Interactions of Value

Interactions between groups can be used as a measure of people’s values. We can use changes in the amounts of people, habitat, and waste resulting from an interaction as measures of how much they are valued by the people involved in the interaction. 

Globally over history, the amounts of people and waste have grown at the expense of habitat such that the amount of waste exceeded the amount of people, and then waste exceeded the amount of habitat. Humanity will become effectively extinct soon after the amount of people exceeds the amount of habitat. 

In simulated world called “Green” that is based on historical data, waste exceeded people by 1940. Waste began exceeding habitat in 2015. By 2018, some members of the world population needed more resources for survival than there was habitat in their accessible environment. By 2025 as many people will be dying as are being born (the population will peak) and half the world’s total resources will be waste, after which there will be net death as increasing waste replaces more habitat. Overall, people will exceed habitat by 2037; and extinction will occur by 2041.

ABOVE: Amounts of resources over time.

People, habitat, and waste are not distributed equally within the world’s population. If they were, then there would be effectively one group of people cooperating to live the same way. In the simulation, a simplified version of reality based on measurable behavior such as economic activity, resources are moved and stored by people throughout the population based on available habitat and produced waste. The world is divided into thousands of environments, each a group with its total resources (“capacity” or size) composed of people (represented by the habitat they consume for survival), habitat (other species and what they produce and can consume), and waste (resources not consumable by people or other species). Changes in the distributions of resources within these environments are indicative of the interactions between them.

If we look at the world’s resources as environments with their capacities adding up (accumulating) based on increasing ratio of people to habitat (habitat ratio), we can see how their distributions compare with each other as a function of their size. This order is chosen because groups with close habitat ratios are similar enough to naturally interact with each other, as found in statistical analysis of economic activity (which, by definition, involves movement of resources) and correlations of life satisfaction. 

Environments with the most waste as a fraction of their capacity have the fewest people as a fraction of their capacity. As the total amount of waste increases, waste occupies more environments, and those environments have larger fractions of people in them. Another way of looking at this is that the groups with fewer people are at war with the groups that have more people (who are consuming), forcing them to move and grow into other environments by flooding them with waste and thereby depriving them of habitat until the habitat can’t support them (domination). Continuing growth of waste (exploitation) results in collapse, with the entire population having too little habitat to survive in environments that are essentially the same (except for one in the simulation, where one person has no waste and too little habitat to survive).

ABOVE: Stacked fractions of resources in each environment as a function of cumulative capacity shown for each decade since 1900 and projected through 2040 in simulated world Green.

In terms of value, interactions tend to favor waste more than people, and habitat only to the extent that it contributes to increasing people and waste by decreasing until it becomes critically low, which is too late to salvage it.

 

Interactions

 The people in two groups can avoid interacting with each other, remaining in isolation. They each have an amount of habitat (resources that meet the needs of people and other species), and waste (resources that displace habitat).

People in each group can interact with each other, with several results based on the rates of change of people, habitat, and waste. 

COMPETITION: 

Domination – One group dominates the other by killing its members.

War – The groups fight each other, replacing people with waste. 

COOPERATION:

Sum – The groups live together, meeting their basic needs and not changing the amount of people or waste.

Restoration – The groups live together, increasing habitat by having less people and less waste. 

Cleanup – The groups live together, increasing habitat and reducing waste. 

EXPLOITATION:

Consumption – The groups reduce habitat by converting it into people and waste.

Collapse – Habitat is reduced to less than what is needed for people to survive, resulting in mass die-off.

If one group is the global population and the other is the next year’s global population, then mostly consumption has occurred, with very few years of cleanup. Collapse is likely soon.

ABOVE: Example of two groups and results of interaction. Area is proportional to the amount of resources. The amount of people is equal to the needs they consume.

Generations of Interaction

A new model of group interaction draws from lessons learned in reproducing global population and natural resource consumption by proposing that the result of two groups interacting depends on potential changes in three variables: available resources, population, and the available resources per person.

People in each group attempt to maximize those variables by choosing among three possible interactions: remaining isolated, taking over the other group's resources (domination), or combining the two groups and sharing all resources. Whether resources are appropriated or shared, people can choose to maintain the same resources per person by changing the group's population, or to divide the resources equally among them. Each group's success in pursuing these options depends on its population: the more people it has, the more successful it will be.

The net result is the generation of a new, integrated group that is a mix of all the possibilities based on their probabilities (likelihood of success) and another group of "lost" people and resources. Just as some energy becomes useless when two gases mix, the losses are the equivalent of "waste" as far as the original two groups are concerned. The integrated group still has some differentiation into subgroups, with five subgroups (corresponding to interactions) for each of the original groups. These subgroups can now interact to generate another version of the integrated group; this second generation also results in losses of people and resources to join the waste from the first generation.

Barring interaction between the integrated group and one or more new groups, further generations will change the integrated group until there is no one left (every person has been converted into waste). If a new group is encountered, then the new group's people and resources will interact with the integrated group to generate a larger integrated group, while also expelling more waste.

This model needs to be tested, a process that should yield some interesting insights. For example, a first attempt at using it to describe humanity's relationship with the rest of the biosphere has shown that our population and the equivalent population of other species will be equal at 7.9 billion members, which is also the peak value of population before per-capita ecological resource consumption is forced to drop in the backcast model of population and consumption (with no global warming). Unless we find a new biosphere, keeping humanity's population constant will require reducing the biosphere's population and resources over several more generations which each take much less actual time than the many millennia in the first generation.