Drop Ratios

After 2001, some people began experiencing falling happiness and life expectancy in my Timelines simulation (“Green”) that best matches our history. Starting in 2012, both of those variables were zero for a growing number of people whose part of the population was essentially living the rest of their lives without being replaced by children. The rest were still growing toward the peak that they had left. These conditions are identified in the following example as ranges of “action phases” that are derived from the ratio of unused resources to resources used to meet people’s basic needs.

ABOVE: Distributions of population, happiness, and life expectancy as functions of action phase at the beginning of 2020. Three ranges of phase identify trends in happiness and life expectancy: Growing (phases 1-5), Falling (phase 6), and Dying (phase 7). In this example, 16% of the population is growing, 35% (51% minus 16%) is falling, and 49% (100% minus 51%) is dying.

The conditions can be further reduced to “drop ratios” that compare the amount of people falling and dying to the amount of people growing. These are defined in the following graph, which projects how they change over time. Note that historical data is used for years through 2014 (where a “year” corresponds to the middle of the calendar year), and every year after that is a projection.

Drop Ratio 1 is the raw drop ratio, is now more than five, and is projected reach nearly eight before the total population is projected to peak and then decrease. It notably decreased just once, in 2009, corresponding to the global recession in that year, but has increased every year since then.

To the extent that people’s motivations might track with their membership in these phase ranges, it is conceivable that the people in the falling range might be split between siding with those who are growing and those who are dying. Drop Ratio 2 assumes an even split between the two.  

The following graph shows the drop ratios as functions of world phase (the phase for the world as a whole). Also shown is the fraction of the population that is falling and dying, which begins at phase 5. For reference, the world phase at the end of this month will be 5.8. 

C-low

A new simulation ("C-low") using my updated Timelines model holds annual population change equal to the historical raw death rate while reducing per-capita consumption so that by 2040 no one is in the decline or termination phases as shown in the following graphs. As before, external ecological impacts such as climate change are taken into account along with our affect on them until that point, after which the impacts will need to have been stopped to avoid disaster.

By comparison, the "Hikeyay" simulation used for the Simulated News blog includes a population rate based on estimated population loss due to age that is more than four times the historical death rate to achieve a lower maximum phase (5.4 vs. 6.0). The best we can do to reduce total consumption, using the current death rate and a final per-capita consumption that allows for basic survival only (simulation "C-min"), results in a maximum phase that is just a little larger than Hikeyay (5.6).

The model's improved evaluation of economic variables, now including the observation that money flows from high phase to low phase – which the previous observation of flow from small to large per-capita consumption very closely approximates – confirms that wealth inequality is still a problem regardless of what approach we take. Our present inequality (the ratio of maximum to minimum wealth per person) is still the highest: about nine times C-low and Hikeyay in 2040; and about eight-thousand times C-min in 2040.

I am inclined to claim that I misjudged the fraction of the population dying due to age in the Hikeyay simulation, and favor the C-low simulation instead. In that case, per-capita consumption would need to decrease by 3.75% per year until external impacts stop (resources stop becoming unavailable for consumption). If impacts continue past 2040, restarting population growth will become progressively harder, and basic needs will not be supportable after 2050, virtually ensuring the extinction we are trying to avoid.

Failed Responsibility

Having failed the most important test of political responsibility in our lives, we the citizens of the United States are now coping with the aftermath – both socially and environmentally. 

Those of us living with the mistaken belief that "personal responsibility" without societal correction is the key to a better future seem willing to tolerate the consequences of disabling the most powerful tools of that correction, governments, with the faith of a spoiled child that an omnipotent parent – either a deity or an economic force – will prevent the worst of those consequences.

Meanwhile, the rest of us must soon, if not already, deal with the reality we helped create, and continue fighting to slow the global trajectory of death and destruction that is by now inevitable. That fight requires enforcement of honest accountability for how people's actions impact others, and promotion of valuing life above everything – including pursuit of possessions and life-devaluing status – that are stealing or degrading the resources vital for its continuation.

A mix of two strategies for avoiding harm (confrontation and mitigation), this approach assumes that people are capable of changing their motivations sufficiently to cause an appreciable slowing in both consumption of critical resources and competition over what's left. To the extent that such a capability does not exist, for example due to innate biological or psychological limitations, then success will be limited. Current behavior as an adaptation to past pain may also be a limiting factor, though some change might be accomplished with a more measured, compassionate approach.

Other countries are trying their own strategies, in part by legacy (they're stuck with what they have) and in part by experimentation. Like a worldwide game of musical chairs, we're all doing what our experience and judgment guides us to do; and like that game, we'll have to live – or die – with responsibility for the result.

Avoiding Harm: A Primer

Who or what is likely to do you harm, and how can you keep them from doing so? This question, always a pervasive part of our lives, has been amplified in public discussion by news of killing by both individuals and groups, and restrictions placed on freedom by governments.

The worst kind of harm is death, followed by physical impairment and pain, denial of resources needed for sustenance, and degradation of lifestyle above and beyond what we need to survive. Each has its own range of possibilities, including who is targeted and why.

Sources of harm are threats, and they can vary from specific individuals, to groups, technologies (physical and cultural), other species, and non-living natural phenomena. The particular threats that might affect you depends on where you are and what relationships you have with each of those potential sources – including how much you know about them.

How we avoid harm depends on the threats and our own capabilities, but tends to involve either confrontation, mitigation, or escape. Confrontation is elimination of the threat, while mitigation is an attempt to limit the harm it causes while living with it, and escape is separation from the threat.

Errors in threat identification and application of avoidance strategies can themselves cause harm, including the creation of new threats, so it is critical that they be minimized as much as possible. This requires robust acquisition of accurate knowledge and understanding of the world around us, and the formation and maintenance of healthy relationships with the people, species, and objects we might interact with. Taking such action has the added benefit of reducing the possibility and magnitude of harm under any circumstance, though of course it can't be expected to totally eliminate it.

When we experience non-lethal harm, we will naturally attempt to discontinue it and then recover from it. We must be just as careful in this process as we are in avoiding it in the first place. This includes learning from the experience so we can reduce errors in avoidance after our recovery.

These basic concepts will hopefully provide useful context for thinking and discussion about related issues.

Death Stoppers Imperative

Last week I published my new book, Death Stoppers Anthology, along with related music. Included with my favorite fiction and poetry are essays drawn from blog posts that, in my opinion, best address the most pivotal issues I've thought about. The last one, Options For A Reluctant Planet-killer, ended on a somewhat hopeful note when I wrote it back in June; but afterwards I fell again into despair, this time the deepest I have ever felt. A combination of factors contributed to it, which I was able to understand as I completed the memoir that ends the book. My life wasn't objectively worse, but my attitude was. With critical deadlines approaching or already past for transformation of our global culture into something much healthier in order to avoid catastrophe, I felt helpless to make even the slightest contribution, and my self respect was plummeting.

I pulled out of my tailspin and resolved never to let it happen again. The solution and its consequences are what I have been focusing on ever since. Essentially, I accepted that it's better to do whatever you can to solve the problems in front of you, than to hide from them or try to live with them, and it helps immensely to have a plan – even if it's one that needs changing later on. My old poem "Death Stoppers," included in the book (and where it got its title), is an outline of such a plan.

Key to the plan is fearlessness. When you've faced the reality that your life isn't worth much if you keep going in the direction you're going, and the security you expected from doing so is a hollow promise used to control you by people to whom you're just a thing (the root of all evil, as one of my essays explains), then going another way doesn't feel as scary. Knowing this, and feeling it at the deepest level, enables you to buck the system you've been depending upon for your survival, beginning with a fight for transparency and accountability for the damage being done to the world, by yourself and all of us, but especially the people who are most actively and willingly tearing it apart for their personal gain.

As my mathematical model of global population and consumption explains, our present crisis is a result of the relationships between personal happiness, consumption of ecological resources that meet our needs and wants, and population size, coupled with the fact that we have consumed a critical fraction of the ecological resources provided by our planet. This situation has made a few of us effectively too happy; and with no new resources to fuel their very human lust for more happiness, they are tapping into what the rest of us are using. Acceleration of this trend, and the depletion of limited resources used by us and other species who maintain our world's habitability, will cause more and more people to be deprived of their most basic needs, leading to their death and a decline in our overall population that we may never recover from.

Understanding this dynamic supports my argument that evil is a characteristic of actions, not people. We all have the drive to exploit our environment, and the power of physical and cultural technologies has enabled us to do so far more efficiently than our biology allows by forcing us to increasingly treat everything as abstract entities. We can – and must – be forgiven for following our nature and using the tools at our disposal to do so, but it must be accompanied by a commitment to offset it by adopting a set of values, such as love and health of all life, which translates into maintaining a habitable world for our population and the populations of other species whose own happiness is tied to their roles in maintaining its health.

Since we are currently at or near our maximum population, and climate change threatens to reduce ecological resources (including members of other species) regardless of our actions, we need to rapidly convince ourselves and others that: we are facing an existential crisis; we are responsible for it; we can be forgiven for our contribution to it (and thus avoid depression leading to suicide); we must adopt a new set of values that keeps it from accelerating and happening again; and immediate action is imperative. Then we have to take the action, beginning with cleaning up our collective mess and giving natural systems room to recover. That's a tall order, but if we are to be death stoppers instead of death enablers, we need to fill it.

Responses To The Habitability Threat

Earth is rapidly becoming uninhabitable by humans and many other species. Lately, and most critically for humans in near future, the climate is changing for the worst. Scientists interested in the truth are in the process of determining its exact trajectory based on what they continue to learn about the complex variables and systems that affect it, but they have no significant doubt about the general direction and the major reason why it is headed there: the atmosphere is trapping more and more heat due to humans releasing large amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. We are also influencing the climate in other ways, directly and indirectly; some effects are positive (such as pollution causing more sunlight to be reflected into space, having a cooling effect) and some are negative (darkening ice, causing it to melt and reflect less sunlight into space). The net effect is negative from the viewpoint of our ability to live here, which includes: contributing to greater uncertainty in availability of food and fresh water; increasing the amount and severity of floods and storms; and increasing temperatures so that more of us die from heat exhaustion.

The most obvious response to this existential threat is to stop doing what we're doing to cause it. This means abandoning our use of fossil fuels, which is the main source of greenhouse gases. It also means stopping our wholesale pillaging and destruction of other species and their habitats, species who have evolved to keep the planet habitable for themselves and others. On a deeper level, it leads to rewriting the definition of civilization to prioritize coexistence over exploitation, setting limits on our pursuit of resource-intensive happiness so that members of all species, including our own, can contribute constructively to maintaining a healthy, shared home.

Another response to the threat is to try dealing with the direct impacts, expanding our access to resources even more, so we can continue growing both our numbers and the creation of environments that maximize our happiness. Included in this response are various forms of geo-engineering, such as the development of new foods using genetically modified organisms (GMOs) that can live in the inhospitable environments we've created; removing excess greenhouse gases from the atmosphere; and blocking sunlight to manage temperatures at Earth's surface. Because this response doesn't account for the complexity of the systems and processes it affects, and proliferates the very approaches that created the current threat in the first place, it has the potential to itself create many more threats.

We could, alternatively, try to escape the threat. This might involve anything from building huge, underground habitats, to moving some people to another world where they have a better chance of survival. Neither option is practical for a significant fraction of our population, even if they could be exercised at all (or safely) in the time we have left before the threat becomes overwhelming, which could be anywhere from one to eight decades.

A fourth response is to deny that the threat even exists. This response includes dealing with the threat's consequences without knowledge or preparation, except to the extent that those consequences resemble otherwise acknowledged conditions. It also involves opposing any use of resources to support the other responses. Such a response has the effect of increasing personal jeopardy and the jeopardy of others who can be influenced to respond the same way.

If, as some scientists fear, we have activated multiple natural processes that are accelerating climate change, making it already too late to take any action that avoids the total extinction of our species, several other options present themselves. We could resign ourselves to that fate, like someone with a terminal disease, and try to have as much quality of life as possible until the end. For some, this will be too much to bear, and they could consider suicide before conditions become unbearable.

Based on population collapses of the past, the "unbearable" conditions following lack of success in reducing the threat (and avoiding worse ones) would be accompanied by increasingly violent competition for the remaining resources needed for survival. This fate is a certainty if it's either too late, or enough of us postpone significant remedial action until it becomes too late (such as if we are in denial, or if we believe failure is inevitable when it is not).

To take remedial action, it is psychologically necessary to have some hope that it will be successful. Among a growing number of people who are convinced that our extinction is practically inevitable, this is called "hopium," a drug that just makes us feel good. I suggest that the alternative be referred to as "mopium," because acceptance of the ultimate failure can lead to listlessness, depression, and in some cases suicide. Treating the symptoms of moping toward oblivion may deal with the feelings, but it also contributes toward making that fate more certain by inhibiting action to deal with the cause, both directly and indirectly (by criticizing others who threaten the failure worldview by believing action may succeed).

Advocates of remedial action have focused mostly on reducing what I call "dopium": intentional ignorance characterized by belief that the threat isn't real, and that remedial action itself represents a threat. Its causes are many, including misinformation campaigns intended to maintain the status quo, operated by a relative few who stand to lose substantial economic and social power that the status quo affords them, and stand to gain the most (in the short term, anyway) by panicked responses to future disasters. We need to instead focus on reducing both dopium and mopium if we are to marshal the human resources necessary to deal with the imminent threat at hand.