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.

New Year

 

Last Friday’s anniversary of the Global Emergency declaration also marked six months since the execution of the global strategy that resulted from the declaration. 

In a report to WICO yesterday, Maura summarized the world’s progress in terms of our work on developing historical context and guidance. Following is an excerpt. 

“The most useful measure of the state of a population continues to be the ratio of ecological resources consumed by people for basic needs to the resources consumed by, and comprising, other species. Expressed in terms of activity phases, it is predictive of, or strongly correlated to, the range of global variables we care most about at regional and global scales, since the phases define relationships of people to their natural environments and, by extension, each other.

“Applying the phase model to history, we have observed what would be expected from the merging of groups of populations and environments with larger ones that consume more per person: growth of a global population that is expanding through each of seven phases with regard to the world’s total environment. 

“The merging is done in the first phase, colonization, and continues until there are no more new groups to merge with. Converting merged groups into integrated larger groups is done in the development phase, which includes a workforce dedicated to managing and converting resources so they can more efficiently meet people’s needs and wants while continuing to grow the population. In the third phase, adaptation, a growing sense of identity with the combined group orients its population toward common goals such as the customization of people’s environments in order to maximize happiness. A maximum in happiness and consumption of renewable ecological resources is achieved in the climax phase, which would be the final phase if the means and will didn’t exist to consume more than ecosystems produce. 

“Using more requires consuming the sources of what is already being consumed. In this exploitation phase, people gain both a new maximum in happiness and a maximum in life expectancy which is short-lived because they are depleting resources that cannot be replenished. Continued efforts by colonizers to search for more resources, and any success drives the depletion that forces those in the climax phase into a new phase, decline, where they experience a precipitous drop in happiness and life expectancy. When life expectancy reaches zero, there are no more children and the people in the resulting phase, decline, will soon face the final phase: death. When total resources are low enough that the entire population as one group is statistically in the termination phase, then it is facing near-term extinction.

“The Global Emergency declaration was issued as the global population was less than six years from entering the termination phase. In terms of phase, it is where it was a half-year before the declaration, still in the exploitation phase. The preferred outcome of the global strategy adopted in response is expected at the end of a 20-year transition that was started in July. The closest historical analogue to that outcome is in 1999 when the world was in the climax phase and people were about to enter the exploitation phase; but with key differences that per-capita consumption will be held constant at the level it was in 1909 and there will be no population growth.

“What happens after 2040 depends on our success in stopping the external impacts from reducing the total amount of resources. Failure could result in a spike in deaths equivalent to the whole population being suddenly treated for the bubonic plague, with the effect of reducing overall consumption to a level that might be sustained for no more than another 20 years. Projected spikes in phase and zero birth rates lead us to believe that it is most realistic to expect extinction by that time.”

Reality Check

Global variables in the simulated world as a function of phase are shown below:

The range of phases experienced over time is shown below:

This is unique to the simulated world of Hikeyay (simulation Hikeyay'). Following is what the phases for our world would look like if we attempted a similar strategy starting in a year later.

Phases of Time

 

Maura recently had a new insight about the historical context framework she first lectured about on June 21. Today she shared it with other members of the history department, many of whom were onsite to prepare for the beginning of classes.

“WICO’s decision to add subregions got me thinking about how to make sense of all the new information.” Behind her at the head of one of the lecture halls, a world map displayed the thousand subregions color-coded according to which of the original regions they were part of. 

“Instead of thinking in terms of ecosystem types, or biomes, we can look at them in simpler terms.” She pressed a hidden button on the lectern and only seven colors remained. “Here, they’re categorized according to their dominant phases. WICO came up with the concept of phases while trying to predict behaviors based on observed correlations with the ratio of basic consumption by people to basic consumption by members of other species.” She showed a graph of the behaviors as a function of phase. “Those behaviors include living longer, seeking happiness, and having children and dying which affects population. Each phase is a range of the ratio that corresponds to aspects of the behaviors. Until the addition of subregions, there was a lot more uncertainty in the predictions than some of us who worked on the global strategy were comfortable with. With refined data collection and testing, it is now possible to have better resolution on what phase a person or group occupies at a given time.”

She scanned the nearly-full hall and smiled coyly. “So… what does this have to do with history? Just as people and groups move through phases, all of humanity has moved through what I call ‘phase epochs’ that each correspond to a range of time where the characteristics of a particular phase are dominant. In my first lecture, I used a crude version of that concept to define ‘milestones’ marking off certain trends in history. Now, I propose being more explicit about the nature of the phases in all its manifestations as the characterization of life’s interactions over time and space.”

A review of the past two centuries followed, where she referenced the milestones in their new context and suggested some new directions of research using both historical records and the growing dataset of observations taken by professionals and the global network of trained citizens living out the transition.

Reality Check

A phase diagram for today is shown below, where L is life expectancy, h is happiness, Fert is fertility, P is population, R is consumption by a group, Cap is capacity (total resources), C is per-capita consumption, and Wealth/p is per-capita wealth (fixed 2010 dollars). Years listed at the 90% value are the original milestones.

Phase epochs are based on which phases are dominant over a period of time. Every epoch except the first epoch is represented in the following graph, which shows the fraction of global population in each phase from 1800 through the transition for the simulated world as indicated by the difference in population ratio between any pair of colored lines. The black line is the projected phase for the population. 

Epoch 1 (dominated by phase 1, the purple line) ended in the year 152. Epoch 2 ended between 1810 and 1850 (likely 1837), when the dark blue line representing phase 2 reached 100%. Epoch 3 ended between 1940 and 1950 (likely 1947). Epoch 4 ended in 1973, and Epoch 5 ended in 1999. The present Epoch 6 (yellow) first ended in 2014, which began the present Epoch 7.

The global strategy intends to reverse the progress this year, and reenter Epoch 6 by 2022. Epoch 5 will be reentered in 2031, where the world will hopefully stay past 2040.

Following is the equivalent graph for our world (“Green”):

Context

By what WICO claims is coincidence, the number of regions and subregions now totals exactly one thousand. Maura suspects that such a round number is more likely an error correction based on the remote and direct observations accumulated over the past month, similar to the earlier increase in regions from around 120 to 300.

Maura and I went to the mountains for a break from work and the summer heat, but I knew it would be more than that when I found a Personal Environmental Assessment Kit in the trunk. We ended up at the site of the local test community (TC-013). “For fun” she demonstrated the full set of citizen observations, which includes a dozen added after I resigned from the GAP team. Several of the original residents were still there, and brought out their remaining instruments to verify our results. Maura and the others cheered when the observations matched to within ten percent, and teased me for not joining in.

Lei Kaleo and Maura’s cousin Ciera Johnson insisted that we all go to the nearest hot springs, which reminds the two best friends of one of their favorite activities when growing up. They lamented that the impending curtailment of air travel means they likely won’t get to return to their childhood home in Hawaii, whose rainforests are a large part of what led them to their present careers, but neither regrets moving to Colorado. During the trip, they all told stories of their time together, especially on the mountain; generally happy, some intriguing, and all providing context for current and future projects of both a personal and professional nature. 

ABOVE (L-R): Me, Maura, and Ciera.

Reality Check

I derived a mathematical formula for the cumulative population as a function of phase, and used it to derive total consumption as a function of phase. A key factor in the population function is dependent on sample size used in the calculation, which equals 1,000 when tweaked to get accurate values for global variables such as total resources and resources used by nature (as determined from historical analysis). 

The results for Hikeyay are shown below for 2019 year and 2040, the end of the transition. Basic functions of phase for life expectancy, happiness, fertility, and normalized population/nature are displayed along with the historical years that the world crossed, or is projected to cross, from one phase to another. Cumulative population is shown the given year. Cumulative consumption is also shown for the given year, as the fraction of maximum resources ever available (a total ecological footprint of approximately 3 Earths/year), while the total resources actually available due to reduction by self-sustained impacts is indicated by a dotted black line.

Feedbacks

Andy’s Riddick’s skepticism last week rattled me enough to look for historical evidence that supported or refuted it. Recalling that a depression and a world war coincided with the built environment (what Maura calls “wants”) exceeded what people consumed for basic needs, I decided to study how people reacted to the growth of waste over the last decade. Maura suggested that I focus on the economy, even though the most obvious similarity was a prolonged war in a region with the means of creating the most waste.

What I found was stunning. It looked like a few rich people were getting a lot richer by essentially peddling dead zones.

“What you’re seeing is an artifact of averages in an economic feedback loop,” Maura said after reviewing my results. She explained, “We’ve been creating waste for decades, but natural systems were able to turn it back into useful resources over a reasonable period of time such as a year. Then they couldn’t keep up, and the difference started making regions uninhabitable, like trash piling up in your house when it can’t be hauled away to the dump. 

“Instead of taking it out of the economy, people kept trading it as if it was usable like everything else. Because we’re converting resources, it still counts as consumption, on average, even though no one’s using it. Because we’re trading it, it counts as part of the economy; and because people are making money off it, there’s no incentive to stop creating it.”

I saw her point, adding, “And the people who enable the trading are making the most money, because all they have to move is paper and data instead of paying for something physical to be processed and moved.”

“Right,” she said approvingly. “Frankly, I’m surprised people haven’t revolted, causing something like a recession that would trigger massive regulation and stop the production of waste. Unfortunately, that economic feedback has created natural feedbacks that our present intervention may not be able to slow or stop.”

“The causes of the self-sustained impacts,” I guessed.

She nodded sadly. “The impacts are similar to waste, and are accelerating on their own.”

“Does your father understand all this?” I asked her.

“I’m sure of it. Dad’s the smartest person I know, with my uncle David being a close second.” That was a huge compliment. “He already expects the people who profited from the waste to try profiting from the self-sustained impacts, along with others who hope to get rich too.”

“That’s not going to happen, now that everyone knows what’s happening,” I said half-heartedly as the plausibility what she said began to sink in. “We’ve also got some pretty powerful government intervention in progress.”

“I’m with you,” she said, “but he’s worked in government most of his life and knows its limitations as well as anyone, along with the people he’s served and fought. He’s also got an excellent record of being right.” She paused for a few seconds, staring into space as I’d seen her father do a couple of times when he was thinking hard. “There’s something else to consider. This year, for the first time in history, the amount of waste will exceed what we consume for basic needs.”

I suddenly felt light-headed, seeing her point. “Like in the 1930s.”

She nodded. “When wants exceeded needs for the first time in history. And that was followed by the largest war in history.”

Tonight, Al will join Mara and me at her parents’ house for a dinner in celebration of Transition Day, which is the official start of the global strategy execution. I don’t feel like celebrating in light of what I learned over the past two days; instead, I’m inclined to brace for a long fight.

Reality Check

Explanations are my own hypotheses based on simulation.

The distribution over time of per-capita needs, wants, and waste for the simulated world Hikeyay is shown below. Note that in the 1970s, all renewable resources were being consumed by humanity, corresponding to the peak in wants, suggesting that a maximum rate of recycling was reached. It took another three decades for significant accumulation of waste.

A similar pattern emerges in projections of reality, represented by the simulated world Green, which did experience a recession following the appearance of waste (2007-2009):

Ideal Expectations

 

“We’ll have the population and feel of the late-1980s, while each consuming as much as people did in 1920.” Maura paused for effect after summarizing the ideal outcome of the transition, and was greeted with confused stares from the crowd attending her public lunchtime lecture. “Oh, come on,” she said with a hint of amusement, “surely most of you have heard this before.” She knew they hadn’t, at least not like this, which was the point of the lecture.

A woman old enough to be her mother raised a hand, and Maura nodded to let her speak. “Sweetie, that makes no sense! My momma grew up in the 20s, and it wasn’t anything like the 80s.”

Maura smiled as she had in her rehearsals when a similar question was asked by her mock audience, namely me. “It’s going to be a new world,” she answered patiently, “where we’ll get to use what we’ve learned in the past century to live better with what people did before that.” It was a gross simplification, as preliminary summaries often are, but as a natural teacher she knew better than to start by taking a deep dive into the details.

“Is it because we’ll be coming out of a depression?” asked a male student I recognized from a summer session at the university.

“The depression happened after 1920,” the woman corrected him.

“We won’t be coming out of this depression,” Maura said solemnly. “The reason is that we’ll be converting much of our artificial economy back into nature’s economy; so other creatures can provide more of what we need, which we can’t safely provide on our own.”

“But we won’t have cars and planes like we did in the 80s, right?” the woman insisted.

“Right. We’ll have to use what we’ve learned to take care of the basics without them and all the pollution that comes with them.” Her answer reminded me of the TBDs in the early strategy draft, which have been turned into goals of creative effort in synergy with other species we’ll hopefully bring back from the brink of extinction.

“It won’t really be like the 80s, then,” the woman said.

“We’ll have a new, better version, where we live as long and are just as happy, and can do so for a long time.”

Al shouted from the rear of the room, “That’s if we can clean up all the waste and stop those nasty time bombs we lit a few years ago!”

“The self-sustained impacts,” Maura clarified, caught by surprise. “Everything depends on that.”

Reality Check

Maura’s description is based on the simulated past back to 1920 and projections out to 2040.

Historical Context

This morning, Maura tried out a lecture to a group of other professors (and me). It was a summary of the imminent extinction threat and the first public presentation of her preliminary framework for putting it in historical context. Following are some of the highlights.

“The last quarter of the thirteenth century is known for at least two technological innovations: eyeglasses and firearms. One allowed people to see better, and the other allowed them to kill more efficiently. Unknown until recently, it also marked the beginning of an era when the world’s human population would be dependent on the populations of the world’s other species. 

“Technological innovation progressed in tandem with scientific discovery, enabling advances in transportation, mining, agriculture, and construction that accelerated the conversion of everything into ‘resources’ that could be traded between people to increase how long they lived, how satisfied they were with their lives, and how many children they had.

“A second milestone was achieved in the 1930s. If we measure the amount of resources as the impact of actions on ecosystems, the resources consumed by the entire population was double what people needed to survive. After that, there would be more resources in stuff than in people. That new reality accompanied and was enabled by the creation of a global civilization marked by revolutions in science and technology, development of cheap fossil fuel, and conflict between groups of people who were trying to dominate or survive the merging of cultures into an interdependent whole.

“Rapidly accelerating per-capita consumption in the 1940s stopped growing in the 1970s, just as total consumption exceeded the amount of resources provided on a renewable basis by other species. This third milestone corresponded to a peak in life satisfaction that was achieved by four out of five people while the rest kept trying to reach that peak. Meanwhile, there was growing concern that fossil fuel production had itself reached a peak, and the status quo might not be able to be maintained.

“For more than two decades, population growth drove growth in how much of the world’s ecological resources humanity used, both in needs and wants. Science and technology contributed to more efficient use of resources that helped reduce per-capita consumption. At the end of that period, a fourth milestone was reached: the population consisted of people still pushing toward that happiness peak and people between that peak and a higher one that also corresponded to a peak in life expectancy.

“Per-capita consumption began to grow again in the mid-2000s, and most of what was added made parts of the world uninhabitable by other species and us. By 2015, more than one-seventh of the original resources were not consumable. Also, that year, a few percent of the population was not having children, reflected by a life expectancy of zero, and self-sustained impacts began cutting into the remaining resources.

“WICO projects that, if the global strategy isn’t implemented on schedule, a fifth milestone will be reached in 2023 as the world’s population reaches its peak. That will be followed by rapid population loss until 2030. Hopefully, we will settle into something between the third and fourth milestones, maintaining a smaller population by living mostly off of renewable resources produced by a healthier biosphere.” 

Reality Check

Historical events are correlated with the historical record until 1940. After 1940, projected global values for the simulation “Hikeayay” are used to identify the boundaries of the phases, which correlate to the “milestones” recited by Maura.

Phases of Perception

TIME TO STRATEGY EXECUTION: 118 DAYS

Professor Archibald Ali is famous as an expert on the ways that self-perception influences social dynamics at multiple scales from immediate families to cultures. Following are some excerpts from a wide-ranging interview that I had with him today.

He began by sharing some new information. “WICO’s new framework for the global strategy is very clarifying. Before the crash, I spoke with several people testing the assumptions built into the strategy. They wanted my opinion about a new version of the framework that they were developing to explain their results. Instead of four stages, they proposed seven ‘phases’ that are a closer fit to the relationships between the global variables they were tracking. 

“The biggest problem they had was with the first stage, growth, which misleadingly lumps together all but the last three decades of human history, and even today doesn’t account for a fraction of the observed variety in the regions assigned to it. In the new framework, that one stage would have three phases. The transition and peak would stay the same, but collapse would be split into two phases, one corresponding to the decline of happiness and life expectancy, and the other having just a falling population with no happiness or life expectancy.

“At the time the server crashed, WICO’s AI was in the midst of evaluating if and how application of the phases could enhance the global strategy. Unfortunately, we will never know the result. It occurred to me that the AI might have given you a clue about the status of its deliberations during your interactions with it.”

I couldn’t recall anything relevant in my conversations with Sanda that I hadn’t already reported. Then I realized how stupid I’d been. Sanda’s last message read “NR53X C310119JNK” which I misreported as referring to junk mail from January 19, when it actually referred to mail on January 31 that I wrote about at the time. The message said, “Prepare for the worst, work for the best, question everything, and fully accept nothing,” which for the purpose of identifying the attacker meant nothing.

Ali agreed with my interpretation of the message, but had a suggestion that made me feel even more dumb. “Readers like me assumed you had what you Americans like to call a brain fart, understandable given the stress of the event. What if it wasn’t, though? This is why I asked about your relationship with the AI last week. Maybe it knew you well enough to forecast the error, and the error referred to the real message.”

Five minutes later, I found another message, still in my junk folder, dated 19 January and from a sender with a slightly different name. This one read: “Climbing is stressful, destinations are for perspective, and trips down must be taken carefully or they end badly.”

“Sounds like stages beat phases,” I observed after some thought.

“No, I disagree,” Ali said. “It mentioned multiple destinations and trips down. The stages apply to one ‘destination’ or peak, and one trip down. The first three phases each have different degrees of effort, making the climb stressful, and last two phases are each a separate trip down. I would say that the AI was favoring the new framework.”

“Why send its conclusion before completing the assessment?” I asked him. “Also, what does this have to do with the servers crashing?”

Ali’s eyes lit up. “Perhaps there is one answer to both questions! My not-as-smart computers back up their data on a regular basis in case there is a serious failure of software or hardware. The AI trusted you enough to make your e-mail a backup destination when it sensed a failure was becoming probable, and sent you a retrieval code when the failure was imminent.”

I recalled the speculation by pundits that Sunday’s deadly protests were planned weeks ago. If there was a common source for the server crash and the protests, then Ali could be right, and new evidence would show that preparations for both were in progress on January 19.

Reality Check

The “phases” are based on points of inflection in global variables as functions of the population/nature ratio. In the following graph, the time is indicated for when the average world population reaches the end of each phase historically and in a business-as-usual future:

The fraction of the world population in each phase is shown below (in gray), and a triangle indicates the world average, for the simulated world’s mid-2019:

As for the misreporting of the date of the “message,” it really was due to a brain fart.