Progress and Concern

Today WICO released report on the world’s progress in implementing the global strategy. It includes updates of fundamental statistics and expectations for the future based on experience and lessons learned.

There were several surprises. The biggest surprise was a much larger drop in population projected for the transition, in part due to a much lower birthrate than projected for this year. Another surprise, related to the first, was higher per-capita consumption after the transition. 

Following WICO’s companion announcement that catastrophic climate change remains an imminent existential threat, even with 60% more habitat freed up by the transition, WICO’s Widely Dispersed Pollutants team revealed that it is ready for full scale use of genetically engineered microbes (GEMs) to remove excess greenhouse gases from the atmosphere and the oceans. A declassified summary it released discussing capability, design, and test results had another surprise: GEM populations are doomed to crash if concentrations of gases in each medium fall to unsafe levels.

Based on our test experience, my team was tasked with helping to monitor local effects of the initial GEM deployment while continuing our search for safer alternatives to that and other approaches included in the global strategy. We share an especially strong concern about this technology, mainly because its deployment is necessarily pervasive and potentially adaptable (by evolution or otherwise) to causing population crashes in other species such as ours.

Reality Check

Upgrades to the Timelines model have enabled more insight into its potential real-life manifestation. Incorporation of climate change variables and simulations to reduce its magnitude and effects have converged on an alternate future that does not include reduction of population as was chosen for the simulated world Hikeyay. That, and practical considerations related to personal survival, have limited efforts that could be made to update fiction like this blog and its related book series BIOME. 

This update remains true to the history of Hikeyay, with alterations to its trajectory that serve as a valuable contrast to other possibilities. The following graph shows projected values of global variables referred to in the blog text. Note that “catastrophic climate change” is assumed to be associated with a global temperature anomaly of 2 degrees Celsius above the preindustrial level.

 

Annual changes in some of those variables are shown below.

 

Changes by phase are among the new insights. They are presented below for the years 2019-2021.

 

A summary of the state of the world at the end of the transition is shown below.

 

The GEMs are based on my own ideas. Any similarities to existing technologies are purely coincidental - and scary.

 

Recovery

 

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

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

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

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

Reality Check

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

Testing Ground

Maura and I started the working part of our honeymoon yesterday, visiting one of three sites on Hawaii’s Big Island that WICO is using to integrate and test some of the technologies that will likely be deployed to rehabilitate land and water ecosystems as part of the global strategy. The site was one of WICO’s test communities until three months ago and has many of the original personnel still working there. I recognized several of the names from my brief time in Quality Assurance; and as their former boss, Maura was recognized by all of them.

“Invasives remain our biggest problem,” said Dan Rogan, the leader of the testing group, as he took us on a tour. “We’ve got robots out hunting the worst of them, most by air.” A small drone whirred past us, as if for emphasis. “They’re still a stopgap, of course, because those technologies have too high a footprint beyond about two years. You’re going to hate this, Maura, but we’ve been given a green light for biotech alternatives.” She stood stunned as he continued, “The effort is being led by a company that’s trying to get them to gorge on pollution and then safely decompose when it kills them.”

“Safely?” she asked. “How can something like that be safe? You’re not testing it now are you?”

“Two years,” I said as he shook his head, “Wouldn’t you need that long just for development?”

He shrugged. “I’m told that they’re fast-tracking it.”

“You don’t fast-track something like that!” Maura was as agitated as I’ve ever seen her.

“I heard the transition time might be cut in half. Maybe they don’t have a choice.”

“I doubt that will happen,” she said. “Nobody’s going to sign off on the resulting casualties.”

“We’ll be ready if they do,” he said optimistically. “Meanwhile, we’ve also got to deal with drought and typhoons. Some of the new portable building designs with attachable shielding and catchments are showing a lot of promise. As soon as they’re proven, the county will deploy them to vulnerable communities and safer areas that people can use as soon as possible.”

“What about volcano eruptions?” I asked while we walked to an area dominated by three demonstration structures that resembled lumpy yurts.

He explained that air pollution was the main issue after people got out of the way of lava. “In addition to portability, suitable filters and building materials are being designed into the buildings.” He then invited us to stay overnight in one of them.

Reality Check

The descriptions of the technologies are fictional and intended mostly as requirements.

Discussion of the timeline is based on multiple simulations related to the “C-low” scenario previously discussed. For example:

Dreamworld

After a week of planting native trees with me and Al as part of the new region-wide Restoration program, Maura awoke from a dream of a day in a world where such a program and the strategy that inspired it were never considered more than a dream themselves.

As “Mari,” she worked as a low-level financial analyst at a defense company that had no interest in developing truly life-saving technologies. The day began with a casual breakfast in front of her television, swearing at news reports of a self-destructing federal government led by isolationists who were focused on accumulating as much personal power as possible for themselves and their supporters. Her live-in fiancé John, an electronics store technician she met in a previous job, reminded her that the current focus on weapons development and profit-boosting deregulation meant they had a better chance of paying off her recent medical bills and moving from their tiny apartment into a real house just in time for their wedding at the end of the year.

Mari’s commute was excruciatingly long and perilous, spent mostly in start-and-stop traffic undeterred by automated signs requesting that people not drive due to elevated ozone levels exacerbated by vehicle exhaust. Bored by the music choices on the radio, she gambled on listening to more news, and almost caused a crash when a reporter announced that a deep recession might be imminent if not already in progress. She had a flash of a global trend analysis that Maura had done months ago, which anticipated just such a possibility in this timeframe as a precursor of a world population peak five years in the future. The implication of the report sent a shock through her mind; if it turned out to be true, then the peak might be too, along with the rapid fall toward extinction that followed. 

She took a deep breath as she listened to the much more benign explanations being offered by economists: that the government’s corruption had critically reduced market confidence in it exercising rational economic policy; that recent GDP fluctuations indicated a reset was due following the last twelve years of growth; and that automation and other technologies were reshaping the workplace faster than expected. All of them would have been enough for the original Mari, but as Mari/Maura she knew there were much larger forces in play that demanded an understanding that encompassed more than strictly political and economic considerations.

By the time she arrived at work, the company’s Chief Financial Officer had already directed analysts in her office and elsewhere to run reality checks on the recession fears, develop likely scenarios, and recommend strategies for minimizing exposure to losses that might result. Technically, Mari’s role was to error-check the scenarios and strategies that the experts produced, but she felt compelled to share her concerns with them directly at the earliest stage. The dream ended following a particularly uncomfortable meeting with them.

“They acted like she was crazy,” Maura told me near the end of her narrative, “dismissing it as a dystopian fantasy that no rational person would subscribe to. It reminds me of the debate when WICO proposed the biosphere assessment. At least we finally agreed to replace opinion with facts, and accept all their implications. These people were limiting the scope of the ‘reality’ they considered, based on their own opinions, and blaming her for questioning it.”

I decided to play the devil’s advocate. “To be fair, she couldn’t divulge the source of her concern, what you learned, mainly because they reasonably wouldn’t believe it coming from her.”

“They had more than enough information already. Their scientists and a lot of activists were already sounding the alarm over several aspects of the extinction threat. The United Nations, their version of WICO, was even getting nations to enter treaties to deal with it. Private industry was pushing what they called renewable technology, an ill-conceived attempt to continue the status quo without a very limited set of environmental costs. Unfortunately, they failed to consider a lot of the critical costs.”

“You learned all that in a dream?” I asked.

“You can learn a lot when you share someone’s mind.”

“Which outside of a dream would sound crazy, right?”

“Right,” she admitted. “Some of the simulations I did when I was at WICO were turned into a story by my subconscious. I’m sure that with some research I could identify which ones they were, which makes the story worth telling.”

Reality Check

Mari’s world is based on the simulation Hella, whose history and future starting in 2015 matches simulation Green - what I judge to be the best match to our real world. In the fictional backstory (explored in Will Jackson’s Personal Log), Maura has a limited ability to observe and interact with versions of herself in the “worlds” of other simulations (as they can with her) - providing a means of comparing relevant parts of the simulations in any given story.

In Hella, global variables change annually as follows:

In all three simulations, self-sustaining impacts reduce total resources after 2014, but of course Hikeyay (Maura’s world) is intentionally decreasing consumption as part of the global strategy.

Downsizing

Maura and I received feedback on our personal plans today. Like many couples uncertain about whether we want children, we were encouraged to abandon the idea and move into a much smaller home nearer the university where we work. Maura suspects that, in addition, our local community plan is being revised by the Extinction Response Unit to replace the buildings in our neighborhood with natural habitat as a node in a wildlife corridor that would logically join open spaces that have already expanded to our north and east.

“They’re going to have to scrub the coal ash ponds,” she reminded me as we studied on online map of our area, “and I wouldn’t be surprised if they take out the neighborhoods surrounding them in the process.”

“What about the highway?” I asked, pointing to the interstate that runs nearby. It seemed like a significant barrier to any major influx of wildlife.

“That would do more harm than good right now. If I were doing the analysis,” which I knew she did in her old job at the ERU, “I’d keep the critical supply chains in place until a basic level of self-sufficiency can be developed in the dependent areas.”

I recalled a graph from the global strategy showing a projection of average personal consumption during the transition. It showed a trading of waste for what it simplistically called needs and wants, with artificial structures used for wants such as living space being replaced with materials that could be better be assimilated into ecosystems. Waste includes pollution such as the coal ash and gas emissions that make places unlivable, as well as those unlivable spaces themselves that need to be reclaimed. “To me, a lot of roads help produce waste, so removing them should be a no-brainer,” I responded.

“Let’s wait for the updated plans before we pass judgment,” Maura suggested. “In the meantime, we should start looking for a new house.”

Reality Check

Will’s home setting is loosely based on my own, and I am personally searching for a smaller house for obviously different reasons.

Establishing low impact self-sufficiency for the population of a metropolitan area like Colorado’s Front Range would be problematic under the best circumstances, not to mention cleaning up waste in its many forms (such as coal ash, which is a real) and cutting off its sources which provide income to many people. One approach that can help was chosen by the simulated world: reducing population by limiting births and limiting medical prolonging of life, as well as enabling emigration to areas with more resources.

Following is a graph like what Will was recalling:

Sharing

 

Today Ronald Wingate vehemently denied that Evolution over Devolution (E.D.) or any of its affiliates had anything to do with yesterday’s emergency, including the pollution-eating microbes and drone dispersal technology.

Shortly afterward, the Denver office of the Extinction Response Unit announced that the escaped drone was a prototype undergoing verification testing by the military due to its access to the necessary test equipment. The problem has since been found and fixed, and an investigation revealed that there actually was no significant risk to the public. 

Sally, meanwhile, told Maura that the question of jurisdiction is now officially settled, and refused to elaborate further on the answer she gave me yesterday.

“That brings up the question of how people will know what’s natural and what’s not,” I said to Al and Maura during a long lunch together at a restaurant in downtown Boulder. It was the first time in two weeks that the three of us had been together. “I know WICO wants maximum feedback for their coordination role, but people need to have realistic expectations to just live their lives, and they’re not always going to have phones.”

“It’s a cluster that everyone’s responsible for,” Al said. “Your PFR folks are creatin’ stuff just like the war machine. WICO’s hopin’ that they can know it all, figger how it all fits together, and share the picture in a way that makes sense. Which of course they can’t.” He turned to Maura. “How did the campers take to the observin’ protocols?”

“They did okay,” she said. “The testers running Possibilities from Responsibilities have the protocols integrated into the curiosity part of the game…”

“The crazy questions Will wrote about?” he interrupted her.

She nodded. “Describing objects, conditions, and events, before and after actions where possible. Though they see the creation of understanding as the fun part, and prefer to internalize the rest.”

“You can’t let ‘em. There’s too many dependencies. Everyone sharin’ is what we need; it’s a great take you had on that empathy ruleset.”

“Tied in with responsibility,” I reminded him.

“It’s all tied in with responsibility,” he agreed. “Discovery’s great, but it’s no more than self-gratifyin’ consumption if you don’t communicate it to everyone whose lives might depend on it.”

Reality Check

Following up on yesterday’s post, this is more exposition of the core “rulesets” of responsibility, empathy, and curiosity. Interpretations are my own.

Questions

 

Three questions have been running through my mind since Monday: What is it, how good is it, and what do others think and feel about it? Answering them and the questions that follow from them was a game started by Louis Delambre on Sunday to train the bootcamp’s participants in the application of curiosity, responsibility, and empathy to actions, objects, conditions, and events. He introduced the game before the tours of Vitalla began, driving Maura and her fellow educational consultants crazy both as targets and sources of the questions.

“I’m getting tired of this,” Maura complained as we crossed the Colorado border yesterday, “and don’t you dare ask why!”

“Don’t worry,” I remember answering. “I feel the same way.” It took less than an hour for us to start up again. We both luckily had the rest of the day off, except for the time I took to write yesterday’s blog post. 

Today I joined her for a debriefing about the trip in my first visit to the Rocky Mountain Operations Center since resigning from WICO. We were interrupted by a rare Homeland Emergency Alert broadcast to everyone’s phones, warning that it was unsafe to be outside until further notice. While the rest of the public guessed the reason, Sally announced to the staff (which she considered me an honorary part of) that an experimental drone used for dispersal of pollution-collecting microbes had been accidentally released from a test facility in Colorado Springs. It was being tracked, and a search-and-recovery operation was underway using Air Force drones.

The whole story sounded fishy to me, but it was confirmed publicly three hours later along with news that the drone was safely recovered. I asked Sally if the Widely Dispersed Pollutants (WDP) group was still involved in experimental technologies development now that the Extinction Response Unit is in charge of trying to stop self-sustained impacts, but she refused to specifically answer, saying instead that “jurisdiction is currently fluid.”

When I was alone again with Maura, I recalled Ronald Wingate’s discussion on Blue Planet Day about commercial pollution cleanup technology, and Sally’s comment suddenly made sense. “What was the drone, really?” I asked Maura.

“Not this again,” she said plaintively.

“Seriously, who was controlling it?” I insisted. “Who, or what?”

“What are you thinking?” she asked, her expression revealing that she was taking me seriously.

“Why did it have to be hunted, unless it was under control? And if it was under control, what was the controller thinking? Was it being used as a delivery device for microbes, if it even had them, or was it being used for something else?”

She closed her eyes for a few moments, but they kept moving like she was reading a book or watching a movie. Then she opened them with the force of a revelation. “It wasn’t the WDP group, or Extinction Response, or the military. It was private.”

I nodded. “E.D. has a lab down there. Or it could be something externally controlling it.”

“The what,” she said, as if she was recalling something, like the conversation we had before we left for Montana. “You don’t think it was Sally, do you?”

“She was a little too vague when I asked about the WDP group,” I pointed out. “That answer left the door open for several answers, and several motives.”

“Like testing a commercial product,” she said. “Or manipulating perceptions to change the future.”

Once again, questions led to more questions.

Reality Check

One point of focusing on curiosity, responsibility, and empathy is to develop a consciousness of context for experience that can guide future experience toward desired goals. In my experience, asking and answering questions is a critical part of the process, and well worth the effort even if it initially leads to more confusion.

Updates

It took less than a day for WICO to release a new version of the global strategy. Knowing Sally, a nearly-complete draft was probably ready before Secretary General Decatur started his announcement yesterday. By early this afternoon I had a good idea of that the scope of changes were; and, an hour after that, I finished briefing Louis Delambre and the rest of the PFR leadership about the implications for the program.

A huge change to the strategy is that the global defense industry is being fully (rather than partially) co-opted to develop and deploy technologies for pollution cleanup; natural habitat restoration and creation; climate geoengineering; and safe decommissioning of the industries and technologies with ecological impacts that are unsustainable under the global conditions targeted for 2040. Another major change is a much faster decrease in raw material mining and processing to both eliminate new ecological impacts and choke off the material supplies for ongoing personal consumption. Finally, the strategy considers what could extend our species’ longevity based on new projections of self-sustained impacts that can’t be stopped, dominated by potentially forced population control for people struggling for basic subsistence and naturally motivated to have more children.

Since the PFR program deals mostly with personal behavior, those last two changes are the most consequential. The former test community members in the program’s core group were already trained for static population and near-subsistence consumption at the end-state, having drawn more inspiration from experiences of a few remaining isolated indigenous groups than advice from self-proclaimed experts in the dominant high-impact cultures. During my weekend visit to Hikeyay, the commune that was WICO’s inspiration for TC-013 and the source of Maura’s greatest personal growth, several residents echoed the PFR core group’s opinion that the transition to the end-state is likely to be more difficult than living there. Predictably, that view led to the unanimous conclusion that the focus of everyone should be on creating the end-state as soon as possible, and that trying to ease the transition would be an unnecessary - and perhaps harmful - distraction.

Despite WICO’s gag order being in effect, I asked Maura how PFR’s response compared with any proposed changes to the strategy deployment plan. She followed orders and didn’t shared any details; but I could tell from her exuberant support of the end-state focus that it was too unpopular a position to be taken seriously by management. 

Reality Check

Until now, I’ve ignored discussion of the rapid uptick in population with low personal consumption that follows the “transition” from 2019 to 2040 associated with the low population/nature ratio that results from the combination of the transition and the self-sustained impacts that are reducing total resources. When and if the self-sustained impacts are halted will largely determine how much the simulated world’s extinction is delayed (the functional relationship between cumulative consumption and resource decrease is the other determinant). Management of population size would mostly affect the amount of personal consumption used for what I call “wants” with more population having historically provided labor for basic resource acquisition and processing to help ensure group survival and create built infrastructure for use in further growth.

Reset

WICO Secretary General Decatur made a rare announcement today that overshadowed all activities related to the imminent extinction threat. Essentially, he said that self-sustained impact projections used in the global strategy were too optimistic, and the alternative model presented by five scientists last week has been validated. The primary implication for the strategy is a faster ramp to a lower target for total consumption, with more aggressive waste cleanup and conversion to safely consumable forms. Adaptation approaches that occupied about a third of the strategy are not considered viable within the new time constraint.

Two major consequences struck me as I read details published afterward by WICO. One consequence is that the additional ecological impact of starting up more cleanup technology will more painfully reduce what individuals can consume. The second consequence is that tighter enforcement of personal behavior could cut off creativity that might be needed to detect and cope with a proliferation of unintended consequences. Creativity is of course the basis of Possibilities from Responsibilities, the movement that I am representing in my new job, and PFR’s future is now far more uncertain.

Maura decided to drop her request for transfer back to the Extinction Response Unit after learning that it will focus entirely on stopping self-sustained impacts immediately after it meets its strategy deployment obligations in two weeks. Samantha Lazlo agreed that she isn’t well suited, professionally or personally, for that or WICO’s education roll-out, and suggested that she interview instead for a position with the project Al might be joining. 

I was surprised that any technology and research unrelated to dealing with the extinction threat would be tolerated after Decatur’s announcement. Maura reassured me that WICO isn’t discouraging basic research or creative personal responses to the extinction threat; it’s just limiting the resources that can be consumed by them.

Reality Check

In my opinion, self-sustained impacts are the single greatest threat to the simulated world - and ours. I expect that emergency response to their presence would devote most new technology to trying to stop them, or at least slow them down. Ecosystems can be enlisted to help with that (one of the basic ideas behind the global strategy), and doing so includes helping them become healthy by reducing our impact on them. Pollution cleanup is one way of doing so, and it would almost certainly require a large technology component to deal with it in the limited time available.

PEAK Assessment

TIME TO STRATEGY EXECUTION: 63 DAYS

Saturday, Ambassador Lazlo ordered Maura (and through her, me) to “stop questioning decisions that have already been made” and to “continue dedicating all resources to preparation for strategy execution” with the immediate focus on enabling the public to make useful environmental impact assessments. I felt a little less anxious knowing that Sally was almost certainly under the same orders.

“You know what we want you to do, right?” Maura asked me after the call ended in the Boulder field office’s main conference room. 

On the table was a box that had just arrived from the Q.A. base facility. “Try out the Personal Environmental Assessment Kit as if I’m a member of the public.”

She nodded. “You’re the closest thing to a real user that we’ve got on the team, except you know what we’re already getting from the test communities,” which she was kindly reminding me had been the motivation for Friday’s assignment.

“How will you know if I’m getting it right?” I asked.

“I’ll be there with you, recording everything.”

“Where should we go?” I expected some kind of detailed plan for a test, especially one as critical as this one.

Her answer was a total surprise: “Anywhere. It’s up to you.” She laughed at my reaction. “Don’t worry! The communities are testing the PEAK under more controlled conditions.”

I opened the box and set its contents on the table: a folded backpack, a hardbound book, and a set of smaller boxes marked Air, Land, Water, Built, and General. Beside me, Maura was now wearing a pair of thick glasses which I assumed had an embedded camera and microphone. “They turned this around pretty quick,” I said, suspecting the materials in the kit were made using the state-of-the-art 3D printer that occupies one room of our facility.

It took more than an hour to familiarize myself with the book and everything in the boxes, commenting on each so my reactions could be analyzed either later or in real time by Sally. The whole thing reminded me of a child’s toy science lab, with lenses for magnifying close-up or at a distance, rulers and a makeshift sextant, optical filters to check air quality, and porous filters to check water and soil quality. Masks, gloves, and cleaning gear were also included along with a special “biosafing” solution that was advertised as a means of neutralizing potentially dangerous compounds for safe storage in biologically sensitive areas (for the record, I openly doubted that it was anything more than high-tech snake oil).

I filled the backpack and we took a hike along a trail adjacent to the field office site. The book’s ecosystem guide seemed correct to me as I took a set of measurements described as a “basic assessment” and wrote the results on a foldout page formatted as a calendar. Several aspects of the process were problematic in my view, not least being the logging procedure. I duly marked our position on a makeshift map created using instructions in the book while Maura recorded the accurate position using the GPS in her phone. Later, we attracted a crowd of onlookers as I took a much more limited set of measurements on a bench in the middle of downtown.

We visited TC-013 yesterday and compared notes with Lei Kaleo, who noted several additional issues that were specific to her local environment, and then stopped at other random places to take more measurements. A trip around Denver today finished my tryout of the kit, focusing entirely on urban environments around the city.

“It’s going to require a major redesign,” Maura reported to Lazlo this afternoon. “Sally and the team have enough information from us and the test communities to have a new design ready for review by Wednesday, with trials starting Friday at the latest. Also, Will has a suggestion I think we should consider.”

“Not a change in anything else we’re doing, I hope,” Lazlo said.

Ignoring her acid tone, I said, “It looks to me like we’re ignoring the most important variable of all, and maybe the easiest to measure: the people-to-nature ratio.”

There was a pause. “That’s because it doesn’t fall in the category of environmental assessment. Besides, it can probably be derived from some of the other measurements.”

“Maybe, but you have a great opportunity to check it directly, and get direct feedback from people about how it affects them. Maybe the data can be used to calibrate the people to be test instruments themselves and help them get ideas of their own about what to do.”

“We can’t afford any change in scope at this point in the project,” Lazlo said after a longer pause.

“But…” I began.

“It’s not an option,” she said, and ended the call. I suspected my stint with WICO might be close to ending too.

Reality Check

As I helped my father develop new ways to teach math while in my teens and twenties, we reveled in searching for simple, low-tech solutions to complex problems. Our main goal was to enable anyone to find their own solutions; and applying the approach to math, one of humanity’s greatest tools, was an obvious means to that end. He invented quite a few tools in the process, often out of easily obtainable materials like cardboard, which are inspirations for my vision of the Personal Environmental Assessment Kit.

The biosafing solution does not exist (which Will suspects). If it did, a lot of our problems could be solved. Here, it is a placeholder for something – or multiple somethings – else.

Friendly Interrogation

TIME TO STRATEGY EXECUTION: 67 DAYS

“You’re way too focused on downscalin’us, Miss Riddick,” Al Menzies said over dinner as part of a far-ranging discussion last night at his house in Boulder. Maura had just been informed that she wouldn’t have anything to review for another day, so we weren’t in a rush to leave. Al added defiantly, “There’re a lotta people who need to upscale!”

She tightly squeezed my hand under the table, surprising me as much as the calmness in her voice when she answered. “The crap, as you call it, is mostly ours. We created it and we live in it. We have the tools, and the responsibility, to clean it up.”

 “Good point.” He grinned, having just given her his greatest compliment. Beside him as he faced us was a hardcopy of the latest global strategy, sticky notes protruding from more than half its pages. I suspected that he could summarize every one of them from memory. “What do your test subjects in, oh, Indonesia have to say ‘bout all this?”

Maura closed her eyes, and I felt a warm peacefulness envelop me as her grip relaxed. “They know that in many ways they are in a microcosm of the world,” she said, “facing pollution and land degradation as a result of industrial growth and natural hazards that have already pushed two-thirds of them into a state of collapse.” She opened her eyes and released my hand. “Now that the strategy has been improved and better explained, they see it as generally helpful and are providing valuable feedback about how it can be specifically implemented.”

“I’m sorry, but that sounds like pure boilerplate talkin’ points. Are they usin’ the same measurement and reportin’ protocols as everyone else?” Before she could answer, he added, “And does ‘collapse’ mean the same thing there as it does here?”

“Yes, and yes,” she answered bluntly. “We built and calibrated most of the basic capabilities during the biosphere assessment, and then expanded them to cover the remaining variables with multiple checks for reliable acquisition and interpretation of data. Of course, we can supplement the suite as conditions and interest warrant. Our main project now is to create a subset that everyone can use to get useful information, share it, and quickly know what it means.”

Al sat back, a mix of confusion and admiration on his face. “Are you sure you’re a historian and not an engineer?”

“She’s more than both those things,” I said, recalling the training as an enforcement officer that goes into becoming a special agent for the Extinction Response Unit which I learned about yesterday. “You didn’t tell her that you’ve got colleagues doing environmental research all around there, Al.”

“What do they think about what we’re doing?” Maura asked him.

“Like me, they figger humans survivin’ past mid-century will be like hittin’ a blade of grass with a dart from the moon, even with your cybercritter Sally callin’ the shots.”

“It’s going to be a pretty big dart,” she said.

“We’ll see, we’ll see.”

Caleb Tosner called Maura early this morning with two candidates for what he insisted on calling a “personal environmental assessment kit” or PEAK. I offered to pick her up at her parents’ house, but she insisted on joining me at the WICO field office after she had reviewed the designs on her own and met with Felicity Jonas at USERU. In the meantime, I was to get fully acquainted with WICO’s reporting protocols as practiced in the Rocky Mountain area.

We both ended up taking most of the day to accomplish our objectives. When we finally met, Maura briefed me and the personnel in Boulder about her choice for the PEAK, and I described what I think is a critical flaw in the reporting protocols that I’m sure we’ll be discussing into the night.

Reality Check

Maura’s description of Indonesia is based on a simulation I did using publicly available statistics (below), along with some basic research about the nation.

The “flaw” that Will discovered is based on an insight I had while analyzing the results of the simulation.

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.