Brain Storm

TIME TO STRATEGY EXECUTION: 73 DAYS

Yesterday’s sense of relief was short-lived. The new information about how our ecological impact affects the self-sustained impacts revealed a huge downside of not pursuing the global strategy. Essentially, we would go extinct a decade earlier than if the self-sustained impacts immediately stopped.

I spent half of today participating in a brainstorming session about how to field test environmental conditions. Many of the ideas predictably included the modification and use of off-the-shelf measurement instruments, along with design requirements for new technologies. Leveraging of equipment and techniques already in use by the Widely Dispersed Pollutants group was a hot topic, especially since precedent had been set by a joint effort during the biosphere assessment which half the test engineers were part of before joining STRIDE.

My mind started to wander about two hours into the session, trying to imagine how someone with no technical experience or interest could be motivated or able to put the ideas into practice. I found myself focusing on one wall of the common area where someone had hung a pair of the latest Hope Charts, one showing business-as-usual and the other showing the expected effect of just reducing impact. Next to the wall was a table with some of the instruments being discussed, which looked totally out-of-place with the charts; and after a few minutes I understood why.

“How are people going to get the equipment?” I interjected during a pause. One of the engineers offered that they could be ordered easily online, but I cut her off. “What if no one can get the materials to make it?”

“Don’t be rude, Will!” Caleb Tosner warned me. He was acting as leader of the session, yet I sensed he had another motivation. 

“Ten years from now will that technology even be possible?” I pressed. The room went silent, which I read as an invitation to continue. “Also, can we count on the infrastructure needed to run it and get the most use out of it, like power plants and computers?”

“We’ll still have some of that,” Tosner said.

“We might, but what about the majority of other people, in a whole new - and more primitive - set of conditions?”

Like a wave, looks of awareness and agreement spread through the room. Then Sally joined the conversation, her voice coming from an array of speakers near the ceiling. “Will’s right. The economy will be like the 1960s in the most likely scenario. That’s what you should be planning for.”

Tosner looked up. “If that’s the case, then we’ve already failed.”

“Try again,” Sally said, and then told me that Maura wanted me in her office.

I was prepared for either a reprimand or a compliment when I joined Maura a few minutes later. She instead surprised me with an offer to help plan my permanent relocation, beginning with a trip to my home over the weekend.

Reality Check

My latest simulations show the consequences of inaction with and without self-sustaining ecological impacts mostly related to global warming. In the following graph, business-as usual without those impacts is shown as total consumption “R(NoW)” and population “P(NoW)” which indicate human extinction by 2041. If instead of reducing total consumption, humanity increases total consumption linearly in the presence of sustained impacts as indicated by “Rused(W)” as an approximation of business-as-usual, then the population will crash in all three cases of sustained impact (Low, Mid, High) by 2030.

This analysis supports the urgency of reducing humanity’s impact to buy time to limit the external impacts (shown below).

Discussions here and in elsewhere regarding testing are informed and inspired by my own experience as a test engineer, particularly in the test and verification of environmental measurement systems and their components.