Happy 2011

Well I did write a Christmas blog, but once written I decided that it was just a little too cynical for the season, so it remains un-posted.

Welcome to 2011, let’s hope that we make it intact to the other side of this year. Of course there is nothing special about starting a year and nothing other than convention that prescribes the start of a year or the numbering of the years. I’m not a believer in any prophesied end of the world scenario, Mayan, Christian or otherwise. Don’t link my pessimism to any significance that the date may have. The feeling of pending doom is solidly rooted in the circumstances we find ourselves in. It may not be entirely be true to say that we just find ourselves in the predicament we are in. We had a lot to do with it, yet could we actually have followed any other path? This mess is our destiny; it is encoded in our genes.

• Just in case there is anyone out there that is not aware of what I’m talking about, a brief summary of a few of the very scary things that threaten our existence, or at the very least the end of modernity and a very large portion of the human population, is presented in the bullet points below. I could write screeds on the subject, but that is not what this blog is about.

•  The threat of nuclear holocaust has not gone away, I’m not sure that it has even diminished; it has merely taken on a new form. Nuclear technology sufficient to build an atomic bomb of the types dropped on Japan is not beyond the means of even small nations to acquire. Hence the likelihood of a terrorist (freedom fighters, call  them what you like) organization obtaining nuclear weapons or any other weapons of mass destruction increases each year.

• Our reliance on fossil fuels has put us on the horns of a few nasty dilemmas. The world economy and our ability to feed ourselves rests firmly on fossil fuels, the most critical one is oil, oil is running out. As soon as the global economy recovers and consumption increases, the markets overreact and the oil price will increase and the economy will collapse. This is the likely pattern until we break our dependency on oil. We seem to have neither the political will, nor the technology to do this effectively. Destroyed economies and bad behaviour by powerful nations to secure access to oil aggravates social unrest and increases the likelihood of nuclear war and/or implosion of social order.

• That same reliance has caused and is causing global climate change. We may have reached the point whereby feedback loops such as the release of methane from peat bogs due to higher temperature (there are several other feedback loops that could come into play|) could rapidly increase temperatures beyond even the gloomiest predictions. The result, economic collapse, starvation, and hence increased likelihood of nuclear war and/or implosion of social order

•  It has been said that we are at all times just four meals away from anarchy. Maybe that exaggerates it, but try not eating for 48 hours and you may agree that it is not many. Even without global climate change and the challenges that peak oil presents to the global food supply, we may well have reached the peak of the amount of food we can produce, the so called Green Revolution probably has reached the end of its run. Sure, right now there is more an imbalance in food distribution than a shortage, but population is growing faster than we can increase yields. When farmers farm to produce biofuel instead of food, the poor will starve and yes, this does mean (you guessed it), increased likelihood of nuclear war and/or implosion of social order

Ok, enough already. The point is we are not in “a good place”, to use psychology speak.

How we got here is not that difficult to describe. This is the tragic by-product of our species greatest achievement, the advent of modernity. We have achieved (at least in some parts of the world) modernity through technology and the harnessing of fossil fuels. We can live in central heated and air conditioned luxury, we can travel, we can feel safe in our homes, we have little worries about where the next meal comes from, we have developed concepts of justice and human rights, we have medicine that actually works and so much more. All of this rests squarely on technology and cheap abundant energy…fossil fuels. I am not overstating this, without machines and cheap energy we cannot even foster the social order needed to advance civil liberties. If human sweat is required to do the work, then serfdom and slavery is not far away.

The driving force behind this development is our very human need to out compete every other human. We are genetically coded to compete like this, we do it to ensure that our genes continue and if possible dominate in the gene pool. It is what all living organisms do; it is what evolution is all about. Gazelles get faster, peacocks grow pretty tails, and we got bigger brains. The truth is that the wealthier and more powerful a person is the better the chance that person has to propagate his or her genes. Ultimately wealth and power are the fruits of intellectual prowess. I’m not saying that rich people are all clever and poor people are dumb, but in most cases acquiring and keeping wealth and power is an intellectual exercise.  

The concept of humanity does not extend to any collective decision making. We all make decisions that primarily are aimed at benefitting ourselves and those that carry our genes. Historically this has led to many great things, it has led to modernity. The powerful mechanism of markets has harnessed our self-interest and created enormous wealth. It has also created over population, peak food, peak oil, global climate change and the horrors of modern war. We have overloaded the system and because we cannot take decisions for humanity (look at Kyoto and Copenhagen) we seem to be unable to reverse or even stop. The force that gave us the fantastic life we have, is the very same force that will screw us in the end, we’ll compete ourselves to death.

When a system overloads, unless there is a safety mechanism to gently release pressure, the result is catastrophic collapse of the system. Blow up a balloon to beyond its capacity and it pops, it does not release enough air to get back to equilibrium, it just bursts…catastrophic collapse. The systems we are overloading are complex beyond imagination. We don’t know if we are beyond capacity, we don’t know how or when collapse is going to happen. We do know if you look at the graph of any system that is impacted by human activity it hockey sticks up against time. A few examples, population, atmospheric concentration of carbon, extinction of species, food production, oil extraction.  Only a fool that insists on living in a fool’s paradise can believe that this can carry on. I see no release value, I see only catastrophic collapse.     

Ok, so what has this to do with the meaning of existence?  Perhaps nothing, perhaps everything.

 The thought has crossed my mind that we are living in an experiment, like we are just a fancy ant farm for some cosmic scientist that wants to see if we’ll eliminate ourselves. Perhaps all over the expanse of time and space within the Universe there are other worlds where some other biological configurations develop intelligent life and we are all test cases. Sadly, as things look at the moment we will be part of the statistic of “failed” with a note in the margin, “clever buggers, just never got the wisdom thing”. If Yahweh is indeed this cosmic scientist, at least his indifference to pain and suffering would be consistent with this option. Of course I don’t seriously believe this, but it does appeal to my sense of irony.

I don’t believe in any cosmic scientists, cruel Gods, or any other God that takes any interest in what is happening down here. Some people believe that we are living God’s grand plan; others have faith in technology to give us the means to buck the system. I think the evidence shows something different.  The Universe has immutable laws and thought we have discovered many of these, it is certain there remain many more. The laws of the Universe are couched in scientific language and describe how energy, matter and systems behave.  Our fate is governed  by these universal laws.

The first law of thermodynamics, the law of the conservation of energy that states that energy is finite and cannot be created or lost. It is in principle the same as the no free lunch rule, or you cannot take more than you give for a sustained length of time. History shows us that empires collapse when they consume more than they can produce. When the materials that sustain the economy run out the economy collapses. We live in a world that is in reality a single empire, the empire of capitalism and we are running out of the main components that sustain it, cheap energy, cheap raw materials and dependable climatic conditions.  The second law states that the entropy of an isolated macroscopic system cannot decrease. Our society has become an enormous, complicated system that demands the consumption of more and more energy merely to maintain overall entropy at a consistent level; we are running out of cheap energy. We are in a system that is chronically out of balance, the balloon has been blown up so tightly there is just no more slack to take up. 

I once thought that we could give meaning to human existence by changing our behaviour, that we could prevent catastrophic collapse, build a sustainable enlightened society. We could in this way become special. I no longer think so. We are just the results of our evolutionary past; we cannot, as a species, change the course of history. Just as any other species is subject to the laws of nature, so are we.  I see no evidence in the course of human history that points at any meaning as to why we exist. We exist because the laws of the Universe allow that we could come into being. We will cease to exist because the laws of the Universe dictate it.