(Nothing new here for anybody who has been reading my gemlog/phlog
closely for the past year or so, I'm just experimenting with
alternative presentations of the same basic arguments. Trying for
shorter and snappier and punchier this time.)
Of all the substances which can exist in the universe, which ones
are found on Earth, and which ones aren't?
Of those which are, which ones are abundant and which are rare?
Which ones participate in biogeochemical cycles and which ones don't?
Of those which are abundant and are of practical use to human
civilisation, which ones are just lying around on the ground free
for the taking and which ones are deeply embedded in ecosystems
which we cannot help but seriously damage by extracting and using
them, no matter how gently we do it?
Of those which need some kind of processing after extracting them,
what are the absolute minimum energy requirements for that processing
and what are the unavoidable byproducts?
Of those unavoidable byproducts, how many of them are dangerous to
human civilisation or ecosystems or both, and for how long?
The answers to these questions, and others like them, are of
existential importance to human civilisation. From the answers
to these questions follow, inescapably, the answers to questions
of the form "for how many years can a population of X humans with
an average lifespan of Y and a per-person material/energy/land
footprint of Z sustain itself before hitting some kind of limit?".
Note that these questions of existential importance are not
political questions! The answers to all of them are exactly the same
under capitalism as they are under socialism or anarchism or your
favourite trendy -ism that I haven't heard of yet. The answers to
these questions were fixed - in some cases literally set in stone -
before any humans were around to believe in -isms.
You cannot vote a finite resource into an infinite one, even with
a supermajority.
You can't pass a law that a food chain needs to keep functioning
even if one of its links is pulled out.
Note that these questions of existential importance are not
technological questions! At first glance they might seem it.
We can invent new techniques for finding and extracting and
processing resources, and of generating energy. Science and
technology and human ingenuity are real and powerful and they
honestly have done much to improve the human condition, but they
are not magic. We are not, in fact, as Gods. Buckminster Fuller's
idea of ephemeralisation, that every new generation of technology
uses less material and less energy to produce more output than the
last did, and that this trend will continue forever until eventually
we'll be able to do everything and anything at a cost of nothing is
simply delusional, it's magical thinking, it's like extrapolating a
straight line from two or three points early on an exponential curve.
The laws of thermodynamics put hard upper bounds on the maximum
possible energy efficiency of our machines.
No new technology can turn an endothermic chemical reaction into
an exothermic one or vice versa.
We're not going to invent new versions of the very stuff that the
world is made of, with different latent heats or bonding energies.
Thus, the answers to these questions of existential importance are
not under our control!
Who or what are they under the control of?
If you believe in a benevolent God who set things up and/or who
intervenes for human benefit, well, there's your answer, at least
potentially. Let's suppose you don't (sincerely no offence if you
do). Then probably you believe instead that the answers to those
questions were set as the consequence of a wide range of processes
unfolding over vast timescales in accordance with natural law.
Cosmological processes, geological processes, evolutionary processes,
the works, all of planetary science and all of the Earth sciences.
Those processes are not random. They unfold, as mentioned, in
accordance with natural laws, and they have systematic regularities
to them which we can understand. But what these processes *are* is
completely and utterly indifferent to the fate of human civilisation.
Geology does not give a damn whether we are ten billion or ten
thousand, whether we each live for one hundred years or fifty years,
whether we go extinct in millennia or decades. So from our point of
view, they might as well be random. We certainly shouldn't expect
answers which are in our favour to be more common than answers
which are not.
A perspective where we as humans get to decide, to dictate, how
many of us there should be and how long we should live and what our
minimum acceptable standard of life (which determines our various
minimum possible footprints) out to be, based on concerns like human
rights or human dignity or individual freedom, or whatever else,
and then that's the way it will be, must be, and if we bump into
problems making it that way then we have to knuckle down, roll up
our sleeves and innovate and solve problems until we get our way,
and to do anything else is some kind of awful regression, some
despicable defeatism, some failure to live up to our potential as
a species, well, that's a perspective which completely and utterly
misconstrues our situation.
Long term sustainable human civilisation isn't a Sudoku puzzle,
where no matter how hard it seems we know there's a unique solution
that was put there by design so if we plug away long enough we'll
get there.
It's not even a video game with randomly generated dungeons which
was play-tested and tweaked until it was empirically demonstrated
that most players can beat most of the levels, such that we at
least know we have a fighting chance.
It's more like a video game with dungeons generated uniformly at
random from the space of all possible dungeons with no consideration
whatsoever for playability. The odds are astronomically against us.
This isn't supposed to be nihilistic or defeatist. In particular I
want to emphasise that I am talking here about winning the long war
of keeping civilisation alive for hundreds of thousands of years,
for millions of years. That's not an absurd goal on the face of it.
Humans have already existed for hundreds of thousands of years.
Plenty of species on Earth have existed more or less unchanged
for millions of years. It's a thing species can do. But, the
long war is going to be totally irrelevant if we don't survive
the decisive battles looming on a much, much shorter timescale of
centuries or even decades. Politics and technology are powerless
against the hard limits that we are up against in the long war,
but they probably can make a real difference in the looming battles,
and we should do our best to use them both to our maximum advantage.
But if we manage to win those battles, what we will need in the
very long term is not political change, or technological change.
At least not alone, in a vacuum.
I'm always reluctant to use the word, but I have no alternative.
What we need in the long term is spiritual change.
I'm not talking about anything supernatural or metaphysical.
I'm talking about facing up to and accepting, deeply accepting, and
living and dreaming and planning for the future in full accordance
with the plain truth:
The Earth is not for us.
I'm not saying we don't have permission to be here, or that we don't
deserve to be here, or that the planet would be better off without
us, that we're a virus or a cancer or any of those tired old tropes.
I'm just saying that it wasn't setup and designed to be a stage
for us, or a playground, a place for us to prove ourselves or live
up to our potential or anything like that. The Earth doesn't
owe us anything. We shouldn't expect it to deliver whatever we
want if we ask it nicely enough. We would in fact be insane to
demand more from it than it can give, to insist that we deserve it.
We must learn to be content with what we can have, even if we are
capable of imagining more, and think more would be really cool, and
that we would really enjoy more. We must let go of our unbounded
ambition and our delusions of Godhood. Climbing the Kardashev
scale is not a moral imperative, just because we dreamed it up.
It's not a scoreboard! There's no shame in moving *down* the
scale. We might well have to. If so, let's be chill about it.
Anything less is a temper tantrum, a sign that we still haven't
learned the rules of the game. Let's not embarrass ourselves so.
