Afternoon musings, on constructing an optimistic scenario for the human future

Earth, viewed from Apollo 8 spacecraft in orbit of the moon, December 24, 1968

When thinking about the collective future of the human race, you have to envision the planet Earth as one big computer simulation. In your mind's eye, picture a giant blue sphere populated by seven trillion bustling little actors called "humans." Each one of them sucks energy and raw materials from the huge material infrastructure smothering the blue sphere. That infrastructure, in turn, extracts extra-mondo-stupendously-gigantic flows of energy and raw materials from the sphere. The bustling bee-hive of humanity strives desperately to maintain the planet-smothering engine of production. They know they can't live as they now do without it, so they maintain it, even though it poisons and destroys ecosystems with its waste, super-heats the climate with more waste, and strips the spherical planetary subsurface of finite minerals and metals.

All of this normally happens beyond our everyday perception, but if you picture it all as one big game, you understand how it works. It's one planet-sized machine consuming what it needs to keep going. As long as it does keep going, we continue to live the way we do now.

Simulation of planetary human infrastructure, seen from Earth orbit at night

But it can't keep running. It simply can't. When you run the simulation forward in time, to the year 2100 and even further out, far into the new millennium we've just entered on the Christian calendar, you come up with only a single outcome.

Overshoot.

While details of the scenario may vary from one play of the game to the next, the result is always the same: infinitely growing consumption outstrips a finite stock of resources. The humans run out of stuff they need to keep the planetary infrastructure running properly. Without it, the greater part of the human population dies, circa 2050-2200. Population stabilizes at a much lower level by the twenty third century or so, with much lower technology and living standards. Medieval, by today's standards.

That's what we face if human consumption of materials, emission of wastes, and damage to the climate continues unabated. The resource base and climate will be too heavily damaged to keep the human infrastructure going and human population expanding. There won't be enough food, water, and energy, and so increasingly more humans will die each year than are born. Population crashes, machine stops. Maybe this die off can be delayed a few decades. But it doesn't really matter. On our current path, based on existing social institutions, cultural norms, and economic systems, the die-off can't be stopped.

 The terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day: planetary infrastructure failure

Mainstream policy-making and planning, of course, doesn't accept this. Or even think in terms that come remotely close to acknowledging that such an outcome is possible. The people who control the infrastructure today simply assume the planet-sized machinery will keep running. They don't know how to think about the machinery as a finite thing dependent on finite inputs. So they practice what amounts to magical thinking, about specific problems in isolation from each other. Based on the unacknowledged assumption that the inflow of energy and materials necessary for problem-solving will continue, indefinitely.

I have friends and associates who work in mainstream policy settings. Mostly in health care or academia. They write about health care reform or U.S. policy in Afghanistan as if climate change, peak oil, or resource depletion aren't relevant or don't exist. My sense is that my policy wonk buddies are about as anxious to discuss resource limits in a serious way as I am to bother with 9/11 conspiracy theories. Probably for the same reason: because such a viewpoint seems so amazingly weird (and likely to be expressed in an off-putting way), that taking time and energy to deal with it simply isn't worth the trouble.

Still, I need to find ways to make a hairline fracture in the armor of denial. I'm about to enter a three year professional degree program in environmental law. Which means I'm deliberately injecting myself into a mainstream setting where "out there" views face extremely tough going, to put it mildly. My goal in the next three years, and beyond, will be to express what I really think about the global situation in a way that won't automatically result in eye-rolling dismissal.

I want to communicate the reality of ecological overshoot as something that is (A) inevitable and (B) survivable. We can't stop it, but that doesn't mean we should all just blow our brains out. It means all of our policy paradigms are obsolete, but we can construct new ones. The future we imagined isn't physically possible, but planning is still necessary, hope is not pointless, and the human story is worth following through to whatever awaits. We need a different vision of the world to come after us. One that accepts both ecological reality and the human yearning to make gentle the life of this world.


I think, on better days, that I'm on my way to fashioning a futurescape that works for me. I've been thinking about this stuff for 23 years -- since watching James Hansen testify on climate change to Al Gore's old committee in the United States Senate, on a burning summer day during the drought of 1988. On that day I had intimations of an apocalypse other than the nuclear inferno that haunted my imagination growing up. The world, it seemed, would still end in fire, just not the one delivered by ICBMs. There are many possible ends to the world, but we always imagine only one.

From many endings, one: hypothetical asteroid impact

In any case, the apocalypse is here, not to be denied. Sometimes life is like that. The biopsy comes back and the results are not what you wanted. But there they are. What now?


Here are some of the still disconnected, mostly abstract fragments that float in my head when I try to imagine what will one day emerge from the apocalypse we have made, that will define the remainder of our time in this life.


1) Steady state economics. For the last five hundred years, human institutions dominated by the conquering societies of the West have assumed endless economic growth is not only possible but is the only conceivable basis for a free, humane way of life. We know now, or soon will, that such growth actually isn't possible. A few notable thinkers, like political scientist Thomas Homer-Dixon and economist Herman Daly, have dared to voice the unthinkable. Once their realization becomes the dominant mode of thought in social power centers, humans will face the task of building totally new economies. We will have to use energy and materials only at the rate nature replenishes them. We'll have to limit our production of machines and gadgets, restricted by the amount of accessible raw materials left in the ground, by our ability to keep existing devices repaired, and by the salvaging of parts from the former industrial societies. No more endlessly increasing production, from ever more numerous factories, fed by expanding transportation nets and by mining operations devouring ever greater mountains of ore from the Earth. If you're lucky enough to have an electric stove in your dwelling in the twenty second century, you'll have to keep it running for decades, because there won't be a new one rolling off the assembly line. Ever.

2) Post-capitalist political economy. The breaking of supernaturally-based authoritarianism as the dominant organizing principle of human societies in the centuries after 1500 was one of the most important developments in the 200,000 year history of our species. Among our intellectual achievements, this monumental break with the past ranks alongside the development of literacy, music, and mathematics. But we flatter ourselves that the replacement of theocratic monarchy with capitalist parliamentary systems represents the end of social evolution. It doesn't. Capitalist parliamentary systems centralize control of resources -- and therefore politics -- in a tiny, elite few. This few lives in luxury, while everybody else lives in shit. One guy in a corporate headquarters can destroy an entire town by deciding to move a factory overseas; the town turns into a poverty-ridden hell hole while the peasants overseas turn into industrialized slaves. The town and the overseas slaves never got to vote on their own destruction. So much for "democracy." But the destruction of capitalism's ecological foundation will at least give our species the chance to develop a new, more humane way of distributing resources and making economic decisions. In a society that accepts resources as finite, ethics will require what's available to be distributed equitably, much as democratic political theory demands the equitable distribution of political power. There is a word for democratic decision-making applied to achieve equitable distribution of both resources and political power. That word is "socialism."

3) Spiritual pluralism. Societies based on equitable distribution of limited resources will need to be buttressed by compatible belief systems about the ultimate nature of reality -- i.e., by religion. Over the last two thousand years, the most expansionist human societies have been dominated by two monotheistic religions: Christianity and Islam. Both of these religions, in their dominant forms, claim that all other visions of ultimate reality are false. It is possible, however unlikely, that the ecological devastation of expansionist societies will discourage imperialistic religions. That result could transform Christianity and Islam, but also nurture the less missionary traditions of other cultures, such as Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, animism and more. Or, maybe we'll see a diverse patchwork of new and old faiths, more attuned to the reality of limits, to economies and societies centered on preservation rather than expansion.


4) Large-scale non-carbon electricity. Civilization as we know it depends on electricity. Not oil or coal or natural gas but the primal stuff that zapped Ben Franklin's kite. If we can find a way to generate decent amounts of it, we can still have a future not made purely of stone knives and bear skins. We may not have endless energy for infinite economic growth, but we could still fashion a decent, finite flow of electricity for a few essential purposes. The key is to generate electricity from a renewable source with abundant energy yield, reasonable maintenance costs, zero carbon emissions and manageable waste streams. Wind, hydro, and solar sources get the most attention, but we will need others. One promising candidate, according to Thomas Homer Dixon, is deep geothermal electric power. This technology involves drilling miles into the Earth's surface and injecting water into the depths, where the natural heat of the Earth's crust generates enormous amounts of steam for turning electrical turbines on the surface. The technology is enormously expensive and fragile today, but it exists, and might be further developed, in the right circumstances. We will need to investigate such possibilities, and deploy them consistent with available resources, in the years ahead.

5) Organic, locally distributed farming. Civilization is based also on agriculture -- artificially cultivated food supplies able to sustain a population living primarily in cities. Whatever the grandiose claims of certain ecological radicals, human populations will not willingly return to hunter-gather lifestyles. So we will need farms to feed our populations. Today's farms depend on fossil fuels to run the mechanized equipment, fertilize the fields, and control pests. Since fossil fuels are finite in quantity and super-heating the atmosphere, that's the end of that. New agriculture will be needed, quickly and cheaply. Organic farming, based on simple, low-tech methods, is the easiest alternative that can be introduced on a planetary scale. It will be more labor intensive, meaning that future societies -- even with continued widespread use of renewable electricity -- will incorporate food cultivation into everyday life far more pervasively than most people imagine today. Cuba offers a glimpse of this future. When Soviet oil shipments ended in 1989, the country faced starvation. It rapidly converted to organic, low-tech agriculture, on fields not only in the countryside but on city rooftops and vacant lots. I'm willing to grant that genetic engineering and other high tech methods might be in the mix of agricultural techniques, if they don't overtax limited supplies of energy and materials. But in the future, the best solutions will be those that are cheap, easy, local, and renewable. On that basis, organic will trump gen-engineered, every time.

6) The return of muscle power and low-tech simplicity. In the future I imagine, modern technologies like electrical devices  will co-exist with age-old technologies based on manual labor. This will be most obvious in agriculture, where organic, labor-intensive techniques might be supplemented by electrically pumped irrigation water. But every aspect of human life will display the same mix of modern and pre-modern. That will mean technology left over from the age of capitalist industry will exist alongside the technology and methods of muscle and sweat. We will see far greater reliance on devices like bicycles, spinning wheels, and sail boats. Over time, this will lead to a collective feature of human societies: they will have certain high technology practices, but these will be few in number and extent, conserved for the most vital uses. If a town has steady electricity from a deep geothermal power plant, the electricity will be prioritized for essential community uses. For equipment in a hospital, for example. Or operation of essential farming technology, like irrigation pumps.

Future communities will not be able to waste energy by cabling it into thousands of individual dwellings for profligate private use in non-essential devices like washing machines, plasma television sets, and home computers. Laundry will be done by hand, most likely, because that's cheaper and simpler in resource terms -- albeit a pain in the ass by the standards of my own day. Plasma television sets won't exist, not just because scarce electricity is better used for other purposes but because petroleum-based plastics, plus circuits made of rare earth metals, will be extraordinarily rare and hence hyper-expensive. Same goes for the plastics and electronics in home computers. No doubt computers and electronic communication will continue to be useful. But computers and telecommunications will be reserved for essential services -- government, medicine, infrastructure maintenance, and so on. If a private citizen wants to use a computer or communications net, odds are this will have to be done in the post-2100 equivalent of today's public libraries and internet cafes. The internet itself, if it survives, will be dramatically reduced in scale and bandwidth, probably supplemented by good old fashioned radio, telegrams, and snail mail. Television, too, will be rare. Something seen in public squares instead of the living room comfort known only to your great, great, great grand parents.


7) Adaptation to a flooded, storm-ravaged, super-heated planet. The material culture of farming and communication and the rest of everyday life will unfold on a planet completely alien to the one we know today. Earth of the future will have a dramatically higher average temperature and sea level. Thus, the ecologies, agriculture, and settlements of today will be impossible. They will have to pick up and move to areas not blasted by heat, drought, floods, deforestation, and storms. The continental interior of North America, for example, will become too hot and dry after 2050 to sustain vast numbers of human beings. So the humans will have to migrate north, into the thawing Arctic regions of Canada. That future is inevitable, because the warming of the planet is now beyond control. If all fossil fuels vanished today, the warming would continue to be driven by non-human causes: Arctic methane emissions and general carbon cycle breakdowns. That warming, in turn, will drive additional deforestation, albedo loss from ice sheet disappearance, die off of carbon-absorbing ocean life, and smothering of carbon sinks in terrestrial soil and plants. All of this will drive masses of people to migrate inland from the coasts, as cities like New York, San Francisco, and Vancouver face a sea that will rise steadily for tens of thousands of years. The eventual sea level, millennia from now, might stabilize 80 meters higher than today, after the ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica have melted away. We're stuck with a super-heating, flooded planetary home, so the only thing left to do is plan accordingly, and save what we can.


* * * * *


So. That's all very general and vague. But useful, for me. It hints at a very different future than the one you'll find in, for example, a World Bank forecast. But it doesn't have to be hellish. It will have room for human beings. And, unlike the sort of future envisioned at the World Bank, it's based on what we can reasonably know about the actual conditions future human beings will face.


So what does it mean for those of us alive today? That we have a lot of work to do. And not much time.


Here we go.

Earth, seen from the International Space Station, July 21, 2003

The cost of complexity

Fukushima nuclear plant, Japan, March 15, 2011

 
Thomas Homer-Dixon is a professor of international affairs at the University of Waterloo, in Ontario province, Canada. His writing and research cover the complex, systems-level interaction of science, technology, environment, and economics. A major theme in his work is that the complexity of human social-technical systems has vastly exceeded the evolved cognitive capacity of the human brain -- and even our ability to pool collective brainpower artificially to solve our problems, by means of our cultures and institutions.

Our high tech civilization, in short, has become more complicted by far than we can manage. Homer-Dixon's writing vividly conveys how this affects the multiple, massive, converging crises of the twenty first century. He analyzes how human institutions must face, simultaneously, an array of problems that would be overwhelming even in isolation. We have to deal with them all at once, using brains -- and organized collections of brainpower -- that simply aren't up to the task. Too many problems create information overload, from climate change, biodiversity loss, topsoil loss, ocean acidification, financial gyrations, mass poverty and unemployment, technological flux, energy shortages, raw materials exhaustion, unraveling food supplies, disappearing fresh water, political extremism and genocide. It's too much.

Homer-Dixon argues that it isn't just that we feel overwhelmed. We are, in fact, overwhelmed. We are biologically and cognitively unable to function in the social settings that our own evolution made possible. Which is why our world is unraveling. Too many problems accumulating too quickly, far faster than we can process, defying our ability to organize resources for any responses.

We've seen this process unfold with particular vividness in the first three months of 2011. A vast swirl of interconnected crises: revolutions, insurgencies, oil shortages, food scarcity, drought and heatwave and storms and climate change, market and fiscal oscillations. And now, on top of all that, an out-of-nowhere blindside earthquake and tsunami, pile-driving one of the world's most advanced economies into a flooded, blood-soaked heap of smoking rubble. The devastation of Japan has further rammed an uncertain, reeling global system.

Worse things may lie ahead. The latest reports say that three potential nuclear melt-downs are in progress at damaged Japanese nuclear plants. Global food and energy prices look set to continue rising this year. North Africa and the Middle East continue to roil with violence and political upheaval.

Our civilization is out of control.


For thinking about how this systems-level cascade of crisis works, I've found Thomas Homer-Dixon's writing enormously useful. His clarity and concreteness get beyond the usual airy academic abstractions, helping readers visualize the implications of runaway social complexity.

My favorite example comes from Homer-Dixon's 2001 book The Ingenuity Gap. As a metaphor for the human predicament, Homer-Dixon offers the crash of United Airlines Flight 232 on July 19, 1989. Bound from Denver to Chicago, a tiny crack in the fan of the plane's tail engine suddenly ripped open, blowing the entire engine to shreds. The explosion of the engine ripped apart nearby tubing of the plane's hydraulic system -- cutting off the entire hydraulic flow to the plane's maneuvering system. All of it. All the rudders, elevators, and ailerons used to control the plane became nonfunctional simultaneously.

The designers of the plane, a DC-10, had judged such a catastrophic failure impossible. But it happened to United Flight 232 on that day. The suddenly uncontrollable plane, minus one of three engines, banked steeply downward and to the right. The crew declared an emergency and began trying to regain control. The flight controls wouldn't respond -- none of the water-pressure-dependent flaps and stabilizers worked. The pilot managed to pull out of the descent by alternating power levels in the two remaining engines under the wing, but the resulting swings in thrust made the plane bob up and down while moving slowly in huge, miles-around circles to the right.

The complexity of the situation was enormous. Manipulating the dual engine thrust to wallow in circles through the sky took all of the captain's concentration, because any error might mean loss of what little control he had. Meanwhile, captain and co-pilot had to communicate with ground facilities and emergency crews, consult with experts by radio on possible ways to restore maneuvering power, manage preparation of flight attendants and passengers for an emergency landing, continuously assess instrument readings and search with their own eyes and ears for signs of potential additional damage to the aircraft, all while trying to determine the best of multiple potential landing sites and veer towards one of them in a barely controlled descent.

A few minutes into the crisis, one of the passengers -- a fellow airline pilot -- offered his assistance. The captain and co-pilot accepted instantly, briefed him, and gave him responsibility for handling the impossibly delicate yet oil-tanker-unwieldy task of steering the plane entirely by varying thrust to two separate engines. Having a third pilot focus on that single overwhelming task gave the other two men in the cockpit a barely conceivable chance of dealing with the rest of what was unfolding.

Homer-Dixon describes the crew's predicament as follows. It's worth quoting at some length. 

As the crew members tried to make sense of their instruments and the data they received via their eyes and ears, problems cascaded into other problems with almost overwhelming speed. The crew was swept along by a tightly coupled chain of cause and effect. For forty four harrowing minutes the captain and his officers assessed a prodigious flow of incoming information, made countless inquiries and observations, and issued dozens of commands. Even with extra help from the check pilot [the passenger who came forward to offer aid], it was all they could do to keep the plane aloft and roughly on course to a crash landing...

The situation they faced was unprecedented: they hadn't trained for it; no airline crew had ever trained for it. Such a disaster was thought too unlikely or too catastrophic to justify specific training. The pilot and his officers therefore had to invent, on the spot, a method for controlling the plane. They also had to assess the plane's damage, choose a place to land, and prepare their passengers for a crash landing.

The moment the engine exploded, crew members had to meet a sharply higher requirement for ingenuity -- that is, for practical solutions to the problem of flying the aircraft in new conditions. 

For the book, Homer-Dixon consulted a post-accident study of the decision-making processes used by the crew. The author of the study, Steven Predmore of Delta Airlines, wrote his dissertation on the Flight 232 event. He used quantitative techniques to analyze the amount of information being processed by crew members during each minute of the crisis, then communicated among themselves and ground authorities in multiple, simultaneous, overlapping conversations.

Here's how Homer-Dixon summarizes the analysis by Predmore of Delta Airlines.

For the entire duration of the crisis, the crew members were close to a human being's peak cognitive load: they were processing information, making decisions, and supplying ingenuity about as quickly as humanly possible. The load was extreme in part because the crew was enveloped by uncertainty and lacked a clear understanding of the aircraft's state... Ingenuity requirements were so high that the check airman [third pilot] quickly became indispensable. "The demands created by the use of differential engine thrust to control the aircraft" [said Predmore] made it almost impossible for either the captain or the first officer to attend to other tasks. The addition of the check airman to the crew allowed the captain to assign priority to tasks, divide and delegate them among crew members, and monitor the crew's performance. "The captain was an amazing leader," Predmore noted. The check airman's help, combined with the captain's effective organizing of the resources he had, allowed the crew to act like a precisely coordinated team; they became almost a single mind.

At about 4:00 p.m., July 19, 1989, United Flight 232 approached the airport at Sioux City, Iowa for an emergency landing. Homer-Dixon cites the transcript of cockpit conversations in describing the culmination of the crisis.

Captain:  "Left turns! Left turns! Close the throttles! 

First Officer: "Close 'em off." 

Captain: "Right turn. Close the throttles." 

First Officer: "Pull 'em off!"

Check Airman: "Nah. I can't pull 'em off or we'll lose it. That's what's turning ya!" 

Unidentified voice: "Okay." 

First Officer: "Left throttle -- left! Left! Left! Left! Left! Left! Left! -- Left! Left! Left!

[Ground proximity alarm sounds]

First Officer: "We're turning! We're turning! We're turning!"

Unidentified voice: "God!"

[Impact]

The plane hit the ground at the runway's leading edge, just to the left of the centerline. The right landing gear touched the ground first, then the right wing. As the plane skidded across the runway to the right it lost its right engine, chunks of its right wing, and its tail engine. It plowed across the grass, lost its left engine and tail section, and hit the pavement of another runway. The cockpit nose broke off. The remainder of the fuselage cartwheeled away and exploded in flames, coming to rest upside down in the middle of a field.

Of the 296 people on board, 111 died, including one flight attendant. The entire cockpit crew survived. 

In post-accident analysis, investigators concluded that saving any of the passengers at all constituted a miracle. The crew somehow managed to keep just enough tenuous control of the aircraft to make a barely controlled landing, thus saving two thirds of the lives in their hands. Later, investigators programmed the situation into a flight simulator. Every simulation ended with a completely uncontrolled crash and total destruction of the aircraft.

 United Airlines Flight 232, Sioux City, Iowa, July 19, 1989

* * * *  *

Nuclear engineers in Japan today, at this very second, face a situation much like the one confronting United Flight 232. Multiple reactors crippled by an emergency deemed not worth preparing for. No way to manage the enormous and constantly escalating complexity of the resulting crisis. No way to supply enough ingenuity quickly enough to avoid some kind of catastrophe.

Much the same is true for the policy-makers currently in control of human societies. They operate a super-complex technological infrastructure encircling this planet, relentlessly destroying the climate, ecosystems, and resources that sustain the infrastructure itself. The only possible solution is to immediately begin rapid, gargantuan reductions in the resource consumption and infrastructure use of our entire species. Psychological and social realities make any such solution impossible. We don't have enough ingenuity to make a difference.

Meaning that we are in the process of crash landing. The only hope is that something will survive in the aftermath.

Ruminations on the life work of Hari Seldon

I've been fascinated my whole life by attempts to predict the future of human societies. It started as a childhood love for science fiction, which led me to Isaac Asimov's Foundation series. In those books, a mathematical genius named Hari Seldon (for whom this blog is named) develops the science of "psychohistory" -- computer algorithms capable of accurately predicting the future course of a galaxy-spanning society inhabited by trillions of sentient beings.

My fascination with societal forecasting continued in graduate school, with long pondering of dense academic tomes on quantitative forecasting techniques in economics and political science. Plus the qualitative, humanities-based literary-esque methods of scholar policy wonks like George Frost Kennan. The quantitative models were almost entirely useless for anything beyond trivial purposes. I remember sitting at a conference in which a quantitative modeler enthused about his computer simulations predicting that unregulated markets would distribute resources unequally. Gosh, really? In contrast, the famously non-quantitative George Kennan accurately predicted, more or less, the collapse of the Soviet Union four decades before the fact.


My interest in such things continued after voluntary departure from academia, into my current existence as a low-paid clerical drone thrall in post-Cold War dystopian late capitalist America.  The major influence over my thinking since then has been the science fiction of Kim Stanley Robinson. Robinson, who holds a PhD in English, combines deep understanding of the humanities, including history, with in-depth research into quantitative sciences and cutting edge technology. I once interviewed him for two hours at a coffee shop in Davis, California, and later got to hang out with him at a very cool party populated by famous science fiction authors. One day I might summon the courage to write it all up. But never mind that for now.

Robinson's dual use of "the two cultures" -- science and the humanities -- is rare among literary types and humanities professors, who are generally too stupid or lazy to bother acquiring much expertise in anything other than the dessicated, math-free prose of their own tiny sub-field. Which annually produces completely meaningless and soon forgotten pieces of writing that are read by a grand worldwide total of perhaps 50 people.

On the other hand, science and engineering types typically lack the subtle thinking and adequate qualitative knowledge of history and political-economy necessary to think about human societies in sophisticated terms. So instead they think about politics and society as akin to equations in thermodynamics -- so simple and clear that the resulting descriptions and prescriptions bear no relationship to observable reality. Consider the vast outpouring of simple-minded Ayn Rand libertarianism churned out by so many science fiction authors with PhDs in the natural sciences or engineering. It's all embarrassingly facile tripe, to say nothing of morally abhorrent (let's create private markets to sell rivers and babies and harvested organs, yay!).

I lack a degree in a quantitative discipline to go with my master's in history, but I've at least made an effort to learn some of the language of the quantitative fields. Done some coursework in algebra, calculus, chemistry, biology, and computer science, plus lots of spare reading of scientific work directed at reasonably not-stupid lay people. It can be done.

And it all comes in handy, both sides of the quantitative/qualitative coin, when trying to think about human societies as systems. They are real, physical entities, made up of multiple, interacting parts, which in turn seem to be governed by regularities or patterns. "Laws" or "rules" would be too strong a term. Human societies display recurring trends, recognizable sequences of change. But none of it can really be quantified. No matter what the economists or computer scientists say. The computer program Sim City is an amazing creation, based on 100% quantitative algorithms processed on a microchip. But Sim City doesn't do prediction. The algorithms are useful for producing behavior on a computer screen that is strongly reminiscent of phenomena seen in real life: the organic growth and development over time of a concentrated urban settlement full of human animals. But the algorithms that produce the simulated behavior don't correspond in a precise, one-to-one fashion, to rules exactly governing rigorously discrete objects in physical reality.

That precise, one-to-one correspondence does prevail, to an extraordinary degree, in the most fundamental physical sciences. Sub-atomic particles, molecular chemistry, and bodies in motion really do obey exact rules that our mathematical equations can describe exactly. Or at least to such a high degree of precision that any lack of exactness is usually trivial for everyday purposes. In Sim City, the equations in the computer program are useful approximations. They are to a real city what a paint stroke is to the Mona Lisa's face. In physics, the equations are the face. For all practical purposes, anyway.

The mysteriously exact correspondence between equations from the human brain and the rules of nature is one of the greatest puzzles ever encountered by our species. The mysterious correspondence is the reason the natural sciences work so well. For some, it also strongly suggests the existence of an intelligence responsible for the creation and functioning of all that exists.

In any case, the correspondence is the only thing that allows us to make pronouncements, with some authority, on how physical phenomena will unfold in the future. In simpler language, our ability to uncover the rules of reality allows us to make predictions about that reality. In the natural sciences, this effort has been extraordinarily successful. This is true even in exploring systems that don't allow precise prediction of a future course of events -- nonlinear systems like fluids and ecosystems, or the fundamentally chance-based actions of quantum particles. In these cases, we can still precisely quantify and anticipate the boundaries of possibility or the nature of uncertainty.

In the social sciences, essentially none of this is possible. We've never found a better method of anticipating the future of human societies than the literary approach of George Kennan and Kim Stanley Robinson. They think about what a society is, what are its parts, what are some of the rules of thumb for its possible behaviors, and then they speculate on which way the whole mess might go, for some defined period of time. Months, decades, centuries. Kennan wrote about the future decades of the obscene Marxist-Leninist monstrosity administered from the Kremlin. Robinson writes of possible post-capitalist societies in the coming centuries or in histories that never were.

Both of these men, in essence, are running simulations on the world's most sophisticated computer -- the human brain. It's the only real method we have of doing societal prediction. And the only one we are likely to have, for as long as our species exists. As I've written elsewhere, human societies can't be quantified in the way that physical systems can. That's because, ultimately, human behavior rests in the mysterious phenomenon known as "consciousness." The ultimate something in our minds that makes us aware of ourselves and our existence, giving us the ability to envision, assess, and choose different courses of action.

We know, beyond any reasonable doubt -- I emphasize any -- that this capacity rests in the physical substance of our brain. Not, as most spiritual belief systems would have it, in something non-physical. Chop out a part of the brain, human being turns to vegetable. Or imagines his wife is a hat. Therefore, consciousness equals brain. End of story. Consciousness comes from our brain, period. At the same time, though, we have no idea how billions of interacting neurons, ganglia, axons, neurotransmitters and such add up, collectively, to "I." There's too much working too fast at too tiny a level for quantification. We can't attach numbers to how the mind works at its most basic level. And, odds are, we never will. In this case, something physical can also be inherently non-quantifiable.

To put it more poetically, there is such a thing as the human soul. Not a supernatural entity that constitutes the real me and continues after I'm dead. When I'm dead, my soul is annihilated along with my brain. It is physical, therefore mortal. But the soul remains a mystery eternal, beyond final understanding, even so.

This limits our ability to predict our future, but still enables us to try. In hopes of finding wisdom, somehow, to make this life better than it is now. It's not much, but it's all we have.

The great burning: paleoclimate data puts it all in perspective

I've learned by now to be cautious about the larger policy implications of any single peer-reviewed paper in the scientific literature. There are too many ways for us non-scientists to trip over our relative ignorance of statistical methodology and data processing.

Still, sometimes I can't help myself. The journal Science recently published a review article analyzing the existing body of literature on paleoclimate -- i.e., data about how the Earth's climate behaved in the past. So in this case, I'm not really reacting to just one paper, but rather to a summary of many others. And some rather hideous findings. You can read a summary for policy wonks here. On our current course, the literature suggests, greenhouse gas concentrations one hundred years from now will rival the highest levels ever seen in the history of this planet. At those levels, the Earth's mean annual surface temperature in the past reached about 87 degrees Fahrenheit. That's up from 59 degrees Fahrenheit today.

As often as I read this kind of stuff, I still can't get over how incomprehensibly awful it is. Or how little clue the policy wonk community has about what's really happening. An 87 degree global mean surface temperature will burn human civilization to ashes. It will, according to the article referenced above, make the middle latitudes of the planet literally uninhabitable -- the combination of heat and humidity will cause respiration in the human body to cease. Whatever is left of humanity will be forced to tiny enclaves in Siberia, northern Canada, and Antarctica. With a vast zone of death separating them for thousands of years, until the temperature someday subsides.

But tonight's State of the Union address will talk about taxes, entitlements, and Afghanistan.

History cinema geekery: JFK makes the other guy blink

Yesterday was the twentieth anniversary of the inauguration of John F. Kennedy. The day of his "ask not what your country can do for you" speech. Which explains the mysterious ghost of JFK appearing on the Google home page yesterday. Surrounded by idealistic words and whatnot.

I've been in a movie kind of mood all week, wandering through clips on YouTube, thinking about films I've seen and have yet to see. Pondering how the pop culture ether has shaped my thinking about pretty much everything for my whole life. As important as science and empiricism and academic inquiry are, there's something to be said for stories and art in the way we humans understand our place in the universe.

JFK has always been a great source of stories, both real and fictionalized. Most polls of Americans rate him among our greatest presidents. Because most people remember only the facile image of the vigorous young leader, appearing to be bold and decisive as he delivered his inspiring rhetoric for the cameras. Then pitching forward in an open limousine in Dallas, before a bullet blew his skull and brain to bits. Camelot lost, the king cut down in his prime.

But in fact Kennedy was very much a mixed bag as chief executives go. His personal life was a disaster that almost certainly compromised his ability to serve as president. Fucking the mistresses of mafia dons will do that. So will letting a quack doctor pump you full of amphetamines to heighten thrill-seeking, risk-addictive behavior. Then there are the highly questionable policies. A vast, across the board military buildup that was totally unnecessary. A fixation on the clownish commie dictator in Havana. Reinforcing the stupid and murderous American military expedition in Vietnam.

On the other hand, there are the moments in which this cynical, profane, reckless man showed hints of genuine humanity and greatness -- or seemed to do so. Such glimpses depend greatly upon the eye of the beholder. It's far too easy to take a fleeting moment and inflate it into myth. Myths aren't necessarily bad. They are stories, upon which we story-telling human animals rely to construct the meaning of our existence.

Kennedy's occasional flashes of seeming brilliance enable myth-building and story telling. How "real" the myths and stories are is open to question.

One story goes like this. He set the United States on course to land human beings on another planetary body. Which they did. This alone ranks as possibly the single most astounding achievement in the 200,000 year history of our species. The only greater success would be that of the first humans to explore beyond Africa long ago, a venture that led our race to colonize the far corners of the Earth.


JFK on the need for space exploration, September 12, 1962

Other stories are told. After initial indifference, Kennedy moved slowly but surely toward putting the national government on the side of civil rights for African Americans. He changed the lives of people around the world by creating the peace corps. Some of the medical students I work with served in that organization, gaining insight and wisdom they might not otherwise have found.

And Kennedy decided against going to war with the Soviet Union over Cuba in October 1962. His performance in that crisis may not have been the cool, masterfully orchestrated manipulation of events described by his great hagiographers, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and Theodore Sorensen. But it was good enough. His choices allowed me and a lot of other people to be born in the years that followed. Kennedy created the current historical time line of the universe we know, in which the United States did not, as planned, launch massive air strikes against Soviet forces in Cuba on the morning of Monday, October 29, 1962. Throughout the crisis, many of his advisers pushed Kennedy hard to forget about blockades and back-channel negotiations and just get on with bombing the fuck out of the Russians. He didn't.

One of my favorite movies is an idealized, not entirely accurate, still highly watchable retelling of Kennedy's actions in the Cuban Missile Crisis. The movie is Thirteen Days, released a decade ago. If you can't stand Kevin Costner, as many people evidently cannot, you will not be able to watch this movie. Costner plays Kenneth O'Donnell, a member of JFK's "Irish mafia" White House inner circle. I kind of like him, actually. Despite the typically bad Costner rendition of an exotic accent.

Bruce Greenwood as JFK does an amazing job blending elements of the president's popular image and actual personality. Cool, sardonic, cautious. The thrill-addict, horn-dog part of JFK's personality is conveniently left out. It's still a magnetic portrayal in an entertaining film. With little touches that make Greenwood's Kennedy feel real. Example: JFK leans forward to make a point and momentarily shudders from a spasm in his back. Greenwood's face and body language, in that flash of time, betray bodily torment kept constantly repressed by sheer will. The real Kennedy, thanks to war injuries and a variety of ailments, endured agonizing physical pain for every moment of his adult life.

Below is a clip from the film. It depicts the first high-seas showdown between the American and Soviet navies, on the morning of October 24, 1962. While my graduate degree in history hasn't made me rich, it does yield a geeky sort of thrill at seeing historical figures on film that most people have never heard of. Dean Rusk, Maxwell Taylor, Robert McNamara, John McCone, Adlai Stevenson, McGeorge Bundy. When I was in grad school, some of them were still alive.



In stories, a President can save the world. It's not like that today. But I like to think there's some wisdom to be found even so, in the stories of how people once made fateful choices, great and small.