Big Pic Explorer

Consumption Drop

Big Pic Explorer — Wed, 25 Nov 2020 20:35:01 GMT

Graphs describe an alternative future using the Timelines model. Population is held constant beginning in 2021, and per-capita consumption is reduced to only what is renewably produced by nature. Greenhouse gases are removed from the atmosphere so that global average temperature reaches a peak and declines to its pre-industrial level.

Habitat Loss

Idea Explorer Blog — Mon, 09 Nov 2020 23:44:14 GMT

As our species dominated and the world’s ecosystems, we made them part of our own habitat. The tools we used to do so were simultaneously used to create artificial environments that removed or spoiled resources that could be used to meet the basic biological needs of species we directly or indirectly depended upon for our survival, threatening to exterminate them and - in much the same way - us. This is a story told by statistical simulation of our history by my Timelines model and ecological observation of how extinctions occur.

According to my simulations, resources available for meeting human needs (what I’ve called “ecological resources”) are now only double the amount consumed for needs. This allows for consumption of only 15% more needs before population reaches a peak and then collapses. Most likely, collapse occurs because the populations of species (counted as resources) that supply the resources we directly consume themselves collapse. Our population peak is projected to occur no later than 2024, after which casualties are unavoidable.

The COVID-19 virus is already exacting a toll on our population. It can be thought of as a consequence of habitat loss, because the other species in our habitat are likewise experiencing habitat loss, being forced to share more of their space with us and enabling those that prey on them to prey on us. Critically shrinking habitat is making this situation catastrophically worse even as our temporarily restrained consumption slows the rate of the shrinking.

Meanwhile, climate change is becoming a self-sustained feedback of our pollution that is destroying habitat and creating conditions such as melting ice that will drive it further on its own. Our collectively growing obsession with reducing greenhouse gas emissions (climate-altering pollution) might slow the destruction, but more is necessary because we are too close to the critical point where species including ours might not avoid collapse in time to recover.

As I’ve suggested before, the best option is to radically increase the total amount of habitat by reducing what we are currently consuming (in needs and waste). This will buy time for us and the other species we save to create barriers to further loss, including cleanup of waste such as that threatens to increase global warming. My simulations of such an approach provide insight into the attendant physical and social consequences that be used to craft a strategy for making them a reality and monitoring the results.

General Update

Big Pic Explorer — Mon, 24 Feb 2020 16:21:33 GMT

Two new Idea Explorer blog posts have been added since the last update to this feed. "Social Cohesiveness" describes how people's experiences as a function of action phase in a population might be affecting its cohesion as a society. This theme is continued with a discussion of recently-discovered "Drop Ratios" that compare the drastically different experiences of people who are heading toward peak happiness and the majority who are past the peak.

The Simulated News blog is not generally addressed here, but the most recent post, "Phased Leadership," is worthy of note. It discusses the evolution of governance in its "world" based on the Timelines simulation Hikeyay Prime on which it is based. In the process, it reveals a new insight into how a population might react to transitions in its growth.

Another insight regarding experiences is the subject of a new article in the Web site. Interactions highlights how the number of interactions between people may vary across a population and in the world over time.

Responsible Survival

Land of Conscience Blog — Wed, 01 Jan 2020 19:03:07 GMT

I recently completed a 20-year project dedicated to identifying links between actions and values. The next 20 years will be about using that knowledge to help create a better world.

Termination

Idea Explorer Blog — Tue, 31 Dec 2019 23:25:22 GMT

Nearly half of the people in one simulated world have entered what could be their final phase of life, while those in another are working to keep it from being final. We face a choice between their futures whose time is running out.

Every Day

Land of Conscience Blog — Tue, 31 Dec 2019 23:21:41 GMT

Every day I wake up to a reality that needs to change.

Life and Death

Commentary — Tue, 31 Dec 2019 23:18:53 GMT

Life is key, because it is self-evident that without life there can be no one to assess value – so, effectively, there is no value. If an action results in an overall loss of life, then it also results in loss of value and is therefore wrong. By extension, our hastening of extinction is wrong. At the very least it must be slowed; and at the very most it must be reversed. In the simplest terms I can think of, accelerating extinction involves direct and indirect killing of the members of a population until no members can survive, and one of the most effective ways to do the latter is to reduce the availability and/or usability of resources needed for basic survival.

For me, learning is an artistic experience of creating artificial constructs of reality that change with experience. It doesn't lend itself to schedules and preset expectations, and its results would be suspect if it was forced into them. It also wouldn't be any fun, and – from my observations – having fun is how people do their best work. In a dynamic and complex world, learning is critical to accurately assessing the consequences of one's actions and therefore efficiently attaining one's goals while avoiding problems that could sabotage other goals. That efficiency requires time and effort spent not directly working toward goals.

Ignorance of that fact, along with the fact itself, are consequences of our collective preoccupation with rapid growth, which might be a consequence of the dominance in our history of colonizing new places where we could grow as fast as we wanted because what we consumed – in the beginning – was insignificant with respect to the much larger total.

Humanity has always had colonizers, who find new resources and enable others to process them into increasingly diverse products. Those products are traded between the others and eventually back to the colonizers, who are financially rewarded in part as a reward for the risks they take. This has allowed more needs to be met and for longer (providing for higher population and life expectancy), as well as personalizing people's environments (making them happier) - until recently.

What changed is that a limit was breached in 2001, when due to declining availability of resources some members of the population began to see their life expectancy plummet. Presently almost half the population are among these "decliners." If humanity continues toward its apparent goal of reaching the peak as a group, and external impacts drive the amount of total resources (capacity) lower, then extinction may result.

Groups

Big Pic Explorer — Wed, 30 Oct 2019 22:26:17 GMT

The future can be modeled as continuous interactions between groups. Here's how.

Timelines Version 5

Big Pic Explorer — Thu, 03 Oct 2019 19:48:44 GMT

This major update to the Timelines model is based on a higher resolution sample which enabled:

Derivation of a deterministic function for the calculation of population
Derivation of a deterministic function for consumption by groups in a population
Matching of historical wealth distribution and better calculation of child/adult ratios
More flexibility in devising simulations of future scenarios
Updated definitions of variables (such as "Waste") that are consistent with the new projections

Multiple Updates

Brad Jarvis — Fri, 12 Jul 2019 20:42:21 GMT

Development of the Timelines model has resulted in more insight and more accuracy. This is reflected in the fictional Simulated News blog and updates to the Bigpicexplorer site.

Context can be found in the following blog posts:

Idea Explorer: Focus on the Future
Land of Conscience: Transitions

A new Patreon site is a portal for people to support research and creative activities (writing and music) beyond buying related products.

Unacceptable Options

Commentary — Thu, 07 Mar 2019 01:29:14 GMT

In the fictional treatment of the Timelines model in the Simulated News blog, I began with a range of possible options for avoiding the "imminent extinction" that the model's most accurate projection indicates for humanity and most other species. Those options narrowed to perhaps the most controversial (and therefore least likely) strategy: reducing ecological impact by controlling population and consumption so that natural processes involving other species might recover and repair much of the damage humanity has done to ecosystems - including disturbance of the climate. That strategy is embodied in a "hope chart" (below) which shows how resources might change over time if the strategy is executed.

The best case result is shown in black, where the effects of global warming and other ecological damage are stopped (green). Unaffected and growing damage is defined by the set of alternatives shown in red, which would drive us to extinction even if we did reduce our own impact. The most likely scenario, not shown, is an increase in total human consumption, leading to our extinction by late calendar year 2037.

As I develop vicarious experience in "a world like ours" that is confronting the full impact of the threat, I am disturbed to the point of extreme disgust by the comparative inaction and woeful lack of commitment in our real world. The most modest proposals are treated as extreme by far too many people who value short-term personal gain more than the survival of their species. I've introduced some fictional representatives of those folks in my imaginary world, and am dutifully exploring their viewpoints (as a thought experiment based on observation) along with counter-arguments by others who must ultimately prevail.

Several of the latest modifications to the Timelines model have been inspired by imagining how people and machines smarter than me would deal with resistance like that found in discourse about the real extinction threat. The answers come from a subconscious source along with the results of those modifications, done on the fly based on ideas I'm often barely aware of. The use of randomized data instead of statistical distributions evolved from a need to simulate how parts of the world's population (like nations) would need to interact so a global strategy could be implemented.

This resulted in the discovery, yet to be confirmed in reality, that parts of a population can be in what I've called "collapse" - equivalent to what Timeline 2 shows for the world after peak population - while the rest are approaching that stage with varying degrees of speed. Understanding and projection of the dynamics of a real world response to imminent total collapse would need to account for how people in all possible stages might act as conditions change, as well as how they might change their conditions. I have a pretty good idea where to start.

Timelines Model Version 3

Big Pic Explorer — Wed, 06 Mar 2019 23:56:34 GMT

A new version of the Timelines model simulates populations using random "regions" rather than normal statistical distributions, but uses the same underlying variable relationships as the previous version.

This version was introduced in the storyline of the Simulated News blog, which is a fictional treatment of the Timelines model where "a world like ours" is developing a strategy to avoid the worst and most likely future scenario.

Future Cases

Idea Explorer Blog — Thu, 13 Dec 2018 15:25:12 GMT

For several months now I have used Twitter (@Bradjarvis) to react in real time to news that impacts the timing and quality of the survival of our species. My Timelines model has been gradually updated and tested in response to what I've learned and decided was worth exploring in more detail. So far, it seems to be very robust, and like any good tool of its kind is generating as many questions as it answers.

The most useful variable for tracking our past and future survival continues to be what I've called the "species ratio" Sratio, which compares the consumption of resources needed for basic survival by humans to that of other life that can be used as resources. Based on extrapolation of historical statistics, I estimate that Sratio is currently 51% (about 1:2, or one-half). Population tracks with Sratio, nearly-symmetrically rising to a peak at 54% and falling back down to zero at 117%. The peak will likely be reached in 2020 and hit zero in 2038 if Sratio continues to increase after that. I have seen no evidence to suggest that the timing of these events will be markedly different from what I expect.

As I've said before, one of the main functions of a model is to identify what it would take to change projected outcomes, and our extinction is an outcome that definitely needs to be changed. One such solution is a "Fix" which would have started six months ago and involved slowing total consumption (population times per-capita consumption) enough to keep Sratio from forcing population past its peak. Not surprisingly, the Fix wasn't implemented, which has made the required changes more drastic but theoretically not impossible – that point will be reached when we actually reach the peak.

Unfortunately the specter of self-perpetuating climate change due to climate feedbacks has grown in both probability and magnitude. This threatens to decrease the amount of resources available for future consumption, with the effect of driving Sratio higher regardless of what we do. Scientists focusing strictly on global warming have concluded that total emissions of greenhouse gases must decrease to have any chance of avoiding such a scenario, which means that a "fix" isn't good enough: we must decrease our consumption rather than keep it from growing. I and others have advocated this in terms of overall ecological impact (which is equivalent to what I call "consumption"), which would have the benefit of enabling other species to enable recovery by reducing the stress on their survival.

There are at least two problems with the option of reducing consumption. One problem is the risk of increasing global warming and triggering more climate feedbacks as a result of decreasing air pollution because some of it reflects radiation from the Sun. The second problem is that population might decrease in response to people's reduced consumption, especially if it is forced (resulting in violent resistance) and/or today's life-saving technology is not replaced with a less ecologically impactful equivalent. In the first case, Sratio would be driven higher; and in the second, the lower Sratio values would be roughly matched with the historically lower values of population.

In my opinion it would ideal if everyone in the world would be willing to do whatever is necessary for our species to survive, even if it involves valuing the lives of others as much as their own and all lives more than power and property. This is ideal in large part because it would run counter to what it's taken for humanity to dominate the world to the extent it has. Competition practiced by a majority of people has been accompanied by a perception of other people and other creatures as resources – things to be used (consumed) for one's own benefit – and is this is unlikely to change at any time, especially in the short time we have available to adapt to the new world that we and our ancestors created. It is ideal for another reason: humans have a great capacity for self-delusion; this includes faith that something or someone else (new technologies or a parent figure such as a group leader or a hypothetical creator of the Universe who cares about us more than all others) will save us from any major threats to our preferred ways of life.

Because the history and future depends on the actions of individual people, I've refined my model to tease out how people in a population under given circumstances perceive their world and act within it. Intellectually this is just interesting, but it also has the potential for identifying how to influence people to take appropriate action for the survival of their population. Part of this process has been the identification of twelve groups of people within a population who each have basic characteristics and behaviors that can be compared to real people both as a test of the model and as a potentially helpful thought experiment. As I prepare a book that combines the related things I've learned with what I hope to learn, these twelve groups ("samples") are expected to figure prominently as they evolve over time in runs of the model that I think of as alternative universes or timelines.

On Twitter I have already rolled out some of my thoughts and observations in this effort, including a preliminary approach to identifying expression of personality types among samples in the model's best approximation of our present world ("Timeline 2"). For example, one promising hypothesis is that each sample has a unique viewpoint shaped by the changes of variables as a function of changes in effort (enabled by, and measured as, basic consumption), what I'm calling focus, and that the Big Five personality dimensions find their expression based on that focus. If this hypothesis is correct, then neuroticism varies more than any other dimension with effort, being most affected by the resources available for meeting what people want instead of need in a totally natural environment.

Another example is an exploration of the effects of changes in the distribution of happiness over a population. Since happiness is primarily dependent on Sratio, increasing the population's total consumption creates more variability of happiness within the population which could be an indicator of conflict. As a minimum, it is reasonable to expect that frustration would become widespread as a larger number of people experiencing high neuroticism discover that more effort decreases instead of increases their happiness (the model projects that one-fourth of the world population is currently in that situation).

Cutting per-capita consumption by nearly half to what it was in the 1920s without changing population would restore the happiness distribution to what was in 2002, right before it reached its maximum and started to drop for those expending the most effort. It would have the added benefit of total impact on the planet equivalent to what it was in 1970 when humanity was consuming only what Nature could spare without harm. I have no idea whether these benefits would be sufficient motivation to make such a change (even if my analysis could be proved to everyone's satisfaction), but just the possibility is a valuable insight provided by the model.

Implementation of this scenario is subject to the concerns about reducing consumption that I mentioned earlier, which implies to me that, if undertaken, it should be done as soon as possible – no more than the 19 years it would take for us to otherwise go extinct - to get the most gain from assistance by other species. In the worst case, it would buy us some time (a rough estimate is 15 years); while in the best case we could avert catastrophe altogether. If the model is right, and my analysis of it is right, then we will soon be forced to make a choice between taking this risky approach and being forced to take even more casualties without hope of recovery.

Save Jon Frump!

Land of Conscience Blog — Tue, 04 Sep 2018 15:54:46 GMT

After watching the movie "Active Measures" (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8135494/), this alternative explanation for recent behavior by the president in OUR universe came to mind.

In another universe much like ours, Precident Jon Frump stared at his phone in irritation bordering on panic. The people with the power to extricate him and his family from this decade-long nightmare still hadn't gotten the message that he needed their help, and time was running out.

The weekend's posts to his Chirpster feed were the most outrageous yet, which would have pushed any normal Congrease into immediate and full-throated impeachment hearings. Instead, the parallel sales pitch designed to steer its members toward doing his bidding was having the opposite effect, with the leadership doubling down to protect him against the consequences of any impropriety.

He turned on the visitelly and flipped through the news channels. To his disgust, the media was still only getting half the story. Worshingten insiders from previous administrations and the growing gaggle of lawyers and former prosecutors were focused on his cover and the evil acts that he was been blackmailed into doing, but they still hadn't discerned his real motivation. His only hope was that someone would figure it out on their own, giving him deniability as he half-heartedly protested that it was fiction and used his public persona as a gullible idiot to enable being cut off from doing more of Pushkin's bidding.

Stopping at Lenny Frock's propaganda channel, Frump gritted his teeth as well-meaning idiots picked up on his pain and tried to make him feel better by attacking everyone but his real tormentor. Their own biases, based on the manufactured biases that drove Lenny's successful profit model, kept them from giving credence to the observations of the rest of the media which would have provided the context needed to see the whole picture. It wasn't lost on Frump that this had been a big part of Pushkin's plan all along: isolating feelings from facts was the basis of his own success.

The phone buzzed, making him jump, as a text message appeared from an unidentified caller. "Tickety-tock," it said simply. He knew precisely who had sent it, and what it meant. What do I do now? he thought feverishly.

Alternate Timelines

Big Pic Explorer — Fri, 17 Aug 2018 22:02:10 GMT

Three new simulated histories have been added using alternative relationships within the Timelines model.

Timeline 3 projects what might have happened if the Enlightenment and subsequent Industrial Revolution didn't occur.
Timeline 4 projects trends since 1650 rather than accounting for the changes that altered them around 1947.
Timeline 5 uses a set of best-case dependencies of global variables on the species ratio to project a very optimistic (and clearly fantastical) future.

This information is limited to basic projections. More detail is planned for later.

Happiness Crisis

Commentary — Fri, 27 Jul 2018 18:57:43 GMT

The Timelines model applied to historical data shows that in 2004 the one in 14 million people who owned five percent of the world's wealth found that more wealth was no longer making them happier. Within a year, they discovered that owning more was making them distinctly less happy; and worse, it was not improving the health of newborn children.

This "happiness crisis" spread like a virus, affecting one in 16 thousand people owning one-fourth of global wealth when the financial crisis hit in 2008. The crisis slowed its progress over the next year, but then it accelerated, affecting one in 13 hundred people owning one-third of the wealth in 2010.

By 2015, the one in 24 people (now in Timeline 2) who owned half the world's wealth had discovered that more wealth made them less happy. Making things worse, happiness had dropped to zero for the richest people, the one in eight million who owned one-fourteenth of the world's wealth. By 2016, life expectancy had also dropped to zero for some newborns.

This year one in five people are affected, and by 2021 half of the population will be unsatisfied by the growing economy. Currently one-fourth of the world's wealth is owned by one in 22 thousand people who are totally unhappy, and in 2021 one in 300 people will be in the same situation.

It is tempting to associate these simulated observations with historical events such as the financial crisis and the rise of authoritarianism in the richest countries (indeed, one of the main missions of the modeling effort is to identify key drivers of history, the other being the suggestion of ways to delay our extinction). One reason for such an association is that it provides an explanation for people getting frustrated with the world economy, including and especially those who have historically benefitted the most from it. As the frustration was felt by less wealthy people, those people could conceivably rebel against governments whose job was to keep things running as expected. The advance of the happiness peak toward affecting average world citizens would initially empower them; but as it crashes past them soon after the world population begins to drop, upheaval would strike them too, no doubt magnified by the passing of the life expectancy peak that isn't far behind.

Underlying all of this is what is proposed as an ultimate cause, as opposed to the proximate causes that normally come to mind. The ultimate cause, of course, is reduction of quantity and quality of natural environments needed for humans (and the many organisms that inhabit us) to both survive and thrive. Notably, the beginning of the happiness crisis in 2004 was accompanied by humanity consuming half of all available resources that are biologically determinant for our welfare. One-third of those "resources" were the natural means for renewably providing food and services each year, the total of which we had begun fully consuming in 1970.

In 2022, if we are in synch with Timeline 2, our consumption - which includes both what we use and what we dispose of, including greenhouse gases - will be twice what we consumed in 1970 and two-thirds of all resources. What's left will include the species keeping the planet habitable for creatures like us, which we are driving extinct along with ourselves. By 2029, happiness is projected to be zero for eeryone alive, life expectancy for newborns will be zero two years after that, and population will reach zero in 2038 as our waste displaces all remaining resources.

Top Fraction Views

Big Pic Explorer — Thu, 26 Jul 2018 19:46:41 GMT

How variables change over the global population can be viewed in terms of the fraction of the population experiencing them. This page shows change over time for several of these variables: life expectancy, happiness, current wealth per person, median age, and the three consumption components (needs, wants, and waste).

Personal Consumption and Happiness

Big Pic Explorer — Wed, 25 Jul 2018 22:54:58 GMT

Personal consumption and happiness vary over time and over the population. This technical page describes how this can be used to derive the efficiency of consumption, which becomes optimum in 2019 for Timeline 2.

Gradients

Big Pic Explorer — Mon, 23 Jul 2018 23:21:30 GMT

Each person in a population experiences values of global variables in common with others who consume the same amount of basic resources. The amount those variables change over the population is likely most meaningful between groups consuming a little less, and those consuming a little more of those basic resources than any person in the population. The changes for any particular variable form a "gradient" over the population.

Values Realized

Idea Explorer Blog — Tue, 10 Jul 2018 22:26:20 GMT

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...

Delayed Gratification

Commentary — Mon, 02 Jul 2018 21:26:30 GMT

If we evaluate the future in terms of how many people there are, years that can be lived, and how satisfied people are with their lives, then extending the amount of time humanity can survive can be understood as the indefinite delay of gratification. This is detailed below.

Seeking maximum population (P), life expectancy (L), and happiness (H) by following the historical trend in ecological resource consumption will result in success between 2020 and 2022 as experienced by Timeline 2, followed by precipitous drops for all of them. The following graph shows each variable as a fraction of its maximum value(Pmax, Lmax, and Hmax), along with the product of all three (PLH).

The approach to their respective peak values is slowed in the Fix timeline, shown below.

Note that happiness is used here in place of economic activity per person as a future outcome to be measured. The combined value PLH (calculated as P/Pmax * L/Lmax * H/Hmax) can be used as a proxy for all three outcomes, and is directly dependent on the ratio of required consumption to the amount of unconsumed resources.

The Extinction Test

Land of Conscience Blog — Fri, 29 Jun 2018 22:33:46 GMT

One of the reasons I became interested in humanity's extinction was because it provides a clear test of whether a set of actions is good or evil. If your actions contribute to extinction, then they are evil (but you aren't). If your actions help avoid it, then they are toward the good end of the spectrum between good and evil. The rationale for this is based on placing the highest value on human life, because without humans there can be no values.

Another reason for my interest was awareness of a non-zero probability that it could happen in my lifetime. While studying the energy crisis as a teenager in 1976, before I ever heard of global warming, I realized that the pursuit of unlimited energy consumption could mean a hothouse-like death if it was confined to our planet, which forced a decision between limiting our consumption or moving it into space.

Nearly two decades later, after the famous impact of a comet with Jupiter, I prepared a presentation to my local astronomy club on the potential for the impact of a comet or asteroid with Earth, and learned that it was a serious threat to the survival of our species. This was in addition to the long-term inevitability that our planet and all life on it would be exterminated by our Sun warming as part of its natural aging process. Asteroid impacts and solar warming also made the case for at least some people leaving Earth so some of us could survive.

So began my research into the possible ways that humanity could not only avoid extinction, but maximize the number of people over time. This and some happy accidents drew me to the growing movement inside and outside the professional space community to pursue the settlement of Mars. As a founding member of the Mars Society, I promoted that vision while investigating the limits of the ultimate goal: settling the rest of the Universe.

While trying to estimate how many people could live on another planet, I became familiar with the estimation of how many people could live on this one. Space enthusiasts and environmentalists have long had an adversarial relationship due to a fundamental disagreement about both the existence and acceptability of limits to human activity, and until I began seriously studying the issues I came down on the space enthusiasts' side of that debate.

Another chance event, my attendance of a lecture by prominent physicist Albert Bartlett on the consequences of exponential growth, especially regarding energy supply and consumption, convinced me that the environmentalists had a point. It wasn't lost on me that I should have seen it myself with years of studying and using both math and physics.

An update of a famous study relating human behavior to environmental impact provided more detail which I could use to inform my research, and made an even more convincing case that people could conceivably die off, on any settled world such as our own, long before an asteroid impact or solar event did them in.

In 2005 my research became a presentation to the Mars Society, along with a published paper. It concluded with several options:

Change nothing and commit to a minimal population living a brutal life.
Stretch our resources on Earth with a limited population living well until natural disaster strikes. Deflect asteroids to extend that time.
Settle the Solar System and have a large population until the Sun dies.
While settling the Solar System, develop the technology for stellar travel, which may help us outlast the Sun.

After thirteen years of studying ecology, social science, environmental science, and many related subjects, as well as constructing additional mathematical models, I think it's highly probable that extinction is imminent: we have pursued the first option for too long, making it far too optimistic and ruling out the remaining options.

Still, those last two options beckon. My imagination has run wild with ways to yet make them viable, fueled by insights from my latest mathematical model. Exploring those ways and how to make them a reality is why I quit my job, along with realizing that the alternative was a life of failure and despair that would not be worth living.

The Fix timeline is one of those ways. It is a variant of the second option that might help most of us survive for a few decades, if we're lucky, and create a new version of civilization that would be able to responsibly take the next steps: settling other planets. To live for more than short exploration periods on far less habitable worlds than ours, settlers would need to have a basic commitment to sustainability – both physically and socially – with a default respect for all life they encounter since that life would already be adapted to survival in the environment.

Commitment to sustainability and respect for life would have already been learned as a basic requirement for living on Earth, and may therefore take more than one generation to cultivate before leaving. This points to another way of making a large interplanetary population possible given the short window of opportunity we have to avoid our immediate fate: overwhelming social pressure to enforce the requirements for living in that future world now. The brief amount of time we can live in relative comfort that kills our future selves would be jettisoned like going on a crash diet with the impending absence of food.

While considering the difficulty of these and other ways to save the future, I must remind the reader as well as myself that we are all subject to the extinction test, whether we choose to be or not: assisting the death of our species is the ultimate evil.

Schematic Future

Commentary — Thu, 28 Jun 2018 15:16:25 GMT

A simplified way of thinking about the future is illustrated schematically below. Changes in values of three variables are used to define each outcome: population, life expectancy, and economic activity per person. Outcomes from projections (Timeline 2 is "likely" and the Fix timeline is "best") are given alongside an idealized list of generic outcomes. The choices for "better" and "worse" are based on an assumed set of values, where higher values of each variable are preferred.

The components of this schematic can be used as a common set of concepts for use in discussions about the impact of a variety of actions and events on the future. Discussions about the basis for each judgment and the choice of variables can also be facilitated by using them.

This and similar diagrams are potential tools for a focus on issues and perspective like that suggested in the blog post "Contagion."

Contagion

Land of Conscience Blog — Wed, 27 Jun 2018 00:20:03 GMT

Uneasiness in social media led to a conspiracy theory of my own making. But if it was true, what did it mean and what should we do?

Triggers

Commentary — Wed, 20 Jun 2018 00:49:10 GMT

The blog post "Fix" outlines a backstory that might explain the branching of potential futures from Timeline 2 to the Fix timeline. It centers on an event in Timeline 2 that triggers a revolutionary change in ecological impact. This helps delay extinction long enough for hypothesized social adaptations to develop that could ensure humanity's survival for at least a few more decades.

The event is a peak in the growth of the world economy that occurs in 2017 and signals the impending population crash that begins three years later. This event was chosen as a trigger because it could shatter faith in the fundamentals of the economy as experienced by most people and force them to accept that something else, namely the health and abundance of ecosystems, is the most important factor determining their wellbeing.

Meanwhile, alluded to in the discussion, is a significant deviation from a historical trend relating Gross World Product to the production of so-called "happy environments": living conditions that provide life satisfaction, measured as the product of happiness and population. This deviation would be felt by a large number of people, possibly contributing to the impetus to make major changes in their lives.

Meanwhile, in our timeline, the world economy is being imperiled by isolationist and dictatorial trade and immigration practices that could be mechanisms for the scale of slowdown projected for Timeline 2, which has much of its recent history in common with ours. Recall that isolation and concentration of control are the enemies of diversity needed for adapting to changing conditions, especially environmental conditions already in unhealthy flux that are needed for basic life support. The economy is also threatened by the plans of a few to create vast new infrastructure that would entrench and expand humanity's ecological impact at precisely the time it needs to be reduced.

Driving prices up on basic goods and services reduces the ability for a large number of people to survive and thrive within the system that enables it. It will encourage the majority to find an alternative to the system, while also limiting their willingness and ability to support new family. Without a natural healthy environment to retreat to and survive on the basics, or access to other social environments because of restricted borders (or alack of healthy social environments to retreat to), population collapse could be triggered.