As
our global civilization self-terminates due to its unwillingness to
reduce the damage it is doing to the biosphere, especially from
habitat destruction and carbon pollution-induced climate change,
there is the potential for a lot more damage to be done. When a
complex technological system goes through something similar,
engineers call it "hard shutdown," with unpredictable, and
often negative, consequences for both the system and whatever is
connected to it. Engineers have learned to design systems with the
ability to maintain some reserve power in the event that main power
is lost, and use that power to control interactions between its
components before turning them off so that damage doesn't occur; this
approach is called a "graceful shutdown." I've
mentioned this before, in the context of avoiding disaster; I'm
arguing now that we should pursue it even though disaster
is now likely.
In
my novel "Lights
Out," I explored what a hard shutdown of civilization
might involve on a small scale, and how some people could survive it.
Violence and death are virtually assured, particularly if people
don't know what's happening and why. The powerful sociopaths who
promote misinformation about climate change and the negative effects
of unrestricted capitalism are working toward this outcome. If even
a quarter of the population goes along with it (an approximation of
the number of unquestioning followers of authoritarian leaders), and
the technology of war and violence with its huge threat-multiplying
capability remains readily available, the collapse of global
civilization may take down all of humanity instead of just a
majority, even before climate change has its full impact.
A
graceful shutdown scenario would involve a growing number of people
meeting their needs without using non-renewable and ecologically
damaging resources, while respecting and preserving each other's
right to meet the basic needs of survival. Relationships between
people would become less about property and more about valuing life
for its own sake. Money, such as it exists in the future, would be
used for its most fundamental purpose, accounting, rather than as a
means for concentrating personal power. Critical to this scenario
would be the promotion and dissemination of accurate knowledge and
understanding, and the development of a value system that outright
rejects as evil the promotion of self-serving distortion of reality.
In
technology, hard shutdowns are typically the default, with thoughtful
design being necessary to enable graceful shutdowns. Considering
that our global civilization has evolved with the built-in assumption
of perpetual operation and growth, hard shutdown looks like the most
probable outcome. With the time we have left, more of us can work to
redesign parts of it, to limit the negative consequences. The
Transition movement is one example of one of the more radical
redesigns in progress, while renewable energy technologies are being
pursued by people who expect civilization to require mere tweaking to
avoid the worst of potential futures. I hesitate to brand these
attempts as futile, since they are moving in the right direction; but
they must be accelerated to a pace even greater than the exploitation
of the fossil fuels that now threaten us, and it remains to be seen
whether this can be done in time to have a measurable impact on the
nature of the shutdown that is nearly upon us.
