Divergent History

 By Will Jackson (World: Hikeyay)

In the very first real-time conference call between worlds, Maura, Sally, and I met with Brandon Johnson from Green Horizon Station to discuss projections of the futures of our two worlds. 

Brandon shared new data showing a large increase in his world’s global temperature over the past year that did not track with cumulative human carbon emissions, indicating that a major climate feedback was triggered. The minimal data since then suggests that the effect is slowing instead of accelerating; but acceleration cannot be ruled out until we know and understand the source. This is in contrast to our own warming, which is slowing in response to our reduced consumption, and will hopefully have less impact if the expected restoration of habitat is achieved and we can avoid or offset catastrophic climate feedbacks by that and other means.

Comparing annual changes in the per-capita resource distributions of the two worlds provides some interesting insights. The difference in lessons learned since World War II is perhaps most responsible for the most obvious divergence in history between us. 

Here in Hikeyay, we established the World Information and Coordination Organization to enable all people to be aware of the effects of their actions on each other and on humanity as a whole, along with other species that comprise and influence the global environment we all share. That awareness, and continuous dialog in every nation to identify, agree to, and ensure accountability to basic values that help define our mutual future, has generally resulted in gradual rather than rapid changes in the amount and quality of resources like those that characterize the experience of Brandon’s world. 

While we promote cooperation, the people in Green promote competition and exploitation. The United Nations (UN), WICO’s counterpart, has components that perform similar functions, but it is managed by independent nations that seek dominance over the others. People’s values are typically those of the groups they identify with, as has been the case for most of our shared history, but rarely are they explicitly debated, agreed to, and evaluated based on tested understanding of reality. As a result, groups instinctively fight each other to achieve their preferred resource distributions, as evidenced by the rapid changes seen on the global level.

Global average temperature has increased and then decreased in the past. If this happens again, such that Green resumes the temperature trajectory it had before last year’s increase, the anomaly (temperature change since 1800) will reach 1.5 degrees Celsius by 2039, just two years before no people are projected to be left in the world. Added warming might speed up the population crash that is expected to start next year. People in Green could follow our example by reducing their consumption and restore habitat to delay extinction; but Brandon and people who call themselves “doomers” consider it so unlikely as to be effectively impossible.

Reality Check

The graphs and discussion, like most posts on this blog, are based on my own mathematical simulations identified as “worlds” and a fictional backstory that explains how they relate to each other.

The model used to project the temperature anomaly is a linear curve fit of temperature as a function of cumulative consumption, where annual emissions are a binomial function of consumption, and consumption is proportional to the estimated global ecological footprint. The temperature increase reported for last year in world “Green,” a close approximation to our real world, is based on news reports, while its deceleration is purely fictional, modeled as consumption by a non-human source that is added to the cumulative consumption used to calculate temperature. In the temperature graphs, the dotted lines are simple exponential curve fits to projected temperature from 1951 to 2023, shown for reference.

Cooperation as an explanation and a preference is actually a consequence rather than a cause, and only strictly applies to the period since the “global strategy” was implemented. Exploitation evidenced by the decline of habitat until then, with a growing tendency toward cooperation, is a better characterization.

Testing Ground

Maura and I started the working part of our honeymoon yesterday, visiting one of three sites on Hawaii’s Big Island that WICO is using to integrate and test some of the technologies that will likely be deployed to rehabilitate land and water ecosystems as part of the global strategy. The site was one of WICO’s test communities until three months ago and has many of the original personnel still working there. I recognized several of the names from my brief time in Quality Assurance; and as their former boss, Maura was recognized by all of them.

“Invasives remain our biggest problem,” said Dan Rogan, the leader of the testing group, as he took us on a tour. “We’ve got robots out hunting the worst of them, most by air.” A small drone whirred past us, as if for emphasis. “They’re still a stopgap, of course, because those technologies have too high a footprint beyond about two years. You’re going to hate this, Maura, but we’ve been given a green light for biotech alternatives.” She stood stunned as he continued, “The effort is being led by a company that’s trying to get them to gorge on pollution and then safely decompose when it kills them.”

“Safely?” she asked. “How can something like that be safe? You’re not testing it now are you?”

“Two years,” I said as he shook his head, “Wouldn’t you need that long just for development?”

He shrugged. “I’m told that they’re fast-tracking it.”

“You don’t fast-track something like that!” Maura was as agitated as I’ve ever seen her.

“I heard the transition time might be cut in half. Maybe they don’t have a choice.”

“I doubt that will happen,” she said. “Nobody’s going to sign off on the resulting casualties.”

“We’ll be ready if they do,” he said optimistically. “Meanwhile, we’ve also got to deal with drought and typhoons. Some of the new portable building designs with attachable shielding and catchments are showing a lot of promise. As soon as they’re proven, the county will deploy them to vulnerable communities and safer areas that people can use as soon as possible.”

“What about volcano eruptions?” I asked while we walked to an area dominated by three demonstration structures that resembled lumpy yurts.

He explained that air pollution was the main issue after people got out of the way of lava. “In addition to portability, suitable filters and building materials are being designed into the buildings.” He then invited us to stay overnight in one of them.

Reality Check

The descriptions of the technologies are fictional and intended mostly as requirements.

Discussion of the timeline is based on multiple simulations related to the “C-low” scenario previously discussed. For example:

Surprises

TIME TO GLOBAL STRATEGY DEADLINE: 8 DAYS

“Samantha gave you only part of the story behind the new number of regions,” my confidential source Sally told me when asked for comment about the status of strategy testing by WICO. “The tests revealed that regions are in the process of becoming uninhabitable, so we grew the number to include what would have existed before the process began in 2005. The number we used before was found to be the number of regions that could have been lost by 2020 if the Global Emergency wasn’t declared. We expect to save dozens by implementing the strategy.”

I asked if there were any other major surprises from the test results. “One consequence is that your nation isn’t fully in collapse,” she said. I recalled that she had made a big deal about how the U.S. was practically hanging by a thread, saved only by its relationships with the rest of the world. “The average is getting close, though, with nearly two-thirds of your people already there and one-fourth of your regions uninhabitable. Particularly surprising is its strong similarity to the world-at-large.”

Sally emphasized that a major part of the global strategy involves attempting to “recover” the so-called uninhabitable regions by making them safe for the kinds of life that we depend on to grow in them. “Anything that can’t be directly consumed by plants or animals over a period of a year or less needs to be either made so or removed. Toxic substances must likewise be removed or made non-toxic. Any transfer of such materials must be done so that no other region is adversely impacted. Of course, priority will be given to anything that reduces the habitability of multiple regions, such as climate-changing gases in the atmosphere.”

This brought up the controversial suggestion Friday by Zara Adsa that bioengineering might be used to assist with cleaning the air of harmful substances. Sally said that she doesn’t have a problem with that, as long as the impacts are well understood with controls in place before deployment. “Application of the Precautionary Principle is critical to success,” she added, “but when it attenuates response to the overall threat then the best course is to rely on the simplest and most historically reliable approaches such as assisting nature to do most of the work.”

Reality Check

While Sally’s statistics are accurate within the context of the simulation, her reasons for discovering them are contrived for the purpose of storytelling.

Strategy Integration

TIME TO STRATEGY DEADLINE: 10 DAYS

When I began my visit to the Strategy Integration group, I expected to see something like a space mission control room. What I found instead was two floors of offices almost indistinguishable from those used by industry for management and engineering, except that the cubicles had full-size walls that blocked sound from within. A third floor was filled with conference rooms surrounding an open bay used for large group meetings.

“The data and logic behind the operation is mostly in computers,” explained Samantha Lazlo, the Austrian ambassador to WICO, head of the group’s Overview team, and my guide for three days. “Our advanced artificial intelligence system, which we call Sanda, has access to the entire WICO database, including the observations and models from the biosphere assessment, and is about to be connected to all unrestricted global online networks. 

“There are over 700 people in Strategy Integration. Most of them interact directly with Sanda from satellite offices around the world, asking questions and helping answer others that contribute to the integration and testing of the overall strategy. They also coordinate input from the national strategy groups in their regions. Our Administration team on the first floor manages who works where, handles contracts and issues, and coordinates with the other groups. And we have a technical team in the basement, which handles facilities and IT.” 

Lazlo and a member of the technical team set me up in a guest cubicle with the Overview team on the second floor with basic computer access that allowed me to communicate with Sanda, whose voice was eerily similar to Lazlo’s but without her cosmopolitan accent. One of the three large monitors occupying my desk was dedicated to visual feedback from Sanda that included text and images, while the other two functioned as a typical computer desktop with the usual applications. “Ask Sanda whatever you want,” Lazlo told me. “I’ll try to answer anything that it can’t or won’t.”

I had brought a list of questions of my own and submitted by colleagues, which I spent most of the first afternoon trying to get Sanda to answer. Virtually every one led down a proverbial rabbit hole of clarifications, details, and intersecting concepts that added exponentially more confusion to what I was trying to learn. 

Lazlo looked at me with sympathy when I shared my exasperation. “Sanda was designed to emulate in each answer the maximum complexity implicit in each question.” For some reason, my expression made her laugh. “It can’t yet assess what you already know, or what you think you know, so it assumes you know the least amount possible that would generate the question you asked. That way, you have the best chance of getting the answer you seek.” She suggested that I join her in a meeting on the third floor, where she would make formal introductions and I could get some insight from the 23 members who were currently in the building. 

The subject of the meeting was an update on the amount and quality of strategy inputs so far received by STRIDE. After Lazlo introduced me, data expert Zhou Li Xiu took a deep dive into what was being learned from the information gathered by the online tool deployed to assist development by the teams appointed by their governments. She concluded with a 45% assessment of quality based on the 56% of inputs received so far, which everyone agreed was dangerously low.

I knew enough about programming to gather that Sanda was the “back end” of the software, and guessed that it was experiencing the reverse of the problem I experienced with it: essentially, it couldn’t derive from the tool’s simple inputs the detail it needed to construct a meaningful strategy. Lazlo explained that the inputs were expected to be mostly corrections to a strategy being developed through a collaboration between Sanda and the larger group that was well-trained to work with it.

On my second day, I investigated the basis of the famous Hope Chart by datamining a computer server devoted to its creation and maintenance and discussing it with Lazlo’s team members. Hundreds of potential strategies had been simulated and each result translated into a chart that served as a touchstone for evaluation. Zhou explained that the simulations focused on interactions between “subunits” of populations and environments that were each represented by a chart and both evaluated and reality-tested by at least one pair of STRIDE group members doing field research as required.

“Our biggest concern is how natural systems are responding to what we do,” Zhou told me. “Sanda uses the latest data and physical models to assess the range of possibilities, which so far track with some simple approximations of overall ecological impact when averaged over decade-long time scales. We are seeing signs that those approximations could break down soon, which is in part why the world must act now so we can exercise what control is still possible.” 

I was reminded of the Secretary General’s analogy of heading through a minefield toward a cliff. Zhou found the analogy apt, but with a modification. “Some of those mines are actually time bombs. Familiar examples are the melting of ice and frozen methane, and of course the acidification and heating of the oceans. Some of the bombs are already exploding, as we see in the cascading effects of species die-offs, especially at the bottom of the food chain in the oceans and on land. The healing effects we hope for when we draw down our impact may be a chimera if the species we save are unable to save themselves or us.”

The third and last day was spent reviewing documents summarizing the draft strategy, and following up with Lazlo on what I had learned. My discussion with Zhou helped immensely in making sense of the strategy, even with all its placeholders. I tested my understanding by sharing it with Lazlo: “You’re basically stopping the damage being done; repairing the damage that already exists; neutralizing known and potential threats where possible; and enlisting allies to create new and safer environments wherever it can be done.”

“That’s right,” she agreed. “I would add that there’s a lot of ongoing intelligence gathering and sharing so time and resources can be used efficiently. While we presently have the luxury of artificial intelligence to help plan and drive our actions, it shouldn’t be taken as a given. People need to learn to take its place, and that will require a whole new kind of education that to me is the most critical placeholder to be filled.”

Reality Check

Organizations and technologies represented here are pure fabrication based on what I guess might be the minimum requirements for such an effort given its time constraints. 

The number of people in Strategy Integration is based on the sample size of my simulations, with overhead for other functions. It is an estimate of that it would take to gather sufficient information for realistic guidance in developing a detailed strategy. My simulations do NOT represent the culmination of such an effort; they are rather the source of approximations like those mentioned by Zhou.

Characterizations of the strategy and the issues it addresses are based on my own understanding.