Movement

 

All nations today officially signed the Open Borders and Mutual Assistance Treaty (OBMAT), developed and negotiated since Blue Planet Day as part of the Threat of Imminent Extinction Global Strategy. As WICO Secretary General Decatur said in a joint statement with the signatories, “This critical step in the strategy’s deployment ensures that people and material can freely move wherever is needed in order to maximize the chances of the most people surviving for as long as possible… People experiencing problems implementing the strategy and dealing with unexpected events are guaranteed help by anyone who can provide it, regardless of affiliation or identity. We are one world now, where boundaries to our joint survival are not our own.” 

Pushback from religious and cultural purity groups was swift and clear. “This is the new world order we always feared,” the Commanding Triumvirate of the International Alliance of Descendants announced at a rally in London. “Intermixing of the clean with the unclean is now assured, sacrificing the lives of the chosen so that a mongrel breed can take its place. We must follow the rules, but we will resist wherever possible.” A similar message was broadcast by the Clan of Light over all social media platforms, including a promising to “take celibacy to a whole new level so we can live and die with dignity.”

 Leadership of Possibilities from Responsibilities worried that groups like the Descendants and the Clan would attempt to coopt and corrupt its creative message in an effort to subvert WICO’s coordination mandate, which some had accused them of secretly wanting. As one of the organization’s spokespeople, I can honestly that I have seen no evidence of such intent within PFR, and don’t believe the concern is warranted. Our values are clearly consistent with the global strategy, and any other group likewise making their values clear would stand out as obviously different.

Reality Check

I expect a treaty like OBMAT to be necessary under highly variable environmental conditions like those expected for self-sustained impacts and interactive failures of ecosystems made vulnerable due to the mechanics and magnitude of species die-offs. Just as members of other species must move to survive, so will members of ours.

Personal Day

TIME TO STRATEGY EXECUTION: 61 DAYS

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

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

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

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

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

Reality Check

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

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

Judgments Day

TIME TO STRATEGY DEADLINE: 2 DAYS

In an echo of the global protests on January 7, large rallies were held in the capital cities of 41 countries, with the largest in the streets of London around WICO headquarters and the offices of its Strategy Integration group. Except for Great Britain, the countries appear to have been chosen because available drafts of their strategies to deal with the DIE threat all include unrestricted migration and aggressive means of controlling population growth such as open support of abortion, capital punishment for rape, and mandatory contraception.

Birth control mobilized many religious groups as revealed by a comparison of statements made by their leaders, with mandatory contraception being the most contentious issue because its use should be determined by individuals based on their beliefs and not by the state. Capital punishment for rape was opposed because it exacted too great a penalty, interfered with some religious and cultural norms, and could be abused through false accusation. Protests of state supported abortion varied with religion and whether it was already supported.

Unrestricted migration was second only to mandatory contraception in crowd size and fervor. Various rally leaders made the point that it was equivalent to a surrender of national identity. Others voiced concern that quality of life would rapidly degrade to a point where, as one speaker put it, “we’ll have total anarchy, and we might as well die from extinction.”

Frank Lanton, the leader of one of the largest Christian congregations in the United States, gave a chilling warning that reverberated throughout the world’s social media: “If these policies are included in the final strategy and codified in treaties, it will spark the great war of Armageddon between the righteous and the forces of darkness, proving for certain that the extinction crisis is code for what will happen on Judgment Day.”

Reality Check

This is an attempt to portray some anticipated (and still imaginary) negative responses to some of the more controversial options that might be considered in response to the extinction threat based on previous “news”.