Simplicity and Humanity’s Future

Arnie Cooper interviews Duane Elgin

“Simplify, simplify.” When Henry David Thoreau made this plea 150 years ago, he was reacting to the increasing complexity of life around him. Today we find ourselves in a far more complex world, one in which increasing numbers of us are beginning to see the wisdom in Thoreau’s appeal. Duane Elgin helped define this trend back in 1981 with his first book, Voluntary Simplicity: Toward a Way of Life That Is Outwardly Simple, Inwardly Rich (Morrow). In that now-classic text, updated and reprinted in 1993, Elgin encouraged us not just to cut back on consumption and ease our busy schedules, but to live a life with purpose, in which every action is the result of a conscious choice.

Since bringing voluntary simplicity to the attention of the larger culture, Elgin has focused on how humanity can survive on a planet whose natural resources are stretched to their limits. The ultimate test, he believes, will be in how we respond to the challenges of the coming years, when he predicts that environmental problems will reach a breaking point. His latest book, Promise Ahead: A Vision of Hope and Action for Humanity’s Future (Morrow), paints a chilling picture of the cultural and ecological dangers we will face, yet offers an optimistic view of the possibility for humankind’s survival and evolution into a more mature species.

Elgin was born near a small town in Idaho in 1943 and worked on the family farm until he was twenty-three. Growing up in a small farming community, he witnessed a strategy for living that relied on a mixture of independence and mutual support. In college he took pre-med courses, but the social turmoil of the sixties led him to drop out of school and eventually move to Paris to attend the Sorbonne. While in France, Elgin met Jesuit priest Daniel Berrigan, who was a seminal influence on his thinking. “Many an evening,” Elgin says, “Father Berrigan would slip a scarf around his clerical collar, and we’d sit at a local bistro, drinking a glass or two of cheap wine and talking about politics, justice, and love.” Berrigan would later become internationally recognized for his nonviolent resistance to the Vietnam War and the nuclear-arms race.

After returning to the States, Elgin completed his education with an MBA from the Wharton School and an MA in economic history. His first job out of graduate school was on a presidential commission exploring population growth and its impact over the next thirty years. It was his introduction to “futures research.”

In 1972, Elgin became a senior social scientist at the Stanford Research Institute (now SRI International) in California. His first major project was coauthoring a book titled Changing Images of Man with Joseph Campbell and others. At the same time, Elgin began an intensive practice in Buddhist meditation.

At SRI, Elgin investigated the long-range future for government agencies such as the National Science Foundation and the Environmental Protection Agency. He saw enormous problems on the horizon, not just for the U.S., but for the whole planet. Yet as his understanding of the world grew, so too did his disillusionment with the political establishment; the reports he wrote did little more than gather dust. He left SRI in 1977 to spend six months in a self-directed meditation retreat. An awakening experience at the conclusion of this retreat led directly to his book on simplicity, and later to his 1993 book Awakening Earth (Morrow), a sweeping study of the evolution of human culture and consciousness. In it, Elgin proposes that human civilization is approaching a moment of awakening similar to that experienced by some individuals.

Because he believes that the process of “civilizational awakening” will involve the mass media, Elgin has cofounded a national campaign for media accountability. He works primarily from home and lives with his partner and collaborator, Coleen LeDrew, in a comfortable and, yes, simple two-bedroom apartment in Marin County, just north of San Francisco. In person, he is soft-spoken and displays a serenity one would not expect from someone so in tune with the impending crises facing the planet.

Cooper: How has your upbringing influenced the work you’ve done on simplicity and human evolution?

Elgin: Because I grew up on a farm in Idaho with very few distractions, it became clear to me early on that the universe is alive. I could see it and feel it around me. That sensibility has guided my life, including my work on simplicity. Simplicity is central to engaging the aliveness of the universe, because it helps to clear away the distractions that separate us from direct connection with life.

Growing up on the land also gave me a clearer sense of humanity’s place in the universe: I saw that people were small creatures compared to the vastness of the sky and the land. I was constantly reminded of our vulnerability to nature’s forces — wind, rain, frost, insects.

Of necessity, people in our farming community were self-reliant and had to be their own plumbers, carpenters, accountants, weather forecasters, mechanics, and so on. At the same time, I saw constant support among neighbors — for example, exchanging different food crops: several bushels of apples one week for corn or potatoes the next. I grew up in a community of self-reliant individuals who were continually pulling together for the well-being of all.

My experience of farming changed as my father became more successful. He began with a small farm and a few horses, which left plenty of free time during the winter months for the woodworking he loved. He built everything from furniture to boats. Over the years, he acquired additional farms, tractors, a crew of laborers, and more. When he finally retired, he was busy year-round overseeing the operation and maintenance of a half dozen farms. There was no time left for woodworking. He was no longer living in the cyclical world of the seasons, but in the linear world of industrialization and material progress.

Cooper: You’re probably best known for your book on voluntary simplicity. What were the origins of that book?

Elgin: The idea of voluntary simplicity came from my mentor on the subject, Richard Gregg. He was a student of Gandhi’s and wrote about voluntary simplicity in 1936, describing it as “a partial restraint in some direction in order to secure greater abundance of life in other directions.” In other words, once we know what our life’s purpose is, then we can organize our material circumstances to support it. Simplicity begins inside ourselves as we decide what really matters to each of us. Voluntary simplicity means choosing our path through life consciously, deliberately, and of our own accord. It’s not so much about living with less as it is about living with purpose and balance.

Cooper: Yet many people equate “simplicity” with a frugal lifestyle.

Elgin: Perhaps the biggest misconception about voluntary simplicity is that it’s about frugal living and nothing more. The media portray it as a life of material sacrifice, which makes it easy to caricature and dismiss as irrelevant to mainstream Americans. This portrayal also misses much of the joy and purpose of simple living. The simple life becomes equated with a plain and dull life, when it’s anything but dull. A long daily commute to a job that has little meaning: that’s dull. The simple life is about freeing up time for what matters most to us.

Another misconception is that simplicity is about moving back to the land. Simpler living is certainly about getting back in touch with nature, but rather than moving to the country, most people who choose a simple life are trying to make the most of where they are — planting urban gardens or working to restore polluted and damaged suburban ecologies. Thoreau’s cabin by Walden Pond is the classic example of simple living, but few people realize that Thoreau was no isolated hermit. His famous cabin was roughly a mile from the town of Concord, and every day or two he would walk into town. In fact, his cabin was so close to a nearby highway that he could smell the pipe smoke of passing travelers. He also had more visitors while living in the woods than at any other period of his life.

People who choose simpler ways of living are often incorrectly portrayed as being opposed to technology. In truth, these are some of the most tech-savvy people I’ve run across. Whether it’s the Internet or solar power or new gardening tools, they are supportive of any technologies appropriate to sustaining a simpler way of life.

Cooper: The simplicity movement has grown quite a bit since your book first came out in 1981.

Elgin: Back then, simple living was hardly a blip on the cultural radar screen. Now glossy magazines tout the simple life from the newsstands, and it’s become a popular theme on television talk shows. Most people attracted to the simple life are not looking for a life of sacrifice; rather, they are seeking deeper sources of satisfaction than are offered by our high-stress consumer society. Surveys show a distinct subpopulation — conservatively estimated at 10 percent of the U.S. adult population, or 20 million people — is pioneering a way of life that is outwardly more sustainable and inwardly more spiritual.

While U.S. incomes have gone up in the past thirty years, the percentage of people reporting that they are “very happy” has remained unchanged. Meanwhile, divorce rates have doubled, and teen-suicide rates have tripled. A whole generation has tasted the fruits of an affluent society and discovered that money does not buy happiness. In the search for true satisfaction, millions of people are not only “downshifting,” or pulling back from the rat race, but also “upshifting,” or moving ahead into a life that, though materially more modest, is rich with family, friends, community, creative work, and connection with the universe.
Besides being drawn to what the simple life offers, many people adopt it to help counter such powerful negative trends as global climate change, the rapid extinction of species, the depletion of key resources, a burgeoning population, and a growing gap between the rich and the poor. These trends are converging into a whole-systems crisis, creating the possibility of a crash within a generation if we do not find new ways of living.

Cooper: Doesn’t rejecting affluence mean performing more time-consuming tasks ourselves: cooking, cleaning, home repairs? What if these are not the things that really matter to us?

Elgin: Simplicity doesn’t mean eliminating the basic tasks of living, but it does mean taking charge of a life that is too busy, too stressed, and too fragmented. Simplicity means cutting back on trivial distractions, both material and nonmaterial, and focusing on the essentials — whatever those may be for each of us. As Thoreau said, “Our life is frittered away by detail.” Or, as Plato wrote, “In order to seek one’s own direction, one must simplify the mechanics of ordinary, everyday life.”

Cooper: You mentioned “nonmaterial” distractions. Does that include involvement with other people? How do relationships and community fit into a simple life?

Elgin: Relationships and community are at the heart of a simple life. For many, happiness is not measured in dollars earned but in the rewards of authentic relationships. Not surprisingly, many who choose a simpler life tend to prefer smaller-scale living and working environments that foster face-to-face contact and mutual caring. They also tend to participate in new forms of community, such as cohousing.

Cooper: What does the ideal simple life look like?

Elgin: Because simplicity has as much to do with each person’s unique purpose in life as it does with their standard of living, it follows that there is no single, “right” way to live more simply. Different people in different life circumstances find varying paths to integrity and wholeness. Richard Gregg wrote, “Simplicity is a relative matter depending on climate, customs, culture, and the character of the individual.” Thoreau said: “I would not have anyone adopt my mode of living on my account. . . . I would have each one be very careful to find out and pursue his own way.”

Cooper: You’ve obviously read a lot of Thoreau. Are there any other writers who’ve been an influence on you?

Elgin: This is where the simple life breaks down for me — books. [Laughter.] I can’t get enough. I have been a voracious reader throughout my life, consuming anthropology, metaphysics, history, physics, economics, philosophy, and spirituality. Existentialist writers were important early in my awakening, as were Zen Buddhists and Quakers.

Cooper: How important is spirituality to the simple life?

Elgin: I view the simplicity movement as more than just a lifestyle change. It’s not just about moderating our consumption, recycling, and eating lower on the food chain. It’s about integrating our inner and outer worlds. Simplicity lies at the intersection of spirituality and sustainability. If you put spirituality, or the inner life, together with sustainability, or the outer life of maintaining things, what you come up with is the simple life.

For the first time in human history, thanks to various information technologies, all the world’s great religions are available for our inspection and practice. We are discovering the deep, common truths at the core of all spiritual traditions: the golden rule, the power of compassion, the importance of looking beyond materialism. One essential truth is to use this world as a place for learning, not as a place for distraction. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t enjoy ourselves, but rather that the universe has put us here for higher purposes than watching television reruns.

We also have an opportunity to bring the different aspects of East and West together. Eastern spirituality says this world is a place of suffering, so let’s get off the wheel of worldly existence. Contemporary Western culture says this is a place to seek gratification, so let’s dive into worldly existence. If we honor both realms, the result is a paradigm of learning. Together, East and West form a mind-set that goes far beyond either one in isolation — creating a new paradigm that values the coevolution of culture and consciousness.

Cooper: I have the feeling that the West is getting the better side of that bargain. Look at Japan, for example, where the younger generation seems more interested in collecting vintage American sneakers than in any spiritual vision.

Elgin: Well, it’s a good idea for them to buy used sneakers. [Laughter.] But I am not at all suggesting that the East adopt a materialistic lifestyle. I am suggesting that putting the two wisdom traditions together gives us more of a systems view of the universe as a living and learning system. In systems terms, we’re coming to “self-referencing awareness” as a human family. In Eastern terms, we’re at the point of “awakening,” a preliminary form of enlightenment. We are awakening to the reality that we are nested within larger living systems, including the earth and the universe as a whole.

One of the great virtues of the West is that we have looked deeply into material reality, and what we have discovered there is truly extraordinary. As Niels Bohr, one of the founders of quantum physics, said, “Anyone who is not shocked by quantum physics does not understand it.” The universe is again being considered as Plato once described it: “A single living creature that embraces all living creatures within it.” At the frontiers of science, we are rediscovering the universe as a living system, and this is changing our relationship with the universe, with the earth, and with one another.
Consumerism makes sense only in a dead universe. If the universe is dead at its foundations, then it is rational to turn to material pleasures to protect us from life’s pains. On the other hand, if the universe is a living system, then it makes sense to get rid of undue complexity, live more simply, and focus on coming into a conscious relationship with the world around us.

Cooper: What do you think about the self-help movement’s version of simplifying: for example, a book like Elaine St. James’s Simplify Your Life, which offers a collection of quick fixes, such as how to reduce clutter around your house?

Elgin: I’m all for it. [Laughter.] I try to do that on a regular basis. One aspect of simplicity is reducing clutter. It helps bring clarity and lets me focus on what matters most in my life. More power to any author who can inspire us to reduce needless complexity and thereby get down to what matters most.

Cooper: One advantage to material wealth is the ability to surround oneself with beautiful objects. How does aesthetics fit into the life of voluntary simplicity?

Elgin: There is a simplicity aesthetic, one aspect of which is an appreciation for older things. The Japanese have a wonderful phrase for this: wabi-sabi, a feeling of appreciation for things whose wear and aging reveal life’s impermanence. For example, if you have had a cup, table, or chair in your family for several generations, each chip or scratch is not an imperfection, but a memory, inviting you to reflect on all the others before you who held that cup or touched that table. So, in my home, if I happen to scratch the dining-room table, I say I’ve just “wabi’d” the table — meaning I gave it a little more patina and age, a little more value.

Cooper: How does the notion of voluntary simplicity connect with those who are poor by Western standards?

Elgin: If you live a life of involuntary simplicity, then the concept of voluntary simplicity doesn’t mean much to you, because you have not yet achieved enough material well-being for there to be a meaningful degree of choice.

Cooper: But is it important for the world’s poor to understand these concepts, or is it just we in the West who need to think about these things?

Elgin: Rich or poor, the whole world needs to be thinking about and exploring new ways of living. We need something akin to the Marshall Plan — which restored Europe after World War II— only global in scale. We need to create a future of mutually assured development, where progress leaves no one behind and doesn’t destroy the ecosystems on which our lives depend.

Given intelligent designs for living lightly and simply, our manner of living would vary depending on local customs, ecology, resources, and climate. People who are poor need to ask not for access to the traditional American lifestyle, which is destroying cultures and the biosphere, but for a helping hand toward sustainability over the long haul. The problem is that we’ve not yet developed a literacy of sustainability that tells us what to ask for. Instead of a global plan that would do just that, we’re being sold a consumerist culture by the mass media.

The average person in the U.S. watches about four hours of television each day. Over the course of a year, we see roughly twenty-five thousand commercials, many of them produced by the world’s highest-paid cognitive psychologists. Their job is to figure out how to grab our attention and make us feel deficient if we don’t own their clients’ products. And these heavily produced advertisements are not merely for products, but for a lifestyle based on a consumer mind-set. What they’re doing, day in and day out, twenty-five thousand times a year, is hypnotizing us into seeing ourselves as consumers who want to be entertained rather than as citizens who want to be informed and engaged. We need to take back the airwaves as a sphere of mature conversation and dialogue about our common future.

Cooper: So the media can be a positive influence?

Elgin: Yes. We’ve already seen evidence of this. The mass media have played a pivotal role in bringing the civil-rights movement, the environmental movement, and the women’s movement into our collective consciousness. Broadcast television is not only the primary window onto the world for most Americans, but also the mirror in which we see ourselves as a society.

For the past thirty years, I’ve been exploring the process of “awakening” at a civilizational scale, and I have concluded that the mass media are the primary carriers of our collective “thought stream,” which can foster either ignorance and fear, or awakening. For the individual, awakening involves developing a capacity for reflective consciousness — or simply paying attention to our thoughts. In a similar way, our collective awakening will involve paying attention to our thoughts at a civilizational scale: not just consuming media, but purposefully directing our attention as a society to cultivate mindfulness, equanimity, and so on.

So the media can have a positive influence, if we will reflect on how we use this immensely powerful technology. The basic problem is that the mass media are not being held accountable for their programming. Although, by law, television broadcasters have a strict obligation to serve the public interest, they are serving their pocketbooks instead. It is time for us as citizens to come together and hold them accountable for their legal responsibilities.

The media have long given lip service to serving the public interest, but there has never been a means for measuring their failure to do so, because there’s no mechanism in place to register the public’s views. Polls show a majority of Americans are deeply dissatisfied with the media but feel powerless to bring about changes. Our Media Voice is a nonpartisan national campaign I cofounded in the Bay Area. We have devised a practical strategy for holding broadcasters accountable for serving the public interest. We want to develop prime-time “citizen feedback forums” in cities across the nation. The forums will be like electronic town meetings, at which citizens can raise concerns about pervasive violence, stereotyping, lack of diverse perspectives, and limited coverage of critical issues. The idea is to give citizens a new “civic voice” and feedback system for media accountability.

Cooper: What about the government? Doesn’t it exert any control over the media?

Elgin: Government deregulation of the media has led to a rapid coalescing of ownership. As a result, a half dozen enormous media conglomerates now own a majority of media outlets in the U.S. It is these corporations — which value profits above all else — that are controlling the media, not the government. On the contrary, the media set an agenda that, in many ways, controls the scope of governmental concerns.

Cooper: In your latest book, Promise Ahead, you liken the human species, though 135,000 years old, to a teenager on the brink of adulthood.

Elgin: Over the past decade, I’ve given talks around the world, and I have asked people to consider the human family as one individual and then, looking at the behavior of that individual, to determine our stage in life. Specifically, do they think the human family is behaving like a toddler, a teenager, an adult, or an elder? I’ve asked this question in India, Europe, Japan, Brazil, and the United States, and without hesitation three-quarters of the people say that we’re in our teenage years. Another 20 percent say we’re in our toddler phase. On my personal website, more than two thousand people have voted on this question, with the same results.

So I’ve looked into adolescent psychology and found interesting parallels. Teenagers are rebellious, and we are rebelling against nature. Teenagers don’t tend to think about the long-term future; nor do we as nations. Teenagers are often concerned with how they look; we’re a materialistic society consumed with appearances.
But there’s also an upside to this life stage. Teenagers have a huge amount of untapped energy and idealism, a sense of hidden greatness that is about to burst forth. As a species, I think we also have untapped idealism and a sense of our hidden greatness. We just need a chance to develop these potentials as a human family.

We are already beginning to move from our adolescent, reactive mode into our early adulthood, in which we start learning to live together. For example, the nations of the world are cooperating in ways that are seldom recognized. Every day we cooperate in running the world’s weather-forecasting systems and air-traffic control. Cooperation among world health organizations has eradicated polio and smallpox. We are beginning to cooperate in the realm of international justice — for example, arresting dictators for abuse of power and genocide. And around the world, reconciliation movements are emerging and trying to take root. Some are making dramatic progress, like the peaceful transition to democratic rule in South Africa and the growing peace process in Northern Ireland.

Cooper: In the final pages of Promise Ahead, you say that, within twenty years, humanity will undergo an “initiation.”

Elgin: Most teenagers do not become adults without moving through a time of testing and challenge — a rite of passage. I believe the human family is about to go through a time of profound initiation and challenge as we move from our adolescence to our adulthood. This initiation will take the form of a worldwide systems crisis as we hit an “ecological wall” — the physical limits to growth. For example, right now, co2 levels are higher than they have been in 20 million years. We’ve already overshot the boundaries and thresholds of climate stability, and it’s just a matter of time before we start experiencing severe fluctuations in the climate.

Add to this equation the fact that by the 2020s we’re going to have roughly 8 billion people on the planet. As the climate warms, however, food production is going to decline, because many seeds are up against the limits of their thermal resistance and will have difficulty germinating. Compounding the situation further is the fact that, within a generation, we’ll be running out of the cheap oil that has propped up our high-production agricultural system with its petroleum-based pesticides and fertilizers. In this same time frame, it is also estimated that 40 percent of the earth’s population won’t have access to enough water to be self-sufficient in growing our own food.

Now, if you start putting all of these factors together, it’s clear that within twenty years we could have a crisis that is completely outside anything in our collective experience. Nonetheless, I think this is a very organic and predictable occurrence. We’re moving from our adolescence into our adulthood as a human family, and you don’t make that transition without going through life-changing events.

Cooper: Is it possible that, through genetics and other new technologies, we’ll be able to avoid the chaos and the tumultuous times that you write about?

Elgin: In my opinion, no. Just look at the global dynamics at work. Climate change and species extinction represent massive disruptions to the biosphere. Population growth is creating enormous, unsustainable megalopolises around the world. I think genetics and new approaches to food production will be important, but I don’t see anything deep enough, broad enough, and transformative enough to make a difference anytime soon.

Cooper: Could you describe what you think life is going to be like in the United States in, say, 2030?

Elgin: My guess is that, around the world, the various forces of climate change, population growth, species extinction, resource depletion, and human misery will have converged into an unstoppable force heading for either breakdown or breakthrough — where the human family either pulls together in cooperation or pulls apart in conflict.

I find it harder to predict what life will be like in the U.S. specifically. We are one of the more resource-rich nations in the world. What I can imagine is even larger numbers of people pushing across our borders saying, “We want a part of your affluence.” We could experience the breakdown of civil society and the need to start rebuilding from a more decentralized base. One way to picture this is to look at what life is like already for people in parts of the world where ecosystems are overstressed, economies are in ruins, and lives are being pulled apart by poverty.

Another dramatic transformation that will take place by 2030 is the growth of global communications. It’s estimated that by 2010 roughly a billion people will be connected continuously on the Internet — and that’s still twenty years shy of the time frame you’re asking about. So, give ourselves twenty years of this new world of communication, add to that the stresses of climate change, species extinction, water shortages, civil unrest, and so on, and what we get is a world that will be intensely in dialogue with itself. And the effects of that dialogue will cascade down into our personal lives — into the food we eat, the clothes we buy, the transportation we use, and the homes in which we live.

Cooper: In your book Awakening Earth, you try to look even farther into the future. What might happen after we’ve cleared the hurdle of our birth as a global civilization?

Elgin: If we go back to the metaphor of the human life span, it’s when people move into their early adulthood that they start thinking about the future, doing meaningful work in the world, and building lasting relationships with their peers. So the next stage will be one of collective reflection on a global scale — seeing who we are as a human family and how we can live and work together in a way that is sustainable.

If we can successfully meet the challenge of living sustainably on the earth, I think we will then have the opportunity to learn to live more compassionately — in harmonious and caring relationships with one another, other species, and the cosmos. A culture of kindness could infuse the planet. This could be an era of renewal, as the earth is restored to health. My sense is that we have a long and interesting future ahead of us, if we can get through this critical period of transition.

Cooper: Our politicians don’t seem particularly concerned with any of this. For example, Dick Cheney commented that “conservation may be a sign of personal virtue, but it is not a sufficient basis for a sound, comprehensive energy policy.” Are there any politicians who are thinking along the lines of sustainability?

Elgin: Certainly Al Gore had an appreciation for living sustainably when he wrote Earth in the Balance. A more immediate example is Oregon governor John Kitzhaber, who signed an executive order in 2000 directing the state to “develop and promote policies and programs that will assist Oregon in meeting a goal of sustainability within one generation — by 2025.” The Oregon Solutions website is dedicated to that purpose and is full of strategies, examples, and resources. And the Bush administration, though it’s no friend to the environment, is pushing for a new generation of cars powered by hydrogen fuel cells.

Cooper: Do you think we should continue to develop faster, smarter, more independent machines?

Elgin: We have to look at what the machines might be used for. If the human family is to create some form of sustainable species civilization, we need a capacity for collective conversation and mutual understanding. So we need the Internet and the global transparency it’s bringing. We also need sustainable forms of energy, which means retrofitting and rebuilding a huge amount of infrastructure — homes, office buildings, and the like — for solar and other renewable sources of energy.

Cooper: In Promise Ahead, you say that “we are the leaders we have been waiting for.” But to keep the movement going, doesn’t there need to be someone leading the way?

Elgin: If it is going to be voluntary simplicity, then it needs to be deliberate and intentional. If you have to be talked into it, it isn’t voluntary. [Laughter.] I find it heartening that this is a self-organizing, leaderless movement. People are recognizing that no one else is going to do this for them. They must take responsibility for pioneering changes in their own lives. When economic, environmental, and social systems begin breaking down in the next decade or two, I think it will motivate nearly everyone to make changes.

Some feel that large-scale change requires government involvement. My sense is that we are moving into a situation that is so dynamic and so complex that no government agency will be able to figure it out. It’s going to require inventive, savvy people at the grass-roots level adapting quickly to radically changing circumstances, making small changes that accumulate into a major societal change.

Cooper: Elsewhere in Promise Ahead, you quote T.S. Eliot: “And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.” What does that quote mean for you?

Elgin: Let me approach it through the name that we’ve given ourselves as a species: Many people do not realize that our technical designation is not just Homo sapiens, or “wise beings,” but Homo sapiens sapiens, which means that we are “doubly wise beings” with the ability to “know that we know.” When we use this precious capacity for reflective consciousness, we are enabling a living universe to look back and reflect upon itself. A gardener appreciating a flower or a child appreciating the stars in a night sky is each a knowing witness to creation, closing a loop that began with the birth of our universe billions of years ago. We are beings who can knowingly appreciate and celebrate the great mystery of our own existence.

Copyright © 2003 Duane Elgin

Books by Duane Elgin at Amazon.com

Thoughts on Humanity’s Future

Dave Jarvis

I’m not your typical religious man. My religion is the belief in Humanity Ö And my belief is starting to shatter.

While driving through logging trails with a friend, I had an automobile accident. We both stepped away unscathed; the driver-side door was crushed. We tried our best to get out of the ditch ourselves. Unfortunately, the ground was soaking wet and the front-wheel drive would not catch. Sometime later two trucks stopped and two men helped push the car out of the rut.

They told me, in no uncertain terms, to commit fraud. Tell my insurance agency that I had smacked into a post, and then they would cover most, if not all, of the damages. But it was my fault. I didn’t hit a post. I hit a tree. I wasn’t on public roads. I was driving on logging trails. I cannot now, or ever will be able to, ask somebody else to pay for my mistake. It isn’t Honest.

Once upon an era, there was a day where a man would rather die than lie. For his word was his Honour. And without his Honour, he was nothing. Now think of all the little lies you have told: You broke it, but never owned up; you borrowed it, but never returned. Think of your big lies. Do they plague you? Do you regret them? Do you ever think of them again? I hope I’m not the only one.

I have come to feel very strongly that Honesty is the essence of Humanity. This feeling has come from my own mistakes. It has come from watching the mistakes of others. Honesty. Decency, fidelity, goodness, honour, incorruptibility, integrity, loyalty, morality, principle, probity, rectitude, reliability, righteousness, sincerity, trustworthiness, uprightness, veracity, and virtue. With so many ways to express Humanity, why are we losing it?

Why do we steal? Why do we cheat? Why do we lie? Where does it all lead us? A friendship with lies isn’t a friendship. Friends forgive. Cheating forfeits friends. Stealing makes us enemies. Abraham Lincoln once said, “Am I not destroying my enemies when I make friends of them?”

I don’t know who coined the phrase, “Every man for himself.” But I do know two things about the words. The first is that the idiom has grown from painful roots. Pain seeded from physical abuse. Pain watered from fearful letdowns. Pain that shoots from forgotten promises. Pain matured from fallen trust. Pain that blossomed from fighting words. The second is that life with only yourself to rely on isn’t life. It’s entrapment. It’s fear. It’s helplessness. It’s loneliness. It’s paranoia.

I write to you today, my friends, that in spite of the abuse, the letdowns, the broken promises, the mistrust, and the biting words, that I, too, still have a dream. My dream delves deep into the heart of Humanity.

I have a dream that one day no lies will be uttered. I dream that soon acceptance, patience, and understanding will rule our motions. I long for the days when entrapment, fear, helplessness, loneliness, and paranoia no longer rule our emotions.

I have a dream that one day no person will be the intentional cause, either directly or indirectly, of another person’s pain. That dream entails accepting the past, for we cannot change what has been, only what will be. That dream revolves around patience, for we all move to the beat of more than just one drum. That dream means trying to understand the reasons behind another’s actions, for we must assume their intentions are decent.

I have a dream that transcends the borders of a single nation. My dream is that one day nations, all nations, will unite our planet unto one common goal: The betterment of Humanity. Is my dream so very far fetched? There is one sure way to find out. Don’t lie. Don’t lie, for the rest of your life.

I conclude with two short questions. Is a Simple Solution or Integrity more important to you? Is Money or Honesty more important to you? Think about your answer. Then think what you would have your children answer. Then think towards Humanity’s future.

Copyright © 1998 by Dave Jarvis

A New Vision for Humanity’s Future

One of the most distinctive aspects of the worldwide Bah·’“ community is the hopeful and yet pragmatic way in which its members face the future. Far from fearing it, Bah·’“s the world over are dedicated to creating a new and peaceful world civilization based on principles of justice, prosperity, and continuing advancement. This vision reflects not only an appreciation for humanity’s historic longing for peace and collective well-being, but also our understanding that humanity as a whole has now reached a new level of maturity. That it is possible to create societies founded upon cooperation, trust, and genuine concern for others is at the heart of Bah·’“ belief and action. Indeed, Bah·’“s believe that humanity is on the verge of an evolutionary leap that will carry humankind to a future where “world peace is not only possible but inevitable.”

Copyright ©2002, Bah·’“ International Community.

Visit The Bah·’“  World.

I found your article as the first return of a Google search for Humanity’s Future. While you seem unaware of the fossil fuel depletion-overpopulation-global warming crisis, 

I would have to be living in a cave somewhere not to be aware of the reasons why so many people think these three phenomena constitute crises.  Indeed, I discuss all three of these challenges in a part of my Futurology writing that you may have missed.

By contrast, (an admittedly brief) inspection of your site yields no evidence that you are aware of the (by far less well-known) arguments that these are not crises.  The most notable work in this field of thought is Julian Simon’s Ultimate Resource, but searching your site for his name and book yields only a single mention (in a broken-link footnote of a piece about the Singularity). If you want to remain an eco-doomsayer, I’d heavily advise you not to read Simon’s book.  It’s hard to take seriously any doomsaying presentation that doesn’t address Simon’s analysis.  If you know of any specific counter-arguments to Simon’s work, I’d be very interested in a reference.

TW-> I am aware of the work of Julian Simon and have read parts of his book Ultimate Resource. (Thanks, I fixed the broken link.) While I would like to believe his premise, my careful reading and review of numerous equally qualified scientists makes him seem naive. I too believe in the unlimited nature of “knowing”, what I do not believe in is the unlimited nature of water, air, soil and fossil fuel on a finite planet.

 

That said, I don’t view myself as an eco-doomsayer. I don’t see myself as an eco-pessimist or an eco-optimist. I strive to be an eco-realist. As a practicing physician, I am called upon every day to prognosticate. My patients want to know what the future holds for them. I spend a great deal of time explaining that the future will be determined by the choices they make. If they eat sensibly, exercise regularly, avoid tobacco and consume alcohol in moderation, they will have a much better future than if they do the opposite. I think the same is true for humanity’s future. If we humans work together, stop wasting the fossil fuels, control our human population, protect nature and biodiversity, we will have a better future than if we do the opposite.

TW-> I am familiar with John McCarthy, because of my interest in human and artificial intelligence. His views on Progress and its Sustainability are to me very much like Simon’s in that they are both physically and biologically naive. It is not my purpose to rebut or critique the works of either Simon or McCarthy. I believe they were/are both good men writing what they believed to be the truth. However since you asked, others have refuted their works for example see: 1) A Review of Julian Simon’s Ultimate Resource by Herman E. Daly, 2) Correcting myths from Julian Simon, and 3) The Myth of : John McCarthy’s Sustainable Progress.

 

My focus has been on the careful work of many writers. See: E.O. Wilson’s Vanishing Point,  Richard Duncan’s 1996 paper on the Olduvai Theory, and his  followup paper of November 2000. This page from the Running On Empty Discussion Group website provides an up-to-date summary of the fossil fuel energy crisis, and includes Richard Duncan’s March 2001 forecast. I also recommend two papers by Jay Hanson, Energy Synopsis and A Means of Control . For those who like their Truth unvarnished, the whole story can be found at Jay Hanson’s excellent website. Also see: Colin J. Campbell’s address to Parliament. Colin J. Campbell and Jean H. Laherr‘re in Scientific American, March 1998, L.F. Ivanhoe, Get Ready For Another Oil Shock, and Matthew Simmons who is one of the leading energy advisors to President George Bush and the United States Congress.

 

But, I am not so interested in what is wrong, but what is right, and in how we can make thinks work better. I am a synergic scientist. My field of study is  “working together”. There are many things we can do to make our human future positive. See some of my writings: A Synergic Future, ORTEGRITY, GIFTegrity (brief)(PDF) (scientific basis), The Unified Stress Concept, Protecting Humanity , Beyond War , Crisis: Danger & Opportunity, Dual World, Tensegrity, What is a Time-binding Trust?, What is a ‘knowing’utility?, and the UnCommon Sense Library.

I found the following as the first return of a Google search for Humanity’s Future. While Mr. Holtz seems unaware of the fossil fuel depletion-overpopulation-global warming crisis, I still found that his article made interesting reading, and the scope of his thinking is to be much admired.

Humanity’s Future

Brian Holtz

Humanity will enjoy increasing political and economic liberty, as well as increasing freedom from ignorance and superstition. Humanity will enjoy increasing prosperity and steady progress within the limits defined by the laws of physics. Effective immortality may result from technology allowing the human mind to sustain its brain or perhaps reincarnate itself as an intelligent artifact. Human civilization will experience neither salvation nor extermination by nature, machines, aliens, or gods. Humanity will spread throughout the Solar System and into the Milky Way, and be enriched by contact with other intelligent species and artifacts. Eventually humanity’s descendants will so improve their genes and minds that Homo sapiens will exist primarily as a revered memory.

Technological Revolutions

The long-term history and fate of humanity is driven almost entirely by technology. There have been five great technological revolutions in hominid history, and one or two others are faintly visible on the  horizon.

Tools.  The penultimate great biological advance on Earth was the evolution of hominid intelligence.  This led directly to the hominids’ first great technological revolution at the beginning of the Paleolithic Age by 2 Mya: the use of stone tools and (later) fire.  Tools and fire granted to hominids a mastery over predators, prey, and the elements that was literally unimaginable to other primates.

Language. The second technological revolution was also the most recent great biological advance on Earth: the development of language by 50 Kya. The development of language, watercraft, and weaving combined to allow early modern humans from Africa and SW Asia to master climates and locales throughout the world.

Agriculture. The third revolution was the development of agriculture at the beginning of the Neolithic Age about 10 Kya. The resulting specialization led to the advanced development of writing, government, and science.

Industry. The fourth revolution was the Industrial Revolution that was under way by 1840.  It included the development of heat engines, medicine, electromagnetics, and (later) atomics.  The Industrial Revolution was of course only possible because the Scientific Revolution that began during the Renaissance.  However, it was not until the Industrial Revolution that living standards finally made a leap to levels that would have been unimaginable to Aristotle or even Newton.

Information.  The fifth revolution is the current Information Revolution.   It had started by 1971 with the development of electronics, computing, and networking, which together had major impacts on commerce and communications by the 1980s and 1990s.  The Information Revolution will continue with the nascent developments of photonics and genetics. It will largely complete the liberation of humanity from tyranny and superstition.  It will witness the completion of humanity’s basic understanding of the origin, mechanism, and fate of mind, life, and the universe itself.

Generation.  By about 2200 a sixth revolution will be under way, driven by some combination of:

• genetic engineering of new subspecies;
• commercialized controlled fusion;
• nanotechnology;
• artifactual life; and
• artificial intelligence.

This revolution will establish the economics of the indefinite future.  Design, energy, and heat costs will be the only ones that really matter, and no future breakthroughs will ever fundamentally reduce them again. During this phase of history, the various human societies will arrive at economic, cultural, and linguistic parity and unity.

Homogenetics. By about 3000, modifications to the human genome will no longer be confined to changing the frequency or expression of existing genes, but will include the design of new genes. This will ultimately transform humanity into a new and improved species.

Automentation.  After engineering the human genome, the next (and perhaps last) technological revolution will be to engineer the (human?) mind. The first step will be the creation of neurological interfaces between human brains and computing devices. Another step might be the (perhaps neuron-by-neuron) replacement of some brain components with improved artificial parts. Or, it may be possible for a person to gradually offload mental processing from her brain to her computational prostheses. Perhaps eventually she could dispense with her fragile mortal brain altogether, so as to gain immortality while still preserving personal identity.

Misunderstandings

Estimating Progress. The modern idea of Progress arose in the Enlightenment. In the subsequent few centuries, prognosticators almost always underestimated future progress.  Only towards the end of the miraculous period of advances from 1859 to 1945 did futurologists consistently start overestimating future progress.

The Doomsday Argument is the thesis that the future of humanity may be relatively short because a human randomly sampled from all humans who ever will have lived is more likely to be middling in birth rank than early. In the absence of other information about humanity’s prospects, the Doomsday Argument would be significant. In the presence of almost any such information, the Doomsday Argument is irrelevant.

5.7.1. Social Science / Futurology / Impossible Advances

Divine Salvation. Humans will never experience either collective or individual salvation by any divine or supernatural agency.

Paranormality. The paranormal phenomena alleged in 2000 by many humans will never prove to be real and will over time be recognized as delusions, hysteria, myths, nonsense, and hoaxes.

Reanimation. There will never be any reanimation of humans whose brains have suffered any of the degradation that occurs at normal temperatures when metabolism ceases. Human personalities may someday be crudely simulated, but such simulations will never have significant fidelity and would not in any event have the identity of the simulated personality.

Explanation of Somethingness. Humans will never have a definitive answer to the question of why there is something rather than nothing. Humans may, however, eventually be able to show that no definitive explanation of existence is possible.

Superluminal Communication. There will never be a way to travel or communicate through space at speeds greater than that of light. Nor will there be a way to warp spacetime to circumvent this restriction.

Temporal Travel. There will never be a way to travel or communicate backwards in time. While time travel is not explicitly impossible under the known laws of physics, the proposed wormhole mechanism for it would require energies and technologies that are simply not achievable. Note also that a wormhole time machine would not allow travel back to before the wormhole was created.

Teleporter Travel. There will never be a way for humans to travel via transmission of information describing their physical constitution. Quantum considerations almost certainly preclude the extraction of a sufficiently detailed description, and such a discontinuous process would not preserve personal identity. The only possible way would be a gradual and continuous disassembly and reassembly with an ongoing causal link between the two separated halves.

Uploading. Like teleportation, transferal of a human mind from a brain to an artifact is almost certainly impossible and would nevertheless not preserve personal identity. Were either technology possible, then a minor improvement would be a non-destructive version that preserves the original body and brain, thus revealing the technology to be a duplicator rather than a teleporter or uploader. The possible technology closest to uploading would be a (relatively) gradual and continuous transformation of the functioning human brain into another substrate.

Energy and Momentum Non-Conservation. There will never be a way to increase the available energy or change the net momentum in a closed system.

5.7.2. Social Science / Futurology / Improbable Advances

Designer Contact. In his novel Contact, Carl Sagan suggested that the universe could have been designed and that its designer could have encoded a message in a transcendental number such as pi or e. Such a situation does not seem logically impossible, in that it would not be on its face a logical contradiction if for example the Bible turned out to be so encoded. The existence of any such message would in fact have to be considered a logical necessity. If so, it could not be considered an act of designer volition, unless one granted degrees of freedom in the design of mathematical logic itself. Such freedom seems incompatible with the very notion of logic: rules of inference that are binding in all possible worlds.

Super-Intelligence. Cognitive ability can increase quantitatively in efficiency, flexibility, speed, capacity, bandwidth, and network associativity, but not qualitatively in its kind of reasoning or knowing. There are no forms of reasoning or kinds of knowledge that are in principle inaccessible to regular intelligence.

Human Evolution. Humanity is very unlikely to undergo significant further natural evolution.  Since the beginning of the Neolithic Age, the development of humanity has been influenced much more by changes in culture than changes in genes.  This will continue indefinitely, even considering genetic engineering.

Singularity. The “singularity” is what Vernor Vinge describes as a moment in the future when the ongoing exponential increases in technological capability culminate in a discontinuity beyond which predictions based on continuous extrapolations do not apply. One candidate for the Singularity is when humanity improves artificial intelligence to the point that it is better than humans at improving artificial intelligence. Another candidate is when the world’s computers are networked into a single self-conscious mind. A third is when runaway productivity is achieved through artifactual life or nanotechnology, perhaps provided by extraterrestrial intelligence.

The Singularity will not happen. First, the limits to intelligence apply to artificial intelligence as much as to natural. Second, intelligence is likely not to vary qualitatively as a function of things like processing speed or memory that are increasing exponentially. Third, the effort to make minds faster or smarter will quite likely be subject to diminishing returns. Fourth, artificial minds will at first not be designed but rather grown and evolved, and will be subject to most of the same limits as minds that are naturally grown and evolved.

Antigravity. There will never be a way to repel matter by virtue of its mass, or even to just shield the attractive gravitational force of mass. Nor will there be an inertial drive — a way to accelerate an object uniformly, as in a gravitational field.

Vacuum or Zero-Point Energy. It is unlikely that humans will ever be able to extract useful amounts of energy from the vacuum or zero point.

5.7.3. Social Science / Futurology / Academic Developments

Academic Developments: the trends and changes in what humans know.

Philosophy

Loss of faith. By explaining the overwhelming majority of apparent Design in the universe, Darwin’s theory of evolution made faith in a “God of the gaps” essentially indefensible among intellectuals. As modern physics eliminates the last traces of apparent Design in the universe, intellectual fideists have in the 20th century retreated from actual revelation-based faith. They are seeking refuge in either outright mysticism or a false skepticism that pretends deism is a skeptical epistemology instead of a supernaturalist metaphysics. Rank-and-file fideists are responding variously with fundamentalism, mysticism, and (primarily) an operational agnosticism that maintains only the trappings of faith. This hollow fideism will dilute into vague agnostic mysticism by about 2150, while hardcore fideists will dwindle and become increasingly isolated.

Decline of mysticism. While faith will continue to dwindle sharply, mysticism will continue to absorb an infusion of former fideists as they confront Darwinism and are exposed to Eastern mystical traditions. Mysticism will thereafter decline asymptotically to a core minority devoted to altered mental states and ecological primitivism.

Spread of skepticism. The revolutions in biology and physics from 1859 to 1929, and the subsequent technological improvements in telecommunications and productivity, will continue to fuel the spread of humanist skepticism. In developed societies like America, belief in revelation will dwindle as rapidly as did (for example) belief in the subhmanity of Negroids. The decline of revelation-based faith will be somewhat disguised by its transformation into a bland mystical reverence for the alleged intention of revelation, but the loss of dogmatic faith will be apparent to those who bother noticing it. Key indicators will be the decreasing number of humans who believe that their mind — including memories, consciousness, and personality — will survive death, or who have serious beliefs in the paranormal.

Consolidation of philosophy. Continental philosophy will continue to thrive for at least a century, especially among humans who misunderstand or fear the recent progress in science, technology, and sociopolitics (viz., the ascendancy of free-market capitalism). Positivism will be the tacit or explicit belief of those leading this ongoing progress. Positivist epistemology and extropian ethics will in the Third Millennium displace first Continental philosophy and eventually most competing forms of mysticism and faith. This will complete the move toward skeptical empiricism that began in the Renaissance. Most fundamental philosophical issues will thenceforth be considered settled, similar to how Realism and Substance Dualism are no longer serious philosophical positions. These developments have some chance of being altered by two technological advances: artificial intelligence, and communication with extraterrestrial intelligence. While extropian ethics is unlikely to be affected, either advance could offer compelling contributions to epistemology or even metaphysics. The most likely contributions would be toward clarification and formalization, and not towards radically alternative philosophical positions.

Mathematics

There is little prospect of fundamental advances in mathematics similar to those that happened during the Age of Mechanism. Future progress in mathematics will consist primarily in formalization and in proofs such as:

• Non-existence of a polynomial-time solution for NP-complete problems
• Continuum Hypothesis

Physical Science

Fate of the universe. In the first few decades after 2000, humans will learn the fate of the universe: collapse, infinite expansion, or asymptotic expansion. Observations in 2000 indicate infinite expansion, but theoretical elegance argues for asymptotic expansion.

Origin of the universe. In the first few decades after 2000, humans will create a quantum theory of gravity that will unify it with the other physical forces. By roughly 2100, humans will learn almost all they will ever know about how the laws of physics are constrained to be the way they are, how they allowed for the Big Bang to happen, and how many physical free variables there are.

Biology

Genomics. Molecular biologists will continue for many centuries to sequence the genomes of entire species and the genotypes of individual humans. This will allow an inexorably increasing understanding of the evolutionary ancestry of earth’s taxa, and of the genealogy of earth’s humans. Genomics and electronic genealogy will combine to create a worldwide genealogical network that will include almost all humans born in literate societies after 1900 or even earlier.

Genesis. By about 2050, molecular biologists will be able to describe in increasing detail how life based on ribonucleic and amino acids arose on Earth four billion years ago as a result of auto-catalytic chemical processes of increasing complexity. Biologists will also be able to estimate how probable or improbable the development of life was.

Paleontology. Over the first century or two after 2000, biologists will greatly increase human understanding of how and why life evolved as it did over the last few billion years. In particular, anthropology will reach a general but not detailed understanding of how and why intelligence developed in hominids.

Exobiology. It is likely that by about 2100, humans will discover

• tangible evidence of (probably extinct) native life elsewhere in the solar system;
• spectrographic evidence of life outside the solar system;
• electromagnetic evidence of intelligence outside the solar system; or
• technological artifacts deposited in the solar system by extra-solar intelligence.

The latter two discoveries seem more likely. Any one of them will accelerate the decline of faith and reinforce skepticism as a more attractive alternative than mysticism. If humans discover life but not intelligence, it will emphasize the responsibility of humanity to preserve and promote life. If humans discover neither life nor intelligence, it will emphasize the uniqueness and preciousness of the earth’s ecosystem and the intelligence it has produced.

Biochemistry. Humans will in the 2000′s slowly reverse-engineer the genomes of H. sapiens and other important terrestrial species, allowing increasingly radical genetic engineering.

Neuropsychology. Humans will in the 2000′s gradually unravel the details of how the neural processes of the human brain create mental phenomena like consciousness, cognition, perception, affect, and volition.

Social Science

Economics. Economic theory and practice will be refined as information technology allows the ever-improving collection and processing of economic data. However, information technology and central planning are unlikely to ever run humanity’s economy as efficiently as the distributed processes of a free-market economy.

Sociology and Political Science. Humans will grow increasingly convinced that libertarian capitalism under federal republican democracy is the sociopolitical system that best provides for human justice and prosperity.

Psychology. Cognitivism will continue to be the most successful school of psychology, and Freudianism will be more and more widely discredited. Human efforts to communicate with cetaceans and with other primates will be tightly constrained by the limited cognitive and linguistic ability of these animals.

Linguistics. Aided in part by human genomics, linguists will make some more progress in tracing the family tree of human languages, but will never know many details about how the first human languages arose and what they were like.

History. Fluctuations of theme and emphasis in the interpretation of history will continue but will ultimately dampen out. There will not be a theory of history that can reliably predict the future or deterministically explain the past.

5.7.4. Social Science / Futurology / Technological Developments

Technological Developments: the trends and changes in what humans know how to use.

Space

Exploration. Humans will continue robotic exploration of the solar system, including sample return missions by 2020. Humans will establish by 2100 an unmanned radio observatory on the far side of the moon, which is the most radio-quiet place in the solar system. Humans will by 2200 launch robotic telescopes to use the Sun’s gravitational lensing out at the edge of the solar system. Humans will by 2300 start sending primitive Von Neumann probes to explore the galaxy and radio their findings back to earth. By about 3000 humans will begin receiving telemetry from high-speed flybys of nearby star systems.

Stations. Humans will by 2200 establish permanent manned stations in Earth orbit and perhaps on the moon, primarily for microgravity and spacecraft manufacturing. Extraterrestrial mining and mass production for terrestrial use is unlikely ever to be competitive with terrestrial processes. Extraterrestrial energy collection or generation is likely not to be competitive with terrestrial processes until well after Earth has too much heat pollution to be able to use the extra energy.

Colonization. There are several reasons humans will want to establish ecologically self-sufficient colonies beyond Earth:

• To enjoy sociopolitical independence or isolation;
• To relieve terrestrial population pressure; or
• To preserve the species in a “lifeboat”.

Humans will by about 3000 create self-sustaining extraplanetary colonies, first on the moon and Mars and later in space habitats. By 4000 the long-time citizens of a mobile space habitat may be willing to embark on the long journey that would bring their descendants to a nearby star system.

If attempted at all, the terraforming of Mars, Venus, or a moon of Jupiter or Saturn would likely not begin for several thousand years and might take thousands of years more to complete.

Quanta

Photonics, optics, and computational processing of spread-spectrum radio will lead to an enormous increase in bandwidth by 2020.

Molecules

Nanotechnology is the creation and use of materials and devices constructed by arranging individual atoms and molecules. Nanotechnology will be used to create extraordinarily strong or light materials and extraordinarily tiny and versatile machines. Self-reproducing nanotech “assemblers” may not be feasible for several centuries, and will not be as versatile as some would hope. The lesson of software is that even when manufacturing costs fall to zero, design and development usually remains a unique problem for each application of the technology.

Life

Genetic Engineering. Humans will over the next few centuries use genetic engineering to change natural organisms into increasingly useful forms. However, it will require centuries more before humans fully understand the biochemistry of even the simplest natural living system. After a millennium or so, humans will be able to design new ribonucleic organisms. After perhaps another millennium, humans will be able to design organisms with non-ribonucleic biochemistry.

Artifactual Life is life created by intelligence and not based on natural life. Humans will in about two centuries be able to create artificial systems that can reproduce themselves. After another century or so, humans will be able to create Von Neumann probes. A Von Neumann probe is a device designed to travel to another star system and reproduce itself there.

Information

Computing. After 2050 the primary constraints on human computing technology will not be processing speed or communications bandwidth or memory capacity and density, but rather physical limits of

• heat dissipation;
• energy density of batteries;
• communications latency;

and human limits of

• sensory and cognitive I/O bandwidth;
• user understanding of software complexity;
• designer understanding of software complexity; and
• ability to specify complex requirements unambiguously.

Display technology will plateau around 2030 with a combination of affordable flat displays and wearable retinal direct-projection systems. Neither quantum nor biochemical computing will prove expedient.

Brain

Neuropsychology will allow the creation of neural interfaces and prosthetics for sensing, computing and communicating. However, mind-reading technology will not improve much beyond current polygraphs, except perhaps through invasive nanotechnology that would probably require extensive adaptation to individual brains.

Mind

Artificial Intelligence is intelligence created by intelligence and not based on natural intelligence. Humans will develop AI in about two hundred years. However, these systems will initially not be designed or engineered but rather grown or raised, much as natural human intelligences are. Another millennium may be required before humans understand the inner workings of intelligence enough to modify or augment it.

Automentation. Will humans find a way to transform their natural brains into artificial ones that are easier to maintain and augment? Such techniques might depend on molecular biology and neuropsychology as much as on nanotechnology and information processing.

Exopsychology

When (and if) humans detect extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI), several possibilities for communication will exist.

1-way transmission. If ETI is detected through electromagnetic emissions over interstellar distances that are not intended to communicate with emerging civilizations such as earth’s, then humanity will have to introduce itself. The important issues will be what to tell and what to ask. Humanity should tell ETI a summary of its knowledge of itself and the universe, perhaps by sending information similar to that in this text. (The summary would have to be made intelligible to ETI, perhaps by including a multimedia dictionary and grammar of the relevant human language.) Humanity should ask ETI for a summary of the ETI’s knowledge, including available answers for humanity’s major unanswered questions and technological assistance in areas like communication, information processing, energy, transportation, and materials.

1-way reception. If ETI is detected through electromagnetic signals over interstellar distances that are intended to communicate with emerging civilizations, then there is a wide range of possible messages the signals could encode. ETI might be broadcasting merely its existence, telling nothing more than the sort of rudimentary information that humanity included in its own 1974 Arecibo transmission. Another extreme possibility is that a federation of ETIs might be broadcasting a continuously-updated “Encyclopedia Galactica” summarizing all their knowledge. Any such message would be designed to be readily intelligible at least at a superficial level, while advanced and detailed understanding might overtax humanity’s current linguistic or technological competence.

2-way communication. The third possibility is for 2-way communication, for which interactive latency is the critical variable. Interstellar communication would have a latency of at least decades or centuries, while communication with an ETI presence inside the solar system would have a latency of at most a few hours. Interstellar 2-way communication would merely be a series of 1-way transmissions and receptions. By contrast, intrastellar communication could permit the exchange of time-critical information or even material goods. ETI could greatly accelerate advances in

• mathematics;
• the physical sciences of physics, astronomy, and chemistry;
• the industries of energy, transportation, materials, manufacturing, computing, and communication; and
• the fields of artifactual life and artificial intelligence.

ETI would likely confirm much human philosophy and economics, expand sociology and political science, and significantly generalize psychology and linguistics. ETI would not be able to advance human history or medicine, or terrestrial biology and biotechnology in general. However, it is conceivable that ETI could give human paleontologists some data or even biological samples acquired from Earth millions of years ago.

5.7.5. Social Science / Futurology / Industrial Developments

Industrial Developments: the trends and changes in how humans carry out their activities.

Food Production

Genetic engineering will continue to improve crop yields and hardiness. By 2050 the price of fresh water will hit a permanent ceiling determined not by its natural supply but by the energy cost of its desalinization and transportation. By about 4000, humans will use genetic engineering to culture animal tissue in bulk instead of raising animals en masse. By about 5000, humans will have geno-industrial techniques for efficiently mass-producing intravenous food consisting only of glucose, amino acids, vitamins, minerals, and lipids. In parallel, humans will use neurological techniques to stimulate the culinary pleasure centers. Human population on earth will ultimately be limited not by food production but by heat pollution.

Sheltering

Over the next century or so, cities will be transformed from centers of industry and work to centers of culture and entertainment. Telecommuting will blur the distinction between home and office, and will allow humans to locate their homes by climate, culture, and time zone rather than by proximity to industry. Undersea or aerial dwellings are not likely to ever be built in significant numbers. Floating communities and estates will by 3000 become increasingly popular among humans unable to afford scarce land property in desirable climates or in both hemispheres. Human population on earth will ultimately be limited not by living space but by heat pollution. Only when heat pollution becomes a serious problem on Earth will humans start building significant populations beyond Earth.

Communication

Networking. Packet-switched networks like the Internet and its successors will be the primary technology humans use for remote and mass communication for at least several thousand years, and perhaps indefinitely. Communication costs will become independent of distance. Bandwidth will be limited only by the deployment of fiber optic lines and wireless local loops. Almost every device with any internal information state or human interface will have (usually wireless) connectivity to the global network. Multi-party telepresence will allow routine arbitrary amounts of social interaction among even distant family and friends. Public-key cryptography will always allow secure and private communication even if network traffic can be intercepted. Networking of ubiquitous stereo and spherically immersive audio-video sensors will combine with satellite and topographic data to allow real-time telepresence at, or virtual travel to, almost any interesting place on Earth. Archival storage of such sensor data will allow a sort of read-only time-travel into the past.

Storage. Storage and recording technologies will increase in capacity, speed, and affordability, such that the major cost associated with storage will be the intelligent effort required to organize or digest it. Humans will by 2100 be able to digitally record, archive, and transcribe as much as they want of what they see, hear, and say over their entire lifetimes. An ever-increasing majority of existing text, audio, video, and images will be digitally archived into what will be in effect a library of humanity searchable from anywhere on the global network. Existing automated translation technology will make archived texts available in any major human language. Real-time voice recognition will by 2010 be combined with automatic translation and speech generation to produce a crude but effective “universal translator” that will allow a monolingual human to converse (at least slowly and simply) with any speaker of any major human language.

Entertainment

Media. The digitization of music will be followed by the digitization of television, movies, books, and periodicals by 2020. This trend will lead to the routine unauthorized reproduction and distribution of copyrighted text, images, audio, and video. Executable and perishable data are the only data types exempt from this problem: software can decline to function if not licensed, and live data can be hard to reproduce and distribute quickly enough. (Databases can also be exempt, if their owners do not release entire copies and can prevent exhaustive enumeration of the entries.) Only extreme state action could minimize such unauthorized copying, by banning certain copying technologies.

Pre-recorded television programming will by 2030 no longer be mainly viewed on broadcast channels carrying occasional commercials. Such viewing will first move to time-shifted commercial-skipping recording and then to on-demand downloading financed by integrated banner and product placement advertising as well as by voluntary micropayment tips. Even live programming (e.g. sports and news) will have difficulty making viewers sit through commercial breaks. Photorealistic computer-generated imagery will by 2020 replace physical actors, sets, and locations for many video applications, but actors will still be used as input models.

Recreation. Tourism will expand to eventually include currently inaccessible places like the North and South Poles, the summit of Everest, seabottom shipwrecks, and even Tranquility Base on the moon. Virtual visual and auditory reality will by 2020 be the preferred way to play computer games. Humans will continue to play and spectate at sports, while outdoor and wilderness recreation will increase in popularity. Dogs and cats will continue to be humans’ favorite pets, but by 2300 they will be genetically improved (e.g. not to shed) and will have competition from pseudo-intelligent robotic “stuffed animals”.

Vice. Electronic gambling and pornography will become available to any adult who wants them, and adult access to prostitution will continue to expand. Most psychotropics will be legalized by 2150, especially as neurochemistry becomes more able to manage the problems of addiction and withdrawal.

Transportation

Transportation technology is mainly a function of the cost, size, and weight of energy storage and conversion technology. As artifacts become smaller and lighter and as humans become wealthier and more geographically dispersed, transportation will increasingly become focused on moving humans and the water they need.

Neighborhood. For distances of up to about ten kilometers, humans will increasingly be using battery-powered conveyances such as ultracompact cars, bicycles, and scootboards. Human bodily flight will by 2040 have overcome problems of safety and energy cost, but nuisance due to noise and wash will limit its use in urban areas. Nanotechnology could in theory allow for lighter-than-air bodily flight if it could just construct a lightweight vacuum sphere 5 meters in diameter.

Regional. For distances of up to several hundred kilometers, humans will continue to use cars and their successors indefinitely. In densely populated areas, conventional buses and trains will maintain their popularity, until the autodrive revolution in around 2060. Automated vehicular and traffic control will merge the best attributes of road and rail, creating a unified system of roads with rail-like traffic flows. By 2080 VTOL aircraft will be sufficiently cheap, safe, and easy to control that they will be as widely owned as recreational vehicles are in 2000. However, nuisance issues will restrict where they can land and takeoff, and safety will require that they fly under at least semi-automated traffic control in busy flight corridors.

Continental. Air travel will continue to get cheaper and more efficient in the first decades after 2000. By 2030 humans will apply supersonic and perhaps hypersonic travel to a few more commercial intercontinental routes. Air traffic congestion around busy metropolitan areas will be partly abated by automated traffic control but may ultimately require shifting some of the passenger load to long-range high-speed subsonic trains. Ships will continue to handle bulk transport without major changes such as heavy use of of hydrofoils or hovercraft.

Space. Space propulsion will eventually transition from chemical and ion to fusion and eventually antimatter.

Energy

Sources. Fossil fuels will continue to provide the bulk of humanity’s power through at least 2150. Solar energy will continue to provide humanity’s food (through photosynthesis) as well as a limited part of its power (through water and small amounts of wind, wave, and photovoltaics). Geothermal and fission energy will not supply major parts of humanity’s power, but by 2150 thermonuclear fusion will.

Applications. Plugged devices will continue indefinitely to be powered by electricity delivered as alternating current over a power grid that may eventually start taking advantage of superconductivity. Unplugged devices will continue to be powered by chemical batteries that will be the limiting technology for more and more applications. Heating devices will continue to be powered by a combination of fossil fuels and electricity. Internal combustion in vehicles will be supplemented by batteries and flywheels before being replaced by hydrogen fuel cells around 2075. Energy storage through anti-matter containment will by 2300 be feasible for space propulsion and military explosives. Safe and efficient anti-matter batteries would be as revolutionary as chemical batteries have been, but may not be practical before 2500.

Government

Communication technology and free market practice will continue to make government more open and more subject to competitive pressure. Electoral procedures will be modernized towards preference ballots, in which voters rank candidates and in successive rounds of ballot-counting the weakest candidate’s votes are redistributed until a candidate achieves a majority. Government will increasingly use market-based mechanisms such as vouchers, negative taxes, or outright privitization. Communications technology will promote less corrupt and more open practices in both politics and government.

Military

Strategic warfare. Ballistic and cruise missiles will continue to be easier and cheaper to attack with than to defend against. Thus nuclear missiles will continue indefinitely to be humanity’s premier technology for strategic warfare. (Other technologies of mass destruction are more suited to unconventional warfare.) Nuclear weaponry may ultimately be replaced by antimatter warheads only if antimatter generation and containment technology becomes effective.

Conventional warfare. Fear of nuclear warfare will continue to make conventional warfare an important capability. As it has since Pearl Harbor, conventional warfare will continue to be dominated by the ability of air power to find and strike surface targets (and also to move and supply ground forces). For reasons of miniaturization, agility, and pilot risk, combat aircraft will by 2060 tend to be remotely piloted (unless transmission of aircraft sensor data makes those aircraft much easier to target). Against opponents without competitive submarine power, sea warfare will continue to be dominated by aircraft carriers. Unless boutique anti-submarine and anti-missile technology can stay ahead of budget submarine and missile technology, aircraft carriers will by 2100 be replaced by submarines carrying aerial weapons systems. Land warfare will continue to be dominated by sensor and guidance technology, especially as all battlefield sensing and intelligence becomes integrated and distributed. Although camouflage, first sight, and first shot will increase in tactical importance, the hard-to-hide and easy-to-hit main battle tank will nevertheless enjoy at least several more decades of battlefield preeminence, thanks to its superior mobility and fire control. Orbital platforms will become increasingly important for communications and surveillance, even as they become more vulnerable to anti-satellite weaponry. This vulnerability will be offset somewhat by the stealthiness and redundancy enabled by miniaturization and lower launching costs.

Unconventional warfare. Fortunately, guerrilla and terrorist warfare will diminish as more and more of humanity enjoys liberty and prosperity. Unfortunately, the weapons available to terrorists will become more and more destructive. Terrorists will increasingly make use of chemical weapons, and will also attempt to create man-made catastrophes. Except possibly for denial-of-service attacks, “information warfare” will by 2020 be useful only against primitive systems that haven’t yet taken advantage of modern security techniques.

Ultimate warfare. At the limit, military technology will plateau at two abilities: to gather and use information about enemy plans and actions, and to collect and deploy energy used to disrupt and destroy the enemy’s war-making capability. By 2300 humanity will have mastered the fundamentals of nanotechnology and energy storage using anti-matter. At that time, even the most advanced alien aggressor might not really have a qualitative advantage in fundamental technology, but rather a (potentially overwhelming) quantitative advantage in its ability to deploy sensors, warheads, and nanobots. “Information warfare” will not be a significant weapon between separate and hostile civilizations, as information is too easy to secure when there is zero desire for communication and cooperation.

Education

Teaching. Communication and information technology will supplement human teachers and make them more productive, but they will remain essential for educating children.  Technology, the shortening workweek, and public policy innovation will make home schooling more common. As information resources grow in richness and as technology makes careers more dynamic, undergraduate education will increasingly focus on learning to learn. Undergraduate and continuing education will be transformed significantly by technology, but graduate research will continue to be like apprenticeship.

Knowing. Technology change and information growth will make meta-knowledge increasingly important: knowing what to know, knowing what one does and does not know, knowing what one can and cannot know, knowing how to find and evaluate knowledge, and knowing how to express, store, and classify knowledge.  Meta-knowledge will allow humans to take increasing advantage of information and communication devices and prostheses. However, direct downloading of knowledge will remain almost impossible without a detailed and thorough understanding of mental architecture that is likely to differ subtly but significantly from person to person.

Health Care

Delivery. Telemedicine will become more common, but health care delivery will continue to be provided mainly by physicians working in clinics and hospitals.

Diseases. The incidence of genetic diseases will slowly but steadily be minimized in the next few centuries by genetic screening and engineering. Treatments for the major infectious, immunological and cancerous diseases will be developed through several more centuries of continued research. Curing the major neurological and aging-related diseases will take much of the coming millennium. Obesity and other nutritional diseases will be cured in the next two centuries by advances in pharmacology and in artificial foods. More and more forms of injury will be made non-lethal through surgery and repairable through transplants and prosthetics.

Longevity. Humans will increase their longevity by finding ways to preserve the body, the brain, and the mind. Expected and maximum human longevity will increase by at least thirty years by 2100. Will humans find a way to keep the body or at least the brain alive indefinitely?

Manufacturing

Robotics will continuously increase in importance in manufacturing. Automation will make hardware design and manufacturing increasingly like software design and manufacturing. That is, absolute manufacturing costs will continuously drop, but design and development will remain relatively costly even while becoming absolutely more productive. Ultimately, the cost of material goods will be the amortized cost of specifying and designing them plus only the marginal energy required to manufacture and deliver them.

Merchandising

Disintermediation is the removal of intermediaries (such as retailers, sales agents, and brokers) from transactions between suppliers and consumers armed with information to which formerly only the intermediary had access. Disintermediation driven by information and communication technology will continue to make transactions cheaper and markets more efficient and pricing more competitive. Intermediaries will continue to disappear in markets where they enjoyed quasi-exclusive access to information (initially travel, auto retail) or where they retail fungible items that can be well-described through telepresence (initially books, music, electronics). Fixed pricing will increasingly give way to auctions and reverse auctions. Suppliers will continue to cut design and inventory costs by allowing consumers to directly specify what they want produced by the suppliers’ automated plants.

Brokering

Disintermediation will continue to revolutionize or obsolete conventional practice in most brokerage markets. However, the markets themselves for money, equity, commodities, risk (insurance), and space (real estate) will operate indefinitely, joined by markets for natural-resource consumption and pollution.

Services

Most service occupations that can be automated without artificial intelligence or mobile robotics have already been automated. Exceptions are some service occupations in industries like transportation and media, which will be automated in the coming decades using sophisticated (but not truly intelligent) information processing technology.

5.7.6. Social Science / Futurology / Sociopolitical Developments

Sociopolitical Developments: the trends and changes in how humans behave.

Economic Developments

Human standards of living will continue to rise indefinitely because human productivity will continue to rise indefinitely. Productivity is a function of per-worker physical capital (investment), per-worker human capital (education), and capital efficiency (innovation).  By 2300 most of humanity will approach the per-worker levels of education and physical capital of the original industrialized nations. Capital efficiency will continue to rise due to technological and industrial developments. The ultimate limit to terrestrial productivity and living standards will be heat pollution.

Economic globalization will continue as the developing world industrializes. By 2100 most of humanity will be using a common currency descended from the American dollar. Inflation will continue to be held to frictional levels of 1% to 3%, while real interest rates will remain indefinitely around 3%.

The workweek will continue to shorten until around 2300 when it reaches about 20 hours, where it will plateau due to psychological factors similar to those that fix humans’ daily transportation budget between 1 to 3 hours. Retirement age will continue to decrease on average while retirement itself becomes less clearly delineated. Careers will fade gradually into lengthy semi-retirements that include sabbaticals, avocational employment, and portfolio management. The share of personal income derived from investments will rise compared to that derived from wages. Increases in wealth and automation will minimize the need for labor but never eliminate the need for work. Rather, work will increasingly consist of analyzing and deciding what is to be made or done and how machines can make or do it.

How will the savings and discount rates be affected by increasing longevity? Why are the returns to capital less than its estimated 30% share of all production?

Political Developments

Since the Renaissance the natural trend toward political and economic liberty has been resisted by three kinds of forces:

• tyranny, whether monarchic, autocratic, plutocratic, or ethnic;
• economic securitarianism, manifested as socialism and communism; and
• moral securitarianism, driven by fideist religion.

The Age of Liberation that erupted in 1989 will by 2020 have eliminated almost all overt tyranny. The major exception will be entrenched and sometimes subtle ethnic tyrannies that will linger for decades until asphyxiated by economic development and modernized communications. Socialism and communism having been discredited, economic securitarianism will linger (perhaps indefinitely) only as the sustaining sentiment behind welfare statism. The moral securitarianism motivated by fideist religion will remain the most serious global obstacle to human liberty, and will not fade until roughly 2100.

Global government will emerge slowly over the next few hundred years, as global regulatory bodies are set up to handle more and more government functions. Thus global government will emerge not necessarily from the UN and EU but from organizations like ISO and WTO. Only by around 2500 will there be a truly global federal government with sovereign legislative, executive, and judicial powers. Any extra-planetary colonies will be federated into the global government no differently than terrestrial political units. Only the communications latency of interstellar colonization would create the need for sovereignties independent of Earth’s.

Private property and relatively free markets will endure indefinitely. Absolute poverty will continue to diminish as per-capita productivity continues to rise. Institutional relative poverty will continue in the absence of social policies to discourage dependency and encourage private accumulation of human and financial capital. Digital reproduction and distribution of copyrighted expressions will become increasingly rampant and could only be deterred through Gestapo-style inspections of digital watermarks. As a result, copyright will by 2040 be redefined to limit only commercial competition with the owner and abuses of attribution. Purchasing of copyrighted expression will be replaced by voluntary micropayments (of money or attention) made directly to copyright owners.

Packet-switched communication technology will affect politics only in limited ways. Voters will have almost unlimited access to information about candidates’ positions, but unfortunately will remain too complacent to use that access effectively. There will be calls to let voters use regular electronic referenda to enact or at least veto legislation. Fortunately, it will be recognized that the electorate remains too uninformed and impulsive to allow this dangerous form of mob rule.

Enfranchisement of fetuses will gradually cease to be a hot issue in America because birth control by 2100 will have drastically reduced the incidence of abortion. Future-phobes will continue to oppose every advance in biotechnology, but in the end their opposition will succeed only when an advance threatens health or property and doesn’t just offend their moral sensibilities. Human consumption of meat and dairy will not be outlawed in the long term, as animal rights will not be extended beyond freedom from torture and extinction. These animal rights will be recognized in machines when by 2200 they exhibit convincing affect and possess artifactual life. Around the same time, such machines will be recognized as persons if they exhibit artificial intelligence.

Vice. Electronic gambling and pornography will become available to any adult who wants them, and adult access to prostitution will continue to expand. Most psychotropics will be legalized by 2150, especially as neurochemistry becomes more able to manage the problems of addiction and withdrawal. Tobacco and alcohol will remain legal. Firearms licensing will become increasingly strict, but even handguns will remain legal for some people to own.

Sociological Developments

Humans will indefinitely remain pair-bonded and omnivorous. The number of native human languages will continue to decline drastically as smaller societies become linguistically absorbed into larger ones. English will become increasingly widespread, especially as a second language. Its status as the global second language will enable it to become the native language of a majority of humans by 2600, and of 90% of humans by 3000. A parallel process of increasing intermarriage will significantly blur racial and ethnic distinctions.

When by around 2300 the rest of humanity has closed the development gap with the industrialized world, Earth’s population will stabilize near 20 billion. Increasing longevity will result in an average age decades older than ever before. Any progress toward indefinite longevity will, as is typical of increases in living standards, probably decrease the birth rate. The long-term population of the Earth will be limited primarily by heat pollution.

Genetic engineering will increasing allow parents to screen and tune the traits of their children. Sale of gametes and surrogacy services will become more widely accepted. Cloning will mainly be used for reasons of sentimentality and reproductive difficulty. Eugenics will never be a mandatory social policy, but widespread voluntary genetic engineering will have a similar effect.

Religion will decline due to the ongoing loss of faith. Christianity will be hollowed out and diluted into a bland mysticism. Islam will follow along the same track but about 150 years behind. Being already more mystical, Hinduism and especially Buddhism will linger as phenomena more ethnocultural than religious, much like Judaism and Shintoism already are.

Copyright 2001-2003 Brian Holtz

Brian Holtz’s online book: Human Knowledge: Foundations and Limits

About Brian Holtz

World at Risk

Peter R. Wills

Biological systems display extraordinary dynamic complexity. They are integrated both within and across multiple levels in time and space. The highest level where intricate dynamic complexity is evident is the domain of global evolution. Entire species continually appear and disappear in a pattern extending over billions of years. The lowest level of dynamic complexity in biology is the domain of elementary biochemical and molecular genetic processes. These processes occur in microscopic cells, and take times as short as a millionth of a second to reach completion.

The authorities who assess the environmental and ecological impacts of genetically engineered organisms usually ignore the complex patterns of causation that are characteristic of biology. This is because no-one has sufficient scientific understanding of biological processes to analyse adequately or predict accurately change in complete systems of any size: cells, organisms, ecosystems or our planetary biosphere. As a result of this ignorance, releasing the products of genetic engineering into the environment puts the world of nature at risk of harm that we don’t yet know about.

Biological systems are characteristically hierarchical and there is a constant interplay between events at different levels. This interplay extends from the events that happen very slowly on a global scale right down to the most rapid events observed on a microscopic scale. A unique molecular event, like a mutation occurring in particularly fortuitous circumstances, can be amplified to the extent that it changes the course of evolution. On the other hand, the global environment, now moulded by aeons of biological activity, has been very influential in determining things that happen far more rapidly and on a scale smaller than we can perceive: the biochemical transformations of ordinary cellular metabolism.

To assess the effects of genetic engineering we must understand how biological networks operate. However, we must also keep in mind the fundamental limitations placed on our ideas and pictures of complex biological systems and their dynamic behaviour.

Some of the networks of interaction that we find at different levels of biological organization are, from the top down:

1. the evolutionary tree of life
2. ecological networks
3. the genetic control networks of organisms
4. the protein interaction network in cells
5. the metabolic network in cells

Summary   Levels   Assessing the Effects   Remote Causation   X

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Thanks for the link to CALRESCO

Reposted from Project Renaissance.

Nuclear Waste Disposal
Making the Problem into a Solution

Win Wenger, Ph.D.

For years, we have been creating and conducting thinktanks using various methods for creative problem-solving. On some occasions we have been able to run several thinktanks at the same time in parallel on the same issue or problem, each using different methods—perhaps the only place on Earth where this has been done, and very instructive about those methods.

Occasionally we focus on a different solution to one of the great “impossible” problems of this country or of the world. This present article, excerpted from the periodic Winsights column running on this website, shows how to dispose of our overflowing nuclear wastes…

Can we make part of the problem into part of the solution?

Can the most nightmarish part of our environmental and global pollution problem actually provide a major part of the solution?

Let’s look at power sources:

There’s only so much hydroelectric potential to go around.

Conventional, fossil-fuel-burning power stations—

• pollute air and water;
• worsen our accumulating world greenhouse CO2 effect;
• if oil-fired, worsen our trade deficits and national dependency.

Solar power—after many decades, we’ve never yet managed to master the art or science of making it economical on a large scale. Hopes for space-based solar power have slipped another generation further back with the successive retreats of plans for the U.S. Space Station.

Geothermal power—it pollutes air and water.

Ocean waves and tidal inlets—after many decades we’ve never managed to make them into an economical power source.

Temperature differences within different layers of part of the ocean—after more than a decade we’ve not yet managed to make it economically feasible as a power source. Perhaps the same principle could become feasible with the sharper temperature differences found in groundwater in desert regions. (Aluminum and bauxite companies, and municipal power companies in the southwest, please note!)

Controlled fusion power—it seems more out of reach now than when we first invented nuclear reactors, and “cold fusion” has gone into the books as an historic example of myth and hysteria in science.

Conservation of power, as relatively a power source, has begun to bump into its limits. Thermal insulation of buildings has run into radon. We don’t seem to be able to push Detroit into much higher fuel efficiencies. Social resistance to further measures is climbing unless we radically adjust incentives. Only the computer revolution has significantly reduced power demand, and how much further can that aspect go?

Nuclear reactors are not only directly dangerous, a la 3-Mile Island and Chernobyl, but their greatest problem is the continued accumulation of radioactive wastes, already far more than we’ve figured out how to handle and potentially the most lethal threat to all life on Earth. To build additional conventional nuclear reactors would be one of the most irresponsible decisions in the annals of history! (Though many more such continue to get constructed around the world, in such ideally stable and morally dependable states as North Korea and Iran, and elsewhere….)

So what is left?—Those very same radioactive wastes already produced!

The end product of radioactivity is heat—enough heat, when brought together, to melt and pump sodium as a thermal conductor, or oil or steam if less than that, to drive turbines or other power-generating devices.

Can there be much doubt that, as a working power source, a given set of radioactive “waste” would receive much more careful handling than it does now as “waste”? Still dangerous, but the assembly of radioactive wastes into “secondary,” thermal reactors has to be counted as a major safety improvement over today’s situation.

Every unit of power generated from radioactive “waste” is that much less greenhouse effect, that much less air and water pollution, that much less fossil fuel used up, that much less foreign trade deficit and dependency resulting from more conventional power generation.

Unlike conventional nuclear reactors, such “secondary” reactors from radioactive “waste” will not generate more such waste. In fact, there will be less such waste, because:

It moves stuff from essentially uncontrolled “dumps” into much more carefully handled power plants; and

Its power can begin to replace conventional nuclear power, thus reducing the rate at which further such wastes are being created! Power-starved industries can again prosper and expand.

Internationally, there would be no longer any excuse to accommodate North Korea, Iran, and dozens of other countries in the building of their waste-producing reactors—we could make a major export industry out of helping them consume their wastes into power instead, no more worries about creating bomb materials!

Design and building of these “secondary reactors” will also be a useful conversion of some of the technical resources of our dwindling defence industry, and a good spur to our economy, perhaps coming at a time most needed in our economic cycle whose long-running upside by now has to be aging and vulnerable!

In the 1940s and ’50s we made the basic national decision, echoed elsewhere, to build regular nuclear power plants and to treat their non-power output as waste, rather than as part of a thermal, secondary power retrieval system. Whatever the economics were then as regards such secondary retrieval, those economics have certainly changed since, and the whole issue certainly bears rethinking.

When we originally made that basic national decision, we were in the throes of a technological fantasy about limitless clean nuclear power. Fusion power was just around the corner, we had not yet come to appreciate how hard it is to keep up safety standards in large-scale enterprises and over long periods of time, and we’d certainly not anticipated or come to appreciate the extent of the problem that we are now posed vis-a-vis horrendously accumulating, dangerous, nowhere safely disposable radioactive wastes. Each of these factors by itself fully justifies we rethink that decision of not converting radioactive wastes into secondary thermal retrieval power reactors. Taken together, it’s quite remarkable that no one is exploring the issue.

It looks like the main reason this recourse has lain neglected so long is that it is such an easy, low-cost way both to generate power and to handle the wastes. It’s not “cutting-edge.” The romantic frontiers of technology have long gone far beyond it so no one is looking there to make an exciting career or to cut exciting research grant proposals. It’s about as exciting as burning garbage for power—which in fact it is! But what it could do for our power needs colliding with our environmental needs colliding with our political needs colliding with the needs of people living near where those teeming-over wastes are being stored—Now that does look pretty exciting…. And whatever the economics were then; and whatever the economics may be now, there is a very simple, direct and easy way to change those economics for the better:

Exempt from all taxes, for a decade, income from commercial exploitation of a long list of substances hitherto known as dangerous and toxic wastes (including radioactive wastes).

Tax such income at half rates for the decade following and at normal rates thereafter. To take advantage of the tax break, all sorts of uses will come out of the woodwork to use up such “wastes.” Any foregone tax revenues during that interval would be many, many times made up for by what we would otherwise have to spend in protecting and restoring our livingspace from those dangerous wastes, and our absolute societal and global costs saved would be many times more even than that!

(Our apologies to all “flat-taxers!” But would you flat-taxers prefer to see the government continue to be the main means by which these various desperate methods are addressed?—Or would you rather see taking care of this situation the private sector, which private sector has hitherto found it uneconomic to address it on its own? Those are your only two options unless you’d rather let those desperately dangerous wastes continue to build!…)

Until World War II, a major part of the history of the industrial revolution was a matter of each generation’s finding commercial uses for the waste by-products and overlooked resources of the previous generation. Since then we appear to have let matters in this regard get away from us. The proposedtax incentive would bring us back in line with this historical precedent and, further, would be very much in line with current social efforts to reclaim and recycle specific wastes such as plastic and aluminum.

Conclusion

We should immediately proceed to study the feasibility and simple design of secondary thermal recovery power plants using some of our radioactive wastes. The wastes we are so anxious (and unable) to control now should be made available to commerce under appropriately controlled and well-understood conditions. We should also begin immediately to determine how best to define and apply the proposed tax incentive to encourage the commercial using-up of all sorts of toxic and dangerous substances with which we’ve let our world become overrun.

Step One: Please discuss this proposal with at least one other person whom you respect.

Step Two: If this idea survives your Step One, please get in touch with us at Project Renaissance or to the Forum at the Beyond Human website.

Step Two-and-a-Half: Any proposed new solution to any major problem is, by definition, controversial. If this one stirs any interest at all, we expect to see flak on it. Flak there will be. Some of it may be justified.

If you have criticism of this solution, please send it to me together with permission for me to publish it in a future Winsights column and/or website. Such criticism, if it’s good, I very well might so publish and thank you!

Comments to Win Wenger

Reposted from Ming the Mechanic.

Renaissance

Flemming Funch

In times of change it can be useful to look back at other times of cultural change, at least those that can be considered successful in retrospect. The Renaissance was one of those periods. ‘Renaissance’, is French for ‘rebirth’. It describes the intellectual and economic changes that occurred in Europe from the fourteenth through the sixteenth centuries. Europe emerged from the stagnation of the Middle Ages and experienced an age of artistic, social, scientific and political innovation and new thought, as well as financial growth.

The Renaissance is usually considered to have originated in Florence, Italy. Fifteenth-century Florence was a self-governed, independent city-state. The basis of its economic success was its twelve artist guilds that regulated the trades. Wealthy guild members held position in government and were very influential in both society and politics. Because of its strong economy and a political philosophy that was dedicated to the welfare of the city, Florence thrived. The Florence banking business was also a foundation for its success. The Florentine gold coin known as the florin was of such reliable purity that it became the standard coinage throughout Europe.

Many factors contributed to the emergence of the Renaissance throughout Europe:

Gutenberg invented the printing press in 1445, which made it possible to more widely read about philosophy and science, and the stranglehold of the church was diminished. And people started to read ‘classics’, texts from ancient Greece and Rome, which had been completely ignored for centuries. That inspired a re-cycling and re-invention of good things from many sources.

Improvements in navigation and map making made it possible to travel farther than before, and there was a lively trade, bringing in exotic spices and gems and fabrics from foreign lands.

Architecture was inspired by the ancient Greeks and Romans, and by newfound mathematical principles, and a fascination for harmonious proportions, the golden mean, symmetry.

There were also many negative factors that have inspired the need for an explosion of innovation. Europe had been devastated by the plague, kept in the dark by the church, and life had just been hard work and misery for most people.

Any of that we can use today? Well, it was about bringing in many different new and old influences. It was about an increased ability to communicate information in writing. It was about advances in science that made it possible to understand the world better. It was about increased ability to trade. It was about versatile geniuses who were both artists, scientists, philosophers, architects and politicians, who would weave these many influences together. …All of which might very well apply to our situation now, with the Internet, and suddenly increased facilities for interacting with cultures and with knowledge we were isolated from before.

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 Here are some references on the Renaissance: [link1] [link2] [link3] [link4] [link5].

More of Flemming Funch.

 

NEEDED: Department of Planetary Management

Joseph George Caldwell, Ph.D.

Because the current system of planetary management (large human numbers and industrial activity) is causing mass species extinctions, there is an urgent need for widespread discussion of alternative planetary management schemes.  The Foundation websites (mirror) have initiated discussion of this subject, but the public awareness of the site and its concepts is very limited.  I propose to establish departments of planetary science / planetary management at major universities, preferably in countries speaking different languages and located around the world, to address the planet’s human-caused mass species extinction, identify planetary management schemes that will solve the problem, discuss methods for their implementation, and prepare for their establishment.

I hereby request visitors to the Foundation websites to pass this proposal along to relevant parties, including universities that might be willing to establish and operate such a department, and philanthropists who might be interested and willing to underwrite the costs of doing so.

Below is a tentative list of courses for a one-year program of study leading to a Master’s degree in Planetary Science or Planetary Management.

Proposed Courses for Semesters 1 and 2 (each course three hours’ credit):

1. Understanding the Earth’s Biosphere (biology, ecology, environmental science, chemistry, physics)
   
   
2. Human Nature and History (understanding human history ‡ la Arnold Toynbee (A Study of History), human social and political systems (e.g., feudalism, capitalism, socialism, Marxism, Plato’s “republic,” synarchy), sociology, psychology, religion, spiritual science, economics)
   
   
3. Long-Term-Sustainable Planetary Management (minimal-regret populations, synarchy; synthesis and evaluation of alternatives; implementation plans)
   
   
4. Management Science (statistics, optimization, operations research, statistical decision theory, game theory, simulation and modeling, systems engineering, demography, economics, population science, demography, strategic planning, military science, organizational development and management)
   
   
5. Social Science (ethics, religion, spiritual science, metaphysics, psychology, sociology, history, culture)

The preceding list provides a general idea of what I have in mind.  If you have observations, comments, or requests for additional information, please send me an e-mail at mail@foundation.bw .

So far as I know, only two web sites focus on the relationship of human population to energy – my web site and Jay Hanson’s “Die-off” web site.  I got an e-mail from Hanson today (16 January 2003) informing me that he is terminating his leadership of the Die-off site, hoping that someone else will continue to operate it.  The Earth’s biosphere is dying and mankind will be extinct within this century if substantial change does not occur, yet no one seems to care.  There is a pressing need for immediate and effective action in this area.  An immediate need is for a planetary management curriculum development center, to provide detailed course outlines and instructional materials.  Please help!  Please send this message to a friend!

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Joseph George Caldwell is a professional statistician. He has supervised economic development projects in the Caribbean, Southeast Asia, and Africa. Dr. Caldwell holds a PhD degree in mathematical statistics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a BS degree in mathematics from Carnegie Mellon University.

More by Dr. Caldwell

The following is the prologue for a new book by Peter Corning. It will be published April 2003 by the Cambridge University Press.

“True innovation occurs when things are put together for the first time that had been separate.”

– Arthur Koestler

Nature’s Magic

Peter A. Corning, Ph.D.

When Arthur Koestler, the famed novelist and respected polymath, penned those words more than 30 years ago, he was seeking to draw our attention to a phenomenon that is greatly underrated and vastly more important even than Koestler imagined. I call it nature’s magic.

Grand theories are commonplace these days. It seems that new ideas must shout to be heard. So the claims for this book may sound like hyperbole as usual. The thesis, in brief, is that synergy — a vaguely familiar term to many of us — is actually one of the great governing principles of the natural world. It has been a wellspring of creativity in the evolution of the universe, and it has greatly influenced the overall trajectory of life on earth. It has played a decisive role in the emergence of humankind. It is vital to the workings of every modern society. And it is no exaggeration to say that our ultimate fate depends upon it.

All this may sound like so much dust-jacket rhetoric, but the “Synergism Hypothesis” (as I call it) is a serious scientific theory that is fully consistent with Darwin’s theory, and with the canons of the physical, biological and social sciences, not to mention the new science of complexity. The theory, in a nutshell, is that synergy is not only a ubiquitous effect in nature; it has also played a key causal role in the evolutionary process. It has been at once the fountainhead and the raison d’etre for the progressive increase in complexity over the broad span of evolutionary history. Far from being law-like and predictable, however, this trend has always involved an open-ended, creative, historically-constrained experiment in which economic criteria (broadly defined) have predominated. Complexity – in nature and human societies alike — is not the product of some inexorable force, or mechanism, or “law”. It has been shaped by the immediate functional advantages — the “payoffs” — arising from various forms of synergy.

What is Synergy?

How do I define synergy? Very broadly, the term refers to the combined, or cooperative effects produced by the relationships among various forces, particles, elements, parts or individuals in a given context — effects that are not otherwise possible. The term is derived from the Greek word synergos, meaning to “work together” or, literally, to “co-operate.” Synergy is often associated with the cliche, “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts” (which dates back to Aristotle, in The Metaphysics), but this is actually a rather narrow and even misleading characterization. In fact, synergy comes in many different forms; sometimes wholes are not greater than the sum of their parts, just different. We will examine the phenomenon of synergy in greater depth in the next few chapters. Here are just a few brief examples, starting with some of the basic forces of nature:

• The center of gravity of an object, say an automobile, is actually a synergistic effect. It depends upon how the combined weight of all its parts is distributed, as we learned in school. But if we were to disassemble the car, its center of gravity would disappear; it would be parceled out (so to speak) among each of the 15,000 or so individual parts.
  
  
• The vortex, or whirlpool, that occurs when your bath water flows down the drain is actually a complex effect produced by the combined actions of several different forces — gravity, water pressure, air pressure, rotational forces, centrifugal forces, even the initial state of the bath water.
  
  
• “Supermolecules” of 50 atoms or more may take on wholly new collective properties that their lightweight cousins lack — greater stability, better binding capabilities, a different geometry, less energy dissipation (entropy) and the like.
  
  
• Chlorine and sodium are both toxic to humans by themselves, but when they are combined they produce a totally new substance that is positively beneficial (in moderate amounts) — ordinary table salt.
  
  
• Chrome-nickel-steel, an alloy synthesized from three natural elements, may be stronger by 35% than all of its constituents added together. In the bargain, chromenickel- steel has rust-free properties, another synergistic effect. (The nickel adds strength to the steel and the chromium reduces its tendency to oxidize.
  
  
• Synergy is commonplace in medicine and health care. One example is the effect produced by using Atropine and Prednisone together to treat eye inflammations. The Atropine serves to dilate the eyes so that the Prednisone, an anti-inflammatory drug, can work more effectively.
  
  
• Our alphabet is also highly synergistic. Take the words “rat”, “cat”, and “bat”. Each combination of letters produces a different image in the reader’s mind. But imagine what would happen if the vowels were removed. Like the coins that magically disappear into a prestidigitator’s folded handkerchief, the synergy would vanish and we would be left with the two-letter nonsense combinations rt, ct, bt.
  
  
• One cup of beans, eaten by itself, provides the nutritional equivalent of two ounces of steak. Three cups of whole grain flour consumed alone provides the equivalent of five ounces of steak. But when they are ingested together, they provide the equivalent of 9.33 ounces of steak, or 33% more useable protein. The reason is that their constituent amino acids are highly complementary. Grains are low in lysine, while legumes are low in methionine. When combined they compensate for each other’s deficiencies. In other words, the whole taco is truly greater, nutritionally, than the sum of its parts.
  
  
• Lichen, patchy growths that are found on tree-trunks, rocks and even bare ground in many woodlands areas, are legendary for their ability to colonize barren environments as well. The key to their success as “nature’s pioneers” lies in their complementary talents. Lichens actually consist of symbiotic partnerships between various kinds of green algae, or cyanobacteria, and fungi. (There are more than 20,000 different lichen species all told.) The algae or cyanobacteria are photosynthesizers. They provide energy-capturing services, while the fungi bring to the partnership both surface gripping and water-storage capabilities — talents that are especially useful in a harsh environment. The partners may even join forces to create a specialized reproductive organ called a thallus that produces combined, symbiotic spores. Together, the “team” can do what neither partner can do alone.
  
  
• “Tensegrity” (tensional integrity) refers to the way in which the counteracting forces of compression and tension can be used synergistically to achieve structural “integrity” in certain self-stabilizing physical structures. The term tensegrity was  coined by the well-known engineer-inventor Buckminster Fuller (who, incidentally, also promoted the concept of synergy) to characterize his most famous invention, the remarkable geodesic domes that today number in the hundreds of thousands world-wide. We now know that many kinds of tensegrity structures also exist in nature. One example is the appropriately-named “Buckminsterfullerine” — Carbon60 and several variants. The great stability and remarkable binding properties achieved by these recently synthesized “supermolecules” of pure carbon (affectionately known as “Bucky Balls”) are derived from their physical resemblance to geodesic domes and soccer balls. Another example, closer to home, is the human body. The tensegrity between our bones, muscles, tendons and ligaments gives our bodies their distinctive combination of structural stability and mobility. Likewise, every one of the ten trillion or so cells in each of our bodies is supported by an internal scaffolding, called a cytoskeleton, which is composed of actin filaments and microtubules. The actin filaments counteract pulling forces that are exerted on the cell and the microtubules resist compression forces. We are totally dependent upon these and many other kinds of synergy.
  

The Causal Role of Synergy in Evolution

Accordingly, I will argue that synergy ranks up there with such heavyweight concepts as gravity, energy, entropy, and information as one of the keys to understanding how the world works and how we got here — not to mention where we are going. Moreover, synergy has been a creative dynamo and a prolific source of innovation in evolution, as we shall see. Synergy was present at the “Big Bang.” It has been deeply involved in the evolution of our physical universe. Some time after the Earth first evolved, some 4.5 billion years ago, synergy provided the payoffs (the emergent functional effects) that arose in the still-mysterious process by which networks of exquisitely complex prebiotic molecules joined together to catalyze the first living systems. It also provided the “benefits” which, over time, led to the awesome complexity of photosynthesis. (Entire books have been devoted to describing our as-yet-imperfect understanding of how photosynthesis works. Synergy is found also in the intricate combination of labor in complex eukaryotic cells and in the “enchanted loom” of the human mind — to use the soaring image of neurobiologist Charles Sherrington — where wondrous new synergies are invented and actualized every day. In other words, the unique cooperative effects produced by various combinations of “parts” in a given context are themselves distinct, independent causes of subsequent evolutionary events.

The universe can be portrayed as a vast structure of synergies, a many-leveled edifice in which the synergies produced at one level serve as the building blocks for the next level. Moreover, unpredictable new forms of synergy, and even new principles, emerge at each level of organization. I like to call it a “Magic Castle” (with a nod to Walt Disney), because there is something truly magical about this creative aspect of nature. In the course of providing a guided tour of this Magic Castle (in Chapters Two, Three and Four), I will show that synergy is of central importance in virtually every scientific discipline, though it very often travels incognito under various aliases mutualism, cooperativity, symbiosis, win-win, emergent effects, a critical mass, coevolution, interactions, threshold effects, even non-zero-sumness).

According to the reigning dogma of evolutionary biology — commonly known as Neo- Darwinism — “random” gene mutations (and related molecular-level phenomena) are said to be the underlying source of creativity in evolution. It is said that the course of biological evolution has been shaped over time by relentless competition among “selfish genes.” I will argue that the Neo- Darwinists have got things skewed. In fact, it is the functional benefits — the survival advantages — produced by novelties of various kinds and at various levels (including even behavioral innovations, as we shall see) that have defined the trajectory of evolution. Contrary to the popular misconception, natural selection does not (literally) select genes. It differentially rewards (or disfavors) different genes, and gene combinations, based on the effects they produce in a given environment. It is the functional effects that matter to natural selection.

In this light, it is novel forms of functional synergy (cooperative effects) that have been responsible, over time, for shaping the progressive evolution of complexity in nature through a process that can be characterized (after biologist John Maynard Smith) as “synergistic selection.” I call this new paradigm “Holistic Darwinism,” and I side with the growing number of contemporary biologists who hold that evolution must be viewed as a multi-leveled process in which selfish genes are most often subordinated to the dictates of “selfish genomes” — synergistic systems; outlaw genes are the exception rather than the rule. The Synergism Hypothesis and the theory of Holistic Darwinism will be developed in some detail in Chapters Five and Six.

The “Synergistic Ape”

Many different theories of human evolution have been proposed over the years. (I will briefly describe some of them in Chapter Seven.) Humans have been variously characterized as the “killer ape,” the “naked ape” and the “talking ape.” We have been called “man the hunter,” “woman the gatherer,” and even the “selfish ape” (looking out primarily for ourselves and our kin).

However, I will propose a radically different scenario for human evolution. I will develop the theory that, in fact, we invented ourselves through a process that I have dubbed “Neo- Lamarckian Selection.” We are uniquely the “inventive ape.” Moreover, the many new kinds of synergy that our ancestors invented over the course of perhaps five million years played a starring role; we are also, quintessentially, the “synergistic ape.” Finally, the Synergism Hypothesis also applies to the explosive rise of complex human societies during the past few thousand years (as described in Chapter Eight). Indeed, the mostly unrecognized common denominator in every one of the recent game theory models (so-called) of cultural evolution is synergy. It is synergy that has been responsible for the evolution of cooperation in nature and humankind, not the other way around.

The Perils of Prediction

It is a common misconception that synergy always refers to positive effects; synergy is presumed always to be a good thing. But this is not so. Every day, in a thousand different ways, our lives are shaped, and re-shaped, by synergy. Yet our attitude toward it — our judgment about whether or not it is a good thing or a bad thing — depends upon our values and where we stand (or perhaps which side we’re on). In fact, there is a mirror-image on the “dark side” for every one of the different categories of positive synergy that I will describe in Chapter Two. I will discuss “negative synergy,” or sometimes “dysergy”, in some detail in Chapter Four (“Black Magic”). I will also highlight some special categories of positive and negative synergy — what I call the “Bingo Effect” (when some new combination crystalizes, often unexpectedly), as well as the twin phenomena of “synergy plus one” and especially “synergy minus one.” As we shall see, both kinds of disruptions may represent a potentially serious threat to any complex system.

A colleague, the science writer Connie Barlow, has pointed out that the Synergism Hypothesis is more than a hypothesis, or a theory. It also provides a world view that focuses on the effects produced by the relationships between things. It highlights a fundamental property of the universe and, more relevant for humankind, a fundamental property of human societies. One of the most important implications of this world view, in fact, is developed in the penultimate chapter, where it is argued that the enduring search for some hidden “law” of history — some deterministic force or mechanism — that will allow us to predict the future course of the “human career” (in anthropologist Richard Klein’s term) is fundamentally flawed. The “Neo-Pythagoreans” — as I call them — exclude a priori (by the very nature of their quest for universal “laws”) the contingent, historical, synergistic phenomena that shape the course of the evolutionary process. As a result, these theorists are blind to a major causal agency in evolution. What is required instead, I will argue, is a “science of history.”

The implications of this world view are discussed in the final chapter: “Conjuring the Future: What Can We Predict?” The synergy paradigm provides an answer to this “ultimate question” that is at once challenging, empowering and threatening. If we should choose to ignore these implications, we will do so at our peril.

Peter A. Corning, Ph.D. is the Director of the Institute for the Study of Complex Systems, Palo Alto, California.

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