A Pandemic-Altered Future

I have continued refining my simulations to account for the progress of the COVID-19 pandemic and the potential futures that might result from it. The strong correlation of carbon emissions and total consumption suggested that atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration could be used to estimate total consumption; I would then project total consumption along with the ratio of needs to remaining resources based on population projections made from pandemic global death statistics and my simulation (Green Prime) of population without the pandemic.

A curve fit of carbon dioxide concentration and total consumption automatically factored in the effects of natural contributors and the cumulative aspect of consumption and extracted the resulting consumption, as shown below.

I updated projections using weekly mean concentration and the average difference between Green Prime population and total deaths from COVID-19. The current projections are shown below.

Despite the apparent convergence of deaths toward a maximum beginning in May, the projected population (“R Projected”) suggested a much different situation. This was perhaps due to an excess of deaths by people who couldn’t be treated for life-threatening conditions other than the virus, or it was due to underlying growth in the virus-related deaths, or both, but it convinced me to continue allowing the possibility of greater growth in deaths as shown in today’s population projections below.

Projecting global variables into the future based on current data shows that the virus would result in one year less of survival for our species, as shown below.

Reducing per-capita consumption (ecological footprint) would still extend our remaining time, although temperature would continue to rise. The following graph shows one such scenario: a 2% annual drop until just needs are being met.

Another option is to freeze consumption at peak happiness and life expectancy as shown below. This would result in temperature exceeded the 2-degree Celsius threshold earlier, which would likely force a decrease in population.

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.

The Happiness Approximation

One of the cornerstones of my understanding of global population and consumption is the mathematical relationship between happiness and ecological footprint (our individual consumption of ecological resources). While trying to derive real significance from the convenient abstraction, I gained insights into how much of the natural world we can safely use, the purpose and mechanics of the global economy, and how people's values influence the survival of our species. Yet still I didn't fully appreciate why it had the form it did.

In the mean time, I grappled with the dynamics of human behavior and how to derive a means of successfully communicating the lessons I was learning so they could be used to hopefully extend the lifetime of our species, which my research showed is uncomfortably limited. One approach was to focus on complexity and how it influences both comprehension and the completion of basic tasks. I studied the implications of a general relationship I had discovered in my own experience between efficiency and the timing of progress in various activities, including the propagation of error in product development and messages as represented by my writing and that of others.

I suspected that task completion might be related to the pace and nature of global consumption and population growth. While I couldn't find a close correlation, I did discover that our species is attempting to use all of the Earth's resources that don't threaten the planet's ability to meet our basic needs, and we have historically been doing so in at least four different ways at a speed that varies with how much we consume.

A few weeks ago I had the latest of a string of epiphanies that has marked my research since the beginning. I accepted the possibility that the timing of consumption might be independent of the timing of task completion, and sought to generalize how they might fit together to describe how much resources are consumed during a task. In the process, I derived a relationship of the form found between happiness and ecological footprint. I was then able to apply the generalization, which I came to call the "happiness approximation" to how happiness has changed over human history and how it could conceivably change over a person's lifetime.

As I studied the consequences of the happiness approximation, I homed in on the special cases of completion and consumption that involve full use of resources in the completion of a task, which would be optimum where resources are limited. A simple statistical simulation showed that optimum completion averaged out to 76%, and that general completion had an average of 87%. Averaging those two values produced the 82% that the happiness relationship had identified as maximum average happiness for a population (and also happens to be close to the 80% used as a rule of thumb for realistic completion by project managers.

The timing of task completion also rang a bell of familiarity. The minimum amount of time it takes to complete a task (in the simulation) is 19, which is close to the 20 years that is the lowest life expectancy in my historical data (at the earliest year: 10,000 BC). If this correlation is correct, then it is the earliest point in a person's life that they can achieve 100% happiness, which according to the simulation only happens in 14% of cases.

I also modeled a better match to traditional expectations of task completion time, including something close to achievement of historical values of happiness and life expectancy in 2015. It never achieved total or optimum completion, and still took three units of time to reach maximum consumption, which is what I typically use for planning purposes (where one unit of time represents best possible achievement). Only 2% of a general population achieves that or better, which speaks to how selective an organization must be to realistically promise such performance; much less than 1% could be expected to achieve the perfect performance that an organization might optimistically promise in one unit of time.

Temperature

Assuming my modeling of population and consumption is correct, then the famous 2° Celsius limit for global warming by century's end is twice what it should be. According to my first attempt to incorporate global warming into the model, if we are successful and the warming is already self-sustaining then we need to immediately start reducing our per-capita ecological footprint by at least 0.7% per year to avoid casualties between now and the year 2200.

A decline in total ecological resources due to degradation will have the same effect as consuming too much, eventually making it impossible for people to survive and our population will crash. Whatever causes it (global warming as an example) must be stopped before that critical threshold is reached, otherwise all we can do is delay the end date.

If, as I expect, humanity will soon be forced to consume less overall (through personally cutting back, losing population, or both), then our slowing rate of pollution will enable natural systems to process the lesser amounts resulting in the approximation of no net increase in the amount, and eventually a decline. In the case of greenhouse gases, I've assumed no decline in the next two centuries, which means that temperature (their effect on the environment) will not decrease either. As far as I can tell from my data, that effect has been masked by our overall consumption, so it hasn't yet resulted in a decrease in total resources; but with us now pushing against the envelope of those resources, there won't be enough left to both process our waste and provide for the survival of the species we directly depend on.

Perhaps by coincidence, my projected temperature will match with the historical trend in 2019, and others who are planning for future emissions seem to be targeting 2020 as their starting point. Also, I projected that direct emissions will decrease around the same time, except for short pulses corresponding to attempts to reach the resource limit after drops in population. For these reasons I chose 2019 as the starting time for a hypothetical decrease in total resources responding to global warming, and for attributing the difference in emissions to other factors that make it self-sustaining so that the temperature trend continues into the future.

The result, which is as close as I can currently come to a representation of future global warming, has consequences much worse than the case I first presented above, which is the best my model can achieve in terms of avoiding casualties with declining resources. Whereas my default case with no resource decline projects a world population of 5.8 billion people by 2200 (a "loss" of at least 1.5 billion), the global warming case projects that everyone will be dead by 2165. Adaptation in the form of limiting population and consumption growth adds only four years to that end date. For reference, in most scenarios I've looked at, the temperature above preindustrial times when the population crashes is about 2.5° C (it is currently 0.7° C, and would be 1.7° in 2100).

Shutdown Time

With evidence continuing to mount that our ability to survive on this planet depends on stopping the burning of fossil fuels as soon as possible, it's time to start holding all governments and corporations responsible for the planning and implementation of a swift and safe reduction of the global ecological footprint to no more than half what it was in 2013, beginning with the total elimination of operations involving the use of fossil fuels. In short, it is now time for what I referred to in an earlier blog post as a "graceful shutdown" and bringing safe alternatives online that provide the basic physical and social needs of everyone alive today.

Reducing our footprint involves both lowering our consumption of ecological resources and rendering harmless the pollution we've dumped into places that harm the world's ecosystems, including the atmosphere. We also need to secure or render harmless substances like nuclear fuel that could potentially become harmful pollution.

Individuals and communities can do some of this on their own, perhaps best by using the concepts and techniques collectively known as "permaculture" and explored in test cases by the international Transition movement. By changing what they buy, who they vote for, and who they work for, as well as advocating for shutdown by the organizations they are part of, people can have a considerable impact on the probability of success.

Much of my recent writing has been devoted to exploring how long it takes to perform tasks, as well as the complexity of events and activities. This may have seemed tangential to my main focus of studying our potential future and how to avoid its negative trajectories. In fact, I have been using this immediately practical knowledge to start laying groundwork for how to plan humanity's next moves (and personally determine how I can maximize my contribution to creating a healthier world). Understanding learning curves helps us as individuals to judge the honesty and competence of organizations who we support or might potentially support, as well as the quality of what we do and what we get from others based on complexity. More than this, we have a useful tool for deciding between alternative actions that could get us to a goal or set of goals. My discussions of values, competition, and cooperation were intended to explore another, critical dimension to making plans: that of amplifying collective effort to accelerate progress instead of reduce it – or worse.

I spent a lot of time determining the likely trajectories of population and consumption, largely to assess the large-scale context for making responsible decisions. I focused particularly on the timing of the crisis revealed by the variables I analyzed, which has closely followed the projections made by many real experts in the social and environmental sciences and therefore gives me more confidence in what they are saying. It seems that no matter what angle is used for examining our immediate future, the conclusions are the same, and they are at odds with the technologically and economically optimistic orientation of most businesses I have studied in my attempt to meet personal financial responsibilities in the short term. From within a socio-economic system fixated on eternal growth in physical consumption and consolidation of power, the very concept of voluntary shutdown is akin to the worst form of heresy in the most conservative of religions, and I understand the potential costs of even suggesting it; yet the costs of not doing so and going further are likely to be much, much higher.

In future writing, I intend to explore what shutdown plans might need to include, and what they may look like in some detail. I also expect to discuss what "holding responsible" means, especially as means of assessing the legitimacy of organizations and their operating principles.

Popscillation

One potential future for humanity I hadn't considered before was revealed recently by my Population-consumption model: population decline followed by oscillation around a new average value (what I'll call "popscillation").

I had simulated humanity's targeting of alternative worlds with populations at least as large as ours, the center of which seems to track in a predictable way with the total ecological footprint. ("Worlds" are combinations of population, consumption, and environments that people use to maximize life satisfaction, or "happiness"; the total ecological footprint, or "total footprint" is the amount of ecological resources consumed by humanity in one year.) The simulations show that over history (since 10000 B.C.) we have deviated somewhat from the direct route to the target, with that "direct route" changing over time. Every route, however, ends in a similar way, with the main difference being the size of the population.

Eventually our consumption will limit the remaining alternative worlds to those with populations no larger than ours. Since happiness depends on the ecological footprint (how much ecological resources each of us consumes per year), we've also reached a limit to how happy we can get without decreasing the population. The simulations show that we will choose to increase happiness, and with it, total footprint. Increasing total footprint reduces available resources, which decreases the largest population of the remaining worlds we can live in. That decrease drives a drop in our own population, which temporarily decreases the total footprint, allowing a slightly larger population if other species can increase theirs in the interim (creating more resources). We then increase our population, along with our footprint, which increases total footprint again (total footprint is footprint times population). This popscillation continues, with a population whose average eventually levels out at a value around 5.8 billion people, with fluctuations of tens of millions per year (assuming nothing else changes). On average, happiness is only slightly greater, people live about a decade longer, and the populations of other species fluctuate along with ours.

On our current route, we are due to begin popscillation soon, if we haven't already. Leveling out will occur over the next 50 years, unless other variables like climate change reduce the available resources further, both reducing the available population sizes and accelerating the decline. If we abandon our historical proclivities and reduce consumption enough to grow back the populations of other species to healthy levels while maintaining our current population, we risk reducing both our happiness and our life expectancy to levels not seen in a century. Such is the situation we find ourselves in on this Earth Day, according to my calculations.