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.

Redefining Waste

Further testing of my Timelines model has revealed that what I've been calling "waste" should be redefined. Instead of representing resources that are unusable, it represents resources we are using that should not be used. Specifically: whatever we consume that is more than half the world's total resources is waste, which I project is currently 20% of all that we consume and 12% of all resources. As a consequence, "wants" are that we consume that is more than our needs and does not include waste.

By this definition, waste first appeared in 2004 and is projected be greater than what we consume for needs in 2027, four years after global population reaches its maximum and begins declining. Since it is equivalent to other resources (instead of being un-consumable as with the previous definition), it is treated likewise by the world's population in every respect. The only un-consumable resources are those removed from the total by "self-sustained impacts" that are projected to have begun by 2015.

ABOVE: Projected fractions world ecological resources in the "Green" simulation using the new definition of waste.

Difficulty reproducing global wealth statistics was the initial clue that "uninhabited regions" (data points with no people or other species) were problematic. The estimate of relevant resources couldn't be justified with the more refined approach that now includes a better estimate of the numbers of people who have common characteristics related to other global variables with many more data points. 

Experimenting with different ways of allocating consumed resources over the world population including that "waste" resulted in two fundamental observations about both economics and consumption when the statistics were reproduced which are obvious in retrospect. First, the exchange of resources and money (that represents both resources and the value of exchange) predominantly flows from people who consume less to people who consume more. Second, the resources consumed for more than needs are distributed in proportion to the ratio of available resources to resources consumed for needs – the reciprocal of the people-to-nature ratio that I discovered is a basic driver of many of the variables I've been tracking.

Although the new definition of waste and allocation of consumption significantly change the projections of related global variables within the population, they have no effect on projections of the entire population over time and support general behaviors found with the earlier version. For example, consuming wants in addition to needs is still associated with a switch from an egalitarian to unequal distribution of wealth, but the details of that switch are different; and the upcoming changes more resemble a cascading failure than a "switch" to a new regime, driven as they are by the crashing of the world's population due to overconsumption (an aspect of which being increased waste).

ABOVE: Distributions of global variables associated with major changes in per-capita wealth projected by the "Green" simulation for dates shown below the Phase axis. Displayed are Phase = lifecycle phase, L = life expectancy, h = happiness, Fert = fertility, Cum P = cumulative population, R = total consumption, Cap = capacity, and C = per-capita consumption. The years projected for when part of the population begins to enter a new phase are shown as Epochs.

Values Realized

What we want out of life comes at the expense of Nature. This fact drives our relationships with each other and the other species we share the planet with, as well as how long and how many of us can survive.

No matter what group or groups we might be part of, we are all part of one group: the human species. The number of people in that largest group, its population, has been growing since the beginning of civilization, reflecting the value we collectively place on people. Like other animals, each of us requires a minimum amount of resources to survive, so the amount of resources we consume increases with how many of us there are. Since the populations of other species use or embody much of those same resources, the resources must be shared over time for the system of life to last as long as possible.

Most of us would prefer to live long and healthy lives. Because sharing resources is so critical, and we embody resources that other species can use for food, extending our lifetimes reduces the amount of resources available to other life during the time they are needed by those other species. Thanks in large part to our ability to develop and share knowledge and skills, and translate those things into material objects that can accelerate the process, we have enabled more people to live past birth and to thwart more of other species' attempts to consume us. As a result, we have increased consumption and more than tripled the average amount of time people can expect to live from birth (life expectancy) since the beginning of civilization.

We would all like to have satisfying lives. Happiness means different things to different people, but statistically it tends to increase with consumption in much the same way as life expectancy. This can be interpreted to mean that it is an expression of how well people are able to match their lifestyles to their personal preferences, which is enabled by economies that distribute resources among people through trade. Economic activity, which is easier to measure than happiness and tied more directly to consumption, is therefore often used as a proxy for happiness.

The Timelines model projects that, if we live like people in the simulated scenario Timeline 2, then global population, life expectancy, and happiness will reach their maximum average values between 2020 and 2022. The good news is that most people will get to see the pinnacle of human achievement, even though it won't feel good for half of them. The bad news is that life expectancy and happiness will reach zero for everyone between 2029 and 2030, and no one will be left alive by 2038.

Since Timeline 2 has 82% of its recent history in common with ours, it makes sense to use it as a baseline for discussion of the future. The values of population, life expectancy, and happiness are all dependent on what fraction of remaining resources people minimally consume: as the fraction grows, the values grow until the fraction reaches about 57%, falling to zero for fractions larger than that. 

If we don't want the values to drop (especially for population), then it makes sense to keep the population below its peak (affecting minimal consumption) and our additional consumption from growing (affecting the remaining resources). This is the logic behind the Fix timeline. We could alternatively let events unfold without intervention and hope that people will not overshoot the peaks; but if they do, that the apparent desire to consume more will be overcome by a desire to seek out the peaks, and they will voluntarily reduce their consumption to reach the peaks again.

The Fix and the "wait-and-seek" strategies include an implicit assumption that depletion of remaining resources is totally within people's control. The depletion beyond the economic equivalent of renewable products and services provided by other species is largely due to harm and killing of the species that provide them, and harm to species that those species depend on for survival. Those effects are caused by the same drivers as extinction: habitat loss, alteration of ecosystems by invasive species, pollution, use of common resources by the human population, and direct killing due to hunting and over-harvesting. Pollution in particular is having a greater role by changing the climate, whose predictability all species (including us) depend on for a variety of deep biological reasons, not the least of which being growth of plant life needed for food and oxygen production. When changes people make to the environment lead to cascades of changes that are self-reinforcing (positive feedback), then depletion multiplies beyond control.

In Timeline 2, the "waste" component of consumption (consumption in addition to basic needs and wants) accelerates its increase while population drops after the population peak. This may indicate that during that period it will be self-sustaining. If so, perhaps the significance of the population peak – and maybe the others – is that humans in Timeline 2 have a biological self-destruct trigger that activates when their actions initiate uncontrolled collapse of the biosphere they depend on for survival. The Fix timeline would therefore be impossible without some extremely powerful, and as-yet nonexistent, technology that could repair the damage as it occurs.

Another timeline diverged from ours and Timeline 2 in 1939. World War II was averted there, resulting in slower development of technology and science. The same desires and constraints existed, however, and the population peak was only delayed another 60 years...

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.

Losing Weight

For each day over more than a month I tracked my weight and food energy in an effort to empirically discover the basis of a strategy for achieving my ideal weight.

I found that weight in pounds, measured right after waking up, is proportional to the calories consumed the day before, with the calories per pound randomly distributed around almost exactly 10 (with repeatability, measured as the standard deviation, of 1.4). Some research into how many calories are used with varying kinds of exercise showed that this relationship tracks closely with the energy spent on a full day of sleep as a function of weight.

This made the strategy simple: daily consume only the amount of calories needed to maintain my ideal weight, calculated by multiplying 10 by that weight. To improve my chances of not exceeding that weight, I wouldn't consume any more than that; and to avoid getting too much underweight, I would consume no less than 8.6 (10 minus 1.4) times the weight.

I couldn't help but compare what I was learning about myself with what I had learned about consumption of resources by humanity as a whole. The calories needed to maintain ideal weight seemed to correspond to what I had derived as the "minimum ecological footprint," the amount of resources provided by other species that is required for stable basic survival where the resources are reliably available (as became the case globally, on average, about fifteen hundred years ago). The lower value of calories I was aiming for corresponded to the footprint for a hungry state of being, with uncertain availability of resources, which I had calculated as 80% of the "minimum" and was the starting point for idealized groups of people driving historical population and consumption change since the start of civilization.

It is tempting to try making a comparison between being overweight and consuming more resources than is healthy for the world. As we are able to consume more stuff besides food, we are also able to consume more food. Our life expectancy, which tracks with footprint much like happiness (gaining less and less as we consume more), begins to decrease as we become more overweight, implying that doing so overwhelms our inner ecosystem just as increasing our footprint eventually overwhelms the external ecosystems that support us. I have long hypothesized that there is an upper limit to happiness, beyond which we cannot go without self-destructing, and it's not a great stretch to expect that obesity might have a role in this given that heart disease is the top killer in the affluent U.S.

My personal motivation for losing weight is tied to the health risks of not doing so, just as my motivation for downsizing is tied to my awareness of how consuming more stuff is contributing to global extinction. It amounts to a selection of personal limits, much as half of the idealized groups in my reconstruction of world history (one-sixth of the population) chose to consume only one-fourth of the renewable resources available in a healthy world while the other groups chose to consume everything.

I am a latecomer to all of this. Many others have experienced a similar awakening of a desire to live within healthy limits, with common reaction to growing evidence of the alternative's imminent failure. Although we are far beyond the ability to succeed on a global scale, I share the goal to nurture that desire as much as possible, for as long as possible, and with as many people as might choose to share in it.

A Brief History of Civilization

About one million people inhabited the world twelve thousand years ago at the beginning of civilization, and were consuming just barely enough natural resources to increase the population by a paltry few hundred per year.

Five of every six people believed that humanity's destiny was to take over the world, while the rest respected Nature and wanted to consume as much as was safe for them and the other creatures in the world. The vast majority in each group preferred to maximize the number of people without improving their lifestyle, with the minority preferring to maximize their lifestyle without increasing the number of people.

Mathematically, the history of global population consumption appears to have unfolded as a result of the activities of these groups which grew proportionately with population. Each has succeeded according to their size and natural constraints, and together forming a spectrum that is a composite of all of them.

The group that respected Nature achieved its goal in the 1920s, when (on average) about one-fourth of renewable resources were being consumed by humanity, leaving half to other creatures and the remaining quarter as a surplus for use in hard times. With nearly two billion people in the world, the minorities had grown so that more than one million people wanting maximum happiness were in this group. In the other group, seven thousand people were working for happiness and world domination.

By 2015 we were three years from achieving the goal of using the maximum amount of resources that would keep the world habitable, but it was snatched away due to an unintended consequence of the pursuit of that goal: global warming. Our use of fossil fuels had unleashed the equivalent of a competing species, effectively consuming a growing share of the remaining resources, depriving us of their use, and then forcing us to consume less.

As long as the group that prefers population over happiness is dominant, we can expect population to stay constant while per-capita consumption drops to the minimum required to maintain a healthy population with food security, which is what it was about 1500 years ago (and what I've been calling "minimum footprint"). That level will be reached by 2040. The preceding decrease in consumption would have kept up with the removal of resources due to global warming.

After 2040 our consumption decrease will slow; but, as it drops, our population will drop with it. Even worse, our collective decrease in consumption will not keep pace with global warming. By 2063 our population will reach zero just as global warming "consumes" all of the resources needed by us and the species we have depended upon.

This narrative tracks with updates to my population-consumption model utilizing new data and insights. It includes the results of a "backcasting" exercise that reproduced basic features of past population and consumption, lending credibility to its projections. My narrative of the future is based on an observed correlation between average global temperature and humanity's global ecological footprint, and assumes that self-sustained global warming will have its own global footprint, independent of ours after 2015 (which is when it is calculated to impose a limit to growth of our own global footprint). As my Twitter feed will attest, I have been monitoring related news and have become convinced that global warming is currently self-sustaining and is having a significant impact on other species, especially those near the bottom of the food chain that will directly impact our survival.

Given our proximity to the limits my model postulates with and without global warming, the model is now making clearly observable predictions of the behavior of familiar global variables in the very near-term: global population, economy (Gross World Product), and wealth. Perhaps the most obvious of these predictions is a rapid decrease in growth rates for these variables over the next two years, beginning soon this year, and an unstoppable contraction of the economy and wealth beginning in 2017.

I likely won't live to test the most critical of the predictions, around 2040, when population either begins to fall because humanity has reduced consumption too far, or we will have already gone extinct after finding a way to survive while killing the rest of the species that historically kept us alive. If some people are alive when my projections show there will be none under any circumstances, then my model will be a glorious failure, glorious because I wish more than anything that the hideous future it projects never comes true.

Efficiency Revisited

In "Efficiency and Completion Time," I discussed how the amount of time it takes to complete a generic task typically takes longer than the minimum possible time. I've since explored the math behind that observation, and how it might vary across the world's population using insights described in "Changing People."

It turns out that what I called the "efficiency" of performing a task is equivalent to what we commonly know as a compounding interest rate on a credit card we're not paying off, where we are exponentially depleting the remaining amount of the task. If efficiency varies randomly from zero to one across the population, then the 68% of people in the central bulge of the bell curve will have efficiencies between about 0.4 and 0.6. That is, a typical person will accomplish between 40% and 60% of the remaining part of a task during a period of time that is the best case for accomplishing the entire task, which includes preparation and perfect luck. Very skilled people working on state-of-the-art projects, in my experience, are at the high end of "typical" efficiency, which is at the low end of the top 16% of the population that includes only one person who can achieve the task in the best-case time.

Realistically there is a limit to luck, which based on my testing experience is around 95%. This means that multiple attempts at a task are unlikely to all achieve more than 95% of it. Typical people take about 3 to 6 times as long as the best case to complete 95% of a task. Only 47 people on our whole planet could accomplish 95% of a task in the best-case time or less (notably, at the beginning of civilization this number was ten – at least two breeding couples – with this efficiency).

Of course, tasks are extremely variable, which would seem to make these kinds of comparisons meaningless. That variability is, however, covered by the definition of best-case time, which includes the influence of such things as technological aids, the education available to the population, and inherent complexity. Efficiency is explicitly tied to just what humans can do, which is subject to finitely limited physical and mental capabilities that influence the performance of all tasks, so the time to complete a task must be measured as the time that humans are involved in activities that support it, which includes education, skill development, and acquisition of resources.

It is also important to note that each person may not have the same efficiency for all tasks: for example, someone with 20% efficiency for one task may have 80% efficiency for another task; the bell curve simply represents the number of people who have given efficiencies. Tasks may also have common aspects that allow people to have about the same efficiency for multiple tasks, especially those that enable them to meet their basic needs in a natural environment.

In this context, our social infrastructure, which includes education, can be seen as a means of accelerating the effective completion level of common tasks to a point where further action on specific tasks takes a reasonable amount of time, especially those that affect the goals of the society – the most critical being its survival. This also involves preparing people to cooperate (another common task) so they can collectively benefit from each other's strengths (high efficiencies), and offset each other's weaknesses (low efficiencies) under changing conditions that force adaptation through performance of modified or additional tasks. With a random distribution of efficiencies across the world's population, it would take seven times the best time to prepare 99% of the population to do a common task in the best time; that factor, and the limit of time available (perhaps 13 hours per day) would determine how many common tasks could be prepared for.

One of the most common tasks in human history is our joint effort to dominate the natural world, which materially translates into maximizing our consumption of ecological resources (our ecological footprint). Our achievement of the task on a per-person basis has accelerated, with the best-case time since the beginning of civilization shrinking through radical changes from more than 220,000 years to around one year, and the appearance that we may have already achieved the task around 2011 and are now going backwards.

Epiphany

Last week I experienced an epiphany while taking a much-needed break at a local park. It involved one of the key insights from my research into world population and consumption, namely the equivalence of life satisfaction, "happiness," with how much of Nature we inhabit (what I've called "environments").

There is a theoretical maximum to happiness, reached when the average person consumes all of the renewable products and services ("resources") produced by Earth's biosphere, and we are now at a value below that number, apparently unable to move it any higher. I have struggled with the question of "why" many times since I first discovered it, and on that day I felt like I was beginning to see the answer.

I have yet to find a precise mechanism that explains my insight into happiness and environments; it is presently a compelling hypothesis that seems to have a lot of explanatory power. If such a mechanism exists, it is likely biological, and has an effect on the way we think and experience the world. I have already speculated that it may behind the observed psychopathic behavior of the rich, whose happiness (based on my research into the economic implications) is near or beyond the maximum. My new insight came from asking the following question: What if there are thresholds below that value that also trigger marked changes in behavior?

It is perhaps not coincidental that our present average happiness is pegged at a value equal to the square of the maximum. That value may be the "trigger" signaling that we are consuming all of the resources available on this planet without having fatal degradation of its habitability. I recalled that ecologists have determined that the other species which provide most of those resources need about 20% of the total to survive, a number close to the difference between maximum allowable happiness and total happiness (100% minus 82%), and we are now consuming about twice as much as we are allowed by that standard of safety. A reasonable consequence of such a trigger would be restraint on our consumption, and we seem to have been responding that way since 2011.

What about other potential triggers? A century ago, the world's average happiness was the cube of the maximum. Like now, it was a period of huge economic inequality, and of course it was followed by the Great Depression and was marked by immense global conflict. The fourth power of maximum happiness was experienced sometime near the middle of the first millennium A.D., which corresponds to the peak and fall of the Roman Empire. These associations may be coincidental, but they are also intriguing and suggest that further investigation may be fruitful.

Targeting Ourselves

Simulation using my mathematical model of global population and consumption revealed something extraordinary recently: an elegant pattern in the evolution of civilization. In essence, humanity appears to be attracted to the most options for living with more people than we have. These options are alternative "worlds" that our real world could become.

Until now, it seemed that population and consumption changed in almost random ways, generally increasing but in many ways subject to accidents of fate. I now understand this behavior to be largely due to the fact that the target is moving. As we consume more resources (destroy the rest of the biosphere, manifested as killing other creatures that keep the system healthy), we eliminate from consideration those worlds that require consuming more than what's left. As a result, the "center" of the remaining worlds changes, and it is this center that we are targeting. Since 1900, our targeting has become erratic as the distribution of remaining worlds changed dramatically and rapidly. The more we've "moved" to compensate, the more worlds we've eliminated and the less predictable our target's position has become.

While it's tempting to simply improve our targeting, there are now very few worlds left that don't involve lowering our population (0.07% of the worlds we started with). My simulation suggests that we may have already gotten as close as possible to the remaining worlds; and further, we may even be the only one left. That is, we'll be targeting ourselves.

What this means for the future is fairly simple and hardly new. Like someone who has overfished a lake, we have to give the fish (other species) time to recover reasonable and sustainable numbers. That is, we have to reduce our "fishing" (consuming so many ecological resources). Unfortunately, in this analogy, we've only got one "lake" where we can get our food – the Earth. If we stop "fishing" altogether, we'll be the ones who die off. If we don't reduce our fishing enough, we'll die off along with the fish. And all this assumes, of course, that we haven't already poisoned the lake (through, among other things, global warming).

Relative History

In 2001, for the first time in history, total life satisfaction became possible for at least part of the world's population. That part of the population had characteristics that enabled it to most effectively alter its physical and social environment to meet its wants, mostly by creating an artificial world out of the natural world. Until the limit was reached, each of these people's part of that conversion (consumption) had been increasing by an average 3.3% per year, corresponding to an increase of 0.004 in happiness (on a scale from 0 to 1), which they knew qualitatively if not quantitatively.

People with different characteristics don't experience life the same way, as if they inhabit different, yet similar environments. The others have tried to modify their environments, but they have fewer options, physically or by choice, and therefore compromise in meeting their own wants. Those closest to Nature, unable or unwilling to live above basic subsistence as humans had until the advent of civilization, saw almost no change at all in their environments; until, that is, they got a lot of help.

Acquisition of money has long been associated with consumption. Expecting their happiness to continue rising, those at its peak continued accumulating money and gambling it on the prospect of future growth. The money was gained by finding lower costs of labor (the poorest people) and lower costs of resources (the resources that had sustained them). Physical consumption among the poor began growing at the rate that the richest had previously enjoyed; but the total was still relatively much smaller, by a factor of about 600. This mismatch led to a decrease in the world's overall consumption rate beginning in 2004, which was soon followed by a global recession as it became clear that the anticipated growth wasn't going to materialize.

That's my current version of recent history, anyway, based on recent research into the range of possible “environments” that people can experience and how observable variables such as happiness are changing over time. I remain uncertain about the nature of the happiness maximum, whether it's a biological failsafe (as I speculated in “Two-Thirds Happiness”), or a mathematical oddity (see “Prime Happiness”), but its existence does continue to have explanatory value, as this narrative illustrates.

Lessons from a Simulated History

The Industrial Revolution was likely responsible for the first appreciable fraction of the world's population consuming more than what Nature could provide circa 1848. By 1979, the average person had passed this limit, and half the population was converting into waste what the other half depended on to produce what it needed, which also happened to be Earth's life support system.

In 2001, some of us reached the pinnacle of happiness, with a life expectancy to match; at that point, the only way to continue the average growth in wellbeing was to increase what the poorest of us could consume. The fraction of the population with the highest life satisfaction continued to grow while the fraction in the upper-middle part of that spectrum, corresponding to the West's middle class, stayed roughly constant.

By 2021, when humanity has consumed 90% of the natural world and its life expectancy has nearly doubled what it was at the beginning of the Christian era, there won't be enough resources left to maintain its growth and the population will begin to rapidly die off.

These are the lessons of my most recent simulation of world history, which up to the present time matches closely with reality.

Now more than ever, it is clear to me that the trajectory of our population is intimately tied to our perception of our ecological environment, which makes sense from an evolutionary perspective since that's what our biology's development would have been most attuned to. It may well be that our population growth will always be offset by the diminishing of life around us, perhaps even to the point that we stop reproducing altogether when a certain threshold is reached, detectable by something as innocuous as the doubling of life expectancy. If these speculations are true, then how much fossil fuel we find won't matter nearly as much to our future as the ecological damage done by its extraction and use, and the same goes for every other technology we might imagine.