Lesson Learned

Maura Riddick and I should have seen it coming, given the date and the political climate, but we were lulled into a false sense of security by the absence of protests during the past month and the general public enthusiasm that followed the founding of Possibilities from Responsibilities in Sieva, Montana. 

Anyone who has followed the news knows the story. A dozen armed protesters interrupted Saturday night’s town hall meeting in Sieva, loudly accusing PFR of being a front group for socialists in the World Information and Coordination Organization who they called “the WICO wackos.” Their leader Tom Torgenson specifically called out Maura as an example, citing her affiliation with “dangerous Colorado communes” that WICO “used as models for their evil test communities.” He then went on a tirade about how the concept of testing is antithetical to “traditional American values” and “is part of a sinister use of an imaginary emergency to create a single world order” that “trades freedom for tyranny.” We and the 232 other attendees, many of them Sieva residents, felt like we were being held hostage, amplified by the unwillingness of the county sheriff to remove them or their weapons.

Luckily, the head of PFR, Louis Delambre, was able to use past experience as both an Army hostage negotiator and a prominent businessman in another part of the state to convince Torgenson and his followers that PFR is “not the problem, but the solution to government overreach” by advocating for “personal responsibility in dealing with the obvious, local consequences of economic overreach by corporations who have taken resources necessary but unseen, like the quality of air and water, and not paid any of us what they’re worth.” He defended Maura’s background too, explaining that the communes Torgenson reviled were offshoots of a movement in Hawaii to protect local communities of all kinds from economic and ecological exploitation that includes what they call “corruption of our body’s very nature.” WICO’s leadership, he added, “shares that mission on a global scale, which requires global protection as well as individual action to create healthier communities literally from the ground up. That last part is what we’re all about, using what we learned in communities where we got to test how to do it.”

Torgenson’s group participated in a vigorous discussion with the rest of us that lasted until nearly two o’clock in the morning. This experience provided a valuable lesson, applicable to future events, which Maura summarized later as if it was a rule in one of the early versions of the global strategy: “We have a responsibility to apply empathy and seek knowledge to challenge our assumptions, because opportunities could be disguised as threats.”

Reality Check

Even in a world where most people accept the nature and magnitude of an imminent extinction threat, it’s reasonable to expect cultural assumptions to result in misunderstanding. It’s also reasonable to expect that resolving such misunderstanding can depend heavily on luck - such as having someone involved with relevant experience and understanding of the underlying issues.  

Response Coordination

TIME TO STRATEGY EXECUTION: 68 DAYS

Maura officially remains a special agent of the U.S. Extinction Response Unit. Prior to being attached and operationally reporting directly to WICO she worked out of the USERU’s field office in Denver, developing local strategy options and helping identify their potential outcomes (the latter of which she was doing with the global strategy when I was summoned). Today we visited the field office, whose personnel have been tasked with coordinating the strategy’s execution in the Rocky Mountain states.

Regional Director Felicity Jonas greeted us warmly and then compared notes with Maura on the status of preparations for the roll-out. After the attack on WICO, USERU made educated guesses about that the final strategy would look like, with emphasis on the national strategy’s inputs, and yesterday finished a review comparing their guesses with the current version of the strategy. Sally had been particularly helpful in the review, which she was simultaneously doing with extinction response units in the other nations. 

“Our guesses were pretty close,” Jonas said as the briefing wrapped up. “Locally we have a couple dozen action items that we can address by the end of the month, no sweat. After that, and until the execution date, we’ll be enlisting public and local governments to refine the impact reduction criteria and translate them into activity plans on a granular level. Do you think you can help us with that, Maura?”

“That’s one of the reasons I’m here,” she replied, giving me a knowing look. “I’m expecting a full report on my team’s personal environmental assessment suggestions and related test plans by end-of-business today. I’ll review them tonight, and I’d like to get your take on them tomorrow morning.” She explained that individuals could use such approaches for high-level detection and assessment during the initial phase, while more technology intensive approaches would be applied to conditions expected to be too large or unsafe. “It will improve the overall efficiency, and give us critical feedback for developing the next version, which will eventually be dominant. For those reasons, we should test them as soon as possible. After you see what we’ve got, I’d like to brainstorm how we can leverage what you’re doing with the activity plans.”

“Agreed,” Jonas said. “Meanwhile, I’ll pass this up the chain of command to see if any other regions can get involved.”

“Will’s next blog post should make that easier,” Maura suggested.

After we left, she suggested we do some sight-seeing and talk about the next steps, beginning with the radical idea I mentioned in yesterday’s post.

As she drove us into the mountains, I gave her an overview. “It’s related to a discussion I had with Sally back on February 7. I know because last night I looked up a post that I wrote then. Ambassador Lazlo even commented on it the next day. People are reacting to their environmental conditions in some ways like other animals do. We’re so used to looking at big picture statistics that we don’t see how it can scale to everyday experience.”

I waited for a reaction. “You mean, people are the detectors?” she asked.

“You got it,” I confirmed. “When people lived in nature all the time they were doing exactly what we want to do, with nothing more than what they could carry. We evolved to routinely make environmental assessments just to survive. Clearly some of it is still happening, affecting how happy we are, how many children we have, and how long we each live. If you believe Sally’s statistics, it even affects how much we trade with each other.”

“But life expectancy is tied to technology,” she argued, “and the economy depends on who is trading with who.”

I had thought a lot about those questions before falling asleep. “We still get sick, even fatally so, which is a direct effect of the toxins we breathe, drink, and eat. As for the economy, the quality and distribution of resources are averaged out in the stats, but they don’t have to be.”

“You sound more like a scientist than a journalist every day,” she observed.

“I like to read as much as I like to write. Also, I have a lot of smart friends.” She smiled, but I was specifically thinking of someone else. “You know what? I think it’s time for you to meet one of those other friends.”

Reality Check

Near the end, Will was of course referring to the correlations between remaining ecological resources and the global variables he cited. In my simulations, I have not used specific distributions of resources but rather inferred them from historical trends, essentially treating populations as resource distribution detectors. In the characters’ quest to test, I’m basically presenting a case for testing the assumptions and results of the simulations on small scales.

Blue Planet Day

TIME TO STRATEGY EXECUTION: 70 DAYS

Blue Planet Day was celebrated as a recommitment of the world to fighting death by imminent extinction. WICO personnel were enlisted to participate in briefings to the public and activities at their local facilities and field offices, with a focus on “the world of tomorrow”: what life will be like over the next fifty years as the global strategy is implemented.

Maura and I stayed in Colorado to assist at the Boulder field office, which coordinates research with universities and government agencies throughout the state, including collection of data at one of WICO’s test sites in the mountains southwest of Denver. We were joined by Maura’s parents and a distant cousin who live in Colorado Springs and, to my surprise, helped found the test site.

Sally was present at all of the events, using her enormous bandwidth to give lectures and answer questions for all of the visitors. She shared details of the global strategy, whose completed parts have already been disseminated to national governments for review. A multimedia presentation produced by the Education group was made available for download and played in theater spaces at each of the facilities.

Most people I talked to were interested in progress made toward limiting self-sustained ecological impacts, especially those in polar regions and the oceans that threaten to further destabilize the climate. A scale model of the WDP group’s pad technology for removing carbon dioxide from oceans was a big hit, along with a hall of dioramas showing how a suburban neighborhood might look after each decade of transformation into an end-state community dependent more on natural systems than artificial ones.

Mark Luke and Ronald Wingate hosted a panel discussion about how the expected changes to the world economy would affect private industry. Most questions centered on the progress of their Evolution over Devolution (ED) collaboration and its plans for the immediate future. Still committed to creating an artificial supply chain that can replace natural systems, Luke said that use of biotechnology is now ED’s top priority, aimed at adapting human life to a radically different resource base within five years to avoid the worst-case extinction scenario. Wingate argued that substantial economic reward is still possible with a mix of renewable energy and community-scale pollution cleanup technologies that can augment the WDP group’s efforts.

A three-hour meeting at WICO headquarters in London was beamed live to meeting rooms all over the world and recorded for later playback. It began with a keynote address by Secretary General Decatur, and included speeches introduced by Ambassador Lazlo, who herself presented an overview of STRIDE’s organization, operation, and progress, as well as a fifteen-minute description of our Quality Assurance team’s work. Maura wasn’t bothered by not being asked to represent us, telling me that she had been given explicit instructions to focus on the work, a new phase of which she and I will be starting tomorrow, right here in our home state.

Reality Check

“Blue Planet Day” is, of course, the simulated world’s version of our Earth Day.

People, technologies and organizations mentioned here have been mentioned in earlier posts, and some elements of the story are related to other fiction I have written.

Shortcuts

TIME TO STRATEGY EXECUTION: 111 DAYS

For four days there was no word from anyone at WICO about the status of its repairs and investigation into the server crash. All of my contacts outside the organization had gone dark too; and the mainstream press wasn’t any better-informed, judging by the dominance of speculation from virtually every outlet.

About 10 a.m. Eastern Time yesterday there were reports of high-level finance executives being simultaneously arrested in a dozen cities, but no one could find out what they were charged with. I was unable to correlate the arrests with any of the nations I considered suspects in the WICO attack, which suggested that they were unrelated.

An hour later I was “asked” to accompany three F.B.I. agents to an undisclosed location where I would be asked to perform a task related to national security. Curious, I complied. After three more hours I sat alone in a small, bare conference room, having been assured that I was not under arrest, and that I was free to leave at any time. I could write later about what happened (which I’m doing now), subject to censorship of sensitive information.

A dark-haired woman in her twenties took a seat across from me and introduced herself as Maura Riddick, a historian attached to the Extinction Response Unit, one of the government organizations working with WICO to coordinate its strategy development and implementation. “I’ve been working on identifying the range of possible outcomes from certain actions taken during this process, and to develop tests that can identify their probabilities at any given time.”

“It must be difficult without Sanda around to help,” I said with genuine empathy.

Riddick nodded. “Sanda has been a great assistant. We hope to have her at full capacity by the time her attackers have been neutralized.”

“Do you think that will be soon?” I asked, happy that she/it wasn’t damaged beyond repair. 

“For obvious reasons that’s classified. Meanwhile there is a lot to do, which is why we asked you here.” She sat back and closed her eyes, though they were still moving. “Sanda suggested that you could assist us with a related task.”

Apparently, I wasn’t the only one she/it left messages for. “What exactly?”

 “Checking Sanda’s past work for bugs.” Riddick opened her eyes and explained that the test team discovered several inconsistencies in the strategy that Sanda should have identified before certifying it for final testing. That suggested a flaw in the process. "When we confronted her, she admitted the inconsistencies, but had no insight into their cause since all of her diagnostic results were within acceptable ranges. She suggested we consult with you, and the attack happened an hour later. Now we have no direct way to identify the flaw, or a system that can be analyzed to find a possible mechanism for it.”

“I’m confused. Can’t you just have your test team check it out when you restore her? Also, you said ‘bugs’ in the plural. What did that mean?”

“There’s the flaw, if there’s only one cause, and there’s a problem with Sanda finding it. Sanda is so complex that it took a year to evaluate her the first time, and anything we missed then is likely to be virtually undetectable now. I hate the metaphor, but we really need to think outside of the box if we’re going to implement a strategy by our hard deadline.”

“It sounds like you’re going on faith anyway,” I observed. “Maybe it’s just better to fix what she gives you.”

Riddick smiled. “We’re preparing for that. There’s also the possibility that she and we missed something else, or several somethings. I suspect that’s why she said we should bring you in: to provide some leads about what to look for...”

“By looking at what she did in the past,” I echoed her earlier answer. The word shortcutspopped into my mind, maybe because it was a theme common to several of our discussions, and maybe because Riddick and her team were now gambling literally everything on my finding one.

Reality Check

The four days of silence in the real world were due to my focus on testing and refining the simulations, which is just a shadow of what the people in the imaginary world would be concerned about. 

One “inconsistency” I found involves global wealth, which was overestimated in the model. When fixed, it revealed another inconsistency: a mischaracterization of monetary inflation used to calculate current values of wealth and Gross World Product. 

A byproduct of that effort was a more realistic and defensible way of generating a “range of possible outcomes” (Riddick’s specialty) for wealth per person within a group of regions. This led to what may be a controversial - but in retrospect unsurprising - conclusion that wealth inequality is built into civilization’s means of processing and consuming resources as a linear process (each activity depends on another, and is rewarded by doing so).

The updated simulations revealed another surprise, with major consequences for a strategy like that being considered in the imaginary world. Essentially, a voluntary reduction in population is so inconsistent with the observed relationships underlying the model that the intended result (lowering ecological impact to sustainable level) can best be achieved with a final population only a little less than what we have now, and each person consuming only what is barely needed for survival.

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.

Christmas Outbreak

TIME TO GLOBAL STRATEGY DEADLINE: 23 DAYS

My anonymous source Sally finally returned my calls and offered to provide deep background on STRIDE’s development of a global strategy. She began with the following story which she cautioned is “only approximately true.”

On Christmas 2002 the world’s richest person realized that she had accomplished everything that mattered to her and that no one would never have a better life than she was having right then. She could accumulate more money and things, but it had become noticeably harder each year, with diminishing satisfaction to show for it; and the effort was both objectively and subjectively on the verge of making her life worse.

After a year roughly four hundred people representing nearly five percent of the world’s wealth shared a similar experience, with most feeling that their lives were getting worse. Growing desperate to break their malaise, they worked harder at what they associated with their previous success, consuming more resources and acquiring more ability to do so. In retrospect it predictably had the opposite effect, behaving much like an infectious virus, and forced others into the same predicament.

Nearly five thousand people and one-ninth of the world’s wealth were affected by the spring of 2005 when another problem arose: life expectancy reached a peak, again affecting the richest people first. By then more than half the amount of resources usable by all species each year was being directly consumed or converted into unusable waste by humanity, contributing to the death of creatures who couldn’t defend themselves or what they needed.

In 2008 the world found out what happens when one-fifth of global wealth is owned by people who are freaking out because they are growing unhappy and their life expectancy is falling: they make big mistakes. Because of those mistakes, the economy contracted for the first time in decades. The magnitude of the drop caught many by surprise, in part because of a driver of inflation that was unknown at the time.

When she was done, I asked if the consumption statistic for 2005 was related to the cause of the declines in happiness, life expectancy, and economy that she described. I also asked why she didn’t mention climate change and its related impacts during that period since the whole point of our discussion was to address how humanity was going to cope with the extinction threat.

“To understand the future, you must understand the past,” she said cryptically. “Think about that and I’ll continue the story tomorrow.”

Reality Check

The story is, like the rest of this blog, is an interpretation of events based on my simulation. The explanation can be derived from my other writing, such as discussions of the Timelines model that is the core of the simulation. I plan to soon spell it out here in somewhat easier-to-understand terms.