The Mosaic Effect: season 2, episode 3: chaos theory

  What do Richard Branson, Howard Bloom and ‘the Elders’ all have in common? and how does it portent the disintegration of the global human superorganism?

  I’m sure you’ve all laid awake at night wondering what the answer to that one might be…

podcast page here

Direct download: TME2.3-chaos_theory.mp3

Producing the Means for Seizure

part two: life on the edge of the power curve 2012-2050

Okay, so let’s change our approach a little bit. I’m assuming you can and have read this… so what might that look like, in a little more detail?

  Let’s start with the basics: chances are, within a few years, you will have been more or less priced out of the market for oil and gas. You might be able to snag a bit for emergency use, or critical transport, but most everyone has to carpool, bike or bus it. If you’re fortunate enough to have trains where you live, then that’s great. This trend gets worse as time goes on. Expect something similar to cuba, where traffic cops routinely stop and stuff cars with extra seats, or huge flatbed trucks take on the function of busses.

  The good news is, the cottage industry for ethanol is ramping up. And no, I don’t mean this corn ethanol bullshit. I mean decomposing waste matter into alcohol on a radically decentralised basis. Eventually this becomes an integrated part of all farming operations, as the technology for alcohol distillation is refined and the design of organisms that digest sugar ( and eventually cellulose)  efficiently become more common.  There will almost certainly never be enough of this to replace all the gas we used to use, but it will be able to take over the critical stuff. The need will create the results. This is not new technology mind you. The first diesel engines were made to work on alcohol, after all, and it’s only a historical curveball that hooked us into ‘rock oil’. Most people will eventually have something the size of a rainbarrel that breaks down kitchen waste and dead plant matter into usable fuel. You will occasionally have to deal with the nuisance of these mutant bugs eating holes in your clothes, or some minor structural damage to wood objects… but hey, shit happens.

  Something similar starts to happen with food. A combination of price inflation,  wage deflation and contraction of economic activity makes imports of food pretty dodgy, and expensive. Wall mart, Safeway, all the globalised chains…these all go away. Food in general gets more expensive, and most people take up gardening on their balcony, backyard or community park. 

  This is all well and good until people start actually starving. You’d yank a couple tomatoes if you were starving, right? Eventually a combination of food riots, influxes of starving refugees, and general anxiety lead to most communities, or even neighborhoods, to form up into gangs/militias for self protection, and preservation of resources. You will probably have to deal with the sad spectacle of families going door to door begging for food, or offering to work for it.

  One starts to spend a lot of time pulling up pavement to expose useful soil, composting waste and capturing rainwater. There’s a pretty good chance you don’t have a job anyway. If you do, you probably work from home. It’s cheaper for everyone that way.

 Which brings us to the low end of the technology situation. I mean, we have iphones now, and wireless broadband is becoming ubiquitous. Eventually technology will be cheaper than food. You can already talk to anyone on earth with a device in your pocket, and carry around every piece of music you own. Eventually it’ll be all the music, all the video, all the pictures and all the books. In your pocket. You can put on a headset and carry on a conversation as if you were in the same room with anyone, or any number of anyones, from anywhere. Why even leave the house? Except to harvest the garlic, that is. The ability to make and hyperdistribute your own cultural material worldwide only accelerates the breakdown of centralised forms of media.

  A small blip occurs when the rolling blackouts start. Or depending on where you live, they started a long time ago, and become permanent. Most of the essential widgets are run by efficient integrated solar panels, and everything else gets run by ethanol generators. Once again, not enough electricity to run your air conditioning, or baseboard heaters; but enough for the lights, the cooking and to recharge your widgets.

 Now all of this so far presumes that you’re really lucky and you live in a (reasonably) sane part of the world. Either that, or you’re smart enough to see the writing on the wall and get the fuck out of dodge when things get bad. A lot of places will be subject to the no-go zone effect. The government loses the ability to project force, and provide services to a region, and said region is simply dispensed with. No cops, no soldiers, no utilities, and no trucks bringing anything. It is entirely possible to fill in all those parts of the equation, as I’ve said above, but the story of any particular place comes in how well that happens, or doesn’t.

  All of this really means a radical redefinition of the power dynamics in society and in the world. What happens when you have the ability to provide your own security, your own services, your own food, energy, culture? Whether by your choice or not, this is what is going to happen. Embracing it will make it easier. The whole idea of  ‘top down’ is going to fall by the wayside. Technology, the proliferation of ideas and institutional de-evolution will level the power curve for everyone to large degree.

   No, you won’t have cruise missiles, tanks and stealth bombers, but within a short time those things will be mostly irrelevant, just as they are mostly irrelevant in iraq or afghanistan. You don’t subdue a wireless, super-empowered, self-sufficient open source retribalised 21st century hyperculture with tanks and bombs. It’s impossible.

  But there are bound to be those stupid enough to try, and this is where it gets a bit scary. You see, it’s already possible right now, for someone of modest education and skills to manufacture a deadly infectious pathogen and it’s only going to get easier. The kind of people who do this are mostly dysfunctional reactionaries, but when you place the whole world in a hyper-connected echo chamber of threatening ideas, there will be no shortage of people with intelligence, equipment, and substandard coping skills.

  The biotech revolution is following an accelerating curve even faster than the one for computing. Eventually, you will know at least a few people who are running a gene sequencer in the basement. Which is good for when some fuckstick lets loose a hemorrhagic fever in your vicinity, and you need a vaccine, but not so good when the backlash comes from what remains of the ‘powers that be’, and a platoon of special forces drops out of a helicopter to machine gun you and burn down your neighborhood. 

 I mean, yeah we expect government to protect us from psychotic people with bioweapons, that’s a good thing. But they won’t discriminate. The crackdown against biotech will threaten to take away the radical life extension, disease elimination, stem-cell regeneration and every kind of weird gene alteration imaginable being cooked up in an environment like this.

  The instructive analogy is filesharing. Every so often, the big boys smash a central hub of filesharing with lawsuits, raids and jail time. And then what? They can’t arrest everyone, they can’t even find everyone, so all that happens is darwinism. The survivors get smarter, sneakier, harder to track and develop more and better ways to keep filesharing.

   But what if that file is a complete genome? And if people these days can crack iphones, they will sure as hell be able to make biotech equipment, when the time comes.

  The sort of chaos you see in the world of intellectual property, will soon be the chaos of our own genetics. And all of this taking place in the social and political chaos of what was the world we once knew. And this is chaos in the mathematical sense, which opens the doorway to a hidden order…

next???

It’s (still) only the end of the world again: 2008

Part 1: the curbstomping at the end of history

Who’d have thought the future would get here so soon?

  I’d been thinking for awhile of formally checking in on my future predictions series, to see how far along we’ve come ( not so much the later series which is really more about my method of discerning future trends). And perhaps adjust my thinking a bit.

 What  I found alarming was that, not only are my predictions for the next five years on track, but things I thought were at least ten, maybe even twenty years out, are starting to happen now. Also my long term, conceptual view has gained a few wrinkles, which I’ll clarify shortly.

  I would obviously suggest you read the original three articles ( and indeed most of the stuff in my futurism category, to get a feeling for where I’m coming from ), but if you can’t be bothered here’s the capsule summary for the first bit. The next two parts to follow…

 the next five years(written in 2006, so that covers up till mid 2011, I guess):

-  past peak of oil and gas extraction

- economic meltdown due to loss of confidence in the dollar, among other things.

- political implosion of the neocon regime and the republican party in general, with a possible realignment of US politics in general, most likely towards some kind of reactionary neo-fascism.

-general war in the middle east and africa, which is really more of an open source guerrilla style bloodbath, and metastasizing into other locations.

  Now, none of these are rocket science, at least not in my book. The writing has been on the wall for some years before I even wrote that old piece.

 If I remember correctly, oil was at around 60$ a barrel in 2006, and now it’s hovering around a 100$. All promises to open up the taps from saudi arabia and whatnot have been proven just hot air. The noise about alternative energy just gets louder and louder, and the price of oil and gas just keeps going up.

  We’re probably in the plateau phase, where all the spare capacity gets used up, as supply starts to shrink and demand grows at the usual steady rate. I have no problem putting off a serious demand crunch for another few years, as there is a lot of slack in the system and waste to be stripped out, before we really start hitting a wall here. People in other parts of the world are already fucked, mind you, but that is, unfortunately, not much new.

Don’t worry, we’re fucked too, just not right away. When that crunch hits and there is an estimated 3% growth in demand every year, matched with a 3% decline in supply, then you’re looking at super spikes in price and what they call ‘demand destruction’, Where whole supply chains start to collapse because they’ve been priced out of the market.

 Keep in mind that 3% is being cautious. The third biggest field in the world is looking at a fifty percent decline over three years. That’s not a decline. That’s a cliff.

 The skeptics in the area are welcome to their opinions, but in every case, they always think in terms of ( usually falsified) proven reserves and static numbers, rather than flow rates, which is what it’s really about. So buckle up.

 Moving on, anyone who thinks we aren’t in major economic meltdown isn’t paying attention. I scarcely need to comment on this, do I?

 This is a bit dated now, but do lets watch Jim Cramer have a nervous breakdown on television, and you can judge the level of feeling in the financial community.

…and bear in mind, things have gotten a lot worse since then. They will have to invent new words for the combination of inflationary and deflationary effects that we will be experiencing in short order.

 Moving on to politics, it looks at this point like the republican choice is going to be the lunatic john mccain. Not only is his support in the world of reactionary partisan politics somewhat shaky, ( he appears to have some actual principles) not to mention his weak appeal to backwards ‘christians’, but he’s also prone to fits of rage and bizarre outbursts. Probably down to his advanced age, and the time he spent in a Vietnamese POW camp.

If anyone thought that the christopher walken character in the deer hunter would make a good president…well there he is.

  The republican chances of winning the presidency again just went from slim to none. The reactionary southern strategy that propelled the republicans from nixon on up has run it’s course and it’s ideology in general has arguably been a spent force since Reagan, so you can be sure when they lose this time around, they will be looking to fuck each other with knives. Good riddance.

 Not that Obama or Mrs. Clinton is really gonna help much either. I will concede that electing a white woman or a black man to the presidency is a huge step for the united states, in principle, but I seriously doubt either one of them is really equipped to deal with what’s happening. They would have to demonstrate some understanding of it first, but that hasn’t happened, and probably never will. So four years from now, look for the democrats to implode too.

And finally, we have what we will eventually know as world war III, but won’t recognise till long after the fact. Everyone is expecting that we have to have nuclear tipped ICBMs flying around to have world war, but what we’re going to get is general breakdown of the nation state and regression to primary loyalties ( that’s another word for ‘tribalism’). It’s not going to be about issues large enough to launch nuclear weapons over, or between bodies large enough to command them. Iraq, Iran, the Sudan, Pakistan, Columbia, Chechnya… same shit, different languages. When war is happening everywhere, that’s called a world war.

 I reffer you to the brilliant and insightful John Robb of global guerrillas who examines this trend in minute detail and echoes my own thinking in many ways.

 long story short: the war of all against all, with semtex and ak-47’s. And that’s if we’re lucky. Because once we kick over into 2012 or so, you’re gonna be nostalgic for the days of car bombs and drive by shootings.

next: 2012-2050?

C’mon, c’mon, listen to the money talk…

 A French maid, foreign chef,
A big house, with kingsize beds.
You had enough, you ship ‘em out,
The dollar’s up, down, you better buy the pound.
The claim is on you, the sights are on me,
So what do you do ? That’s guaranteed
Hey little girl, you break the laws,
You hustle, you deal, you steal from us allCome on, come on, lovin’ for the money,
Come on , come on, listen to the money talk
Come on, come on, lovin’ for the money,
Come on , come on, listen to the money talk

Just thought those of you interested in like, the economy and stuff might  enjoy this perspective on the ongoing ‘market’ upheavals, from a parapolitical, platonic idealist perspective.

Shit’s  going down, ya’ll.

Some Convenient Bullshit: they blinded me with science

  Okay, lets go back and talk about this consensus of scientists for a minute.

So far I’ve mostly confined myself to a critique of the public image side of this whole thing, and poking some holes in the bubble of fake certitude that our erstwhile green priesthood are riding on.

However, that’s not to say there aren’t some grave and compelling flaws in the basic science, because there are. Try and follow along an understand that any errors are my misreading, and not errors in conclusions, which are not mine to begin with.

For starters, I’d be curious to know, of the ‘consensus’ of scientists that put their weight behind something like the IPCC, how exactly does that break down by field? How many chemists? How many computer modelers? How many biologists? How many oceanographers? How many climatologists?

But most of all… how many physicists? How many people trained in elementary physics are there who take this raving apocalyptic scenario seriously?

I’m wondering, because when you google ‘global warming physics’, much of what you get is middling credulity, bordering on outright scorn, for the whole thing. I have yet to see or hear of a climate catastrophist who had any real grounding in basic physcial principles.

One possible exception I know of, who is a vocal AGW agitator is Noam Mohr, who appears to confine himself mainly to the implications of vegitarianism/veganism on the climate. I saw one youtube video of him with a notable skeptic of global warming, and he was unable, or unwilling, to answer any of the raised points. At all. He seemed satisfied to trust that his colleagues had done their work properly, and that if you had a problem with it, you should ask them, or trust peer review to sort it out.

So I’m willing to bet that Mr Mohr’s attitude is typical of some segment of the scientific consensus. Which is too bad, because most physicists that I’m aware of have some pretty interesting things to say about the greenhouse effect.

In essence the global warming effect, when you get down to basic physical principles is about absorption and radiation.

The earth absorbs the sun’s radiation and re-radiates it back into space. The atmosphere stops a lot of this energy from striking the earth at all, including pretty much all the infra red ( heat) radiation. The outer layers absorb it completely and gradualy re-radiate it back into space.

The heat we experience down here comes from the more intense blue part of the spectrum that strikes the earth, and that the earth, once again, re-radiates as longer wave ‘black body’ heat. Greenhouse gasses like co2, water vapor and methane absorb that heat again and re-radiate at longer wavelengths yet, keeping it from going back into space. If it were not for this layer of insulation, earth would be about 33 degrees colder than it is now. The amount of co2 we happen to have now is responsible for about 3 degrees of this warming.

Which is all fine you might say, but what’s the point?

The point, as they say, is this: when you’re dealing with the physics of absorbing and trapping heat, changes in the balance of gasses do not have a linear effect. It’s logarithmic

What does that mean? It means that doubling (for instance) the co2 does not double the amount of heat the co2 is trapping.  Our atmosphere is already saturated enough to essentially trap nearly all the IR that can be trapped, in the spectra that co2 can affect. This is important to remember: co2 does not, indeed can not, trap all the heat radiated by the earth, no matter how much of it there is. As it is, much of the heat radiation passes through layers of co2 as if it isn’t even there. The interference spectra simply do not line up, any more than most minerals or gasses affect cosmic rays. All we might do is slow down the process of re-emmitting some of that heat into space, which would, in effect, bring the layers of heat slightly closer to the surface.

I invite you to investigate this and understand it better, but essentially, every time you add co2, the net increase in temperature is less than before. Eventually there is no more heat to absorb, regardless of how much co2 you add. If we were to actually double our atmospheric co2 the increase in temperature would be an estimated 1.5 to 2.5 degrees, proceeding from the baseline mathematics of the warming our atmosphere already does.

Depending on whom you talk to, that 3 degrees equals either something in line with the balmy medieval optimum, or,  according to James Hansen in vanity fair,  sea levels high enough to drown skyscrapers. History would seem to predispose us to the former. 

 Keep in mind that in the last 170 years humans accounted for ( at the most) about a 30% increase of atmospheric co2, by my glance at the numbers, and that increase seems to have been less than catastrophic, even assuming we caused all of it:

The twenty year smoothed Law Dome DE02 and DE02-2 ice cores show the levels of CO2 to have been 284 ppm in 1832.[10] As of January 2007, the measured atmospheric CO2 concentration at theMauna Loa observatory was about 383 ppm.[11] Of this 99 ppm rise in 175 years, 70 ppm of it has been in the last 47 years. (wikipedia)

Considering what we’ve already done, and our predicted peak in oil and coal use in the early to middle part of this century, our chances of actually doubling the content that exists is basically nil. About the only thing that might do that is a massive warming of the oceans, catastrophic volcanism, or the mass extinction of all organic life, and subsequent decay of carbon based life systems. The main reservior of co2 is the oceans, and they operate on a centuries long timetable so far as warming and cooling, and no climate theorist in his right mind thinks we can warm the oceans with the greenhouse effect (the reason is that IR only penetrates the top few microns of the ocean surface ) .

Quite simply, while we do indeed warm the earth with co2, it is already about as warmed by our activity as it can get, and for us to do much more is probably not in the realm of our abilties and timeframe . The main greenhouse gas is water vapour and we have no control over this whatsoever, and no clear understanding of how to influence it indirectly, or even model it, which is why climate scientists focus mainly on co2 and methane.

This is not some computer model with a bunch of poorly understood variables. This is pretty simple math, actually, and while our understanding of climate is basically nil ( we don’t even know how clouds form, for instance), the electromagnetic spectrum and gaseous radiation is pretty straighforward.

The projections for catastrophic global warming simply do not mesh with physics as we understand it. So do we overturn physics too, in our rush to ‘reduce our footprint’, or do we give our heads a shake and go back to the chalkboard?

where the rubber meets the road

So, I’m sure by now you’re going ‘okay zac..16 possible futures…gee that’s great. Before, I only had to pick between two or three. Thanks asshole. ‘

But fear not. I wouldn’t leave you in such a dismal condition. From this point it’s just matter of which one you think is the most likely, or fits the evidence best, right?

So, I’ll condescend to predict a little more, but I’ll add one more wrinkle of complexity first.

Because, you see, it’s entirely possible and even likely that just one scenario won’t cover it. we could get the best and the worst, and indeed, all I can really do is attempt to draw a line down the middle and speculate on which side of the line we might skew towards.

To add a little more veracity we can introduce time periods into this; short mid and long terms to be precise.

If we deem that things are fluid enough to reverse completely from short to mid terms, and from mid to long terms that means that we have not 16 but rather 16×16x16=4,096 possible through lines for our future, arising from just four main variables. I will spare you all four thousand of them.

Given all that, lets weed it down and pick which we’ll lay our money on.

In the short term:

we’re enjoying the bloom of some real climate hysteria, so even if it turns out that the anthropocentric greenhouse effect was a fat load of horeshit, it won’t matter because we have adopted it as an operating premise. Another katrina-like catastrophe, even if it turns out to be totally natural and unavoidable, will cinch that.

Based on the best scientific studies going, we’re much too late and much too clueless to prevent, at the very least, a major liquid fuels crisis that will mean a major economic crisis that will probably take a decade or two at the very least to mitigate or begin to recover from. This will have reverberations in everything from food distribution to geopolitcs. So that means worst case energy, in short.

Unless someone busts out the bioweapons, or nuclear bunker busters in short order, it looks like we’re still on the good side of the technology equation, for a little while anyway. wireless and peer to peer technologies continue to incubate the promise of a new form of social organization that may well realize itself sooner than later. There’s not much chance we’ll have a real upgrade in transport, manufacturing or medicine, but you never know. In any case something big like that wouldn’t penetrate the mainstream for a few years at least. So it’s a soft best case for technology.

While population continues to grow at a small but potentially disastrous rate, it’s not likely that this will take over as a real issue for anyone right now. The words ‘carrying capacity’ will be met with blank stares for a while yet. So while we’re living in the seeds of a worst case, we’re treating it as non-case, or even a best case. Depends on where you live, mind you.

All that adds up to neonate form of world #12: continued resource war, malthusian/green backlash against ‘business as usual’, and advanced technology mostly channeled into conservation of energy and efficiency measures.

Al Gore or someone like him convinces the great unwashed to tighten their belts and conserve, as we shift phases into a more blatantly energy influenced foreign policy. venzuela, mexico, and iran in the crosshairs. 70’s style oil shocks, leading into major recession. Back to the land hysteria. Futile flailing for stupid alternative energy ’sources’ like ethanol, or coal-gas. All this is potential set up for some kind of hitler figure, while tough times sweat all the idealism and airy fairy abstractions out of us.

Noble leaders will suffer a sad fate unless they can get their head around the full scope of all the problems and somehow communicate that to the public. In other words, fat fucking chance. Expect a chain of martyrs for, in no particular order: 5$ a gallon gas , losing the war in iraq, lack of air conditioning, empty shelves at the safeway, the stink of manure in your neighborhood, and every other piece of reality that we’re been trained to not want to hear about. Maybe jimmy carter will do us a favor and take another one for the team.

Mid term:

Eventually things will get hard and scary enough it terms of resource shortage that any high minded ideas of reducing our carbon footprint will be quietly dispensed with/ The first genius to realize that because we’ve peaked in fossil fuel use, that we don’t need to take any special measures to steadily reduce our emissions, gets a free term in office. Things warm up to a certain point and no further. Weird climate shit will keep happening, but we will eventually realize that weird climate shit has always been happening, so fuck it. Get a helmet and move on. Meaning, we flip into into a best case climate scenario. The vocal greens will be hiding in their solar mansions and issuing increasingly irrelevant proclamations to the mob, who are preoccupied with something besides melting ice, and couldn’t care less. Turns out co2 is pretty harmless after all. Plants even, like, breathe it, and stuff.

We probably hit rock bottom in energy about now. Rolling blackouts, fuel rationing, growing your own food in the backyard, etc. It’s not as bad as it sounds. Turns out we’re social animals and we actually like having a connection to the real world and each other more than we thought we would. It’s actually a lot nicer to work at home and walk everywhere than the shit we used to do. Your neighbors are a lot less scary then they looked a few years ago. Most services are going for shit, but the reduced stress and slower pace make it quite tolerable. A lot of things can actually be handled by you, believe it or not.

On the other hand, by this point we’re in the awkward infancy of things like advanced bioenegineering, nanotechnology and artificial intelligence. It’s more likely than not someone is gonna get the idea to turn them to destructive uses. We are, after all, at the bottom of a resource war without end, and weapons technology is always the first place new shit gets used. It’s getting a bit hard to find gas for tanks and planes, and stuff, so those targeted bioweapons are starting to look good. There’s not much point worrying about it, because it’s not the sort of thing you’re going to survive. You’re either a target or you’re not. Work on not being a potential target.

The very simplest forms of this are penetrating the mainstream and so you can change your hair and eye color, correct most genetic disorders and disease proclivities, rebuild damaged nerve tissue or bone, play in virtual words, and conduct mostly convincing relationships with simulated persons. Computers are embedded in everything, and privacy is becoming a sort of quaint anachronism.

So, a soft worse case for technology, because dying in a engineered plague sort of outweighs virtual sex, but not by much, I guess. The nerds out there are a lot happier and more productive, if nothing else.

By this point, it’s getting noticeable that we’ve a shit load of people, and not enough food. Partly because of the natural gas crisis that torpedoed fertiliser production a couple decades back, and partly the sheer weight of numbers. Things get a bit too crowded and squalid for anyone’s liking. Some nimrod probably gets the idea to create a virus that sterilises indiscriminately. That’s right, worst case population, too…

So this is equivalent to world#8: resource war without end, minus the green pretensions of a little ways back. Pragmatism will trump aesthetics, and the world takes a gut check. We get a nice close look at the end of everything. When you’re not jacked into virtual moneyshot vol12, or something, that is…

Long term:

By this point we’ve well understood what’s really going on with the climate, and we’ve got enough knowledge of genetics and nanotech to start to fix the shit we broke on this planet. The big issue ends up being toxification of various kinds, and programmes to remediate the soil, water and air go into effect.

Eventually we figure out a way to get plentiful electricity, and leverage that to make liquid fuels again in large quantites. With enough free electricity, say from nano-engineered solar, you could make a limitless amount of hydrogen out of seawater, even if it’s a shitty fuel storage method, we’ll eventually make it usable, or else have some engineered fungus that breaks cellulose into biodiesel with near perfect efficiency.

All the promise of advanced technology begins to pay off, as we get near total ability to manipulate matter from the molecular level up. You can look how you want, feel how you want and go where you want, real or otherwise. You can find out how other people think and feel pretty easily, and swap experiences. Anything you want to know about anything is pretty much available instantly, if you have a connection to the wireless network. Which you pretty much always do.

Lastly, our population probably keeps growing, but we have the means to provide everything except (real)space for free. Conflict is a bit less of an issue, but the narcissism of minor differences will never go away for many people, no matter how many minds you share. Everything comes down to the war of ideas, in the end.

and what happened to the resource war, you say? Pretty simple. Eventually people realize that they don’t have to participate in that shit anymore, and with free energy, free food, and free information, they just don’t. Near perfect telepathy means near perfect democracy. Which, yeah does in fact mean the lowest common denominator, but it’s the lowest common denominator amongst nearly immortal superhuman intellgences.

So, world#3: the transhuman diaspora, as we seek more room to express our minor (and not so minor) differences. Space, the oceans, maybe even time and other dimensions. Different minds, and different bodies. Life is restless, forever and ever. Amen.

Futures on the Pivot

 

Okay. So these last six are what you get when half the variables are good, and the rest bad, which will make them composites of the characteristics and relationships we’ve seen so far.

World #11 Best case technology and energy, worst case climate and population:

Similar to world #3 but the drive to colonize new territories is enhanced by climate collapse. Things likely take on a more green-tribalist flavor as well, along with the tribalism that evolves out of population conflict.  A great divergence of posthumanity in many directions

World#12 Best case technology and population, worst case energy and climate:

Somewhere between the primitivist jihad of world 7, and the internalized technology  of world #5. Global warming and peak oil catastrophe drive a backlash against ‘civilisation’ but a resource war scenario forces those who remain to merge with low-energy technology. Cyber primitives with a chip on their shoulder.

World#13 Best case technology and climate, worst case energy and population.

Very similar to world#10, with it’s tension between shrinking energy and expanding population, and still mitigated by advanced technology.

A more stable climate makes this outcome less dire, and we can adapt more slowly and the end state is likely to be less radical. Imagine a world where most of us spend most of our time in a kind of hibernation, enjoying an infinite virtual world, where we can rotate into some kind of tour of duty in the ‘real world’ to help maintain the infrastructure that keeps 15 billion of us on sleeping life support. Kind of like the ‘matrix’ but more voluntary.

World #14 Best case energy and population, worst case technology and climate.

Once again, negative technology with no energy constraints sucks ass. And in this case a falling population is probably more of a mass die off.

Suppose in the face of climate catastrophe, we get an engineered plague that knocks us back down to a billion people, with ferocious genetically engineered predators to keep mankind in line, orchestrated by the environmental priesthood.  12 monkeys meets jurrassic park.

World #15 Best case energy and climate, worst case technology and population.

As in world#9 where we mutate into viral space locusts,  but as the earth remains more stable, it’s likely we’ll see more a split between those who remain on earth, and the faction who exile themselves, or are forced, into the solar system. We eventually become several subspecies, continuously at war with each other with horrific technology, over building materials and living space, and the earth itself remaining the big prize.

World#16 Best case climate and population, worst case energy and technology.

After a long resource war and plunge into energy scarcity we embrace a renunciation of technology and probably put taboos on the horrors of fossil fuels, agriculture, and metallurgy. Every so often a genetic boogeyman or AI shows up to remind everyone how scared they are. Welcome to planet amish.

Not quite dystopia

So moving along, we shift to the bad side, and add a positive variable into our World #2 hell hole, one at a time, in turn.

World#7 All worst cases, except best case population:

This world, more than any other, bears the fingerprint of some kind of radical anti-technology, eco-primitivist style backlash. In a situation of declining energy, negative technology, climate collapse and falling population, you’ve got all the makings of a luddite green-meme jihad.

As in world 2, the steamroller of negative singularity effects unwinds itself as energy runs out, and even more so here as a scattered population provides fewer targets/hosts.

It eventually becomes a ‘race to the bottom’ of the olduvai gorge, as we sprint to become fully paleolithic humans to some extent. When terrifying technology isn’t the target, the jihad will turn on itself to root out technological sympathizers, and drag everything farther down the thermodynamic cliff, until we are at a carrying capacity of 1 billion or less, in a dark ages condition or worse.

And so it will go for a few centuries at least, until we forget what it was that actually happened, and we start to build up again from a degraded resource base.

World #8 All worst cases except best case climate:

As the above, but without the eco-primitivist undercurrents, and a more crowded, urban desperation instead.

In this world, the earth can’t be bothered to shrug us off, except by starving us of energy, and we go into a self destructive orgy fueled by the most advanced technology we can find.

In short, this world screams “resource war without end”, eventually fought by AI’s, genetic chimeras, killer nanoswarms, and targeted bioweapons.

Without global warming hysteria to dampen fossil fuel use, or any particular anti technology sentiment, and a huge throng of ‘consumers’ eager to maintain their lifestyle, this is petro-apocalypse, ne plus ultra. Right until the near-end, the relatively rich ( as in you) will be able to pretend that the rest of the world isn’t living like the future humans in ‘the terminator’, but that’s pretty much what you’re doing now, so no sweat.

If you’re lucky enough to live in one of the last secure enclaves, it’ll be virtual porn and good drugs right up until that nanoswarm turns you into biodiesel. Eventually the people left alive will be living in pre-industrial squalor, wondering what the fuck just happened.

World #9 All worst cases, except best case energy:

Similar to world 6, in that a negative technological singularity plus unlimited energy is pretty dire, but made worse in that there is great added pressure on us from our numbers and from the collapsing climate.

This world more than others, spells ’space-travelling locust swarm’. We would eventually migrate out to find more materials to chew up, and to get away from each other. We would turn the solar system into a kill zone first, then who knows what. This also spells some pretty radical mutation, as we adapt to our new condition as ravenous interplanetary predators. We merge with the worst aspects of our technology and the ‘old moon’ psychology that rudolph steiner speaks of. In so doing we probably do a pretty good job of killing the earth, making our lifestyle change inevitable.

We don’t do it because we’re starving… we do it because faced with infinite energy, we realize that even that still won’t make us feel any more satisfied, and less empty.

World #10 all worst cases, except best case technology:

Interesting paradox. Normally, an expanding population with decreasing energy means something has to give, but with beneficial technology it doesn’t have to.

It does get very weird, though. First we’re using technology to replace food, then we’re using it to take food from others, then when resource war peters out, and we’re still growing in numbers, we have to change our fundamental nature as energy consuming beings.

The trend is for us to become smaller, slower, colder, less physically vital, at the same time as our minds can move faster than ever and project into virtual spaces.

The end result of this trend is much like world#5 but more extreme yet, as we multiply endlessly, but in the form of fully disembodied intelligences, embedded in a material  substratum that is itself mostly immobile and seemingly inert.

Not quite utopia…

Alright, so our first adjustment will be to leaven the best and worst cases, with a little more reality. So we’ll take worlds 1, and 2, and change each variable, one at a time, and see what we come up with.

Well start with world #1, our utopian transhumanist paradise, and introduce one worst case variable each time until we’ve done them all.

World #3: All best cases except worst case population.

Well, in a world where population hasn’t come under control this probably means that, in spite of free energy, and advanced genetics, supercomputing and whatnot, we still haven’t really achieved much penetration in terms of economic growth, or education. This is probably down to some kind of religious backlash against advanced technology and free information, as blue meme tribes always want to increase their numbers to overwhelm the opposition. This creates pressure for living space, and tension between regions that want to control population density to maintain their standard of living, in the face of mass immigration.

Although most of the resource-based reasons for war are going away, ideological conflict and terrorist excursions are still prevalent. This is a variation on the mark pesce ‘terror and transhumanism’ scenario, where we have so much power it’s ridiculous, but still can’t quite get along. Any one misanthrope or psychopath can make a big noise in a crowded world.

As this continues, the drive to colonize the oceans, virtual reality, and/or space have a large impetus to ramp up, as opposed to other situations where we have the technology and resources but no particular urgency. The diaspora of a retribalising world to the four corners of reality begins as each faction adopts just enough technology to liberate themselves and declare difference but shuns the rest, or it’s full implications. Think the space station full of Rastafarians in ‘neuromancer’. Another example would be primitivists, some of whom will use genetics to turn themselves into apes, or dolphins, but not explore the full ramifications of pervasive biotech.

There may end up being a global cyborg hive mind, and the ability to do that exists, but this situation mitigates against it.

World#4 All best cases except worst case climate:

A future where we have climate catastrophe, falling population, and advanced technology is probably one where you’ve had some kind of primitivist or malthusian programme take effect. When you look at how katrina was used to ramrod global warming hysteria into the public discourse, and multiply that by a thousand, you have that here.

Population ‘control’ here is exactly that, as our ‘best case’ is really a combination of austerity and genocide, as vicious constraints apply to anything that might smack of straining our carrying capacity or ecological footprint.

As a result technology stays in the hands of the elite, and is subject to the approval of an increasing politicised and ideological scientistic priesthood. There’s lots that we could do, but like now, a lot that we don’t.

You’ll probably see a reign of terror- style purge of ‘climate criminals’ of various stripes, as green lefties celebrate their long awaited vengeance.

The destruction of energy infrastructure by climate disasters and backlash against fossil fuels mitigate against anything like a globalised world, so we have another kind of retribalisation, in a more literal sense, as everyone re-localizes into some kind of bucolic peasant existence, which is shot through with advanced technology. Whole earth cataloge-hippie world, basically, for those who get with the programme. Those on the wrong side of the jihad, or who want to go big and weird with the new tech, are in for a tough time. You probably have an international malthusian bureaucracy, which legislates the development of poorer countries ruthlessly.

World#5 All best cases except worst case energy:

It turns out nature played a joke on us, and petroleum was as good as it gets for surplus energy.

As we cascade down the olduvai cliff, we have the means to adapt though, as our technology evolves to become not only more powerful, but more energy efficient. Everything gets smaller, cooler, and harder to see. Hard mineral-based stuff is set to one side in favor self assembling large scale biotech, which feeds off the sun. Buildings that grow like plants, photosynthetic skin grafts for humans, computers the size of grains of dust.

We internalize most of our technology, and rebuild our ecosystem. We’ve gotten our psychological and educational issues under control, and the earth is cooperating with our efforts to live smaller and quieter. Our big dreams go into the virtual world, and to outside observers we eventually look like completely primitive people living in a highly organic world. But behind our eyes, all bets are off.

World#6 All best cases except worst case technology:

A negative singularity in a world without energy constraints is really, really bad. There will always be harmful uses of advanced technology, but a worst case is something really off -the- hook.

Most of the reasons for war don’t exist, so WW3 fought by AI’s is not likely. A small dispersed population wouldn’t suffer greatly from an engineered plague. Grey goo could always happen, but it’s pretty likely it could be contained in a stable world with a working infrastructure.

One possibility is that some psychopath makes it through the door into a post human super being condition, and goes on a tear. One is probably not enough to constitute a worst case, though, depends on how smart he/she is though.

If however, you had a cheap enhancement technology that produced violent or aggressive behavior in whoever installed it, and the uses of it went massively viral over the world, via the wireless computer network, you’d be in for a bad time, especially if they started working together.

Suppose you could install a combination nanotech/genetics package that made you super-humanly smart, with diamond hard bones, carbon nontube flesh, redundant organs, and factories in your skin that made infectious copies of the same package… and the whole thing also turned you into a hardwired psychopath with out of control aggressive instincts…

Once it was out there, you’d eventually have too many to control, especially if they started working together, and with new variations all the time.
Silence of the Lambs meets 28 days later. Eventually there would be no normal humans left, as they would have to be enhanced themselves, just to survive.

Any strange and dangerous self replicating creation would have similar effect. This scenario presupposes that it outruns our attempts to control it, which implies that it either catches us totally off guard, or that it’s smarter than we are.

In a world called extremity

Now, when we’re exploring these possible futures, we will be proceeding dialectically. Going from one end of the spectrum to the other, and attempting to sift the truth from each shift.

So, for starters lets examine the two polar opposites of possibility: all bad, and all good.

And so…

World 1: All best cases. This is essentially the vision of the future put forth by transhumanists and extropians like ray kurzweil, hans moravec, etc. Not because they actively concern themselves with population, climate, and energy, but rather that their vision of technological determinism assumes that all these things go well, without really speaking of it, or they inflate the power of technology to the point where it trumps everything else, which, historically has tended to be true, so it’s a fair assumption to at least argue from.

Technology makes unlimited energy possible, and the associated economic progress causes population growth to subside. If carbon dioxide or methane are an issue, genetically engineered biorgs, or nano-factured carbon sinks offset the problem. Everything eventually becomes so efficient and powerful, we need not burn fossil fuels or toxify the environment any further. The only limitation left for us is our own psychology.

Cue the music from 2001: A Space Odyssey…

World 2: All worst case. This is the brainchild of the most wildly paranoid primitivists and even they don’t really take it seriously.

The world sails off a thermodynamic cliff, but technology manufactures just enough low grade foodstuff to keep an ever increasing population alive at an extremely meager subsistence level, and little else besides. Some sort of cheap engineered seed of an extremely resilient type, or a nanotech device for creating lots of nitrogen phosphate makes this possible. Either that or soylent green.
Quality and expectancy of life plummet. These pressures are compounded by climate collapse, as a diaspora onto the open oceans or inland begins, and hurricanes wreck what’s left of the energy infrastructure.  The rolling blackouts apply pretty much everywhere except the pockets of technology that are developing targeted bioweapons, swarming killer drones, and tactical AI’s to fight resource wars.

Eventually the earth turns into an apocalyptic wargame for posthuman intelligences who devastate the earth in attempts to eliminate each other. This lasts until energy constraints bring the thing to a standstill, and the biosphere devolves into a hellworld of killer transgenic monstrosities, wretched starving people and permanent darkness in a frothing ecological super-storm. There’s no way for anyone to get to safety because with the vast throng of people and shrinking landmass, there’s no where left to go. Eventually the cascading combination ( an engineered pandemic amongst a tightly packed global population of 12 billion or so, and no particular medical infrastructure or pharmaceutical industry left, is  a likely candidate) wipes us out below replacement level and we go extinct. The AI’s eventually break down and undergo their own entropic collapse, and fail to outlive us by long. Some exceptionally virulent engineered killer takes our place at the top of the food chain, and begins their slow trek towards intelligent folly. The End.