Collapse Protocol

         By Brandon Johnson (World: Green)

Restoration Acceleration Consortium (RAC) has activated its collapse protocol based on evidence supporting the projection of world population peaking next year, and that the population of the most powerful nation in the world, the United States, has already peaked and is dropping as would be expected due to the dominant extinction drivers. Our current projection, prepared with the assistance of Sally the AI, is that the U.S. population will reach zero by 2032, nine years before global extinction.

 

The collapse protocol transitions our activity to rapid application of what we have learned at the largest scale possible, which includes the rest of the world. With Sally’s help, we have integrated aspects of world Hikeyay’s global strategy into our activity profile with a focus on restoration and growth of natural habitat, despite the potential for it becoming illegal here in the U.S. The incoming administration favors the exact opposite: an extreme agenda of exploitation that will likely be a major contributor to waste generation and direct destruction of habitat that we expect to accelerate the collapse.

 

Among the lessons applied by the protocol is the distribution of value-based proclivities throughout our world’s population. Their increasing variability will require counter-intuitive interventions that we have already anticipated based on historical analogs but have been unable to test due to their likely negative effects under normal conditions. That testing will be a high priority as opportunities present themselves in this early phase of the collapse, especially here in the U.S, where we expect many to appear within the next year.

 

In the interest of security, RAC is shutting down Green Horizon Station within three weeks, including destruction of all Interlink infrastructure except, of course, the core node of the Mountain Sisterhood, which will remain active in its natural sporadic mode. Transformation of lessons learned and collected data to safe and usable forms is continuing until then along with maximum data flow to Hikeyay for use by others and, if we’re successful, any survivors from here.

Reality Check

 

The Timelines model’s projections for the world and United States in simulation Green are as described in the blog post. Election results and their impacts track with real events and include my own speculation about the details. The definition of “collapse” as a dropping population that is unlikely to stop, is what RAC is expected to use, while the model’s definition is the range of habitat ratio (people per unit of remaining natural habitat that humans depend upon, normalized to its maximum) from 0.5 to 1.0. 

 

“Values based proclivities” refers to global preferences associated with a mix of three values: people, natural habitat, and waste. Prior to collapse as defined by the model, the distribution of values across the world population (or any closed ecosystem) is constant, with sub-groups such as nations occupying ranges within it. During collapse, the distribution changes such that, in the end, the preferences for all values are the same.

 

The Interlink and Mountain Sisterhood, described and discussed in previous posts, are fictional means of communication between “worlds” which, of course, are simulations based on analysis of historical data. As a work of micro-fiction with a crude resemblance to a set of use cases for the Timelines model, nothing in this blog should be confused with what is in the real world.

 

Crash

TIME TO GLOBAL STRATEGY DEADLINE: 4 DAYS

“NR53X C310119JNK” was the last communication from Sally, sent as text to my phone exactly one minute before all 350 of the worldwide WICO computer servers crashed. I can now reveal that Sally was in fact Sanda, the artificial intelligence used by WICO to develop the global strategy for dealing with the Death from Imminent Extinction (DIE) threat. 

There is no trace left of Sanda according to Ambassador Lazlo, whose voice was the template for the AI that I practically considered a friend. In a statement, Lazlo said, “All electronic records of the final strategy were erased in what WICO considers a crime against humanity. An investigation of the cause is in progress, and the results will be made public when we have them.”

It took two hours to hypothesize the meaning of the puzzle Sally/Sanda sent to me. The first part, NR53X, refers to the origin of the crash (denoted as “X”), which is a region or nation with a normalized population-to-nature ratio of 53%. The second part was a direction to “see” my junk mail from January 19, 2019, which I had tentatively assumed was sent by her/it. Stripped of its details, and considered in the context of our discussions, I interpreted the message as confirmation that the core strategy was a set of simple rules, and that people in a stage of collapse were most likely to resist implementation of those rules.

Ambassador Lazlo refused to comment on my hypothesis, or give any clues about what WICO will do next.

Reality Check

Of the ten most populous simulated nations, only one is in the collapse stage. Its real-world equivalent is marked by telltale signs of collapse: the death rate exceeds the birth rate, and demonstrates a strong preference for hegemony that could potentially reduce its population-nature ratio.

Redesign

TIME TO GLOBAL STRATEGY DEADLINE: 7 DAYS

With a week left before WICO’s deadline for completing its global strategy for dealing with the imminent extinction threat, the organization is going quiet again, “Focusing completely on our task,” as Secretary General Decatur put it in a brief statement today. Given what I learned about the results of their testing, it is reasonable to assume that a major redesign followed by rapid retest is in progress.

Various public and private organization are trying to anticipate how the publicly released information might impact the final product. A major thread through their efforts is the question of whether core assumptions provided to national strategy developers have changed, which could prompt pushback from policy makers and their constituents who have been using the published strategies as a guide to planning future action.

Predictably those who are worried the most about adverse outcomes consider themselves likely to be partially in what Ambassador Lazlo called the “collapse stage.” We already know what fraction of the world’s population has that issue. Rich nations like the United States are attempting to identify what the most radical aspects of the strategy might be, including larger than expected movements of people within and between nations, and major demolition and environmental cleanup activities.

Notably, prominent companies in energy and other resource-extraction industries have announced that they will resist any significant changes to the roles they agreed to in the nation-level negotiations.

Reality Check

Major redesign is not uncommon when test results throw into question key assumptions and structural decisions made in the design process. This is such a case, and it is also not uncommon to resist pushing back a schedule when it happens because of commitments already made to stakeholders and customers of the “product.”

Stages of Progress

TIME TO GLOBAL STRATEGY DEADLINE: 9 DAYS

WICO signaled that its strategy testing has not gone well by going dark until today and then pushing its deadline for roll-out back to March 1 from the optimistic date they set a week ago. Ambassador Lazlo was tasked with explaining what happened at a morning press briefing.

“We have had to increase the resolution of monitoring and control,” she said in answer to a question about whether the test results were forcing a change to the strategy. “The number of regions is now three hundred, which decreases the uncertainty in global status to no more than five percent. 

She added that regions have been reclassified for easier understanding and assessment of what actions should be made over time to achieve a given outcome. “World history, and likewise the history of every region, can be divided into four stages of change in the number of people and how they live their lives. They focus on growth until further growth ceases being healthy for them and the other species they share their environment with. If they choose more growth then they will transition to a stage where they are consuming the basis for a natural existence, with a resulting peak in everything they might hope to achieve. Attempting to grow more than that will collapse the ecosystems they depend upon for survival along with all aspects of their lives as biological beings.

Lazlo provided a graph showing the new set of regions and the stages they were in last year (shown below). Roughly one-fourth of the world’s population was (and is) in the peak stage, and two-thirds was in the collapse stage. Taken as an entire world, we are in the peak stage, bordering on collapse.

She explained, “The stages are directly correlated with the ratio of people to nature in each region, or, more precisely, the resources consumed for basic survival by people as a ratio of the remaining resources of that type in the environment. Fractions are used here because they easily show how many other creatures support each of us at a given stage, as the denominator minus one. Collapse clearly occurs because each creature depends on at least one other to support it, and we have through civilization stopped directly supporting them.

“Note that the trend line indicates how growing population will tend to move a region to a higher stage. This progression is not inevitable. People in a region can consume less, have fewer children, leave, or die, and have the region fall back to a previous stage if the damage to ecosystems is not too extensive or experiencing self-perpetuating collapse.”

Reality Check

The delay in updating this blog was due to my choice to refine the simulation down to the regional level before reporting on progress. Lazlo’s description is obviously mine, and the graph is a random set of data using the Timeline model’s projection of last year’s global averages.

Coping and Collapse

TIME TO GLOBAL STRATEGY DEADLINE: 22 DAYS

Public concern over population management has dominated the response to WICO’s global strategy summary and the national inputs to development of a detailed strategy by March 1.

Reviewing Ambassador Lazlo’s discussion of the issue on January 14, I found a clue to what might be connecting the events Sally described yesterday. I asked Sally about it when she called to continue her story: “Is the fraction of resources we consume affecting how satisfied we are with our lives and how long children might live?”

“Yes,” she said, “except it’s the remaining fraction that people are most sensitive to, which is why the richest are affected first. Their surroundings are more artificial than natural, so they experience less of what nourishes them biologically and psychologically on a basic human level.”

“What can be done about it?”

“The obvious choice is to replace the artificial with the natural. You’ll recognize that as the essence of our global strategy. Another option is to address the effects instead of the cause by, for instance, using technologies such as drugs to feel better and extend how long people can live. For a while you could delude yourself into believing there are more resources than you have, using your imagination or the technology of entertainment. You could remove other people from your environment or just take what they have; at the very minimum you’ll want to keep more people from coming in. Finally, if all else fails, you can just kill yourself.”

“Are those options reflected in the global strategy?”

“They’re built into the trajectory of history that the strategy is based on,” she said, and resumed her story.

We now know that had the United States, the origin of the financial crisis, been a closed system in 2008 then it would have been in the process of rapid collapse. Its connections with other nations kept that from happening, but at great cost to the rest of the world. Still, eighty-five percent of citizens were feeling the effects of too little nature in their environment, and using all of the tools available to cope with it.

Over the course of the next ten years the U.S. reduced total consumption by one-third, effectively slowing but not reversing the collapse that might occur if it becomes isolated. Meanwhile its total amount of resources decreased by more than one-fourth, due to a combination of economic exports and destruction by multiple causes that include storms, drought, and fires. 

We project that by the time our strategy is executed, seventy-eight percent of the people in your nation will find that more effort yields less happiness and life expectancy for their children, while worldwide that fraction will be thirty-seven percent as more nations are approaching collapse than experiencing it. 

Reality Check

Characterizations of the situation in the U.S., including cited numbers, are based on simulations of an idealized population with historical values of relevant variables fed into the model.

Explanations of causes are my own hypotheses based on experience and logic applied to the design and results of the simulations. Options for dealing with the consequences are my own best guesses, and are likewise working hypotheses at best.