Phases of Time

 

Maura recently had a new insight about the historical context framework she first lectured about on June 21. Today she shared it with other members of the history department, many of whom were onsite to prepare for the beginning of classes.

“WICO’s decision to add subregions got me thinking about how to make sense of all the new information.” Behind her at the head of one of the lecture halls, a world map displayed the thousand subregions color-coded according to which of the original regions they were part of. 

“Instead of thinking in terms of ecosystem types, or biomes, we can look at them in simpler terms.” She pressed a hidden button on the lectern and only seven colors remained. “Here, they’re categorized according to their dominant phases. WICO came up with the concept of phases while trying to predict behaviors based on observed correlations with the ratio of basic consumption by people to basic consumption by members of other species.” She showed a graph of the behaviors as a function of phase. “Those behaviors include living longer, seeking happiness, and having children and dying which affects population. Each phase is a range of the ratio that corresponds to aspects of the behaviors. Until the addition of subregions, there was a lot more uncertainty in the predictions than some of us who worked on the global strategy were comfortable with. With refined data collection and testing, it is now possible to have better resolution on what phase a person or group occupies at a given time.”

She scanned the nearly-full hall and smiled coyly. “So… what does this have to do with history? Just as people and groups move through phases, all of humanity has moved through what I call ‘phase epochs’ that each correspond to a range of time where the characteristics of a particular phase are dominant. In my first lecture, I used a crude version of that concept to define ‘milestones’ marking off certain trends in history. Now, I propose being more explicit about the nature of the phases in all its manifestations as the characterization of life’s interactions over time and space.”

A review of the past two centuries followed, where she referenced the milestones in their new context and suggested some new directions of research using both historical records and the growing dataset of observations taken by professionals and the global network of trained citizens living out the transition.

Reality Check

A phase diagram for today is shown below, where L is life expectancy, h is happiness, Fert is fertility, P is population, R is consumption by a group, Cap is capacity (total resources), C is per-capita consumption, and Wealth/p is per-capita wealth (fixed 2010 dollars). Years listed at the 90% value are the original milestones.

Phase epochs are based on which phases are dominant over a period of time. Every epoch except the first epoch is represented in the following graph, which shows the fraction of global population in each phase from 1800 through the transition for the simulated world as indicated by the difference in population ratio between any pair of colored lines. The black line is the projected phase for the population. 

Epoch 1 (dominated by phase 1, the purple line) ended in the year 152. Epoch 2 ended between 1810 and 1850 (likely 1837), when the dark blue line representing phase 2 reached 100%. Epoch 3 ended between 1940 and 1950 (likely 1947). Epoch 4 ended in 1973, and Epoch 5 ended in 1999. The present Epoch 6 (yellow) first ended in 2014, which began the present Epoch 7.

The global strategy intends to reverse the progress this year, and reenter Epoch 6 by 2022. Epoch 5 will be reentered in 2031, where the world will hopefully stay past 2040.

Following is the equivalent graph for our world (“Green”):