Future Reference

I hope that the next 30 years will be much better than my attempts at projecting the future have indicated. They will almost certainly be different – and interesting. At the very least, I want to be able to look back (assuming I live that long) without regretting the way I spent that time.

My latest projections are now being tested by experience. Interestingly, the latest element of my analysis is the subject of worldwide attention now: the potential progress and impacts of global warming. I have taken time off from writing and modeling to follow the COP-21 negotiations in Paris, and to acquire and process the latest news that pertains to my research. Coincidentally I am facing some personal and professional deadlines that require planning inputs just like the projections I have been working on. As a result, I've decided to use the projections I currently have, for both planning and discussion, with the goal of incorporating the results of those uses into a future update of the model that produced them.

I've created a part of my research Web site that is dedicated to this process, and chosen to focus on two sets of projections which I have discussed previously. The "default" case is the second of two stories that my research has revealed, where humanity begins consuming resources needed to maintain our survival. The "warming case" involves the influence of self-sustaining global warming in combination with our behavior in the default case, which drives our species to extinction by 2165.

Embedded in both of these reference cases is a fundamental assumption about values: that happiness, enabled by using ecological resources (footprint) to customize individual environments, is much more important than people's lives and the lives of the other species whose demise is causing people to die. As total resources decline due to global warming, some surviving people will be still able to consume much more than others, but humanity as a whole won't be able to recover its numbers.

Key to validating, understanding, and possibly mitigating these catastrophic trends is the identification of the critical "producer" species assumed to enable the survival of the "supporter" species that we directly depend upon for our survival. While I don't know what they are, I do have some guesses, chief among them the creatures that enable plants to survive, such as birds with their dispersal of seeds and nutrients, and the fish which keep many of them alive. I have recently been studying the condition of soil, which I expect will reflect our impact on producer species. The fact that one-third of remaining soil is degraded, plus the recently revealed fact that Earth now has two-thirds of the arable land that existed 40 years ago, means that we have less than one-quarter of the healthy soil we had at that time. Interestingly, my calculations show that we now have about one-third of the extra resources (resources not directly consumed by us and supporter species) that we had in 1975.

The first significant decline in our own population is projected to occur in the next few months, with around 200 million deaths due to lack of resources, most likely food. This will be the clearest possible signal that we have begun killing off the last producers alive on Earth; though we may not initially recognize it as such because we will directly be seeing its impact on the supporter species. By 2017 we will have recovered, perhaps due to artificial replacement of what the producers were providing along with some recovery of the producers. We will see a smaller death rate the following year as we attempt to consume more, and probably try a similar fix in 2019. By 2021 the two cases diverge: in the warming case, our recovery will couple with the effects of climate change and we will see the greatest, fastest population drop in history, with more than a half-billion people dead; and, after another recovery, a second drop will occur with almost the same magnitude. The default case, meanwhile, has its greatest population drop in 2023, with more than 300 million people dead, though there will be other, smaller "drops" in the future.

One thing (among many) that I don't account for is the impact of having births make up for drops in population, the most obvious part being the growing fraction of young children over time. That will foreseeably reduce the ability of humanity to maintain its growth in consumption, unless machines grow sophisticated enough to do so without human intervention. A similar argument applies to producer and supporter species, which must grow back, at least partially, and may not grow to be mature enough to provide the products and services expected.

The smartest thing we could do following a population drop is to resist growing the population back and to try lowering per-capita consumption to a sustainable level (at least long enough for other species to recover their numbers and maturity) and then maintain it at that level. If we don't do that on purpose, then perhaps the changing demographics will have the same effect.

Earl's Myth

In the latest installment of a novel I'm writing in parts, a fictional industrialist named Earl recalls a myth he used to finance his nascent company. The myth was based on an ecological interpretation of businesses within an economy which in reality I made up while writing about it:

Economies functioned much like biomes, with companies acting like organisms, industries functioning as populations of species, and economic activity joining them in communities that, together with the physical resources such as people and materials that they collected and processed, functioned as ecosystems.

Of course, economies are artificial, but I wonder if most of us tend to expect similar things from both our artificial and natural environments. Evolution has shaped us to get what we need from natural environments if we follow certain instinctive behaviors, and to penalize us if we don't. Education serves a related function in relating to civilization by priming both our skills and our expectations so we can survive and thrive to the extent that we occupy useful niches within our artificial environment.

For the analogy to work, people must be equivalent to organisms in both types of environment, but there are many indications that it is no longer working. Perhaps the most obvious indication is the huge amount of wealth inequality in the world today, the equivalent of which would, I suspect, never occur in a natural system that wasn't about to include at least one population collapse. Instead, as Earl's myth described, we have organizations that are functioning as organisms, and people have been relegated to the role of "resources."

For the most part, the few people who have mastered control of the artificial organisms, through the acquiescence of their fellows and the illusion of embodied energy in money, still function as organisms themselves, and receive rewards commensurate with their occupation of the new niches demanded by the artificial world. The rest of us are simply used, then discarded, and perhaps recycled eventually (after extended periods of unemployment) while others are "consumed," all the while thinking that the work and personal degradation is an appropriate sacrifice for a better world created by the super-organisms (some of whom are still like us) that will eventually meet our wants and needs too.

Of course, the fact that our artificial organisms are using actual resources, and are crowding out the real organisms whose bodies and work enable our planet's habitability, means that the flesh-and-blood puppeteers of those organizations will also be part of the human population collapse facilitated by their efforts. Barring the success of fantastical efforts like that described in my book (a success we may not end up wanting), humanity will have to dispense with dangerous myths like Earl's and become reacquainted with Nature's reality just to survive.

The Half-Earth Hypothesis

Following up on my epiphany about the significance of historical happiness, I reanalyzed the data and developed an explanation that I call the "Half-Earth Hypothesis." Simply: there are a fixed amount of ecological resources, which include both producers and what they produce; and we, like other creatures, have been programmed by evolution to make sure that a critical minimum amount of those resources (18% of the total) is never used up.

In our natural state, we require a minimum amount of resources to survive. That same amount is used by a supporting group of producers, which means we use only half of the resources in our environment. To preserve our basic functioning, we've had to protect the supporting producers and enlist enough more to supply our growing population.

We would like to use more, and technology (physical and cultural) has enabled us to do so since the start of civilization, some 12,000 years ago. The motivation for doing so seems to be connected to a need to dominate our environment, and is clearly manifested by increasing both lifespan and happiness. Increasing our population has provided a labor pool for finding and converting resources into creations that are more of a match to our personal wants and needs than the minimum can provide. These "creations" also include byproducts such as pollution. Nature appears to have limited the amount of resources we can use for creations to 52% of the total, with our basic resources and supporters together limited to 30%. To use more reduces the producers available to sustain our supporters, which of course sustain us.

At present, we are essentially at the limit. Any increase in consumption, whether individually or due to added population will likely reduce the supply of resources we need for basic survival. This makes the growing threat of climate change particularly troubling, since it could have the same effect regardless of what we do, like being on the edge of a precipice and having someone pushing you toward the abyss.

Spaceship Finance

In its simplest form, personal financial planning is governed by one inescapable requirement: Total income over remaining lifetime must be greater than or equal to expenses over remaining lifetime. If you're lucky, "remaining lifetime" is the sum of working years and retirement years, where you are not physically working during retirement.

In practice, planning gets complicated by the many forms of income and expense, but even they can be simplified when you realize that there are basically only two types of each: constant and exponential. The exponential types, in particular, can get pretty tricky, since they depend on the ability to accelerate growth of money without limits, and that money can represent both physical things and non-physical things. As the constant types have been increasingly linked to the exponential types (for example, your "constant" salary is likely paid by an employer who relies on exponential growth in profits), they too have become harder to plan for.

Now that we face hard limits to the availability of quality ecological resources, upon which our economy and our physical survival is based, basic assumptions built into our economy are beginning to lose their usefulness, which is making successful planning by most individuals and many organizations even more difficult. In addition to reducing room for growth, which has been assumed to be infinite, we are degrading the ability of social and physical ecosystems to absorb or nullify the negative effects of our actions within a period of time that is meaningful to people. This results in decreasing exponential income and increasing exponential expense, as an average, for our whole population, which reduces our effective lifetime.

One positive aspect of our situation is that we are collectively becoming a global village, re-creating some important dynamics of near-isolated communities of the past. In an idealized version of such a community, the social and environmental impacts of economic activity were felt directly by both businesses and their customers. Since the number of prospective customers was practically limited, businesses had to focus on keeping them satisfied; and since resources were limited, their consumption had to be kept below the regeneration rate (such as the growth of new trees for wood) if the business along with the community was to survive over a long period of time. Businesses were rewarded with enough profit to create new products or services only if they could find more resources or efficiencies in the use of existing resources, and if it didn't result in harming the community. Exponential growth became possible as a community's territory expanded and its population grew to take advantage of the newly available resources. Combining of multiple communities also contributed to that growth, leading to our present situation. Enabled by multiple technologies that have also grown exponentially, we have turned much of our planet-sized spaceship into a giant community of communities, subject to rules of survival similar to the ones those early communities had to live with, but without most of the self-replenishing resources they had.

Our new community and the environment it occupies is much more complex than the ones we were naturally evolved to maintain, which is a big reason for our heavy dependence on technology. Our computers and communications enable us to share and mentally process experiences around our community, translating its complexity into much simpler forms we can comprehend, thus keeping us from being aware of all but the largest of the consequences of our actions, and, even then, not with the gut-level feedback we naturally depend upon for knowing and acting to change the status of our environment. Put another way: We have taken over Spaceship Earth by cannibalizing its parts for our pleasure and thereby sabotaging its life support systems, while knowing a lot about the small part we were supposed to operate before we went rogue, and knowing very little about the rest of it.

One thing we do know is that life tends to maintain habitability for itself, and there is still a chance that species we haven't destroyed could fix enough of the damage we've inflicted to keep our planet habitable (if still uncomfortable) for at least a few decades more than if we don't let them. To give them that chance, we will need to let them have more resources. From a personal finance point of view, I estimate will all need to learn to limit our individual expenses to under $12,000 per year, which, not surprisingly, is most easily done by reinforcing the necessary regrowth of natural ecosystems and their denizens so they can provide more replenishing resources like what we evolved to consume (of which we should use less than half). This should also help reduce our greenhouse gas emissions, one of our largest negative impacts on ecosystems both directly and indirectly (through climate change).

Ideally, the world community would eventually function like an isolated sustainable community, utilizing exponential income and expense only as necessary to deal with conditions that require swift growth or contraction to maintain survivability, instead of an ongoing expectation for personal gain. For most of us, our life focus would shift to favoring quality over quantity. The inevitable fraction of the population that found this impossible to live with would have the option, like generations of the past, to explore new environments – this time in space – and make them habitable for people, so long as those efforts did not degrade the lives of existing communities.

Spaceship Logic

We are the latest of many generations of astronauts on an intricately complex spaceship that is orbiting the Galaxy every 200 million years or so. Like other astronauts, we have a set of jobs to do in order to keep the spaceship functioning and its passengers alive. Unlike other astronauts, most of us have abandoned our jobs, and have been tearing apart the spaceship to create and maintain playgrounds so more of us can have more fun. We have been doing this without understanding or caring about how it affects how the spaceship works.

There are now many of us who have grown up in the playgrounds and know nothing else, including what our original jobs were. This is unfortunate, because we have now done so much damage to the spaceship that its life support systems are breaking down. The other astronauts have worked valiantly to repair the damage since they depend on the spaceship for survival too; but we have treated them like the rest of the spaceship, without regard for their value as fellow astronauts, what their jobs are, and what will happen when they can't do their jobs.

The lives of all aboard the spaceship depend upon using and reusing almost everything, preferably during the lifetimes of its passengers. It has many mechanisms for ensuring this, including passengers eating other passengers and converting them into forms that others can use, as well as producing more passengers. We have disrupted these processes, which is a large part of the damage we've done, by either hoarding a lot of what we take, or turning it into forms that others can't use within the time they need for survival.

Conditions have grown so bad that our playgrounds are in danger and people are becoming sick enough to notice. A growing number of us are realizing in horror that it may soon be too late to repair the damage before it kills our generation of fellow astronauts, and they are raising alarms. The alarms are muted, however, because the majority have grown up depending on the playgrounds and the people who manage them for their survival and fulfillment, and they are trapped, at least psychologically, in the patterns of living they know there. They continue to plan their lives so they can work for only part of the time, and enjoy a few of their later years without working; in part through saving, and in part by subsidizing the growth of activity by others, using abstractions that shield them from the real effects of what they do. The alarms make little sense, because the rest of the spaceship has no meaning except as a source of material for food and construction, and as a dumping ground for what we don't use.

Based on the logic of the playground, our best response is to make better playgrounds, isolated from the threat. This is, of course, the worst thing we can do, because it will cause more damage, amplifying the threat. We will be essentially fighting ourselves until we lose, and sadly most of us may never understand why. Our best hope is to keep that from happening by replacing the logic of the playground with the logic of the spaceship, and gaining more knowledge about how everything works by experiencing it with an open mind and respect grounded in our identity as part of the spaceship, instead of something apart.

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.

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.

"Are Scientists Stupid?"

The last place I expected to hear that question was in the clean room of a semiconductor manufacturer, spoken by a technician whose livelihood depended on scientists being a lot smarter than he was. I soon found out that he really meant biologists were stupid for accepting evolution instead of creationism as the best explanation for the complexity of life, especially when it came to humans. That was my first exposure to the possibility that functioning members of modern society could reject, on the basis of faith, hundreds of years of painstaking observation, testing, and thought. As a trained physicist, I easily determined that for their explanation to work, various laws of physics also had to be wrong. Essentially, God was testing people's faith and their intelligence by whether they would find the ways the Universe worked that were consistent with the literal translation of his words as related in the Bible. That scientists had reached the different conclusions after hundreds of years of painstaking research, thought, and testing just proved that they lacked both faith and intelligence.

There is a parallel and oddly similar argument, which I've recently encountered as part of a belief system shared by some people in the sustainability movement. Basically, it says that the complexity of the Universe is so great that it transcends explanation in the terms used by science. Instead, we, like other creatures, already have everything we need to appreciate and be a meaningful part of the Universe, or at least that part of it that supports life. There are a small number of basic patterns in Nature, that we are already intuitively aware of, that allow us, if we want, to use minimal, non-destructive technologies to be an integral, healthy part of our planet's ecosystems. We don't need anything else, and it's pointless – and harmful to the Earth – for us to seek it. The bottom line: scientists are stupid and dangerous.

Science is fundamentally a means of describing and explaining experience in abstract form, an extension of how we humans use language to communicate information about our experiences. The invention of mathematics, writing, and computational tools has enabled science to become both explanatory and predictive, to an extent far beyond what any one mind or group of minds can comprehend. I believe it is this transcendence beyond personal, visceral experience that is at the heart of both the arguments I cited, despite the fact that science and technologies using it have resulted in a progressively more benign environment for at least some of us.

Two basic needs are not being met by the increased power over our personal environments that science, technology, and the leveraging of group effort through economies have enabled. One of those needs is for meaning in life; the other is for the ability of people to meet their basic needs through direct influence. It is no more meaningful to be a consumer and a producer in an economy than it is to be a manifestation of mathematical probabilities in a multiverse of matter and energy. Most of the time we must rely on governments and corporations to provide our safety and sustenance, often from places and using technologies we can never hope to understand or manage.

A deity such as a personal god provides an easy way to, at least in concept, meet both needs: You are special to the creator to the Universe, and because of that, you can convince him to take care of you. Alternatively, you might see yourself as an integral part of that Universe, without whom it wouldn't be the Universe; you have what it takes to survive in Nature because Nature is you – all that's needed is to create a local, more ecologically healthy environment where you can use it. Ironically, pure science does not pretend to be able to define such a subjective thing as life's meaning, nor does it rule out a more personal relationship with one's environment or any other.

When empowered with adequate technology (such as supercomputers), science can do a pretty good job of simulating large systems; and with proper translation into experiential terms, it can give us insights into the impacts of our actions that our minds and bodies are simply not capable of doing anywhere near as accurately. To be responsible, and have any hope of being true to the values that we define for ourselves, we need to match the power of our actions with our knowledge of their consequences, and science currently provides the most reliable way to do that. If we are uncomfortable with this dependence, we must find a way to scale back our influence on the world to a point we no longer need to depend on it. If we want to rely on a deity of dubious existence, we must be willing to reduce our impact on others so we won't hurt them if or when our faith is found to be misplaced (if the deity's existence wasn't dubious, we wouldn't have to depend on faith).

Ironically, science is showing that we must collectively limit our influence over other species or risk driving most of them, and us, extinct. A world closer to the one we evolved in will be a healthier world, but at the expense of much of the power we've spent centuries accruing. As the tools needed to maintain and monitor our artificial environments falter, become unusable, and are replaced with more natural ones, I expect that science will continue to occupy an important niche in human understanding, but in a form much more usable by the majority of people. Perhaps at that point we will all be scientists (most of us something closer to what we now call naturalists), and the question that opened this discussion will never be asked again.

Tests of Survival

One of the common retorts to warnings of resource exhaustion and environmental catastrophe is that humanity has overcome similar problems in the past, and will continue to do so, primarily through innovating and exploring that is driven by the promise of great rewards for those doing both. This ignores the historical record of collapsing civilizations, the huge advantages accompanying our access to cheap energy in the form of fossil fuels, and the growing signs that we have merely postponed the worst consequences of our excesses, not eliminated them.

The bottom line is that every civilization – and every species – has lived or died based on its ability to solve two basic problems: matching resources with demand, and safely disposing of waste. It is far from a sure thing that our global civilization will solve these problems, though plenty of potential solutions are known. Whether you are optimistic or pessimistic about the future may, at some level, depend on your confidence that solutions will be implemented before resources run out and we are overwhelmed by our waste.

Given the stakes – entire species at risk – it is tempting to think that motivation won't be an issue. Those who acknowledge the stakes and are advocates of capitalism, even the distorted form currently dominating the world, expect that the price associated with demand exceeding supply will be enough of an incentive to spur discovery of new resources and innovative new ways of using the ones we have. This is certainly happening in the “green” industries, which are also taking on the waste issue by creating connections between waste and production, and increasingly altering the nature of ownership so that they can control everything but the use of the products, which is leased to their customers. To anyone who knows – or is – a true innovator, the majority of incentive to create comes from the innovation process itself; but true innovation is all-too-often a very minor part of industrial systems, where it is far cheaper to exploit workers and customers' ignorance than to provide quality, long-lasting products.

That so many people remain in ignorance or denial of the critical condition we're in by definition suppresses innovation. Not surprisingly, the people most responsible for disinformation are those whose personal power derives from the status quo, which in addition to causing the looming shortages and excess waste that is sabotaging Earth's life support systems, has no constructive alternatives to provide. Instead, all they can do is reap the profits of diminishing supply, and promising what they can't deliver (and convincing people that no one else can) while appearing to try by further exploiting the resources in decline.

Really sustainable solutions, because of the universal availability of resources and durability of products, will not ultimately lend themselves to profit-taking and power concentration. This is understandably unacceptable to those who have learned to value the maximizing of personal power. One tried-and-true alternative, which provided legitimately high rewards in the past, is to locate other sources of nonrenewable resources that can be controlled. Since such resources are limited or too dangerous to exploit here on Earth (whether people accept that fact or not), it is natural to try to find them on other worlds.

Various nations have space exploration programs, well-funded private groups not far behind. As noble as the search for scientific knowledge is, there is a strong component of the space community that has argued strongly and explicitly for the exploitation of other worlds. Now that NASA is terminating its Space Shuttle program and looking for a grander mission than remote observation and measurement, the space exploitation advocates (one of whom I used to be) see an opportunity to gain traction in the exploration and eventual settlement of Mars. I now find myself in the strange position of offering lackluster, if any, support for the idea, mainly because I fear that humanity hasn't learned the lesson of respect for other life that would keep us from spreading death and destruction as far as our technology can take us.

Not that long ago, I found people with attitudes like mine to be dangerously naive, idealistic, and maybe a bit crazy, mainly because I figured that our unique opportunity to transport life outside the death zone of our expanding Sun was worth the risk, and not likely to be available for much longer. Besides, I reasoned, we might still learn the life-respect lesson along the way. Now I figure that if we're bound to kill everything in our path anyway, it's probably good for the Universe if we stay right here and limit the damage. Of course, I hope that I'm proven wrong, but we should take the time to find out. A sustainable civilization is likely a good civilization, at least to those who value life and quality of life beyond our own experience.

Delta World

In the language of mathematics, the Greek letter delta (∆) is often used to denote a change in a variable. For example, “∆X = 5” means “the change in X is 5.” In comparing the world we have with the world we want, the difference can be thought of as “delta world” (∆W).

The world I want starts with a definition of “good” as anything that maximizes the amount (“A”), variety (“V”), and longevity (“L”) of life in the universe; that is, the product of all three (W = A*V*L). There is almost certainly some physical limit to this (Wmax = Amax*Vmax*Lmax), but since we are only responsible for what we know and can change, the best we can do is to approach that limit and try to develop more capabilities through learning and creating tools. Put another way, we should try to minimize ∆W = Wmax – W.

This approach to definition helps clarify differences between people's values. For example, there are some people who primarily value only people like them, or themselves and a very specific set of species that are useful to them (V and A are very small); until very recently I was one of them. The amount of disagreement two people might have on the aggregate of all issues might even be proportional to the difference between their ideal values of W, which would explain why education (affecting their ability to estimate Wmax) can only go so far in getting them to agree.

Even if we all agree on a definition of good, our individual knowledge, skills, and experience will create differences in our perception of the best course to take in achieving it. Because we are individually limited, it is critical that we communicate and collaborate so we can approximate a solution that has the best chance of success. This is the logic behind my insistence on cooperation over competition, where competition is limited to testing solutions rather than dominating the entire process. It is important to keep in mind that because agreement on values is a prerequisite for success, competition has the additional role of determining what those shared values are, and should be completed as soon as possible.

Much of the aggravation I personally feel about the course of our global society comes from the ongoing dispute about values which has increased the probability to near-certainty that we will reach the simplest configuration of the world, with a minimal amount, variety, and longevity of life. This is why I have focused so much time and effort on ideas rather than practical solutions; most of the knowledge is already available, but it will be irrelevant to most people, and the other species we share this planet with, if we're not all working toward a goal closer to the one I subscribe to.

Getting Unstuck

A growing number of us are stuck trying to maintain what we have while laying the groundwork for a new lifestyle that is more sustainable.  Maintaining what we have typically involves supporting an economy that has become dependent on perpetual and inherently unhealthy growth.  The lifestyle we seek would allow us to thrive without such an economy.  Given this dichotomy, it’s no wonder we’re stuck.

Perpetual growth demands unlimited resources, unlimited efficiencies, or both.  If these conditions cannot be met, the number of people must decrease; but with the theoretical (but totally unrealizable) limit of one person having everything.  If we value life, and appreciate the fact that natural law prohibits both access to unlimited resources and unbounded efficiency, then we must reject the goal of perpetual growth.

The economy’s perpetual growth requirement stems from its built-in rewards for increasing the amount and configurations of resources available to its population.  As the number of “pioneers” seeking these rewards has become large in proportion to the total population, acquiring and consuming more has become the norm rather than the exception.  To reverse this trend (or create an alternative), most pioneers must become settlers – learning to live with a fixed amount of resources that, by necessity, are replenished at a fixed rate.  Given these facts, the goal of “maintaining what we have” must be changed to “maintaining what our environment can afford for us to have.”

Unfortunately, many of us – including our governments, and by extension their citizens -- have already promised to pursue more growth as a condition for basic survival.  This takes the form of debt, which increases exponentially until it is paid off by the rewards of being a pioneer.  A  trivial, and therefore least likely, solution to this dilemma is for creditors to forgive all debt and for everyone to commit to the creation of a more sane economics. The least acceptable solution is for debtors to simply leave the economy, which has already started due to deprivation of alternatives for earning the money they need, and the predations of creditors who value property more than people.  Perhaps the most doable and generally acceptable solution is to make money less usable for consumption or spoiling of physical resources.

The implementation of this last solution would need to be done carefully to avoid some very negative consequences, such as slavery.  For example, society could encourage investment of the money in businesses that are more efficient, or use more renewable resources, or clean up pollution.  This is already being done, but still with the implicit goal of unlimited growth.  To keep from merely delaying our demise, we must choose a limit to how far we will go along this path, and a good place to start is to incur no more debt. 

At the same time, we can join groups (“social units”) where some members focus on keeping the creditors happy while an increasing fraction develop the ability to freely and voluntarily meet each other’s needs with a fixed, environmentally sustainable amount of resources.  Instead of everyone trading with everyone else, groups would interact – peacefully, and with minimal exchange of resources.  Such interaction will ultimately be critical to the process of converting to a fully sustainable world by helping to relocate the world’s population to regions where people can meet their basic needs.

Imagining the Future: Strategic Goals

To create an ideal world, we should work toward all of the following strategic goals:

• Transitioning to entirely renewable energy and reusable materials
• Eliminating pollution both at the source and in the environment
• Emphasizing service more than attainment of personal power
• Re-humanizing our relationships with each other and the rest of Nature

For a healthy, sustainable society, material consumption should be kept to no more than the biocapacity of local ecosystems and no less than the amount required to maintain a functioning society (see “Imagining the Future: Meeting Needs”). This currently translates into an average world average global ecological footprint of between 1.5 and 1.7 global hectares per person. Because the biocapacity per person is inversely proportional to the ecological footprint per person, which itself is proportional to population, increases in consumption and population should be avoided at all costs.

The goals that I listed support meeting this objective. The first two directly reduce the ecological footprint and its growth by reducing waste, and could eventually contribute to increasing biocapacity if we enlist other species in meeting them. The third is based on my analysis of why we are so wasteful (see especially “Fatal Flaw”).

According to Global Footprint Network's “Ecological Footprint and Biocapacity, 2007,” the average person in the United States had an ecological footprint of eight global hectares in 2007, or five times the minimum acceptable amount.  Because the money we spend is roughly proportional to our ecological footprint, then as a first step toward creating an ideal world, we in the United States could try to limit what we spend to one-fifth of our income in 2007. We could then use the rest of our income to pay off our debts, assist people below the minimum to at least be able to live at the minimum, and contribute to pollution-fighting and habitat restoration and preservation.

An overall decrease in the world's per-capita consumption would seem to require a corresponding decrease in the population, which is why I've shied away from proposing it in the past. The broad goal of replacing current consumption with renewable and replaceable resources, without requiring that those resources come at the expense of the biosphere, left open the possibility that technologies might be developed that could do so. I now have little (less) hope that this could happen before the population peaks. One possible alternative is to increase biocapacity enough to compensate, but this too would require time we may not have.

The fourth goal presents a possible way out of this dilemma. Personal relationships with each other and other species have weakened considerably as our population has increased. To the extent such relationships exist, they have become largely transactional and correspondingly abstract, thus more likely to weaken or break if there is less to trade. Strengthening the non-transactional aspects of these relationships, bringing them closer to what our distant ancestors enjoyed, could conceivably deal with this problem. As we become more familiar with other creatures, they might be perceived as a part of our population (similar to how some people view their pets) who could take of themselves, while helping us. The contribution to happiness – the internal experience of approaching our comfort zone that is probably a major motivation behind our consumption – might offset the perception of loss accompanied by the reduction of consumption. Keeping consumption at or above the minimum would assure that changes to life expectancy (also correlated to consumption and happiness) wouldn't be an issue.