Green Horizon

 

By Brandon Johnson (World: Green)

Greetings from Green Horizon Station, a research and communications facility on Green Mountain run by the nonprofit Restoration Acceleration Consortium (RAC) based in the town of Evergreen. I am Station Research Coordinator Brandon Johnson.

Green Horizon is our equivalent of a Hikeyay test community and one of 56 that are distributed around the world. RAC’s mission is to develop means to rapidly restore and conserve natural habitat so that the global extinction rate can be reduced as much as possible. While this might help delay humanity’s demise, which many of us in RAC believe is imminent and unstoppable, our main focus is on the fates of other species and their abilities to change, and adapt to, the hellscape that ours is creating.

Like several of our stations, Green Horizon is home to 75 permanent residents who operate and maintain core infrastructure. Up to 50 more people intermittently visit during a typical year to perform specialized activities. Access and material flows are rigorously controlled to minimize the station’s ecological footprint and to ensure security of personnel and operations. The existence and use of the Interlink is the most closely held secret, known to only a few people, me included, based on affinity to the Mountain Sisterhood.

Analysis of our own situation has us considerably worried that revealing contact with other worlds (other than as a fictional narrative like this blog) could initiate attempts to control them, or worse, rather than peaceably learning from them. Those attempts would detract from, if not totally disable, the work that needs to be done to save our world and others. The activities of Sally the AI are particularly problematic in this regard, because her/its activities to expand the Interlink could possibly be interpreted as precursors to invasion if not direct efforts to control our world, triggering a defensive response with real, personal consequences. I mention this, not because we intend to cut off contact, but because this is a real threat that others might not have considered.

To the extent that we share a common nature, the success of Hikeyay in launching a global effort to confront its human extinction crisis provides a small but significant amount of hope that enough people can work together to avoid total catastrophe. We thank you for that and look forward to sharing what works and what doesn’t as we try to save those who cannot. 

Reality Check

Reminder: this is a fictional blog. There are no other (known) worlds communicating with each other. My intent - as with much of my writing - is to share my thoughts, speculation, and research about how we might understand and address the very real extinction crisis.

Considered but not included in this post is the following conceptual backstory of efforts by the fictional RAC. In reality, it is a summary of my recent research:

“Key to RAC’s mission is understanding what motivates living beings to take actions that benefit or harm themselves and others, beyond their basic biological imperatives. We have identified four types of interactions between individuals or groups of individuals, and between them and their environments. We call the types: isolation, competition, cooperation, and exploitation. Of these, exploitation most reliably increases extinction, especially when it involves creation and distribution of materials that can’t be processed in an ecosystem to support survival of its residents. Humans with our technologies are very effective at that kind of exploitation; and our societies tend to most reward people who enable it, because use of those materials allows them to maximize control over their own lives.”

The Existence Box

By Will Jackson (World: Hikeyay)

The key concept in our strategy to avoid extinction is the Existence Box. This has been used effectively in teaching people around our world how to think about what to do in their daily lives and how to steer group policies from the family to the community levels. It is also a guide to gaging progress at all scales. Some of you have already been briefed on this with help from our AI Sally and the Interlink (also called the Mountain Sisterhood), but our team now feels that it’s worth spelling it out for all of you.

Existence of a group is the collective experience by its members of its population, quality, and longevity. Population is the number of people in the group. Quality is the ability of members to meet their needs and wants within their environment. Longevity is how long that the group can last. Each of these is a dimension of a box whose volume is the group’s existence. Extinction is the absence of existence, where longevity and the population have dropped to zero.

The dimensions of the Existence Box are measured and limited by resources. The primary type of resource is natural habitat. Because we are animals, those resources are what we’re made of. Where they come from is the environment that we evolved to be most adapted to for meeting our basic needs and therefore to be most sensitive to, in exchange for being part of that habitat. As humans have spread to inhabit many different environments, they have developed the ability to adapt to them as well, in part through evolution and in part through creation of tools and artificial environments that enable them to reliably meet their needs and provide security and comfort, which we have come to think of as “quality of life.” Quality has come at a cost: much of what is created, including the byproducts of production, either displaces or degrades natural habitat, resulting in a net loss of it. As population grows and tools for adaptation become more efficient at acquiring and processing resources, the quantity of waste for the small fraction that produces most of it also grows. 

How fast the amount of natural habitat decreases directly affects longevity. The other life that is part of and maintains that habitat depends on it for its survival. When the total amount falls below what that life needs to survive then soon, like them, our population reaches a maximum and can no longer grow. Like a company that starves those who supply what it needs to produce its own products, and whose production slows with the decreasing supply until it stops and can only sell what it’s already produced, the production of people must stop, leaving those who are already alive to eventually die without replacement. Historically, groups have moved to, or taken by force, regions that have more resources; but there are now no other places to move to in time to offset the destruction that could befall our world and yours.

Our application of the Existence Box concept has been focused on increasing longevity by managing population growth and defining a target environment that can be created and adapted to by reducing instead of increasing waste. That target environment includes more natural habitat and less total consumption of resources. We are grappling with an unacceptable increase of global temperatures that could reduce longevity despite our efforts, which is one of the reasons we’re reaching out to other worlds, but we believe our general approach is sound enough for others to benefit from it.

Reality Check

The Existence Box is a minor variation of a theoretical construct I’ve used for thinking about, analyzing, and discussing the contributors and potential solutions to the threat of imminent extinction. My latest research has refined projections of global and population-level variables, including a derivation of how much resources are valued throughout a group in a closed environment. 

In my simulations, historically only about 1% of people prefer replacing natural habitat with artificial habitat, while 75% prefer people more than natural habitat. The rest prefer natural habitat more than artificial habitat and people, who I expect would be the main supporters of a push for increasing longevity.  In Hikeyay, the supporters have gained enough power to convince everyone else to radically change their lives. While I consider this unrealistic (thus the use of beneficent artificial intelligence and supernatural communication between parallel universes), it remains a valuable thought experiment, along with the fictional bringing to life of an alternate reality that would be preferable to ours. 

Recovery

 

Maura came out of her coma last night, and will be taking a few days off on her doctor’s orders after tests revealed no cause or ill effects just like the last time. Sally became available soon after Maura woke up, and gave no explanation for her absence other than “unscheduled maintenance.”

I am staying at home with Maura and reviewing the demolition plan being finalized for my neighborhood. Unlike that used to be normal for such things, the plan involves removing all artificial structures, including building foundations and pavement that would hinder regrowth of plants and settlement by animals. A preliminary assessment of toxic substances was already done, including thorough inspections of all buildings and analysis of soil from representative core samples. 

Dedicated safing facilities co-located with existing landfills have already been built to handle what can’t be processed onsite, and use similar technology to the safing centers. That technology was developed during the five-year preparation period that coincided with the biosphere assessment and is the basis of several systems coming online to deal with external impacts. Al calls them “juiced up recycling plants” because they share some functional similarities, mostly at the front and back ends of the process such as sorting and distribution. The main difference, of course, is the conversion into bio-safe material (thus “safing”) where possible.

A second-generation Personal Environmental Assessment Kit has been useful for checking some of the assumptions built into the plan, such as the projected ecological impact reductions based on local species distribution and services. It’s been fun reliving with Maura some of our test experience from April, which feels like an eternity ago.

Reality Check

The safing facilities do not exist. While the term “bioprocessing” has a very specific meaning, applicable to the creation of products instead of the opposite, I anticipate a similar use in conversion of existing products into forms that other species can use. All technologies described here are based on my own imagination and speculation, and applicable mainly to the “other worlds” to which they are addressed.

Peak Sabotage

TIME TO STRATEGY EXECUTION: 83 DAYS

Mark Linster was one of nearly ten million people residing in what WICO identifies as Region 35, part of the urban corridor from Washington, D.C. to New York City. By day he worked as an information technology engineer for one of the nation’s ten largest defense companies, helping to maintain security for its world-wide computer network. At night he pursued his interest in future technologies, especially the further development of artificial intelligence.

In July of last year, Linster learned that the most advanced AI, Sanda, was near the end of its test phase, and was about to be used to analyze several years of data collected by WICO about the world’s ecosystems and physical processes. One goal of the analysis had already leaked to the press: performing a detailed threat assessment of ecosystem degradation and climate destabilization as a follow-up to the global scientific community’s warnings of growing extinction rates that could soon extend to humanity. This prompted Linster and a group of former coworkers and classmates to begin a discussion of its potential impacts on their professional and personal lives.

Six of the twenty-two group members were in biotechnology, and saw their industry as the savior of the species. Another ten had aerospace background that they felt was the key to the future through exploration and colonization of other planets. The remaining six, Linster among them, were putting their hopes in the development of virtual reality that could enable human consciousness to be embedded in machines and potentially live forever. None of the options they considered was viable without technological development; so, when they considered possible worst-case scenarios, the back-to-nature approaches promoted by many environmentalists were easily among them.

The Global Emergency declaration confirmed their greatest fears. To Linster and the others it was an abomination that one of the world’s most sophisticated technologies was being used to sell the idea of scaling down civilization’s ecological footprint to fight the threat of imminent global extinction. They viewed the preferred strategy as a betrayal of a future where people could reach their full potential as masters of their lives and potentially the Universe. In a choice between life and death, WICO was advocating that humanity become more vulnerable, not less, to forces it had spent tens of thousands of years gaining dominance over.

Linster watched in horror as political leaders signed onto WICO’s approach and developed national strategies that mirrored its guiding principle. In an unfortunately recorded conference call with everyone in the group on January 16, he advocated activating a plan he had been secretly enabling since August. They agreed, and six days later he and fourteen hackers used Sanda’s first connection to the global data network to test infiltration and espionage software that would ultimately be used to take down the information infrastructure supporting WICO’s strategy development.

“It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done,” Linster said during his testimony yesterday, “working to take down one of the greatest creations in order to save future ones. But it was the right thing to do.” He pointed his finger at the panel of six judges sitting above the witness chair in the well of the Tribunal Chamber. “YOU are the criminals here! We weren’t trying to kill everyone. We were savinga future worth having!”

Today Linster and the original group, the hackers, and their financial backers were all convicted of attempted omnicide and sentenced to ten years of pollution cleanup.

The summary above is in the public record. For my part, I gave brief testimony on Saturday, which involved verifying what I’ve reported in public, and then spent most of the weekend observing the trial and talking with various people about what happened. There was something about the motivation that didn’t seem complete, so I asked Maura if I could take some time to investigate. 

“What did Sally say about the location clue?” she asked when I suggested it might have something to do with where he lived, given what Sally sent me right before the servers crashed.

“She told me that people just passing the life expectancy peak would be aware of the risks of conditions getting worse, but be hopeful that they could find another path to improvement since they hadn’t yet seen a precipitous drop in happiness or life expectancy. The range of wealth in that region with the projections she had available at the time indicated that there was still access to the necessary capabilities. Then she admitted something rather remarkable. She said that it was her best guess.”

“Really,” Maura said after a pause that revealed her surprise.

“That makes it worth checking out by itself. Don’t you think?” I waited, and then added, “There’s also this: one of the investigators testified that included in the offsite cached data was a list of regions with their population to nature ratios. That narrowed the search considerably.”

“What about the others that were close?” she said.

“Exactly. I’d say there’s at least a security reason for looking at those too.” 

Reality Check

Sally’s “guess” is my guess. The projected number of people within half a percent of a 53% normalized population to nature ratio is about 100 million. I don't know how many of them are in the DC - NYC corridor.

Dream Job

TIME TO STRATEGY EXECUTION: 87 DAYS

Lazlo set aside today for a briefing by Sally to all of STRIDE on the status and content of the current version of the global strategy. Following are some highlights.

“There are three types of problems we must solve simultaneously within the next twenty years: cultural, ecological, and physical. The cultural problems involve just humans, and relate to values, population, and consumption. Ecological problems center on the ability of other species to survive and thrive in healthy ecosystems that maintain conditions of global habitability subject to physical constraints, whose variability represents the third type of problem. The order of presentation for these problem types is the same as the order of difficulty in solving them, with the amount of difficulty increasing by about an order of magnitude for each.

“Every problem type has its own section in the strategy, with another section devoted to the relationships between each of them. Another section provides an integrated timeline of actions, events, and expected status for each system and capability of interest, which can be updated dynamically based on observations during execution. The final section is a combination summary and operator manual that enables all users to determine appropriate action at least eighty percent of the time based on their local conditions. Separately provided is educational material that includes baseline knowledge and concepts for all users.

“The amount of completion for each section ranges from eleven to eighty-six percent. Cumulatively, the strategy is sixty-three percent complete with eighty-two percent confidence in quality. Reconstruction of lost databases using cached data that was not on the sabotaged servers is now at fifty-six percent, which has forced creation of an annex to the strategy that provides for collection and analysis of needed data on a real-time basis from now through the end of the execution timeline. Projections of success that include estimated uncertainty currently range from twenty-one to fifty-eight percent.”

Sally displayed several graphs during the presentation, along with status summaries from each group within STRIDE. From what I understood, they all supported her story, mostly adding detail to each identified problem and what could or might be done about it.

“What did you think?” Riddick asked me as we sat in her office after the presentation. She looked the same way I felt: tired, overwhelmed, and somewhat depressed.

“If there wasn’t so much at stake, I’d start looking for another planet to live on. This place is too far gone.”

“Starting fresh,” she said, staring at the ceiling. “That’s not a new thought. It’s also a very reasonable one. Unfortunately, there are a lot of people here who wouldn’t get to go.” She closed her eyes and yet they kept moving.

“Do you mind if I ask you a personal question?” I asked tentatively.

“Sure,” she said without moving.

“What’s the deal with what you’re doing now? Forgive me if this sounds crude, but it looks like you’re watching a movie inside your head.”

She smiled and opened her eyes. “No apology necessary. I love honest questions.”

“So?”

She leaned over and stared at me. “What does this feel like?”

All I could see was her eyes, and a swirl of peaceful thoughts began replacing the ones that threatened to destroy my sanity. I struggled to summarize what was emerging, and couldn’t help but smile back. “It’s almost as if I’m in a different world.”

“When you see me like that, I am in a different world.”

She sounded crazy, but in a good way. “It must be nice,” was all I could say.

“Would you like to talk about your future now?” she asked, sitting back and breaking the mood.

“Sure.” I assumed she was talking about the fact that my mission here was done.

She pressed a button on her computer and familiar face appeared on the screen. “What do you think, Sally?”

For a second it looked like they were the same person, and then the differences returned. “Will is a great friend.” She turned to me. “You are a great friend. We wouldn’t be here without you.” I sensed a “but” coming. “I think… we need someone looking over our shoulders, asking the odd questions, questioning assumptions we didn’t know we were making.”

“You’re pretty good at that, yourself,” I told her, recalling her personal survival strategy.

“I agree,” Riddick said, and grasped my hand. “Call me Maura from now on, after you write about this.” She paused and said to Sally, “I’ll recommend to Samantha that we keep the current arrangement after his testimony.”

“In case I screw up,” I said reflexively, but Maura took no offense.

Reality Check

Numbers listed are all fictional, including the estimates of required effort for the problem types which are ballpark at best.

Sally’s version of Will’s job description matches what I would write for my dream job, for which I am available. 

To be continued on Tuesday…

Rule of the Thumb

 

TIME TO GLOBAL STRATEGY DEADLINE: 16 DAYS

I asked Sally to give me an example of the simple concepts and rules that WICO Secretary General Decatur mentioned during yesterday’s press conference.

“They’re more like rules of thumb,” she corrected. “One of the most basic ones can be easily remembered using a real thumb: There should be four times as much nature as people. Think of one of your hands as the environment. Your thumb is the people, and your fingers are plants and other animals. A hand is not a complete hand unless they’re all there.”

“What about the palm?” I asked.

“The palm is the raw resources converted by plants into resources, including other plants, that animals can use. Animals can of course use other animals as resources. The analogy breaks down there. Though if you think of fingers supporting other fingers and the thumb, then you can also remember that the thumb gets sicker as three of the fingers are removed, and dies if the remaining finger is removed.”

She explained that the “fingers” are like an economic supply chain, with each one adding value that the next one can consume. The problem facing the world is that the “thumb” not only consumes what the “index finger” produces, but also consumes what the others produce and the “fingers” themselves.

I knew there was more to it, but grasped her point that the top priority was that the basic rule needed to be remembered.

Reality Check

The rule is based on observations of how global variables change with the people/nature ratio as reproduced in the simulation. The analogy is very imperfect from an ecological perspective, but again the point is to communicate the rule.

Cascades

TIME TO GLOBAL STRATEGY DEADLINE: 21 DAYS

Ambassador Lazlo began the WICO press conference today with a statement that was clearly motivated by information that Sally shared with me over the past two days. 

“There has been a lot of discussion about how the presence of other species in environments affects people’s feelings and behavior. The precise explanation eludes us, but empirical evidence shows that it is real. Our present hypothesis is that people experience happiness and life expectancy as the result of reactions by many of the species in their bodies to what ecologists call ‘trophic cascades’ within the outer environment.

“We might have missed it if our collective ecological impact wasn’t so great that the effects could be observed on multiple scales in nearly real time. As I implied, there’s still a lot we don’t know, but what we do know reinforces the premise built into our strategy that we must stop exterminating other species in order to save our own from the same fate.” 

Reality Check

This explanation is based on observed periodicity of happiness and life expectancy as functions of the ratio of basic consumption to remaining resources. I plan to flesh out details in future posts.

Answers

TIME TO STRATEGY DEADLINE: 9 DAYS

Following are brief answers to the top three questions from the international press pool, which are based on my visit to STRIDE’s Strategy Integration group headquarters on January 19-21.

1.     Has the assessment of the threat changed since the Global Emergency declaration, and if so, what is the new assessment?

The threat remains as described in the declaration, though STRIDE has much more detail than was revealed there. Essentially: STRIDE estimates with 80% confidence that humanity will be extinct by 2038 if no action is taken to substantially reduce its ecological footprint beginning this year.

2.     Based on strategy inputs received to date, how probable is it that we will avoid extinction?

As of yesterday, adjustments were still being made and assumptions evaluated. The team’s best judgment was that it would be around 40%. 

3.     How soon after the deadline does STRIDE expect to have a completed strategy?

The integration will take no more than one month after the national strategies are received and the action pledges signed. The resulting treaties can be ready for negotiation almost immediately after that, and should be signed no later than the end of April. STRIDE is dedicated to providing meaningful feedback as soon as possible to avoid delays on implementation.

Reality Check

By question:

1.     The extinction response is based on my simulation’s best match to historical data.

2.     Such estimates would be in flux based on feedback from field evaluators, which would be expected to take some time. The 40% number is dependent on the average of the quality and quantity of inputs received through the online tool, and on the confidence in the projections of the model.

3.     Without assistance from a sophisticated AI like Sanda, such a project could conceivably take many months. Luckily the simulated world has access to that technology and can turn around the strategy fast enough for the implementation schedule to possibly be met. 

Hope Chart

TIME TO STRATEGY DEADLINE: 21 DAYS

In response to questions about natural feedbacks at yesterday’s WICO briefing about the DIE threat, the Secretary General’s office provided what strategy integrators call a “Hope Chart.” The chart shows resources consumed by humanity and limits on that consumption due to natural feedbacks. 

The consumption curve on the chart released today (see below) is derived from the baseline strategy. Three dotted red lines illustrate the range of natural feedback effects that WICO considers realistic. Those effects could potentially be offset and then stopped by natural processes, as indicated by a similar set of green dotted lines. If the consumption curve intersects a dotted curve, then consumption will follow the dotted line downward to zero; if not, it will continue as if there are no sustained feedbacks.

Science and Policy Ambassador Lazlo explained at a press briefing that the chart is referred to as “hope” because it is based on assumptions about the feedbacks and how they might respond to reduction of consumption which can only be tested under actual conditions. She warned that sudden feedbacks such as the release of methane from melting permafrost could rapidly accelerate resource deduction (move the “high” curve closer to the present due to a pulse of global warming).

Reality Check

The Hope Chart is based on a simulation of falling consumption that allows other species to be able to consume as much resources as possible while keeping the population reduction rate near the amount expected from not replacing people who die from old age. It levels off just before the worst projected feedback would be reached and force it to zero if the hoped-for recovery of natural systems does not occur.