The Martian Scenario

A few years ago, I explored the idea that people's behavior could be described in terms of personality traits interacting with associated environmental variables, directed by knowledge and enabled by power, with the goal of finding the best match that would manifest as maximum attainable happiness. Because, in aggregate, a population's happiness increases logarithmically with ecological footprint, the price of continually growing happiness is faster depletion of ecological "resources" – including other species that provide basic services that keep the planet habitable. Population size multiplies this effect, and exponentially increasing population accelerates our approach to a critical point where habitability can no longer be maintained.

My projections have shown that this point will likely be reached by 2030. As it approaches, the world will get harder to live in as resources become degraded and harder to find and use. But we will keep trying, because more happiness and life expectancy are what drives us. After that point, deaths will exceed births, and our population will drop to zero by 2075, which I now understand will likely be due to our ecological impact having grown due to self-sustained global warming. According to my calculations, the difference in global average temperature from pre-industrial times will climb past 3.3°C, and the world will be uninhabitable.

Using the Big Five personality traits (OCEAN: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism), we can guess how groups of people will both perceive and want to act as this nightmare scenario unfolds. Power and knowledge can be expressed as efficiency in achieving total happiness, where efficiency is a fraction of the happiness someone doesn't have, which can be achieved in the amount of time it would ideally take to get from 0% to 100% happiness. Using efficiency, we can estimate change in happiness over time. Using the relationship between happiness and ecological footprint, we can tell how people's ecological impact will change over time. Assuming a statistical distribution of personalities among people, we can also estimate how many people will act in a given way.

I expect that the openness, conscientiousness, and extraversion traits correspond to variability in the environment. The more variable it is, the more a person with high openness prefers it. Because a rapidly changing environment can't be easily planned for, people with low conscientiousness will prefer it. Extraverts will like the excitement of rapid change, and be more inclined to be active parts of communities that must react to the change and share resources. I estimate that maybe 1% of the population would (initially) benefit from large variability.

The cooperation/competition dynamic inherent in the agreeableness trait would correspond to the distribution of resources among people, as well as the amount of social order and violence that accompanies its breakdown. People with high agreeableness (around 17%) would prefer to share resources and avoid conflict, while those with low agreeableness would do the opposite.

A high amount of neuroticism would translate into increased stress as deviation from preferred conditions for the other traits increases uncontrollably and inescapably. Stress leads to more disease and death, and ultimately may kill off the most people, even those with low neuroticism (17% of the population), before environmental conditions do.

Climate change due to global warming is perhaps the best example of how humanity's influence on the world's physical systems is changing the range of environmental conditions. In the case of temperature, the range has shifted significantly from what we depend on, and will continue to do so (such as in Australia this past summer). As some conditions become less likely, those people who are best adapted to them (and are happiest when experiencing them) will find it harder, and eventually next to impossible, to meet their desires and then their needs, mirroring what is already happening to other species whose ecological niches are disappearing. If the shift happened slow enough, our population (and those of other species) might be able to change its preferences through evolution so that more members would be adapted to the new conditions, or new species would do so in our place, but climate change in particular is happening far too fast.

Technology and social behavior have enabled people to adapt to different conditions, and can be expected to do so in the future – up to a point. My calculations indicate that they enabled our efficiency at achieving happiness to increase by several orders of magnitude until the 1950s, when it spiked due to immense technological progress. Efficiency achieved a minor peak in the late 1980s and has been declining since then. Notably, that last peak occurred less than a decade after the world's annual ecological impact exceeded what ecosystems could offset in production and processing our waste.

Using our highly complex civilization as a base, we can now support keeping small numbers of people reasonably comfortable in space for limited periods of time. With a moderate amount of additional development, artificial habitats might be able to support a dozen or more people over a lifetime on a planet like Mars. By my crude estimates based on personality, around 220,000 people would find our rapidly deteriorating world acceptable, and only 300 of them could have enough power to prepare for its physical consequences. It is conceivable that such a minority (curiously close to the actual number of extremely rich people) would attempt to outlast the rest of us just as Mars settlers would eventually be forced to do.

Environment Control

In our pursuit of more happiness and longer lives, we humans have been modifying our environment, gradually bringing it within our control. My recent research suggests that in 1943, as the world's industrial base was ramping up in the midst of war, humans for the first time could control the average environment. Our control increasingly accelerated until 1965, as world oil discoveries were approaching their peak. We haven't been able to maintain that level of acceleration since then, and recently – 2007, as the world economy was tanking and we had arguably hit peak oil – our control began to actually decelerate. If current trends continue, I project that we will stop being able to control the environment at all in 2022, corresponding to when the world's population is expected to peak.

The research is based on a premise I've explored in the past, that we each have a set of conditions under which we thrive the most – are the most satisfied with our lives. Simplistically, this might be correlated to our personality, which expresses how we prefer to deal with the rest of the world. If our environment is matched to these preferences, then we will have maximum control over our lives and be as happy as possible and live the longest; to the extent that it isn't, then we are unhappy and don't live as long.

If we simply consider an arbitrary continuum between two extremes for the human population that represents our preferences, the average for the random population will likely correspond to the center (if the extremes are arbitrarily given values of zero and one, then the average of the population would be one-half). The environment (technically, the part that affects us) would have a similar continuum, but not be necessarily bounded as we are; that is, it could have a value less than zero or a value greater than one. Using these definitions, we have maximum happiness (and life expectancy) when our “value” and that of the environment are equal, and happiness decreases as the values get further apart.

With some reasonable assumptions, I used my historical estimates of happiness and their projection into the future to derive how the average of the environment's continuum might be changing over time. The small and virtually constant happiness in the earliest part of my simulated history forced me to accept the idea that the environment's continuum would largely be out of our control, represented by how much of it didn't overlap with the population's continuum. As the population has consumed more, corresponding to its growth in size, the overlap (control) has increased. Unfortunately, we are unable to continue this process for much longer, since the resources we depend on for that control are becoming harder to get and process.

The historical summary at the beginning of this post is my first attempt to assess how this new viewpoint relates to actual events, and the first evidence I can recall of a direct correspondence between my models and peak oil theory. What we may actually be seeing here is a glimpse into the difference in effects on consumption growth between energy supply and the depletion and degradation of the biosphere, which I expect to expand on further.