Personal Day

TIME TO STRATEGY EXECUTION: 61 DAYS

I took a personal day yesterday, and unfortunately could not escape either the news or my obsession with helping people know what they need in order to create their own future in line with what’s survivable.

As anyone who hasn’t had their head stuck in their work already knows, Reverend Lanton has followed through on his vow to wage war against those he perceives as trying to “prevent the apocalypse.” Members of his church and likeminded groups are actively interfering with preparations to execute on WICO’s global strategy to fight the imminent extinction threat, targeting governments, NGOs, private companies such as those involved in the Evolution over Devolution collaboration, and of course WICO itself. So far, WICO’s main offices had been targeted with protests blocking access to buildings, but last night Lanton warned at a rally that field offices and test communities were next.

Not coincidentally, Lanton spoke just after President Larson unveiled a major part of the U.S. plan to help stop climate feedbacks: devoting much more resources to supporting the pollution-eating microbe development being done jointly by WICO’s Widely Dispersed Pollutants group and the Department of Defense. She further revealed that it is being merged with the isolation and neutralization technology behind the biosafing solution that I worked with on Monday.

While doing some much needed housework and planning how I might move to the Q.A. facility if my job with WICO is safe (which was my original purpose for coming home), I thought about how to measure the population-nature ratio on my own. From what I understood, there were three main components to the concept: people, places (environments), and things (creations by people), the relative amounts of which influence how people feel, procreate, and live longer. The experience of my house was an example of this, especially when frustration mounted in the presence of clutter and trash. One of the main objectives of the global strategy is effectively to reduce clutter in the “home” shared by people and other creatures, enabling us all to meet our needs with limited stress - but just enough to avoid eating too much, or being eaten ourselves. Becoming more conscious of stress and what (and who) was around at the time seemed like a good way to start exploring both the effects and their causes, as opposed to finding ways like entertainment to just blunt the effects.  

Maura called early this morning to warn me off from coming to work. There were two reasons: the upgraded PEAK prototype wasn’t ready yet; and affiliates of the Savior of the Apocalypse church had effectively blockaded both WICO’s Boulder field office and the Extinction Response Unit’s field office in Denver.

Reality Check

Yesterday I followed my own obsession, working to integrate what I know about ecosystems with the Timelines simulation. An interesting result, potentially useful to the simulated world and Will in particular, was quantification of a population density interpretation of the (normalized) people-nature ratio and its correlation with related global variables. 

A simple equation summarizes the distribution of resources (Population + Nature + Wants + Waste = Total Resources), where the unit of resources is what an average person absolutely needs to survive in a totally natural environment (Population = Needs), Nature = (0.88 / Sr) * Population, Total Resources is 1900 resources per square mile (land ecosystems), and Sr is the normalized population-nature ratio. This is shown below for several values of per-capita consumption (C).