too.

Of course, the fact that our artificial organisms are using actual resources, and are crowding out the real organisms whose bodies and work enable our planet's habitability, means that the flesh-and-blood puppeteers of those organizations will also be part of the human population collapse facilitated by their efforts. Barring the success of fantastical efforts like that described in my book (a success we may not end up wanting), humanity will have to dispense with dangerous myths like Earl's and become reacquainted with Nature's reality just to survive.

Tree Line

In the late 1990s, I was on a group hike that nearly ended in disaster. About a dozen of us were above tree line on a mountain just as a thunderstorm threatened to move in. Our goal was to reach a small lake near the top, but the thunderstorm made it too dangerous to continue. A handful of people insisted on going anyway. Since it was an organized hike, the entire group needed to return to the trailhead together, so the rest of us waited at an abandoned mine so the others could find us when they returned from the lake.

We hunkered down in what little cover we could find just as the thunderstorm moved over us and began dumping torrents of rain. In the distance, we saw a couple of people become trapped on a rock face, and we were soon joined by a larger group of hikers who were less prepared than we were. We assisted the newcomers and debated just how safe we really were. The storm was bigger than we hoped, and it became clear to most of us that the risk of staying was too great. During a brief lull in the rain, we and the newcomers made a dash for the trees. Luckily, the rest of our group had made the same decision, abandoning their trip to the lake, and joined us at tree line. After hiking down the mountain as fast as possible, we encountered emergency vehicles waiting for the hikers we had seen on rock face.

I was reminded of this story recently as more bad news came in about humanity's sabotage of natural systems. Honeybees, critical to the survival of plants, are losing habitat because of climate change. Meanwhile, scientists have documented a mass die-off of seabirds that suggests serious problems with ocean ecosystems. Catastrophic seal level rise may now be inevitable, again due to climate change; and a new study indicates that we humans are critically reducing the collection and availability of energy necessary for ecosystems – and us – to function.

Like hikers determined to get as far above tree line as possible, we have defined "progress" as distance from Nature. We have done the equivalent of cutting down trees to fuel our ascent, altering the weather in the process and spawning the thunderstorm that threatens to maroon us, and then kill us. Heading back down the mountain is perceived as an act of cowardice, giving up on our dreams; so some people go ahead, while others compromise by waiting in the brush just above tree line until they come to their senses. Meanwhile, the risk is growing that lightning will cause the remaining trees to burn, cutting off escape, and that the thunderstorm will grow and last a very long time.

We can do the equivalent of retreating below tree line, and try to grow as many trees back as possible to reduce the risk; we could hunker down and hope the storm passes; or we could follow our original plan and keep going up. The option you choose depends on what you value; and if you value people's lives above arbitrary personal attainment, then the choice is obvious.

Complexity and Global Warming

Global warming continues to generate bad news for the present and the future:

• El Niño has finally arrived, promising that temperatures over land will soon rise to compensate for the statistical lag between observed and predicted values
• Oceans and land are becoming less efficient at keeping carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere (the latter no-doubt aided by our rapid erosion of soil), and temperature rise will likely accelerate to a new rate not seen in over a millennium
• As California, already suffering from historic drought, is coming within a year of exhausting its stored water, and the largest South American city is much closer to running out of water, new research projects that multi-decade "mega-droughts" are likely to become normal by 2050
• A huge Pacific cyclone has just decimated the island nation of Vanuatu

Meanwhile, the legislative branch and the governments of several states in the nation most responsible for the problem (mine) are actively trying to convince its citizens that the problem doesn't exist, and that it is acceptable to continue the actions that precipitated it. These actions benefit individuals and corporations who stand to lose large future profits if the actions don't continue, and who bankroll the campaigns of politicians who spend more time pandering for money than developing the legal framework for maintaining our increasingly complex society, which is arguably much more than a full-time job by itself. That complexity, and the inherent limitations of our minds and bodies in dealing with it, along with arbitrary values and knowledge unshared and untied to the realities of community survival in this new world, is fundamentally inhibiting the responsible application of the power granted humanity by its numbers and its technology, power which has enabled our present, existential crisis.

Ironically, reducing the complexity and the power likely have the best chance of reducing our risk, but it will also reduce our domination of the natural environment that is the measure of happiness that we are most tuned to. Some of those who resist such a reduction seem to have put their hopes in advanced technology, effectively outsourcing mental effort to computers now on the verge of artificial intelligence, and attempting to reduce our dependence on wild species for maintaining Earth's habitability by tinkering with their biology and ours. The resisters may however be trading one set of problems for a potentially more dangerous set, as some of the smartest (human) minds have warned regarding artificial intelligence.

Luckily for most of us, complexity is built upon simple building blocks and relationships; and with some training and freedom to explore and think about what's around us (instead of being slaves to our jobs, our tools, and distractions), we can use that fact to make a dent in creating a more healthy part of the world for ourselves and those we come in contact with. Global warming, for example, is a special case of too much waste in an effectively closed system like the Earth, a consequence of our physical relationship with Nature that people throughout the lifetime of our species have understood, or learned the hard way (as many of us are doing now).

When we acted as part of Nature (ecosystems) instead of apart from it, energy and materials cycled through us with negligible waste, where "waste" is the result of an activity that is unused or unusable by life for a period of time. Now we generate much more waste, and those materials (including gases) that do enter ecosystems can either be used by life, harm it, or kill it, at least until something evolves that can use (consume) it. One way to judge whether we are creating too much waste is to observe whether the amount of animals and their variety is decreasing around us, which is a basic sense built into our own biology. Clearly we are failing that test, and are on the way to failing the ultimate test while we keep doing so, as the growing list of hazards and catastrophic events stemming from global warming clearly indicates.

The View from Home

Sometimes, it helps your thinking to just look around where you live. For all my study of ecology and culture, I have to admit a fair amount of ignorance about my local environment outside of the usual range of knowledge most of us have. For example, I didn't know until very recently the species of trees on one of the routes I frequently walk (the dominant ones, currently with leaves, are Blue Spruce, Western Larch, and Ponderosa Pine). Of course, knowing the name of something is mainly good for communicating with other people about it, sharing what you each know and perhaps taking action based on that shared knowledge. I have a number of books (not to mention access to the Internet) which can provide a lot more information, including the books I've used for identification.

I've spent a lot of time studying and thinking about the similarities and differences between what I call the natural world and the artificial world, and how the two interact. My focus has been mainly on how what we do with them is healthy or not, contributing to our survival or ensuring our demise (there is, of course, a lot more to care about; but given the currently high probability of our demise, I feel justified in my preoccupation). In the urban area where I live (metropolitan Denver), the natural world is clearly at a disadvantage: trees, shrubs, and grasses are planted, pruned, and watered wherever people deem they can be, and wildlife is tolerated wherever it isn't perceived as a threat to the way people think their environment should be. My state has done a fair job of protecting wild areas both inside and outside of settled regions, but even there you can see that plants and wildlife have clear limitations imposed on them by the artificial world, a part of which we all carry with us.

The recent disaster in Japan was a horrific reminder of how the the two worlds can seriously harm each other, and how that harm can potentially spread to every neighborhood due to the global reach of the artificial world and the huge influence it has over the natural world. My neighborhood has already seen extreme weather due to the climate changes caused by industrial activity all over the planet. The vacancies at local malls are part of the devastation caused by marauding Wall Street traders and irresponsible bankers who live many hundreds of miles away, and hint at more systemic problems. For a beginner naturalist like me, it's going to be tough learning what's normal for my area before it all changes, but at least I'll understand the changes better in the process.

Prime Happiness

Key events in the history and potential future of the world's population seem to be associated with prime number multiples of minimum happiness (life satisfaction). This may be a coincidence, or it may be an indicator of some deep biological connection with Nature's limits. Whichever is the case, it's extremely fascinating.

First, some background: Happiness, as a fraction between zero and 100%, appears to be related to how many natural resources we each consume per year. By estimating this per-capita consumption for the world's population, we can calculate what the happiness is. I have a mathematical model that does this, along with estimating the size of the population, how many resources there are, and how fast we must be able to move what we consume (transport speed). The model and its results are detailed both in this blog and on my Web site.

I became interested in happiness in an attempt to explain how population and per-capita consumption appear to be in synch with each other, and have been recently focusing how fast population and resources change. The clearest connection with happiness comes from how fast these growth rates themselves change, similar to the familiar concept of acceleration (the speed of something's speed). A pattern emerged when I compared these accelerations to multiples of minimum happiness for the past and for potential futures.

Minimum happiness is simply how happy people are when consuming the least amount of resources, which I expect to be equivalent to today's poorest people. Everyone was at this minimum more than two-thousand years ago, and the world had a stable amount of resources that humanity could eventually use. As the population grew, there was enough labor to extract more resources, which enabled further growth. Because total consumption – how much everyone was consuming – is proportional to the square of population, the total amount of resources decreased more and more rapidly (it accelerated).

By the time 10% of the initial resources had been consumed, in the late 1800s, happiness had doubled (the multiple of happiness was two). This also translated into an increase in life expectancy of nearly half. The speed of the population rate (the acceleration of population size) stopped increasing and began decreasing.

In 2008, we passed the tripling of happiness (a multiple of three). The population has already stopped accelerating, corresponding to a peak in the population rate, and the population rate is now decreasing toward what I project will be an eventual crash as it continues to fall past zero. At that zero point, when the population is as high as it will ever go, resources will once again be at a 10% point, but this time only 10% of the initial amount will remain, and happiness will be at a peak of 3.1 times the minimum. Life expectancy will be close to doubling (reaching a maximum of about 1.9 times its maximum), but never get there.

The only way to keep happiness increasing (but not the only way to avoid the crash) is to increase the number of resources. If we could do that, probably by settling much of the Solar System, we might be able to achieve 100% happiness for everyone, which would be nearly five times the minimum (actually, 4.9). It is odd and possibly significant that life expectancy would be a multiple of 2.7 times its minimum, very close to the value of one of the most important constants in mathematics: the base of natural logarithms.

There may very possibly be a biological limit associated with 100% happiness; but assuming there isn't, there is an ultimate limit to how much mass we can consume, set by transportation speed: the speed of light. Here is where we meet our last prime number. At the speed of light, happiness would be about seven times the minimum (actually, 7.3; the multiple of 7 would correspond to 0.4 times the speed of light). Life expectancy, meanwhile, would reach its highest level at 3.8 times its minimum.

I find it interesting that life expectancy shows an equally memorable pattern by nearly doubling when Earth's resources are exhausted, nearly tripling when 100% happiness is achieved, and nearly quadrupling at the ultimate limit. Perhaps the most amazing aspect of this analysis is the existence of both patterns existing simultaneously. Whether it's coincidence, an artifact of my math, or the discovery of a fundamental aspect of our relationship with the Universe, finding it has been both a lot of fun and confirmation that asking questions and exploring the implications of their answers is well worth the effort.

Two-Thirds Happiness

It's either the most incredible coincidence I know, or I've stumbled onto something approaching a natural law.

If you've been following this blog or my research site, you're aware that I've been fascinated with the mass of resources the human population annually consumes (extracts, uses, and converts into waste) and how it corresponds to our satisfaction with life -- “happiness.” Over the past few years, I've discovered what I believe to be key relationships between this consumption, the size of our population, and how fast we can move those resources in the process of making transactions with each other. I've used these relationships to project how our consumption has changed over time, and determined that humanity is headed for a population crash within the next twenty years if we don't make major changes to how we live, mainly because we appear to have started with a fixed amount of resources and we've become increasingly efficient at using them rapidly. Our happiness, subjectively measured on a scale from zero to 100%, appears to vary logarithmically with our personal consumption; that is, it takes progressively more stuff to increase our happiness by the same amount. I've used this statistical correlation to study how happiness may have varied over human history, how it's likely to change in the near future, and what we would need to do (mainly in the procurement of more resources) to satisfy the trend in increasing happiness we appear to prefer.

Happiness obviously isn't the same for everyone: there's a minimum, a maximum, and an average. Until a decade ago, the minimum happiness stayed pretty fixed, since and the maximum kept rising. In 2001, the maximum reached 100%, where almost by definition it would have been unable to exceed. Because the average kept increasing (evidenced by consumption), the minimum would have needed to increase to compensate (I suspect that the increasing investment in poorer countries has been the economic manifestation of this). Unfortunately, soon after, the rate of growth in consumption (that our economy depends on) began to slow down, and by the onset of the recent recession there were too few resources to sustain the entire population at 100% happiness for more than a year. If my projections are right, by 2021 the world's population will reach a maximum, and the the average happiness will be 64%. If it could continue increasing, the average happiness would get up to 65% by the time my projections show the population plunging to zero, in 2027.

As I discussed in my last post, if we somehow pushed past 100% happiness and could acquire more resources (not to mention keeping our planet from dying), we would eventually reach an ultimate limit to consumption, imposed by the fact that we simply couldn't move resources, and products we produced from them, faster than the speed of light (and technically, not even that fast). Happiness would be pegged at 149% no matter what we did.

Now, finally, here's the freaky part: 100% is pretty close to two-thirds of 149%; and as I mentioned, average happiness would be at 65% when I'm projecting the population to crash, if we avoided the crash, and that's pretty close to two-thirds of 100%. If that doesn't send chills down your spine, consider this: When the world's population was consuming all of the resources produced annually by the biosphere (Earth's “natural capacity”), the average person was two-thirds as happy as the average person might be if our population could grow to the point where it was consuming all resources that existed 2,000 years ago – 59% vs. 87%.

It's well known that our minds are predisposed to see patterns everywhere we look, and mine very much follows that rule. A rational interpretation, as I said at the outset, is that there's no pattern in what I discovered; it's just coincidence. But since I'm an “idea explorer,” it's tempting to consider the implications if it's not.

One of the most puzzling aspects of my work on the relationship between population and consumption has been the identification of the mechanism linking the change in population to the total amount of resources. What if happiness has a biological component that enables us to feel how close we are to a natural resource limit, and it is linked to another component that adjusts population controls such as fecundity and stress levels so we don't get too close?

Technology and culture were likely responsible for us clearing the first such hurdle, in 1857, when average happiness was two-thirds of what it would be when we consumed all of the natural capacity; humanity was in the midst of the Industrial Revolution, which enabled access to the remaining resources. The world was consuming all the natural capacity in 1994, but only a relatively few people seemed to notice, which implies that by then feedback from our artificial environment to the putative biological controls was overwhelming the feedback from the natural environment. In the following decade, the negative feedbacks from our destruction of Nature's production and maintenance capabilities and our depletion of non-renewable energy sources became too large to ignore; at the same time, some of us reached 100% happiness while average happiness was at 60%.

Suppose that 100% happiness is a manifestation of a biologically-based indicator of maximum resources, and two-thirds of that (67%) corresponds to the depletion of natural capacity. This could have been set by evolution, translating into detectable (logarithmic) terms the ratio of ecological production (natural capacity) to the total mass of producers (natural capital) and natural capacity, which I estimate to actually be close to 1/96. If this is true, then it may not matter to our population trajectory if we find more resources; our internal sense will trigger increasing population control behavior, ultimately leading to a crash.

I must once again emphasize that this is speculation that just starts to explain what may be total coincidence. It needs to be tested. One way is to try falsifying it, such as posing the following question: If increasing happiness leads to dangerous behavior, are the people above the 67% threshold acting that way? I'll close by answering the question anecdotally, observing in the United States that the “rich” are clearly acting in a destructive way through their hoarding of money, sociopathic social agenda, paranoia, and continued demolition of the natural environment, despite evidence of the negative consequences for people and the climate (which they publicly dispute).

Fatal Flaw

The artificial ecosystems we call economies developed so we could gain more personal power, without having to give anything back to the rest of the natural world (and, to a growing extent, each other). Knowledge translated into tools (technology) that could enhance this power through access and processing of “raw materials” – the lives and life-blood of the biosphere – to create environments under our direct control. Social manipulation, enhanced by communications technologies, allowed people's behavior to be coordinated so these environments could continue to be built, improved, and function with minimal disruption in the service of their main goal.

Natural ecosystems were obvious templates for the artificial ones, except they had the unfortunate characteristic of diffusing the power of individuals rather than concentrating it. This characteristic was understandably left out of our creations. Several early attempts failed dramatically, and others much less so, merely harming large parts of their populations without totally self-destructing.

Associating the failures with the lack of power diffusion, some people tried to force that diffusion in alternate types of economies, but without realizing that it was a consequence rather than a cause, a consequence of a deeper aspect of ecosystems they failed to reproduce. And their economies also failed.

Eventually, technologies grew so powerful that the world was able to unite under a dominant economic model, a model that sadly still had the fatal flaw, but with a workaround that kept it from totally failing. Then the workaround began to lose its effectiveness, and the global economy began to falter. The prospect of worldwide failure, accompanied by the collapse of the entire human population, became too obvious to ignore.

Tragically, the underlying cause was known decades before.

Natural ecosystems function by using available energy to drive the transformation of non-living materials into life and back again, recycling everything, and collecting and reusing as much of the energy as possible. Life is not only a consequence of this transformation, it manages it. To do so, it must adapt to the variety of materials and energy sources available. Different forms of life (species) operate with different sets of inputs, and produce a different sets of outputs. Many interact with each other, using what the other has created as an input, and providing its output to another species. Every individual of every species has a role to play, and is rewarded with survival and the ability to reproduce for as long as it can do so. “Power” in Nature is a reward for keeping the transformation process going, not a goal in itself. If any population interferes too much with the process, by reducing the diversity of life or consuming more than it produces, it is generally punished severely, often by death; if it is the only population of a species, the species may go extinct.

Our artificial versions (economies) treat groups of people with specific skills as the equivalent of “species” and process energy, materials, and other species into people, objects, chemical compounds we can't use or that makes us sick (waste), and useless energy (entropy). These then become “outputs” that are returned to natural ecosystems, typically without regard for whether they can be processed by other species and eventually become “inputs” to our economies in useful forms.

Those economies that collapsed did so because they were unable to consistently acquire usable inputs from natural ecosystems, get rid of their waste (so its toxicity overwhelmed people), or both. Those that diffused power arbitrarily, without demanding that individuals perform their roles adequately, failed because they couldn't effectively do even the processing they were attempting.

Today's dominant economies survived this long because they could change where they got their inputs and where they sent their outputs. If one ecosystem became unusable, they could effectively move to another one. They did this, and became adept at changing their internal processing to handle a larger variety of inputs. They even learned to use several ecosystems simultaneously. This workaround was not without negative consequences: often there were people and economies dependent on those ecosystems, and they either resisted (sometimes violently, and generally unsuccessfully) or were assimilated into the dominant economy. Dealing with these consequences became a standard part of the workaround, often co-opting social institutions such as governments to do the dirty work (such as military domination).

The success of the dominant economies led to globalization, which ironically has made the workaround both harder to use and less effective. People have more political options for fighting the co-opting of their ecosystems. Economies are so dependent on each other now that what affect one, affects the others. Technology has become powerful enough for economies to affect the entire biosphere – all ecosystems simultaneously – and there's also nowhere else to go, though a few enterprising souls have their eyes on extraterrestrial sources.

The most popular approach is to fix our economic model. This can involve creating fewer outputs, and incorporating into our internal processing a way to make the outputs we do create more acceptable (or at least less toxic) to the biosphere. More efficient processing can be used to reduce the amount of inputs we use. And we're still working on changing the types of inputs we can use, such as directly processing solar energy (instead of relying on plants and increasingly scarce embodied energy from millions of years ago).

Another approach, gaining interest but far from popular, is to reconnect our civilization to the rest of Nature by finding ways to become useful partners in the ecological process again. Among the options being considered is decentralizing our population into communities that rely on, and interact in healthy ways with, local ecosystems, including revitalizing them through restoration of habitat and detoxifying our existing waste. Many of the same people who diagnosed the problem with our dominant economies argue that the critical resources (among them easily used energy, rare metals, and fresh water) that they use as inputs cannot be replaced fast enough (if ever) to avoid their demise; we can only transition to smaller, resilient communities as soon as possible to avoid catastrophic population loss. To work in the long term, this approach would require a drastic reset of our personal aspirations, from increasing power to valuable service, which may be the hardest change of all.