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.

Trauma

Maura woke up screaming at 3:45 this morning, and then fell into a deep coma. Doctors have not (so far) found any measurable damage or determined a cause. Al joined me by her side after she was brought by ambulance to a local hospital, and I intend to stay as long as it takes.

While we waited for a set of tests to be run, the emergency room television displayed breaking news of raids by national extinction response units that apparently targeted companies involved in the global strike on environment-assisting technology (EAT) development and deployment. As of this writing, there has been no official statement or explanation for the raids.

I intend to focus on the here-and-now, and plan to suspend this blog until at least Maura wakes up.

Reality Check

The onset of Maura’s coma coincides with a (purely fictional) trigger in the backstory that Will is currently unaware of. It is expected to last a week, preoccupying him along with ongoing events that he can’t reveal publicly, and keeping him from writing his blog until after she recovers.

Trip Plans

TIME TO STRATEGY EXECUTION: 52 DAYS

Our small GAP team got through the third page of our task list today. Most of the tasks involved data processing, along with scanning of paper photos and maps collected from the three test communities over the past month. It wasn’t all secretarial: we got to manually study what we were scanning and record anything we found of interest.

Starting tomorrow we will be visiting the two other test communities in the Rocky Mountain region, learning firsthand about their daily activities by actually participating in them. We’ll spend most of the weekend at one of the communities, TC-014, which is in the middle of Wyoming butte country and part of the desert biome. Then we’ll spend nearly two days at TC-015, northwest of Yellowstone National Park in Montana's temperate grasslands biome and near both the desert and temperate coniferous biomes.

Maura reminded me that the first test community that I visited with her (TC-186) is also in temperate grasslands, and near the temperate broadleaf biome. Al added that some of the most interesting ecosystems are mixes of several types, and the borders of the Yellowstone area are among his all-time favorites in the United States. During the trip we’ll be able to make assessments of a variety of environments with a Personal Environmental Assessment Kit, “running it through its paces” as Al likes to say.

As I studied a map of our route in our now crowded office at the RMOC, I felt an echo of the concern I had with the distribution of test communities. I asked, “Doesn’t it bother either you that these communities are downright tiny and out of the way?”

“What’s your point, Will?” Al asked. “Except for our number thirteen, they’re in proximity to the stations for observin’ verification. You know that.”

“But do they represent what most people will experience? I get that the commune flavor matches what might be the case in the end state, and the isolation helps keep the data clean.” I realized I really was talking like an engineer. “But can we count on them reflecting what people in even modest-sized towns would be able to do, or want to do?”

“They’re not aliens,” he said. “Most of ‘em have grown up near the communities, or got their education in large cities. They know what to expect.”

“Is that really the same thing?” I pushed.

“Al’s right,” Maura said. “This was all considered when the reference strategy started being developed. It wasn’t considered an issue. What do you recommend instead?”

The answer suddenly became crystal clear. “We take it on the road.”

“Take what on the road?” she asked.

“Like what we did when we were testing the PEAK around here. We start the roll-out early, informally, enlisting everyone we meet to start taking the first steps and get used to seeing things differently. Let’s face it: we already know most of what needs to be done. The experts in the test communities can get out into their local communities and begin educating people immediately, get them thinking creatively about what to do next.”

Maura paused, apparently taking it seriously. “Extinction Response is already working with local governments on the roll-out. How would this be different?”

“That’s at the government level. It has the appearance of being imposed on people from the top. I’m suggesting simultaneously building from the bottom up.”

“Let’s talk more about it during our trip,” she said. “We can ask the testers what they think.”

Reality Check

The descriptions of the settings for the test communities are a general match to reality, but they are still fictional.

Personal Day

TIME TO STRATEGY EXECUTION: 61 DAYS

I took a personal day yesterday, and unfortunately could not escape either the news or my obsession with helping people know what they need in order to create their own future in line with what’s survivable.

As anyone who hasn’t had their head stuck in their work already knows, Reverend Lanton has followed through on his vow to wage war against those he perceives as trying to “prevent the apocalypse.” Members of his church and likeminded groups are actively interfering with preparations to execute on WICO’s global strategy to fight the imminent extinction threat, targeting governments, NGOs, private companies such as those involved in the Evolution over Devolution collaboration, and of course WICO itself. So far, WICO’s main offices had been targeted with protests blocking access to buildings, but last night Lanton warned at a rally that field offices and test communities were next.

Not coincidentally, Lanton spoke just after President Larson unveiled a major part of the U.S. plan to help stop climate feedbacks: devoting much more resources to supporting the pollution-eating microbe development being done jointly by WICO’s Widely Dispersed Pollutants group and the Department of Defense. She further revealed that it is being merged with the isolation and neutralization technology behind the biosafing solution that I worked with on Monday.

While doing some much needed housework and planning how I might move to the Q.A. facility if my job with WICO is safe (which was my original purpose for coming home), I thought about how to measure the population-nature ratio on my own. From what I understood, there were three main components to the concept: people, places (environments), and things (creations by people), the relative amounts of which influence how people feel, procreate, and live longer. The experience of my house was an example of this, especially when frustration mounted in the presence of clutter and trash. One of the main objectives of the global strategy is effectively to reduce clutter in the “home” shared by people and other creatures, enabling us all to meet our needs with limited stress - but just enough to avoid eating too much, or being eaten ourselves. Becoming more conscious of stress and what (and who) was around at the time seemed like a good way to start exploring both the effects and their causes, as opposed to finding ways like entertainment to just blunt the effects.  

Maura called early this morning to warn me off from coming to work. There were two reasons: the upgraded PEAK prototype wasn’t ready yet; and affiliates of the Savior of the Apocalypse church had effectively blockaded both WICO’s Boulder field office and the Extinction Response Unit’s field office in Denver.

Reality Check

Yesterday I followed my own obsession, working to integrate what I know about ecosystems with the Timelines simulation. An interesting result, potentially useful to the simulated world and Will in particular, was quantification of a population density interpretation of the (normalized) people-nature ratio and its correlation with related global variables. 

A simple equation summarizes the distribution of resources (Population + Nature + Wants + Waste = Total Resources), where the unit of resources is what an average person absolutely needs to survive in a totally natural environment (Population = Needs), Nature = (0.88 / Sr) * Population, Total Resources is 1900 resources per square mile (land ecosystems), and Sr is the normalized population-nature ratio. This is shown below for several values of per-capita consumption (C).

Observations

TIME TO STRATEGY EXECUTION: 69 DAYS

Maura and I spent several hours at test community TC-013 today.  Located on one of Colorado’s mountains, this former commune has thirty full-time residents who live off the land, perform scientific investigations, and maintain a suite of environmental monitoring instruments whose data are transmitted via satellite to Boulder for analysis. Officially we were there to brief the residents about the field test development effort and recruit them to help verify the resulting approaches. Unofficially we were hoping to get some ideas of our own.

One of the oldest residents, Dr. Lei Kaleo, gave us a guided tour of the local flora and fauna with a focus on their adaptation to local soil and climate and the changes that have occurred in the thirty-three years since she moved there from Hawaii. “We’ve been lucky not to have any bad fires here,” she told us, “but it is getting warm and dry enough now to significantly stress the trees and the animals that depend on them. It doesn’t take a lot of technology to see that we’re in the middle of a crisis.”

“Do you still keep your observer log, Lei?” Maura asked.

“I’m up to volume twenty now,” Kaleo answered. “I still have my records from when you visited your cousin as a little sprout.” She took us to her tiny cabin and found a leather-bound notebook in a chest under her bed. “There’s a copy of this in a museum somewhere,” she added. “Writing things down is still the best way to track what’s happening, along with good drawings.” To prove it, she showed us multiple sketches done in pen or pencil.

“What about memory?” I asked, thinking about the most basic way to keep information, and remembering stories about so-called primitive cultures that kept extensive oral histories.

“I wouldn’t expect it to be very useful after thirty or forty years. That’s from my own experience, mind you,” she admitted.

“What was that about?” Maura asked me later as we drove to Colorado Springs to have dinner with her family. “Things won’t get so bad that oral history will be necessary.”

“Just wondering,” I replied as a new and even more radical idea began to take form.

Reality Check

Written log books are still being used by engineers (I kept several of them during my career until I transitioned into full-time writing, documenting information others didn’t want to lose). Recording technology is beginning to take their place, however.

Kaleo’s observations haven’t been verified in the real world, though they do generally match with what I’ve learned about the area.

Region 35

TIME TO STRATEGY EXECUTION: 82 DAYS

Sally warned me that statistically half of Region 35 was effectively dead, with three in four people living in what WICO classified as a state of collapse and the rest pushing for more growth that could eventually drive everyone into collapse. What I found when I visited there was an urban area that was indeed half-dead, if you counted infrastructure that had no resemblance to natural habitat (where anyone or any animal could survive using what was there) as “dead.”

There were plenty of stores around that imported food and other supplies from outside; and I could see how, on average and with a lot of imagination, they might be considered “habitable.” The areas where the wealthy lived had more green spaces, populated by trees and animals that seemed to be more visitors than residents. A few parks added to the appearance of natural habitat around the region, but they were by definition designed more for visitors only, with attempted residence by any creatures strongly discouraged.

This was where the core group of saboteurs had lived and worked while they hatched their plan to keep the world from inverting the ratio of artificial to natural habitat. They thrived in this environment, or thought they did, depending as they did on imported resources whose ultimate origins were no longer visceral enough to comprehend or respect.

I realized that the global strategy was as much about re-establishing that direct connection with the sources of life as it was about preserving the life itself. Here there was no urgency to achieve that goal, and I could imagine how even starting down that path might be perceived as scary, or even repugnant. Sally’s insistence on viewing each region as a spectrum of conditions reminded me that there were pockets of people who felt differently, especially among those who visited more directly habitable areas, but there were also people who were literally dying and failing to be born because the connection to their nature was effectively severed.

Reality Check

This is largely based on a simulation of a global region, intentionally vague in terms of location in order to focus on the characteristics of interest. General observations are based on my extensive experience in urban environments, mostly through my thirties.

WICO Press Conference Focuses on Built Environments

TIME TO GLOBAL STRATEGY DEADLINE: 13 DAYS

“When you encounter a built environment such as a building and the ratio is too high, you can try to remove it unless the impact of doing so forces the ratio higher,” Ambassador Lazlo said at WICO’s press briefing in response to a question about lowering the people-to-nature ratio, which she admitted was one of the basic tactics for executing the strategy. “One way to minimize that impact is to disassemble some of it and let nature do the rest.”

“You mean, let the place go to hell,” the reporter said, “like opening the doors and not doing any maintenance.” The L.A. Messenger’s Harry Tanner was as disgusted as I’ve ever seen him.

“Something like that,” Lazlo said.

“That’s crazy,” Laura Marcus from the Sacramento Watcher blurted, and there was a murmur of agreement in the room. “If it’s a house, where will people live?”

Lazlo answered, “They can occupy a smaller controlled space in the house, or find a place with lower impact.”

“When was the last time the world met your standard?” Tanner asked.

“The mid-1980s, when there were about five billion people, about what our target population is.” 

“So, everything built since then has to get torn down?” he pushed.

Lazlo stared at him. “It’s not that simple, or possible. But you already know that, Henry. A lot of other things have changed. Think of it as replacing most things with fewer and better things.”

“That’s not very helpful,” Tanner said.

“How many regions will be in the final strategy?” I asked, changing the subject.

“We’ve got between 110 and 120 right now. The starting number is likely to be 113, unless test results suggest otherwise.”

A slightly different version of the chart Sally showed me was displayed on the screen behind the podium. “This is one of our test cases,” Lazlo explained. “It’s based on the end-state of the drawdown, after 2040. Each set of concentric circles represents a region, with relative amounts of people’s basic needs, consumption, and total resources approximated by the areas of the circles, which of course are not to scale. The equation represents the ratio of the entire group of regions. In this case, built environments are in place, which are part of consumption. Given the choice of reducing population or consumption beyond natural attrition, we will prefer consumption.”

She clarified that by “natural attrition” she meant replacing people who die from old age, just like the people are expected to do during the drawdown which is the subject of the majority of the strategy.

Reality Check

The chart is a simulated random sample of “regions” as described. There is no correlation to actual data. Names and affiliations of reporters are totally fictional.

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.

Integration Process

TIME TO GLOBAL STRATEGY DEADLINE: 18 DAYS

“The process is in principle quite simple,” Sally said after displaying a complex graph on my computer screen. She was referring to the steps taken to stitch together a global strategy from the national inputs and the stream of public feedback that has dominated every social media platform. “The people to nature ratio is calculated for each region. Statistics for each of the global variables are collected, where available, and estimated if not. Our biosphere survey data is used similarly for other species, along with time series to identify how they might adapt and cause changes to the conditions and populations of relevant ecosystems. Human behavior models from several fields of study are used to estimate adaptation and changes people might make, similar to the other species and informed by how the national strategies and likely reactions to the strategy might alter that behavior.  All of that includes movements between regions, and is integrated with projections of physical processes and how they are expected to affect regional environmental conditions.”

“That doesn’t sound simple,” I told her. “No wonder WICO needs an AI to do the majority of the work. How much of it is done?”

“Roughly three-fourths of the development effort is complete. Testing will begin by the weekend; and if there are no major issues found then the strategy will be ready for publication on February 25.”

“What kinds of issues would be major?” I asked.

“Significant deviation from the top-level strategy is one, since it would signal a fundamental problem with one or more of the guiding assumptions. Discovery of significant new feedbacks between multiple variables is another. That’s just what we can anticipate.”

“That last comment suggests you have a buffer built into the schedule.”

 “Any good plan does,” Sally acknowledged. “The only hard deadline is the implementation date, barring any new information to the contrary, of course.”

Reality Check

The process outlined here is my best recommendation, given the capabilities I’ve given the imaginary world. Since I don’t have those capabilities myself, I can’t offer even high confidence in guessing what the results would be.

System Integrity

TIME TO STRATEGY DEADLINE: 3 DAYS

As I predicted on last night’s news shows, WICO Secretary General Decatur released a statement today characterizing Sally’s assessment of the strategy status as an extreme opinion that isn’t shared by the vast majority of people working at STRIDE. He especially took issue with her view that “preferred territorial and cultural integrity is inconsistent with minimizing casualties,” arguing that it was based on unjustified pessimism and a set of unrealistic expectations about what can be accomplished. The statement concluded with effusive praise of the national strategy development teams and “thanks for their heroic effort in response to this grave threat.”

I was unable to reach either Sally or Ambassador Lazlo for comment, and none of the strategy development teams would return my calls. I did however get a request for a meeting with Expansivtek’s Ronald Wingate. 

While we talked, Wingate took me on a tour of his company’s large wind farm in northern Colorado, which he happened to be visiting today. “Your source Sally put a real scare into her bosses at WICO, didn’t she?” he asked rhetorically. “Who do you think is blowing smoke, her or Decatur?”

“Neither,” I answered. “They just disagree on whether or not we should plan for the worst case.”

“That’s a pretty good guess you made yesterday. It sounded like you’re on the same page with her.”

“Think about something long enough, and your guesses start getting better,” I said. “My job is to report and interpret for my audience, not to make policy.”

“Sure it is,” he said skeptically. He waved at a technician near the top of a turbine, who waved back. “You know, I started out as part of a team of techs making field calls to repair equipment all around the country. What you said about hunter-gatherers and Sally’s comment about fixing the environment reminded me of those trips. That’s kind of the way it felt. It got me to thinking that if this situation’s as bad as she thinks, there might be another way to deal with it.”

“You mean ED?” I asked, referring to the Evolution over Devolution project he announced two weeks ago.

“An extension of it,” he said. “When we would go to a site, the first thing we would do was clean things up, check all the physical and electrical connections, make sure the basic maintenance was done. If the system still wasn’t working properly, we had fewer possibilities for what was wrong, and the odds were good we wouldn’t have to come back for a long time. I’ve been assuming that the system just needs better versions of what it’s currently using that we can strap new functionality to, and that what it’s hooked up to is in good enough shape that we just need better connections. If those assumptions are wrong, then we need to redefine the system as something a lot bigger, and then apply the process to that.” 

I began to fear I had created a monster. “Just to clarify: What exactly is the new system?” 

He grinned. “The whole damn planet!”

Reality Check

I expect that any rational governmental entity would balk at any challenge to the physical or cultural integrity of it or its members, no matter what the reason.

Wingate’s epiphany and related experience is an extrapolation of my own experience and the experience of people I’ve known. His fictional company does not own a wind farm, though there are wind farms in Colorado. 

Supply Chain Problem

TIME TO STRATEGY DEADLINE: 15 DAYS

In an interview at Expansaerospace headquarters in Colorado, CEO Mark Luke discussed what he calls “the supply chain problem.” That issue is what motivated him to host the forum two days ago which added fuel to the public debate over the merits of actions proposed by the World Information and Coordination Organization in response to the imminent extinction threat.

At age 46, Luke is an expert at business logistics, which is why he got into the transportation industry 17 years ago. “The global economy depends on extracting raw resources, creating things with them, and enabling people to get and use those things. For every person who uses something, there is a community of people called a supply chain that performs those functions. My industry, for example, contributes to moving resources, products, and people, and this company focuses on doing that above the ground. 

“Whether we like it or not, what we call raw resources includes other creatures and what they need to survive on, basically their supply chain. They also have to live with what we can’t put into products, as well as the products when we’re done using them, which of course they can’t use. That makes them the losers in every aspect of the economy, even the service industries that rely on moving people into their homes. You see where this is going? If we don’t use resources so more of them can live, or live better, then people don’t get what they want and need. It’s basically them or us.

“One of the main points that WICO and its environmentalist base likes to make is that other species provide products and services that help keep us alive. That’s misleading, because what we get is incidental to them keeping themselves alive; and there are other things they do that can hurt us, such as trying to consume us or putting substances in the environment that are toxic to us. In my opinion, which I share with many others, we’re better off creating supply chains we can control so we can keep ourselves alive. I see that as one of the core functions of civilization, which our economy was created to serve.

“Some of the alarmists have compared our impact on other creatures as equivalent to a company demanding more product for less money each year from its suppliers until eventually its suppliers go out of business and the whole supply chain collapses. Again, that’s a false equivalence, because they’re more resources and competitors than suppliers. A business solution is to expand the supply chain to include suppliers who compete with each other to become more efficient, and pick whoever’s winning at the moment. Obviously, other species aren’t competing to better serve us, so we’re justified in taking what we can get from them while developing a network of humans, and ultimately much more efficient and controllable machines, that will be increasingly capable and motivated to give us what we want.

“So, I basically disagree with the definition of the emergency. It isn’t that we’re about to go extinct because of growth. It’s that we need to grow a new supply chain to replace the one that’s becoming useless.”

Reality Check

Luke’s points are based on my experience in business and engineering, some of which I once agreed with. I’ve portrayed the logic as I imagine someone in his position would, and have left out my own considerable criticism so it stands on its own.