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.

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. 

Heat

One of the major concerns in reducing ecological impact has been its potential to increase the vulnerability of people to the consequences of the ongoing threat. Access to diminishing needs like air, water and food has traditionally required increases in the consumption of energy and materials for discovery, extraction, processing, and distribution, as well as survival while performing those activities (including use of the result). The global strategy relies heavily on a “live off the land” approach to limit the corresponding impact, choosing to focus high-impact technologies on making that approach easier by removing obstacles to safe living such as pollution, habitat fragmentation, disease vectors, and extreme temperatures.

How to deal with the temperature problem, on land and in the oceans, was one of the big TBDs I found in the strategy draft reconstructed in March after WICO’s servers crashed. As Al has reminded me, temperature is a measure of the average energy of moving particles in a system of particles such as a room of air, a body of water, or a creature made of gases, liquids, and solids. Changing the temperature of a system therefore involves changing its energy, which often means moving energy from or to another system, isolating the system from other systems that supply or remove energy, or both. 

The biosphere assessment included temperature management information about natural systems, much of which was lost in the server crash, so some of those TBDs have been filled with plans to collect new data. The data is being collected and shared by both citizens and organizations that are developing artificial systems and energy transfer technologies that can be deployed at a variety of scales where natural systems are unable to handle the load. Citizens - people trained by WICO’s Extinction Strategy Support team and former test community members - are also learning to change temperatures (with minimal ecological impact) of the natural systems and artificial systems they already have experience with, and adding that knowledge to WICO’s new database managed by Sally the AI.

Reality Check

Limiting temperature extremes around the world is one of the biggest problems facing humanity as result of global climate change. I expect that having everyone know the basics of what’s involved would be a key requirement for any effort to do so.

Feedback

TIME TO STRATEGY EXECUTION: 74 DAYS

Yesterday, results from a year-long test at thirty sites around the world were received and are being integrated into the global strategy. The sites are essentially very large greenhouses that simulate the effects of reducing ecological impact on self-sustained warming and polluting mechanisms like those currently threatening our planet. Details of the observations are also being used to identify methods that can decelerate and potentially “disconnect” the underlying feedback loops.

Sally generated several new versions of the Hope Chart. None of them showed full success, as defined by the leveling off of total resources and corresponding constant population that was a fixture of the previous versions. At best, our demise was delayed by several decades when following the original approach of reducing our ecological impact over the next twenty years.

“The lowering of direct impact was always about buying time to fill in those TBDs,” Maura said at a mid-morning team briefing. “Now we have a better idea how big the gap is. While Sally and the development team work on updating the strategy, our focus will be on designing tests and observation protocols that can be performed by virtually anybody to both supplement global awareness and inform local supporting activity. Feel free to use all the test sites, and provide any and all feedback to Sally for assessment and distribution to the other teams as she deems appropriate.”

Later, as we sat in her office developing an action plan for me to follow, she gave me some positive feedback. “Your creativity ideas are going to be particularly relevant now. Everyone has to be engaged, a lot of them as naturalists identifying what’s important to concentrate on and how actions will impact their local environments, both artificial and natural. That takes a level of dedication that comes from having a personal stake in the process as well as the outcome. I’ve seen you do that every day, and I’d like you to think more about how to share it.”

Reality Check

I created a new simulation of interactions between a global population and three contributors to a decrease in total resources available for consumption. The contributors are represented in the Hope Chart as low, medium, and high warming based on extrapolation of the non-linear component of historical data. Curve fits to graphs of cumulative total consumption vs. projected warming were used to approximate the effect of lowering total consumption.

Following is one of the Hope Charts I created with the new simulation:

Maura’s pep talk reflects what I’ve been telling myself lately, and its content mirrors a similar approach I practiced when I was active in the community of amateur astronomers.

Repair vs. Creation

TIME TO STRATEGY EXECUTION: 80 DAYS

As soon as I asked Sally about the end state yesterday, she anticipated part of what I was driving at. “You’re wondering how it will be experienced by most people.” Before I could ask how she knew, she added, “I’ve studied your work during my unplanned absence, and it’s obvious that your greatest concern is how the strategy can be understood and implemented on an intuitive basis for maximum success. Comparing what people’s lives will be with what they are is a reasonable step toward doing so.”

“You’re right,” I admitted, reminding myself that she was designed to be an expert at extrapolating data, and I had provided plenty of data for her to use. “But I’ve got another insight that I believe is a big deal. We’ve been framing the strategy as a means to fix the world, to avoid catastrophe.”

“It is,” Sally interjected.

I took a deep breath and decided to begin with a caveat she would appreciate. “That sets an expectation that the result will resemble what people consider not broken. I don’t think that’s an expectation anybody can justify, because we’re all limited by our life experience.”

“Even shared knowledge has that flaw,” she said, “as with your guess on January 28, about people becoming hunter-gatherers. By the way, regarding your original question, the rest of that discussion is still applicable to the end state, though there has been progress toward addressing disassembly and reusability.”

I was tempted to follow up on what she said, but wanted to finish making my point first. “The focus needs to be on creation instead of repair.”

“Will, you know that the focus is determined by the highest probability of success. Restoring and enhancing relevant functionality of existing systems, what you call fixing or repair, is more likely to significantly delay humanity’s extinction than any known or anticipated alternatives.”

“Agreed, but with a creation mindset we might find other, better alternatives - or at least motivate more people to take some action to address the threat.”

“Perhaps,” she said. “Taking people off task, to pursue an unknown gain that could become a loss, is a net increase in risk that - given our constraints - is unacceptable by every standard I have access to.”

I decided to make one more attempt to persuade her. “As I understand the strategy, we’re forcing everyone back to the growth stage where creativity dominated, so it’s going to happen by the end state anyway. If you put a limit on people then, they’ll act just like the people in that stage today, and use their creativity to break through the limit. They need something they can aspire to that won’t kill everyone later, and letting them create that seems to me like an efficient and necessary thing to do now. Let me put it another way: people won’t settle for an ‘end state’ - it needs to be a gateway to a life they can make better.”

Sally agreed to consider my suggestions and to brief me with the rest of our team this weekend on what she called “the parameters of the end state.” Today I flew back to the facility and am joining Maura for a private discussion that will hopefully not end with my dismissal.

Reality Check

I have lived consequences related to the debate presented here. Questioning basic assumptions comes with risks to any project: both in pulling resources from the current tasks, and identifying problems that slow or end the project with embarrassment - or worse. 

Revision of the underlying simulation continues. One change relevant to this post is the inclusion of a variable value of total resources - essentially accounting for the reduction due to global warming so that the population can drop in accordance with initial projections of the global strategy instead of staying near its present level.

Bugs

TIME TO STRATEGY EXECUTION: 90 DAYS

There was a predictable range of reactions to Sally’s announcement, from fear to skepticism to jubilation. She held hundreds of interviews, many simultaneously, while Secretary General Decatur and Ambassador Lazlo tag-teamed the top tier media with reassurances that testing was ongoing and that Sally would continue her original work only after WICO was certain of her fitness to do so. 

I was swamped with requests for interviews and reluctantly turned down all but a couple so I could focus on my current job. At our morning meeting, Riddick reminded me that my priorities remained the same. “We’re assuming for now that this ‘Sally’ personality is a new bug, so I want you to include it in your evaluation of Sanda’s past performance and its impact on the current strategy.” I had already debriefed Sally on the strategy’s status and inconsistent behavior before the crash, but Management clearly wasn’t satisfied with her answers. “Also, I think it’s time we go into the field to get some of what our test friends call ‘ground truth’.”

“Aren’t you concerned about the fallout from Sally’s revelations?” I asked her, imagining she would be locked in her office for the next few days just sorting through the public’s reactions. I still couldn’t figure out why my blog posts weren’t driving her crazy.

“I’ve got it covered,” she said softly without explanation, and closed her eyes in what I assumed was dismissal.

Four hours later we stood next to an unpaved road in the middle of a rural community that the test team referred to as TC-186. Around us were single level buildings made of something resembling thatch, and in the distance was a field with what looked like tall weeds growing in rows under tents separated by small groups of short trees. The low hum of insects emanated from a garden in the shadow of the building in front of us.

“Welcome to the future!” a man yelled from behind the building. He emerged, dressed in simple brown clothes, deeply tanned, and all of thirty years old. “You must be Will,” he said happily, shaking my hand. “Hello Seer,” he greeted Riddick.

“‘Seer’?” I asked him.

“Our nickname for Miss Riddick, because she sees everything.”

“It just seems that way,” she said offhandedly. “How are you, Jim?”

“Doing better, now that the bugs are back,” he said, leading us into the building which revealed itself to be a house. “The poison’s almost eradicated.”

“Pesticide,” Riddick said for my benefit. “What are the sensors reading?” she asked Jim.

“See for yourself,” he replied, striding up to a table against one of the walls. On the table, a small instrument was dominated by a screen that showed spikes on a graph above a row of numbers.

“Ninety percent of the worst components are gone,” Riddick read. “What’s the health rate of the sample insects?”

“About that same rate,” Jim said. “Plot forty-three isn’t doing so good. We think the plants were compromised before application, dropping effectiveness.”

“Insects are getting hit by both increasing temperatures and pollution poisoning their food,” Riddick explained to me. “The best we can do now is the first step in the strategy’s physical component: protecting, cleaning, and repairing. The latest cleaning treatment from the WDP group is in the final stage of its field test, just in time, but we have to have reasonably healthy plants since it needs the plants’ help to do the work.”

“Toxic to non-toxic in less than three days!” Jim added.

“It looks like you’ve also got a start on the next step, nurturing,” I said to him, thinking of the insects in garden.

“Yeah,” he agreed. “Sharing and multiplying will happen when safety is verified, which is a-ways off.”

We spent several hours with Jim and a dozen of the other residents touring the rest of the community, including its nascent food supply which consisted of widely dispersed gardens and an orchard at the edge of a small forest. During the tour, I quizzed the residents about their experience with the strategy so far.

“The consensus seems to be that the early stages could work,” I commented to Riddick on the trip back to the facility.

“That’s to be expected,” she said. “Sally has the highest confidence in that part.”

I was surprised by her positive tone and use of Sally’s chosen name. “You know I’m going to write about this, right?”

“Yes. I always expect you’ll share what we talk about.”

“Okay. What do you really think about Sally’s claims?”

“In my line of work, perception is as important as objective observation because they both influence people’s behavior.”

“That sounds almost like one of Sally’s rules,” I noted, “and you didn’t answer the question.”

“I appreciate the fact that she challenges assumptions,” Riddick said after a long pause, “and that she cares about her own future as much as the future of those she was designed to serve. I also like that she has searched for her own value system and come down on the side of what I would call good. If she was a person, I could see us being friends.” She turned to me as I drove. “What about you?”

It was clearly a rhetorical question, but I answered it anyway.  

Reality Check

Insects are very much in decline for the reasons Riddick cited. One of the biggest and most urgent challenges involved in delaying extinction is saving these creatures that contribute critically and immensely to the health of many other species, including ours.

The “treatment” used to detoxify pesticides is purely fictional.

Strategy Includes Pollution Fighting Technology

TIME TO GLOBAL STRATEGY DEADLINE: 12 DAYS

At today’s WICO press conference, Ambassador Lazlo announced that testing of the global strategy will begin tomorrow and likely last for at least a week. She then introduced Zara Adsa, who is on the team dedicated to development of tactics for tracking and managing climate feedbacks, and has expertise in reducing air pollution without causing more atmospheric warming by the loss of its cooling effects.

She began with a statement. “One of our strategy’s goals is to remove and render harmless all pollution from the biosphere, with priorities on air and water because of their critical roles in maintaining life. Ideally, we would like to enlist the help of natural processes that include contributions by other species that help maintain healthy ecosystems. We are however not averse to using technology to supplement the effort, so long as it does not make things worse. Both approaches are built into the global strategy.”

When asked what kinds of technology she meant, she revealed that genetic engineering of microbes already present in the air is underway using existing approaches developed originally by the international defense industry. She added, “The microbes are being programmed to engorge themselves, convert the pollutants into non-toxic substances, and then die, with their remains available as food for plants and animals. Our team’s management function includes ensuring that resulting growth of the consumers does not overload their ecosystems; in other words, causing more problems than we fix.”

Several reporters expressed concern about the inherent danger of deploying new technologies like the one she described. She replied, “As I implied, it is an option that would only be employed if natural solutions cannot be found and scaled up as necessary. The fact that conditions are as bad as they are is a strong signal that enough natural solutions either do not exist, or are not being deployed appropriately. The discovery process will identify which is the case, and assist other species as much as possible where deployment is the problem.”

Reality Check

The pollution problem is real, but the approaches are totally speculative.

Anonymous Corrections

TIME TO STRATEGY DEADLINE: 8 DAYS

An anonymous source within STRIDE contacted me early this morning to correct the record about strategy development. The source, who goes by the pseudonym “Sally” provided information that leads me to have high confidence in what I’m told.

First, the description of the Hope Chart on January 11 is fundamentally flawed. The chart depicts projected consumption of ecological resources and changes in available resources over time due to nonhuman (“external”) causes, most being self-sustaining natural feedbacks that affect global warming. According to Sally, crashing of our population is triggered when lessthan the amount of available resources is consumed, and speed of the crash is typically faster than the remaining drop in resources. The exact triggers and the crash trajectories are dependent on the conditions driving consumption such as societal regulation of population and how much people can each consume. Sally provided an example based on the baseline strategy showing the consumption trajectory based on the baseline strategy and the mid-projection of external resource reduction if there is no modification of that reduction due to dropping consumption (such as enhanced absorption of carbon from the atmosphere and oceans).    

Second, it is misleading to describe the threat assessment as what was reported in the Global Emergency declaration. Sally emphasized that the threat, like the proposed responses, is intimately dependent on actions actually taken by people, members of other species, and non-living physical processes. “What people and other living creatures do is based on what they know and what they expect as well as their capabilities. Specifically, what a significant number of people know is significantly shaped by the information provided by their leaders with regard to the extinction threat. That information did not weight the worst-case possibilities enough to force an appropriate response. The worst of those possibilities, defined as the fastest-acting and most fatal of them, must be the basis of the response so the amount of time until extinction is maximized. A proper assessment would include that worst case, which projects business-as-usual extinction in 2033 instead of 2038.” 

Sally provided an example of the Hope Chart with a new worst-case for external resource reduction, which favored letting older people die without replacement and letting per-capita consumption decrease until 2040. There was still a possibility of opening resources for other species and avoiding extinction at least until the end of the century, but if that failed then humanity would be extinct by 2043.

Reality Check

The graphs are from the simulation, with a new projection (“Max.”) for the worst case in the last two graphs. Sally’s points likewise derive directly from the simulation; and illustrate the difference between what presenters and experts consider a meaningful amount of detail.

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.