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.

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):

Christmas Outbreak

TIME TO GLOBAL STRATEGY DEADLINE: 23 DAYS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reality Check

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