Land of Conscience

Remember

noreply@blogger.com (Bradley Jarvis) — Wed, 08 Jan 2025 20:55:00 +0000

Remember how we are

As the controllers try to change us.

Remember the value of others

As the selfish try to erase all but theirs.

Remember the life we share

As the greedy try to steal it.

Remember how to learn and know

As the deceitful try to gaslight us.

Remember the beauty of diversity

As the fearful try to destroy it.

Death Stoppers

noreply@blogger.com (Bradley Jarvis) — Sun, 08 Dec 2024 03:27:00 +0000

The team deployed throughout the world

Its goal was crystal clear

To stop the death that threatened all

Without a shred of fear.

Its members started with the worst

The ones who didn't share

Who raped the land for fun and gain

And cared not what was fair.

They called them out for what they were

Made their acts a source of shame

No one took their money

For fear they'd share the blame.

Next the team set out to change

How much it cost to live

By growing more of Nature

So freely it could give.

The land provided basics

Renewable each year

While factories made less and less

Of unnecessary gear.

People learned to value life

In all its varied kinds

The team showed how we're all the same

Part of a web that binds.

Though some remained who wanted more

The earth chose what they had

Slowly wounds began to heal

As good replaced the bad.

Disaster was averted

Death slowed to a crawl

Love and health became the rule

The team became us all.

Poem by Bradley Jarvis, featured in the book "Death Stoppers Anthology."

A Clear Choice

noreply@blogger.com (Bradley Jarvis) — Sat, 26 Oct 2024 16:21:00 +0000

I hate bullies. I hate liars. I hate bullies who are liars. That, unfortunately, is what we have as one of the two top presidential candidates in the United States election this year. It is unfortunate that there are people who support somebody like that. It is also fortunate because it's really easy to spot somebody you don't like and to vote for the alternative. That's certainly what I'm going to do. I have issues with the plans of the candidate that I support, Kamala Harris, but they are tiny in comparison to the issues I have with the cruel, dangerous plans of the lying bully I could never support, Donald Trump.

My hate comes from the threat of assault on what I value, which is people. I value people's lives. I value their well-being. I feel most guilty when I cause harm to another person. I feel most joy when I feel like I made somebody's life better. Bullying liars thrive on harming others, using them to pleasure themselves and then throw away when they’re done, which is my personal definition of pure evil.

We’re lucky to have a clear choice, between that and an honest caretaker. I think we need an honest caretaker as we face our many challenges in the present and in the future. It's important to have a tough one; someone who can stand up to threats. And I firmly believe in fighting when somebody's life is at stake, to defeat the threat of damage by someone like a lying bully. I expect that most people's lives will be better to the extent that they can be under Harris, and they will be worse to the extent that they can be under Trump. It's a no-brainer as far as I'm concerned. Unfortunately, that's not the case with many of the voters that support him; but I can't control them. I don't believe that I can change their minds because they are under his control. I choose not to control; because to do so would be to become that which I hate.

As we face choices of who to lead us and who's going to have the power to lead people, the way that we make those choices can be influenced for what we consider to be the better. In my case, “better” is based on a bias toward people and their welfare; toward ecosystems and their health; and toward life in general, which is interdependent and requires something from each of its members in order to be able to sustain the environment that we all live in.

In this election, those considerations are a major factor because in the case of the lying bully, there is a desire to remove regulation, remove the constraints on harmful behaviors and enhance the ability of people like him to thrive in pursuit of what they alone want, without consideration for their effects on other lives. The selfishness of Trump and others like him turns the resources needed to maintain basic survival into waste that cannot be consumed and fouls the resources that are left so that people and other species cannot live healthy lives. Worse, these lying bullies force others to do the same.

On the other hand, it appears that Harris’s heart is in the right place. She definitely has the qualifications to effectively serve people by managing the people’s agency, government, one of whose purposes is to do for people what they can’t do themselves in order to live and thrive. She also has the ability to learn and adapt based on intelligent assessment of reality, which will be critical to extending our collective lifetime in the face of global crises largely caused by the lifestyle she has sworn to defend.

Update

noreply@blogger.com (Bradley Jarvis) — Sun, 19 May 2024 00:06:00 +0000

[The following is an edited transcript of a video posted to my Patreon site.]

I've been away from the research side for quite a while, focusing on work and some normal stuff for a change.

But I have been keeping up on what's been going on in the world. If you've been tracking my Twitter (now X) feed, you can see a lot of the stories that I've been most interested in. Of course, they have to do with the ultimate end state of everything, which is death of humanity.

Key to those things are the collapse of Earth's ecosystems and the emergence of invasive species contributing to our extinction, such as viruses.

And then, of course, there is the pollution issue, which is directly affecting us like it's affecting other creatures on the planet. We have injected some pretty nasty man-made chemicals into our system along with basically everything else in the world, and we're starting to pay the price.

I have also been tracking one of my earliest interests: astronomy. You've probably seen the news about the solar storms that we've been having. Those are pretty interesting. They also have a component in the disaster realm, of course the possibility of the equivalent of shutdown of power grids and other things, with effects like the electromagnetic pulse which I explored in my first novel Lights Out. It does make for some very pretty aurora. I didn't get a chance to see any, but I have a friend who did. and a lot of other people around the world did. So, that's all the consequence of our sun’s being in its most active period of its 11-year cycle.

And then there's the social upheaval, the potential of having an authoritarian fascistic state resulting from developments here in the U.S. and around the world that very likely could exacerbate all of our other problems as many of the adherents are in serious denial about what's going on in the world and in particular about the vulnerability that all humans have.

None of us has a degree of superiority that is of any significance over each other or other species especially when it comes to our combined survival. We as a species have essentially taken the role of the ultimate invasive species, using abusing, destroying everything in our path that doesn't serve our very narrow purposes which unfortunately doesn't serve the purpose of survival for most of the life on the planet.

I have been keeping up on that, viewing it through the lens of my research, since my research really is just a set of hypotheses that helps to guide discovery: questions about how things work, what's likely to happen, and testing, testing, testing. Don't take anything for granted, trust yourself no more than you trust anything or anyone else. Basically, trying to stay honest.

I am continuing to follow those hypotheses and the kinds of things that they predict, just to see what happens and then prepare basically a comparison between the worlds that it projects and the one that we're living in.

So yeah, all that stuff is going on, mostly in my head. I have done some writing and I suppose I could say I've been mainly in the test phase.

Also, the recuperation phase, because currently dealing with all that negativity is stressful. It kind of reached a level where it was intolerable, so I had to take a little bit of now time and just focus on what for me is normal stuff: trying to find another house to move into that is smaller and more efficiently meets my family's needs and essentially jettisoning the waste that I've been carrying around for probably at least 20 years. So that's fun.

Getting back to viruses, there's COVID, and COVID is about to make a major resurgence as a new variant that is essentially immune to our medicinal approaches to fighting the disease is very soon, if it's not already, going to be like a whole new pandemic. And there's bird flu, which I've also been tracking. Thanks to the anti-vaxxers the basic science deniers among us, diseases that we had under control as a species are now making a comeback, like measles.

So, I've also been dealing with the huge amount of just disappointment in the judgment of many people in the world around me. Part of me wants to attribute it to the variables that are affecting other species. I'm sure that there's a lot of that; but there are cultural deficiencies. We've avoided holding people accountable for meeting common values like, primarily, long term survival, at least from my point of view being the ultimate one.

It's not just this generation, but generations past. We're just reaching a point where ignoring those limitations is no longer an option. We have gotten to the point where there's nowhere left to plunder without destroying ourselves; and we've probably surpassed that point by now, so I'm going to continue trying to learn from all of this.

For now, I think my focus is going to be on the application and exposition of values. As I've been saying in some of my personal videos, the world is dying and I'm doing this stuff, and hoping to be able to turn that stuff into something that's going to ultimately slow things down at least to the extent that I can, as opposed to just living my normal life and continuing to accelerate the damage.

Projects and Responsibility

noreply@blogger.com (Bradley Jarvis) — Wed, 22 Nov 2023 14:50:00 +0000

I am currently working on several projects while attempting to live a healthy life and support it through employment in an economy that is rapidly destroying life on a global scale. Those projects primarily serve my personal needs for self-expression, discovery, and serving my values, among which is the long-term survival and health of the world’s inhabitants that my lifestyle is helping to eradicate.

Until very recently, I had some hope that my net impact on the world would be a positive one. Now I am practically certain that the impact will be deeply negative, no matter what I do before I die. The best I can do is make it less negative; that includes nurturing relationships with other people, especially those of family and friends, and is the most compelling reason I have to continue living.

My projects consist of writing fiction; sharing insights on social media; and exploring through research and simulation how actions and values influence each other in order to develop strategies that serve my values. The projects are interdependent, with shifting priorities based on what feels like the best way to spend the limited time I have for them. That feeling varies with what is in the news (mostly involving existential threats), connections my mind makes between threads of experience and knowledge, and general motivation due to a variety of other factors.

When I’m feeling especially depressed about the future, I “help out” the denizens of my fictional Simulated News blog who are working together to deal with their own extinction crisis using a strategy derived from my research. If the stress is manageable and I feel okay indulging in pure fiction, I continue writing my second novel, BIOME. My newest book under development is an attempt to share what it’s like to live a life of accidental exploration, through the fictional experiences of someone who thinks – and learns from getting lost – like me.

My non-fiction blog posts like this one are both personal and speculative, grounded in years of living and study as well as occasional reactions to current events and insights from my mathematical modeling of history and the future. Introspection and conflict between values and commitments to one’s culture provide a powerful motivation to write, as I’m doing here and have elsewhere.

Weakness and strength are two sides of what I perceive as normal existence, where changing situations determine which is dominantly observed both internally and externally. In this case, weakness and its consequences are most on my mind as the world seems to be collapsing around me and I am inclined to reflect on my responsibility for it.

In Pursuit Of Waste

noreply@blogger.com (Bradley Jarvis) — Sun, 13 Aug 2023 00:06:00 +0000

My latest progress in the pursuit of a simple, objective measure of values has yielded a testable model based on estimated distributions of resources throughout the global population. I’m presenting the model as a set of concepts and simulations for use in discussing and exploring ideas and explanations about the world as I’ve been doing in my first blog, Idea Explorer, and more loosely in my fiction as embodied in the BIOME/Lights Out books and the Simulated News blog.

To the extent that my current simulation is applicable to actual history, I can characterize my lifetime as coinciding with a period of human history when economic activity in the production of waste has had more value than people and is likely to result in the extermination of our species along with many others that are even more undervalued. I have personally pursued waste, which I define as resources that do not meet basic biological needs, and/or they eliminate the ability of others to meet those needs. In particular, I have devoted most of my life to the enabling and development of technology that can acquire and manipulate the world’s resources at an accelerating rate.

One aspect of the simulated world’s future is rapid production of waste even as the world’s population crashes, which might be explained by the influence of artificially intelligent machines taking the place of humans to serve the purpose of their own continuation as the ultimate embodiment of waste. While I have not directly contributed to that, I have enough experience and knowledge to closely follow it and use some of its precursors in my own work, making such speculation more than an extrapolation of science fiction.

Interest in the role of values in the determination of humanity’s fate has always had an emotional component, alternating between the elation of discovery and the guilt of being part of a global killing machine that enables that discovery. What felt like a binary choice between personal longevity and happiness aided by employment of technology and waste creation, and long term longevity of the biosphere that encompasses and nourishes life, has been largely verified by study and evidence. Hope has driven the search for a third choice that optimizes both, and frustration has accompanied failure in that search.

Technology as the answer to many of humanity’s wants, fulfilled by waste, has sabotaged our desire for a long future that only a replenishable and diverse habitat can provide. In the terms of the simulation, serving the value of waste ultimately overwhelms the values of habitat and people. By pursuing waste as a default in a culture where personal survival is contingent on it, contribution to the demise of life has been all but inevitable.

Doubt

noreply@blogger.com (Bradley Jarvis) — Sun, 04 Dec 2022 01:02:00 +0000

As always, I am open to pleasant surprises; but I am under no illusion that they will be just that: surprises.

The last few years have been rough for much of the world. My instinct to hunker down and try to weather the storm of disease, social unrest, and environmental disaster, while using my particular skills to search for ways to extricate us all from the worst of it, appears to have been a good one. This, despite the fact that the “storm” is most likely to intensify and overwhelm even the most careful and fortified among us. There is no safe place to go; and luck is not on our side.

I have avoided the worst consequences so far, but symptoms of advanced age remind me that even in the best circumstances my time would be about as limited. Doubting myself more than I doubt others has been forced into reverse, so that now I see that window of time being pushed closed by people I expected to be at least as responsible and caring as I think I am. I find myself doubting what until now I never imagined doubting: that humanity has what it takes to survive, and that we are even worthy of it.

Awareness borne of experience and indulgence of curiosity has revealed the scope of threats to longevity and the networks of causes that have both created and amplified them. That awareness, which I once perceived as a valuable tool for collaboration toward workable and working solutions, has become a source of physically painful stress, triggering a fight-or-flight response that cannot be acted upon, while the third option of living with the threats is intolerable due to their nature - and mine.

There are patterns in history that reveal what appear to be fundamental aspects of human nature. Chief among them is that we, like other creatures, seek to procreate and dominate the environments we occupy. What saved us until recently was the existence of predators and limited resources that kept us from succeeding beyond what the rest of life could tolerate.

Invention of technologies that could harness the forces of nature, coupled with our willingness to use them to meet our ultimate goals, enabled us to attain what no other species could: global dominance. Unfortunately, wisdom and empathy weren’t up to the task of keeping us from destroying those on which we depended for survival. Those qualities were overwhelmed by an illogical yet basic belief in our innate superiority over those we inaccurately perceived as not being like us, or as part of us, or as valuable as us. And now, they are dying; and because we are also part of them, so are we.

My doubts aside, future experience will determine what is accurate and who is accountable for whatever fate awaits us. Perhaps foolishly, I refuse to give up on the possibility that something good is ahead of us, rather than locked into unreachable pockets of the past.

Remembrance

noreply@blogger.com (Bradley Jarvis) — Wed, 22 Sep 2021 00:49:00 +0000

My father Arthur “Art” Jarvis died of a heart attack 29 years ago in a world very different from the one we now live in. He was at work in a business that sprang from his lifelong love of learning and a desire to share that love and its many benefits with others. Among the benefits was the ability to make logical, informed decisions that might, on average, improve the lives of the people they affected, what he considered and hoped would be “common” sense. I was working with him at the time and shared a darker motivation for trying to develop and share a better way of learning than what was being taught in schools: avoiding life in a world where people could not distinguish fact from fiction, a society whose lifetime would consequently be brutal and short.

Now more than double my age at the time and just six years away from his age when he died, I have lived to see the world we feared begin to emerge. I continued the work in my own way after it became impossible to follow our common path, becoming aware in the process that we were taking for granted that people would choose to make good decisions if they had reliable information and could apply logic to determine their consequences. In short, the definitions of “good” and “bad” were not being explicitly considered. It was among the most consequential blind spots I have found in the search for blind spots that has been an integral part of my life. The most consequential and deeply personally blind spot was that moving to higher altitude would not adversely affect my father’s health, which it did and likely contributed to his death.

Environmental effects on health are now a major part of everyone’s lives, just as environmental concern has grown to be a test of values (“good” and “bad”) that are shared by - and therefore defining - groups in our diverse and increasingly fragile global society. Since the fates of everyone are tied to how we affect our common environment, with varying and considerable degrees of power bestowed by technology, the survival of our entire species and countless others that we share that environment with, depends on us having a core set of common values that is consistent with that survival. That is: we need “common sense” based on common values and a common understanding of reality.

One of my father’s insights, and the essence of his approach to learning, was that the process of discovery provides a common experience that can be a basis for effective communication and accelerated understanding through collaborative application of logic to the observations made in that discovery. Open-ended learning by small groups can scale to larger groups and their members (us) perceive and value the relationships between each other and between them and their environment. If knowledge and understanding are inherently valued, then the process and the growing membership of those who follow it, will be inherently valued. For my father, and for me, that was self-evident and enough. To reiterate what I learned later, what we value is arbitrary; and (in my view) to ensure that the process can continue or reach a mutually agreed end, we must include discovery of our values along with our discovery of the rest, beginning with the value that makes all values possible: our continued existence.

Seeking Miracles

noreply@blogger.com (Bradley Jarvis) — Thu, 15 Jul 2021 01:23:00 +0000

I was recently introduced to the Miracle Question by my wife, a social worker who has used it to help people transcend hopelessness in their lives. A substantial part of my writing has unwittingly followed its example as I’ve dealt with the growing potential for humanity’s extinction and the guilt associated with helping drive other species there first. Definitions and simulations of an “ideal world;” fictional versions of what they might look like and feel like by characters who care; and poetry describing efforts by heroic “death stoppers” have resulted from creative problem-solving with both analytical and artistic dimensions.

In my latest experience, self-care has required a setting and enforcement of boundaries, practical and emotional, that enable functioning in the face of persistent news of growing breakdown in society and the natural infrastructure that it depends upon. I examined the relationships between what I thought and how I felt from the perspective of cognitive behavioral therapy, coupled with an honest appraisal of my responsibility for conditions I automatically chose to feel guilty about. I finally found a job to recoup financial losses during my self-imposed hiatus that had unfortunately coincided with the onset of the COVID pandemic and the predations of a much more irresponsible mob.

Understanding how easy it is for me to expect and therefore detect the existence of catastrophic failure modes in every system around me, including myself, I have allowed myself to celebrate resilience and learn to seek it out effectively as I have its opposite. This is a work in progress, as I fight fear that it too may be doomed to failure.

Recently I turned to an approach that strikes a middle ground and has worked briefly in the past, sometimes as a seed for creative insight. I searched for simple overarching variables that could define a better state in the experiences at hand. During a walk at a nearby reservoir I instead seized on a simple value statement based on what I have already discovered: everything comes down to how well we live and how long we live. I explored one aspect of this statement in a video I made during that walk. The three variables I identified form the basis of my historically derived model of human experience; and they can be appreciated at all scales, including what is seen and felt on a morning stroll in a mixed setting of people, birds, plants, and artifacts.

Since then, I have mentally and emotionally processed daily experiences within this context, easily expanding my awareness to the possible configurations of all variables based on which we choose to care about in the actions that we take. This view helps, like a map, to define and plan how to achieve a set of experiences that is “better” than what (or where) they are now. Creativity replaces reactive feelings with a process for turning the perception of miracles into lived experience.

Emergence

noreply@blogger.com (Bradley Jarvis) — Mon, 03 May 2021 22:37:00 +0000

Like many people I have been vaccinated for COVID-19 and will soon have the maximum immunity. I understand that this does not mean I will be totally unable to catch or spread the virus, which remains deadly to many people.

Based on trusted guidance about the risks:

• I will avoid being inside with people who I don’t know are vaccinated unless they are masked and there is proper ventilation and room for social distancing (in which case I will also be masked and will minimize extended contact).

• When outdoors, I will wear a mask only when in extended close contact with people I don’t know are vaccinated.

• Until herd immunity is achieved, the need to occasional sneeze and blow my nose due to persistent allergies will make it difficult to avoid freaking people out, so I will avoid being with others (unless we are all vaccinated) for more than an hour at a time.

The main difference from behavior before vaccination is that I am considering going indoors for other than unavoidable medical reasons.

My preference for entirely remote employment is consistent with my attitude about the virus. I have recently decided that I will also be willing to make infrequent visits to an office subject to the constraints above. My other reasons for remote work remain strong ones:

• My creativity and productivity are maximized when not subject to interruptions and expectations inconsistent with my work style.

• Commuting is dangerous as well as costly in resources and time; it should be avoided where it can be.

• I am in the process of changing my living conditions to match my values and abilities; an associated move would not risk interrupting remote work.

• I intend to continue working on my own projects, which would benefit from spending more time at home and having more control over my schedule.

Responsible Survival

noreply@blogger.com (Bradley Jarvis) — Wed, 01 Jan 2020 18:08:00 +0000

It has been 20 months since I quit my job to complete the project that has dominated my thoughts and creativity for more than 20 years and nearly crippled me with stress and bouts of despair based on what it revealed: that humanity is overwhelmingly responsible for a mass extinction of the life on which we depend that could culminate in our own extinction within my lifetime.

I restarted the project several times over that 20 years, each with a fresh look, new data, and broader scope, in service of my goal to identify a means of assessing actions as right or wrong based on a mix of core values centering on life: its quantity, quality, and longevity (time until death for individuals, time until extinction for humanity). Much of the effort involved exploring theoretically and historically the interactions and relationships between the three.

The set of variables I studied expanded from population size (people and other species) and resources (mass, energy, and ecological) to include happiness (life satisfaction through personalizing of one's environment), economics (Gross World Product, wealth, and inflation), median age, children, birth rate, and death rate. "Actions" included changing the amounts and types of available resources (by consumption, acquisition, destruction, and degradation) and changing the amount and types of people (procreation, killing, merging groups).

I also derived how the variables changed (and could change) over time. The results were the basis of projections into the past and future of civilization. Sets of assumptions formed different projections, each a "simulated world" whose history could be interpreted in experiential terms and compared to actual events as a test of relevance to the real world. They were also used to suggest options for making our own future better based on preferred combinations of values, which typically favored longevity and quantity of life since the projected futures based on history were unanimously showing imminent and catastrophic drops in both. Close monitoring of news reports along with personal experience convinced me that reality was tracking with the worst of my projections, and increased the urgency I felt to advance the project as far as I could on my own.

Complicating the matter on a personal level was a need for money and a need for sanity. An obvious solution to both was the expansion of my side business as a creative writer and music creator, which helped my mental health by increasing happiness (creating the experience of an imaginary environment) in a way that could be shared with others in return for money. I pursued that solution while working on the project, sharing my research and insights about the news online, and advertising both aspects of my efforts in a fictional blog about one of the simulated worlds that is pursuing options to fight extinction based on my own. Meanwhile, my wife and I lived off her income and money saved up from my previous conventional work.

Now the project is effectively done, the accomplishment I am most proud of; but I am under no illusion that it is more than a small tool that can be applied to providing guidance for creation of a better world. I have already used it to identify a basic set of prescriptions that address the greatest crisis of our time, and am encouraged that they line up with recommendations of others who I deeply respect and know far more than me.

The logical next step is to work on implementing those prescriptions to the extent possible, even if the probability of success is as vanishingly low as it appears. In the world of my fictional blog, that involves stopping population growth and using no more than 30% of the world's ecological resources within 20 years (I project that we currently use an average of 63%) by reducing what we consume and stopping the negative responses of natural systems that threaten to radically reduce how much we have left (what I've called "external impacts"). If humanity is successful and lucky, a sustainable population will inhabit the new world it creates.

I turned 60 recently and don't expect to survive another 20 years in even the most optimistic trajectory of the world's future (in the least optimistic, it will be less than ten). Facing that, my new goal is a no-brainer that will be a recurring New Year's resolution: "responsible survival." Now that I have a means for determining what's "responsible," such a goal is defensible and possible. Unlike the past 20 years, I will focus less on what everyone must do while following the lead of others until it feels wrong. I will focus more on leading while seeking what's right, and living so it feels that way. The result may not be the best; but I'll be damned if it isn't as good as I can make it.

Every Day

noreply@blogger.com (Bradley Jarvis) — Mon, 23 Dec 2019 16:00:00 +0000

Every day I wake up to the knowledge that I live in a community that depends on my contributions to its wants and needs and contributes to mine in return with the expectation that doing so is serving a larger good that includes growth and longevity.

Every day I wake up to the knowledge that I live in a nation managed by a raving lunatic who thinks he's a king and is supported by more than a third of people who would sacrifice the nation and the world to make that delusion a reality.

Every day I wake up to the knowledge that I live in a world whose vital systems are being dismantled and consumed along with the life they support for the short-term benefit of my species that is on the verge of killing itself in the process.

Every day I wake up to the knowledge that the expectations of the past cannot be met by the reality their pursuit has created and that new expectations and goals are required for everyone alive and who is yet to born so we can all wake up to a better reality.

Memories of Value

noreply@blogger.com (Bradley Jarvis) — Tue, 23 Jul 2019 17:54:00 +0000

Last week I was reminded on a visceral level what it is like to live with far less pollution of light, sound, air, and thought. It began with a resurgence of stress symptoms I have fought for years and learned to suppress – neck and chest pain, difficulty thinking, and chronic agitation – and transformed on the third day into a clarity I had hoped for when planning this celebration of my fifteenth wedding anniversary.

The place we picked, the area around Colorado's Gunnison River, had sparse cell phone coverage, which made it easier to avoid familiar triggers, and its beautiful natural environment could easily be imagined as part of the transition my recent theoretical explorations depicted for a more benign future than the hell-scape our world is actually facing. In many ways, it was reminiscent of family vacations as a child to Virginia's Blue Ridge Mountains, taken coincidentally with the period of time – the 1960s – most similar to that transition.

My favorite memory, already fading, is the ambient silence as we lay in bed, punctuated only by an occasional car or truck traveling down the dirt road, some creaking wood, and the chirping of birds. Other memories are tied to skywatching, my all-time favorite hobby, which I got to indulge at Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park as part of a public star party expertly managed by a ranger and amateur astronomers, and on our final day as a witness to a gorgeous sunset. The full moon rising 50 years after the first lunar landing mission was a reminder of that hopeful pursuit that triggered my life-long love of astronomy the year before, while its orange tint caused by a distant fire's smoke along with the desecration of a star-filled sky by several satellites reminded me of the polluted peak we now occupy in human history.

A brief indulgence in social media accompanied a spurt of inspiration that yielded my only writing during the trip. Having done my best to understand and identify ways to deal with the largest problem I know, while sharing the results so others could benefit from it, I decided to focus on implementation that would be defined by a basic statement. "We are in the midst of a disaster that likely won't end until those of us alive today are long gone. Fighting is futile, but surrender is complicity. Instead, we can inhibit the evil propelling it, while creating and preserving good for as long as possible." The first part is a description of probable physical conditions. The second is a judgment call that sets the moral stage for action versus inaction. The last two parts are actions that would be required to achieve a better future, regardless of the final outcome.

Framing current events and personal actions in terms of the preservation and creation of good begs the question of how "good" should be defined. My research and writing has provided my own answer, which is the context for much of my positive experience on the vacation: optimization of happiness, longevity, and life's abundance and diversity, which is largely determined by how much of the world is occupied by natural ecosystems. The loss of those ecosystems is the heart of the "disaster" I mentioned, and reversing that loss is an obvious and critical way to end it. The futility of total reversal is due to physical processes that are amplifying the losses outside of our control in the short time we have to stop them; but what control we do have – stopping our own contribution being the most basic example – can, and should, be used to preserve what's left for as long as possible.

I returned home to news of growing "evil" – the opposite of good – as people pursuing more personal happiness force others into deadly collapse of their own, along with the rest of the world. An attenuated form of my stress returned, but I better understood its usefulness as a source of motivation and energy for taking action to deal with its trigger. Having a better sense of what action to take will go a long way toward turning that pain into something resembling its opposite, for myself and others, something I can now better recognize from experience.

Transitions

noreply@blogger.com (Bradley Jarvis) — Thu, 04 Jul 2019 04:31:00 +0000

As the citizens of my fictional simulated world "Hikeyay" begin their transition to a healthier life based on the best recommendations of my multi-year effort to model humanity's past and future, I am attempting a transition of my own in a world that is headed in a very different direction.

For more than twenty-five years I have sporadically attempted to identify my own values, related goals, and means for realizing them after mostly disappointing results from studying and trying others. As I near my sixtieth birthday, that attempt is mostly complete, and I don't have much time left to act on the result – the equivalent of Hikeyay's execution of a global strategy to delay extinction as long as possible.

The competing responsibilities I've grappled with for more than a decade and wrote about in Death Stoppers Anthology are still in play. Global responsibility, anchored in humanity's survival and defined by our relationship with the rest of the biosphere, is – I know now – best served by helping other species survive and thrive by decreasing ecological impact, which reverses the drivers of extinction (habitat loss, invasive species, pollution, population, and over-harvesting). Personal responsibility, tied to maximizing individual happiness and longevity, is served by increasing personal ecological impact up to a point (the happiness peak); and is served by decreasing ecological impact if beyond that point.

My simulations show that a globally significant number of people began passing the happiness peak after 2001, meaning that human pain and death became a consequence of not serving global responsibility. Now two-thirds of the world's population is past the peak, and the rest could be past the peak by 2030 under worst-case (and what I currently consider most likely) conditions if action isn't taken. Even if aggressive action like that contemplated in Hikeyay is taken, any delay would add more casualties and risk that consequences could multiply far beyond what even the most optimistic technologies might be able to manage.

Based on measurable variables like age and wealth, I estimate that I am at least as close to the happiness peak as the world total (a "phase" of 5.7 in the graph below). That matches my subjective experience in the realm of personal responsibility. I have always felt global responsibility, but it has grown exponentially with knowledge of my role in the future and the waning of confidence in the judgment of leaders who claim they know how to make that future better.

The future is the result of a collaborative effort. Until now, I have chosen to mostly develop and share my own insights with others, look for ways to contribute to a comparable reality, and do what appears right until and unless it shows signs of being the opposite. With the equivalent of a better roadmap for identifying appropriate action, my new transition involves interpreting that map and trying what it suggests.

Accidents of Birth

noreply@blogger.com (Bradley Jarvis) — Tue, 06 Nov 2018 16:49:00 +0000

We, and what we have, are all accidents of birth.

Our biology is a consequence of who our parents are and the conditions under which we developed before being born (including whether we were conceived), which are all accidents.
The community of our citizenship depends on where we were born and/or the citizenship of our parents at the time we were born, which are all accidents.
The economic and social trajectories of our lives are dependent on the economic and social status of our parents, which is an accident of our birth.
The limits and opportunities in our physical environment are a result of where and when we live, which is an accident of our birth.

All those accidents, and more, have resulted in one undeniable fact of our existence: we are all human. As such, we are among the starting conditions for future accidents, including:

How long we and others live.
How well we and others live.
Environments that people and other creatures live in.
And, of course, future people.

As a consequence, we are unique, but no more special than anyone else.

Save Jon Frump!

noreply@blogger.com (Bradley Jarvis) — Tue, 04 Sep 2018 15:31:00 +0000

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 being 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.

The Extinction Test

noreply@blogger.com (Bradley Jarvis) — Fri, 29 Jun 2018 22:20:00 +0000

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.

Contagion

noreply@blogger.com (Bradley Jarvis) — Wed, 27 Jun 2018 00:06:00 +0000

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?

I have a confession. I got pulled down the Rabbit Hole again. As before, my feelings were triggered by a series of events and words in the news, resulting in an overwhelming need to react. The reaction involved publicly sharing both the triggers and the emotional meaning I assigned to them, along with implicit and explicit cries for help to deal with them and options and insights for doing so. Because the reaction was public, it offended people who were not triggered while resonating with others who had been similarly triggered.

Others have experienced the same thing as interacting groups formed along pre-existing values, biases, and identities, and moved to dominate, cooperate with, or isolate each another based on how much they had in common. This dynamic has been repeated with more and more frequency as feedback loops developed. Triggering events and communications have proliferated, like the effects of a virus that has found an efficient way of delivering its load to the most people, and is simultaneously mutating at such a rate that its impacts cannot be anticipated and therefore defended against. The end result may well be the dissolution of the society.

Intellectually, it is straightforward to deduce through basic logic and observation that the origin of the "infection" and "mutations" might be a very small group of people using psychology and information technology in a sophisticated version of the classic divide-and-rule strategy to hold onto personal power they perceive as jeopardized by most people collaborating with each other. They are gambling that whoever emerges victorious from the conflict will be easier to control than the unified group that was emerging before it; and judging from the experience so far, they could be right. This understanding, which needs to be verified, points to a solution that mirrors treatment of a runaway virus: isolate the source from the population; find and stop the means of transmission in the population; and then safely eradicate the contagion.

If the problem has been accurately defined, then before such a solution is implemented two big questions need to be answered, in large part because avoiding them has significantly contributed to the emergence of the problem.

The first question is whether the "problem" is really a problem. Part of the population, in addition to those directly responsible, wants to live in a smaller group that is at least selectively isolated from others, with unrestricted access to all the resources they might conceivably exploit. It is not uncommon for them to complain that they and their values are not respected by the majority, even though they identify with people who for many years have held most of the social and economic power in the world. Competition is the arbiter of what is right, in their minds, and the "problem" is in reality a means of creating the best world.

Needless to say, the majority think differently, myself included. Everyone has an inherent right to live the way they want to, to the extent it does not infringe on another's ability to do so – which means that someone, an agent of all of us such as a government, must track and police the impacts people have on each other. Constantly raising the baseline quality of everyone's lives is as close to a definition of "best" as we have, which includes universal access to basic resources which are considered common and therefore off-limits to private control.

The second question is whether the "source" is a proximate rather than ultimate cause of the problem. If the putative engineers of disruption have specific traits and experiences that can only exist now, then they are collectively the ultimate cause. If those traits and experiences can be manifest in other people, or if some other variable is responsible for their direct involvement, then they as the source are the proximate cause.

Common wisdom appears to come down on the side of a mix of both answers. Every once in a while, a few people with certain traits get enough power to do serious damage to the majority and must be treated as ultimate causes of whatever problem they are dealing with. The actual ultimate cause may be a combination of genetic and environmental factors interacting over a range of experiences that manifests those traits, which in turn find expression under chance conditions; but that's irrelevant since we can't control it.

I expect that humanity's long evolutionary and cultural history has cultivated a range of traits and behaviors in all populations that offer the best chance of survival over a broad range of environmental conditions. As conditions change, those traits and behaviors that enable survival in those conditions become dominant. The world is definitely undergoing major environmental changes, some which are very obvious (such as climate change) and others which are not (such as chemical impacts on our microbiome), so we should expect and perhaps encourage corresponding adaptive changes in our biology and culture.

My own research has exposed strong correlations, if not outright causation, between environmental impact and multiple biological and cultural variables. This reflects the tenor, if not the specifics, of more detailed studies than mine, and suggests that what I've called attention to is not so much a problem in itself as a symptom of a larger "disease" we are all suffering from, in different ways and to varying degrees.

The competitive preferences of the minority and manipulations of those who stand the most to lose from stagnant growth may be proximate causes of the population peak and decline that my simulations imply are most probable. In what feels perverse to someone like me, a decline in population that concentrates consumption among a few, albeit not for long, might enable a smaller number of people to survive longer – but not much longer.

As I am drawn to peer again into the abyss of the Rabbit Hole, I am toying with the idea of focusing all of my public discussion on issues and perspective rather than on individual people (which could still include links to relevant information), including the asking of leading questions and proposal of meaningful answers. The solution I've proposed as an alternative to a population crash will no doubt be a topic I revisit over and over, and necessarily include the treatment of public sabotage as a problem.

Reset

noreply@blogger.com (Bradley Jarvis) — Thu, 31 May 2018 00:26:00 +0000

It became painfully clear in April that I could no longer live with business as usual. Following my own instincts on a part-time basis while yielding to those of others the rest of the time just wasn't working. A constant barrage of news that made the stress of awaiting terrorist attacks after 9/11/2001 feel like a lazy day at the park was also a factor. The trigger for acting to change it, though, was the result of upgrades to my Timelines model which I had tailored to reflect how multiple variables changed within the world's population over most of civilization's history based on identification of what was likely causing those changes. The model confirmed with more than 80% confidence that there is, at most, a two-year window to reduce the chance of humanity's population from suffering a major decline that could likely lead to our extinction in twenty years. I had a moral obligation to use what I'd learned to take maximum advantage of that window.

I quit my job and worked full time on figuring out the next steps, among them how I could collaborate with others committed to the same cause and develop resources to continue. The first step was obvious: rolling out the new version of the model as a starting point for discussion. I was under no preconception that what I had was ideal, nor fully tested, but it was good enough to reproduce the problem in sufficient detail to identify potential fixes. As I started the rollout, I discovered with the advantage of full-time effort a few minor bugs in the model, and fixing them suggested other modifications that made it more robust than before. I also decided to investigate historical context which might provide guidance in interpreting (and further testing) the numbers in terms of actual experience; and its earliest insights helped outline the first narrative in the rollout.

Meanwhile, I was sucked back into the Rabbit Hole. The minimal progress made on various environmental, economic, and social fronts by the last U.S. administration while being obstructed at every turn by its political opposition has been aggressively reversed, and the goals guiding that progress – which I interpret to include increasing decency, fairness, health, and safety for all – have become harder to reach. In response to this I felt also compelled by moral obligation, but on a more visceral level.

As the youngest student during most of my school years I was terrorized by bullies and developed an almost autonomic reflex to stand up to them and fight if necessary. That reflex has been activated more times than I can count since November of 2016, but social norms and a deep pride in personal decency have immensely limited its expression, mostly on social media, where recently my self-control has waned in proportion the magnitude and frequency of assaults on what – and who – I consider good. Calling out bad behavior can only go so far in stopping it; like the bullies I faced in school, its protagonists may need more solid resistance.

One of my favorite T.V. shows of all time is Star Trek (the original series). Its design as a set of morality plays often showcased innovative, if sometimes imperfect, conflict resolution. The characters on each side of a conflict had eventually-identifiable motivations, capabilities, and weaknesses, just as people do in reality. Changing motivation was a typical first option: find common needs and wants, and discover a way for both sides to get them (or at least not lose them) without fighting. Identifying the others' weaknesses and developing a strategy to exploit them was another option, employed when the first option looked like it might fail. A third option was to assess or develop capabilities that could be used to minimize the damage from confrontation or avoid it altogether (even if one or both sides wanted it). Key to success in any of these strategies was understanding and eventual respect by at least one side of any potential conflict. That those lessons still resonate fifty years after I was first introduced to them is both a testimony to great storytelling – one of the reasons I'm attracted to writing fiction – and their universal applicability to human (or human-like) relations.

Understanding and respect are never a given; they must be developed because of their dependence on the specifics of each situation. That work requires motivation, which is tied into the determination of whether conflict or cooperation (absence or resolution of conflict) will be the main dynamic between two parties. If one side's motivation is limited to dominating or destroying the other side and it is capable of doing so (including prohibiting escape), then conflict is inevitable and somebody is going to get hurt or dead as a result. People who have a hard time believing that there is anyone who can't be reasoned with may try to avoid that possibility by putting extra effort into their own understanding and respect, inviting the risk of losing a conflict already in progress.

In the U.S. there there have been multiple conflicts in progress during most of my life, with the sides easy to spot. As a child in the Washington D.C. area during the 1960s I saw riots in the streets and news stories on T.V. about self-identified groups of people with economic and social power hoarding it to the detriment of those they didn't identify with, and fighting or instigating wars to preserve the ability to do so. As has been the case in other countries, religion was used to both define some of those groups and justify their actions based on questionable history, and even more questionable understanding of cause-and-effect. There was also a conflict we are all involved in, between humanity and Earth's other species, with the most horrific of consequences for us and them if we "win": extinction.

My personal efforts at understanding simply reinforce that last observation, which has been known for decades but not believed by most people. It is still hard for me to believe, though intellectually I consider it a certainty. As a member of a "can-do" culture that holds unlimited growth to be a supreme value, and someone who spent most of his life believing (and being nurtured by others with the same belief) in an exclusively omnipotent being that un-verifiably promises an afterlife if we just worship it/Him, the idea that ultimate winning causes ultimate loss is overwhelming. It also calls into serious question a vast network of interrelated beliefs that would render it untrue, and that form a basis for the identity of many groups that view themselves as superior to other people and other species so that they can have a clear conscience as they take what the others have.

In a way, I see the battle between reality and voluntary delusion being played out in the news these days as akin to how a person might react to a diagnosis of an unintentionally self-inflicted terminal illness, and a long-shot, painful course of treatment that would only delay death by a short amount. That person could choose to be in a state of denial like that many are in now, hanging onto the idea of doing what they're doing until it is unquestionably proven fatal by the end result. Accepting responsibility for the illness a more psychologically challenging alternative, with all the issues and feelings it brings up (such as winning as the cause of loss). Accepting the existence of the illness and blaming others for it is yet another option, which is a very real possibility for some of the people in the real world this analogy represents, especially the poorest and least powerful among us (including children) who are as close as any of us to being clear victims. The decision about whether to take the long-shot treatment hinges on which of these reactions is chosen, with denial being the one that definitely will not lead to treatment.

As someone who values both truth and life, I choose to fight for both while realizing that it is very likely too late to make a difference in the outcome. The necessary is worth doing, even if it is impossible.

Beyond the Rabbit Hole

noreply@blogger.com (Bradley Jarvis) — Sun, 05 Nov 2017 22:14:00 +0000

For weeks I have been fighting episodes of physical pain and depression triggered by what I've come to call "going down the Rabbit Hole." Direct experience or news leads to a cascade of thoughts about its meaning at all scales, accompanied by a mix of anger, helplessness, and despair that cannot be expressed productively to effectively delay, stop, or escape the destruction of many lives in the near future. Since I built my entire value system on the avoidance of extinction, its failure is my failure, and what feels like a profound depletion of the value of my own life – especially since I continue to contribute to the source of that failure in the way I live, a hypocrite to the last.

Seeing over a decade of predictions coming true provides no solace, and no useful guidance about what to do next. I had focused most of my energy trying to understand it and figure out how to stop it, while sharing the results of that search with as much passion and reason as I could muster. What was a tiny amount of remaining hope a year ago was dashed by the election of leaders whose words and actions strongly support just the opposite: growth at any cost, including the extermination of humanity – except for them and their families – as well as any other species that get in their way.

Attempts to focus onto doing and celebrating as much good as possible – like a dying patient working though his bucket list – have been overwhelmed by the torrent of news about far too many others doing just the opposite. I fall easily back into troubleshooting mode, and from there back into the Rabbit Hole.

As I write, there has just been another horrific mass shooting, beckoning for me to learn who and what was responsible. I am drawn to watch a crazy routine of identifying short-term answers that won't yield any lasting effects, because such acts are a symptom of something that resides in all of us, something we fear addressing more than the consequences of not doing so: the capacity to objectify other people to the point where their lives mean nothing relative to our own. Such reflection is just a taste of what it's like to go down the Rabbit Hole, which as part of a vast network of tunnel-like understanding connecting many experiences, is the same as the network itself.

Intellectually, I know that to get beyond the Rabbit Hole, to get beyond the pain it triggers and the death it represents, a new set of experiences must be discovered, described, and felt at a deep, visceral level – made as real as what they will ultimately replace. To draw on another metaphor, we must think and live "outside the box." In whatever time I have left, I'll try doing so, because the pain is becoming too much to bear.

No Winners

noreply@blogger.com (Bradley Jarvis) — Mon, 14 Aug 2017 15:00:00 +0000

The world now the faces the very real possibility of a nuclear war between the U.S. and North Korea that the entire world would lose. In addition to massive loss of human life resulting from even a limited exchange of such weapons, the already overstressed populations of other species we all depend upon for survival would crash if forced to also deal with the environmental effects, accelerating our headlong rush toward extinction.

Complicating any attempts to avoid such a scenario is the delusion that surviving it is still possible, along with an apparent unwillingness by both adversaries to accept responsibility for the costs. This is a special case of the threat we already face as a species, where large groups of consumers are unwilling to accept the impossibility of perpetual growth or the responsibility for its pursuit crippling our planet's ecosystems to the point where further damage will reduce our ability to survive.

The most rational way to deal with both threats is for everyone to recognize their costs, agree that they are unacceptable, and commit to doing whatever it takes to eliminate them. We would have to admit that no one is better than anyone else in the sense even the last person to live would not be "winner," but rather the most pathetic loser in the history of the world. As a minimum, the two people facing off today must admit this fact and believe it.

Terms of Derision

noreply@blogger.com (Bradley Jarvis) — Thu, 30 Mar 2017 13:30:00 +0000

Planet-killing psychopaths. Ruinators trying to turn the U.S. into RuiNation. Promoters of money over lives. Stupid, evil, or both. On social media I have been saying these things about the people with political and economic power whose actions I perceive to be reducing the chances of living in a world that conforms to my values. The terms were consciously crafted to highlight my judgment of right and wrong based on those values, while conveying characteristics that appear responsible for their actions. Because I value honesty, I've used them in venues where it should be clear that I was stating opinion, and tried to add context by providing explanatory references to sources of those opinions.

For example, "planet-killing psychopaths" (formerly "planet-killing sociopaths") refers to people and organizations whose actions excessively increase the extinction risk for both humans and other species, while apparently demonstrating no remorse for that impact – if they even have an interest in it. I use the term derisively because in my value system the continued existence of life is paramount, especially human life and the species whose existence supports it.

Objectively, I understand that such behavior may be built into some people's nature, or it may have been shaped by personal experience that made it a way of coping with their own lives. For all I know, it may even be a sort of safety valve on the growth of our species, ensuring that we humans are stopped from totally destroying the global ecosystem by destroying ourselves first, with the others that support us as necessary collateral loss. Whatever the reason, the result is bad in my view; and if the result is bad, then to be true to my values I must discourage or work to disable what causes it.

Similar logic applies to the other terms. "RuiNation" is one I made up to describe a "ruined nation" that has had its basic social and physical infrastructure damaged to the point that the majority of its citizens are suffering on a regular basis along with a diminishing life expectancy. "Ruinators" are those who facilitate the existence of such a country. RuiNation introduces quality of life to quantity of life as a value. Because I like to measure things, I include life expectancy, which has a clear correlation to both values. Any action or combined actions that increase the chances of making it so are to be discouraged, as a minimum. Clearly such actions may include reducing such things as: the quality and quantity of health care; the quality of air, water, and food; and access all of these.

My research has shown that money is an abstraction that serves the main purpose of coordinating acquisition, distribution, and use of resources to provide people's needs and wants (collectively, "happiness"). To the extent that it provides needs, it supports life; but when some people use it to meet their wants with resources others require to meet their needs, then it reduces life. This latter case is referred to in shorthand with the term "money means more than lives," applied to those who apparently value their own happiness (specifically, their wants) more than the survival of other people. It is used with derision because of my overarching valuing of life over the material environments that money and its accompanying physical resources can provide, environments that also use resources needed by other species who enable all people to live on this planet.

In some cases, it is unclear whether an action is intentional or the consequence of ignorance. We all have lack of knowledge and understanding, blind spots that lead us to cause bad things to happen (however one defines "bad") without being aware of it; I use the term "stupid" as shorthand for a person with this condition, particularly if it appears to be chronic. If actions are taken with knowledge of their negative consequences, then I ascribe the term "evil" to the person, even though on a more objective basis I consider evil to be a characteristic of actions rather than people. Sometimes (and perhaps more often than not), a mix of intentionality and ignorance contributes to such actions: trying to do one bad thing and causing another. If someone is in a position to know the consequences of their actions but appears to not know them, such as a politician with significant power, then I may ask which explanation holds (either or both) without excusing them for the consequences because they should know what they're doing more than most of the rest of us.

As I understand it, the most successfully long-lived societies survived and thrived in large part due to social feedback that promoted healthy behaviors and discouraged unhealthy ones. Valuing the characteristics of longevity and health has led me to fully embrace providing such feedback as a duty, which I have chosen to exercise through writing perhaps because I am an extreme introvert. I have also become more and more stressed as evidence continues to mount that we all live in a very short-lived society, motivating me to increasingly cry out in pain and judgment against the forces I perceive are causing that. This has caused some people to brand me a scaremonger and an extreme partisan. It's not scaremongering if the threat is real – which it is – and the appearance of partisanship is a consequence of the reality that there is a strong correlation between political affiliation and contribution to whether we will live or die, which is the ultimate value.

Moments of Joy

noreply@blogger.com (Bradley Jarvis) — Mon, 09 Jan 2017 15:11:00 +0000

Last week I found myself in a dangerous situation not unlike many I had experienced before. A recent storm had dropped several inches of snow in the middle of a deep freeze that left a glaze of ice on what little road was exposed. The responsible thing to do was to work at home, eliminating the chance of committing an act of evil: that which, by intention, increases the risk of death or pain for other people without their consent and their ability to share in any gains. There was a chance, but it was arguably small, since everyone on the roads had implicitly decided to take the same risk. After a brief call to my boss, who subtly reminded me that work at the office was expected except under extreme circumstances, I decided to attempt the drive.

My first fourteen years of driving were in the Boston area, in cars that were far less reliable than the one I now drive, and under conditions much worse than any I've encountered in the Denver area since I moved here. I remembered that as I watched cars randomly cross lanes of the highway that were hidden by the snow. A reassuring thought stream from my subconscious reminded me that I was spoiled but not unprepared, and fed me directions derived from those early years and basic knowledge that was now part of my neuron memory.

As conditions rapidly deteriorated in one part of the trip, I experienced a burst of euphoria brought about by one stark, illuminating thought: if I die soon, I'll make sure that I die happy. Every experience any of us has ever had is already locked into the Universe, which no one and nothing can destroy; the next few minutes can be good or bad, in large part based on our own actions, and they too will be locked into the fabric of spacetime. We may as well make them good.

Coincidentally, my iPod started playing the theme to the TV show "Spenser for Hire," which had been a popular addition to Boston culture when I was driving there. The euphoria was joined by nostalgia, in part for the decade-long creative binge I enjoyed while working with my father in an attempt to develop and teach self-reliance through joyful derivation and use of understanding in any situation. My memories have long cast that time in terms of building a better future, but I now grasped that they depended on experiencing a better present. My father thrived in new situations, sometimes created by making what others would consider a mistake, and learning things from them that could alter his understanding of everything else so that life was more interesting. It was easy for me to focus on those larger insights, but I had lost sight of their source in the minute-by-minute experiences that are constantly embedded in the reality of the past and should be savored as much – or more.

As the world becomes a more dangerous place in the weeks and months ahead, I'm taking that recent experience and its insights to heart, folding them into a vision of how I want to spend the rest of my life, however long or short, and holding onto the goal of embedding as much joy as possible into the Universe – moment by moment.

Loss and Resolve

noreply@blogger.com (Bradley Jarvis) — Wed, 14 Dec 2016 14:59:00 +0000

Recent events in the Arctic have confirmed that global warming is self-sustaining, which along with accelerated extinction rates and other news has led me to believe that my worst-case projections of future global trends are likely correct. For several months I attempted to create a global survival plan that mapped out this and other threats to humanity and what we might do to confront them, but the results of this year's U.S. election, especially at the national level, appears to have nullified even a remote possibility of enacting such a plan and saving our species from extinction in the very near term.

It is small consolation that I did what I thought I could to fight against this outcome even as my research exposed that it is an inevitable consequence of our nature. Loss of hope had not squashed my lack of acceptance as I made a case for delaying the outcome for as long as possible; but at least in this country there was just too large a fraction of the population that either didn't care, or wasn't even paying attention to basic facts that belied their beliefs (including the obvious clues about the evil they were about to unleash).

I zeroed in on what I could personally control by enacting a plan to cut back on my own contribution to the drive toward oblivion: paying off credit, developing ways to scale back on my ecological footprint, and exposing through writing how people in a healthy world might live, as compared to our own dying world. It remains a fact that although it may soon be more possible for people to exceed limits of planetary habitability, we don't have to act on it. More specifically: if they drill for more oil, we can still avoid buying it. If more jobs become available in what I think of as the planet-killing sector of the economy, we can refuse to take those jobs. As protections are removed from our food, drugs, and financial industry, then we are justified in not trusting them, and seeking more reliable and responsible means to survive. I understand that "we" are likely a very small part of the world economy, but at least we can have clear consciences by contributing less to its death.

In a way I feel very sorry for the decent people who voted for the acceleration of our global nightmare. Many just want better jobs, or recovery of jobs they and their friends have lost. If we lived in the world of a century ago, which presumably is when America was "great," the costs of stripping away restrictions to growth would have been bearable, and the horrific outcome we now face would have been perhaps decades in the future (giving them enough time to live out their lives, even as the loss of future lives was ensured). I personally know a few of them, and it's not lost on me that for most of my life I had a lot in common with them.

My father remains my personal hero, and he was one of the most conservative people I've ever known. I don't know if we would be at odds with each other if he were still alive; but I do know he would have respected the results of scientific research, and perhaps would have tried, as I did, to derive his own understanding of what's happening. A child of the Great Depression, and a combatant in the world war that challenged the great fascists of the last century who are emulated by the new leaders of today, he would have at least recognized that threat, and challenged me – as he often did – to be "not just a man, but a hell of a man," and stand up for what's right as I see it. The great war of this century may already be lost; but those of us with honor and the vision to recognize it must try to delay that outcome for as long as possible.

Voting In a Different World

noreply@blogger.com (Bradley Jarvis) — Sun, 06 Nov 2016 23:25:00 +0000

Those who wish to "make America great again" seem unable or unwilling to accept that the United States and the world it inhabits are irreversibly different from anything they might identify as "the good old days," and that trying to force change in that direction will cause death on a massive scale that ensures its impossibility. By selling that goal and policies that would promote it, Donald Trump has proven himself a menace to the country he is campaigning to serve (regardless of whether he intends to really "serve" – or rule).

As I discussed back in July, both presidential candidates support the behaviors most responsible for the existential crisis that faces our entire species, with the main difference being mainly in degree. Trump would accelerate the destruction of natural ecosystems that enable us to live, without acknowledging it is even a problem; while Clinton is willing to at least admit there is destruction, though seems unwilling to take the drastic steps needed to truly address it (even if she does have a friendly Congress).

I share both race and age with many hard-core conservatives who I'm sure support Trump, and for many years I also shared their political opinions and religious beliefs. Experience, and a parent who thrived on innovation and exploration, encouraged me to question everything; and by age 40 l had jettisoned most of those opinions and beliefs in favor of a more general and personally meaningful set, which I have written about extensively.

In retrospect, my evolving views reflected the changes in the world around me – physically, socially, and in terms of an explosion of knowledge and understanding of how everything works. As people became more interdependent, they were forced to face their core values about life, including which lives they would cherish and which could be used and thrown away. Those who valued only a few lives seized as much power as possible for their groups; while the vast majority who valued other lives as much as their own supported sharing power with other groups and, to a growing extent, other species.

Meanwhile, humanity's activity – aided by technology – began having obvious and increasingly serious impacts on quality of life, and predictive technologies used by scientists showed that those impacts were directly traceable to our approach and exceeding of a range of natural limits to the habitability of our planet. I became aware of this, and in my own way verified their predictions with a corresponding change in my worldview that now defines my politics, along with other parts of my life – because knowledge is most valuable when shared and converted into action.

I have shared my insights and attempted to convince those who pay attention that certain actions are critical to improving the future, however bleak that may appear to be. Currently the most critical action is to keep ultraconservatives like Trump from exerting enough power on world affairs to accelerate humanity's race toward extinction. In a few days we will know the impact of voting, and be able to assess whether or not we are in for the worst.