The Kardashev Imperative

Given our predicament as a global civilization it’s useful to look at things in a broad perspective. The broadest perspective I know of is the Kardahsev Classification System. Dr. Nikolai Kardashev is a Russian Astrophysicist and Deputy Director of the Russian Space Research Institute. Kardashev was thinking about how we could classify galactic civilizations, some of which may be millions or billions of years ahead of ours, and therefore more advanced. The Kardashev Scale is a method of measuring advanced civilizations. Naturally, it’s speculative. The primary metric in the scale is a civilization’s energy consumption, or the energy at its disposal, plus the degree of space colonization. There are three types: Type 1 is a civilization that has achieved mastery of the energy of its home planet, Type 2 its solar system, and Type 3 its galaxy. Because of the wide consumption ranges Kardashev includes intermediate measurements – in hundredths. As of 2010 we are at Kardashev 0.72.

In thinking about how we’re doing on the way to Kardashev Type 1 I realized that what I was really  looking at is a species intelligence test. I’ve just made up the Kardashev Test: Is your species intelligent enough to develop and maintain a civilization capable of successfully mastering the energy resources of your planet, solar system or galaxy? Which means you’re going to be smart enough to avoid  blowing  yourselves up through war or experimenting with dangerous fuels, avoid exhausting  all one fuel before you’ve developed a more advanced one, avoid polluting your environment catastrophically and avoid destroying your climate. Because if you do any of these things your nascent civilization will fail.

The caveat here is the famous “one shot” quote by Sir Fred Hoyle:

“It has often been said that, if the human species fails to make a go of it here on the Earth, some other species will take over the running. In the sense of developing intelligence this is not correct. We have or soon will have, exhausted the necessary physical prerequisites so far as this planet is concerned. With coal gone, oil gone, high-grade metallic ores gone, no species however competent can make the long climb from primitive conditions to high-level technology. This is a one-shot affair. If we fail, this planetary system fails so far as intelligence is concerned.”

Roz Savage, the Ocean Rower and Environmental Campaigner, (good luck on the Indian Ocean Roz) asked me if there’s anything left to play for. Yes Roz, there’s everything to play for. It’s all or nothing. We are either going to wake up and get smart enough to achieve Kardashev Type 1, or we will fail. There are a lot of environmentalists out there who think it’s game over and there’s no doubt we’re on the edge.

So the Type 1 Kardashev test is, if you’re too dumb to manage your planetary resources, population and environment, you weren’t an intelligent species to begin with.

This is the Kardashev Imperative: To devise a global system based on the scientifically rational use of resources and technology to sustain and advance our civilization until we reach Type 1.

Which means we won’t be able to indulge in religious mumbo jumbo, idiot wars, corporate capitalism and its artificial externalities, exponential population growth, and all the rest of the primitive nonsense we’re up to at present.

So far it looks like we’ve turned down the rational MIT approach in favour of the Hollywood action film version with Somali pirates, Russian Mafia, billion person famines, super yacht driving banker villains, mad max infrastructure, and internet porn to keep us entertained when we’re bored with Halo Reach and Lady GaGa. I mean, really, is that the best we can do?

Diary of an Ocean Vagrant II

Wednesday 23^rd February 2011

It was a frustrating night of fluky and contrary winds. We should be in Gibraltar by 4pm nonetheless. Yesterday we sailed past one of the most bizarre expression of modern industrial farming: the greenhouses on the southern Spanish coast near Almeria. An entire coastal plain into the foothills of the mountains in one pane of glass. Inhabited by indentured Ecuadorians no doubt. This glass covers an area of Murcia so extensive you can see it from space, should you happen to be in space. And for what? So that the lardy English, abandoned to sloth, X factor and obesity, can get their fresh strawberries in February. But soon the rivers of southern Spain irrigating this monster will run dry. Then what?

Luxury:

There is a theory of Utility in which there are useful items and useless items. For example, buying a normal car to get to work is useful. Buying a Bentley transports no more people and therefore all the money and resources used on the difference is a loss to the useful economy. It’s reached a scale where it’s having a profound effect. All the luxury items, the super yachts, the cars, the planes, the 10 million dollar parties. Not to mention all the Kitchen and bathroom refits in all the mac mansions. Useless and really uninteresting.

But in SuperWorld this is the standard of the infrastructure. Everything must be perfect – all the time. Legions of chauffeurs, executive security agents, deckhands, concierges, cleaners, stewards, PA’s, you name it, scuffling around the ‘family’ and the guests, and God forbid there should be a hair, a napkin, a screw, anything, out of place. While we’re happy to send First Recon Marines into Iraq in clapped out hummers with no armour, it is absolutely imperative that Mr and Mrs SuperClass be cocooned in perfection at all times.

Super Residence:

The hubs of SuperWorld consist of parts of major cities like London, New York and Paris. Then there are the tax residences like Monaco, Islands in the Caribbean, Isle of Man, The Channel Islands.  And the resorts like Gstaddt, Davos, and Aspen. Naturally there are parts of the Middle East, and Asia (especially on the edges of China) where a new section of the SuperClass is gathering. America is probably still home to the majority of it, although the European countries have their fair share. These residences are either physically or financially separate communities, and many of the locations are out of the spotlight. These are not celebrities in the newspaper sense of the term. While they may hire Beyonce or any of a host of other celebrities to entertain them for a birthday party, they generally prefer a quieter life, out of the media glare.

Super Education:

Education is handled by private schools , tutors and private universities – much the same as it always has been, but on a larger scale.

Super Medicine:

It’s in the area of Medicine where the SuperClass really are becoming a separate species.  Medical technology is advancing rapidly, but in most of the developed world access is either becoming prohibitively expensive (US) or the National Health Systems are coming apart at the seams (UK, EU). In SuperWorld there exists a range of services, both cosmetic and otherwise, and in luxurious surroundings in private clinics, unimaginable to anyone on an NHS waiting list.

But the frightening part is in the near future. The gap is about to widen appreciably, extending useful lifespans, and…abilities. It’s anyone’s guess how far we are from real enhancement BioAI, but it’s not more than 10/15 years. If DARPA gets in first it’ll be the military, but a hop skip and a jump behind it’ll be the SuperClass who will be enhanced.  It’s very possible China gets to functional AI first, then  it’s hard to tell how it will play out. But any physical or IQ enhancement available only to the SuperClass will be a major change in the way our species operates and evolves.

Thursday 24^th February 2011

We got too close to running out of fuel just before Gibraltar, and spent the night in Duquesa, just up the coast. I love Duquesa, the fuel dock is open 9-9 and there’s a real little town half a mile from the fish and chips and thai cafes in the marina. We walked along the beach and sat next to the church of Stella Maris, drinking beer in a bar called The Refuge. A perfect hidden gem.

Tuesday 1^st March 2011

I haven’t had a moment to write while we’ve been in Gibraltar. We’ve been working on the mast, the sat phone and half a dozen other things. Spending  time in some of these little islands of ennui in the old empire is educational.  The old guys with their roll ups and beer guts, first beer at 10am.  A cross section of women with inch think foundation and goldie chains, sundresses and slippers. Forever young living out their pensions in these marinas, catching the soccer on the flat screen in the waterfront  bar. Shoot me.

I’ve got my books from the marina free library (give one, take one). I’m reading Generation Kill, by Evan Wright, and it’s a ripper. How we really went into Iraq, as told by the members of First Recon Marines.  Some of the best war reporting I’ve ever read. I also got a mint copy from 1974 of The Limits to Growth from the Club of Rome. I haven’t read it in years and it’ll be interesting to read it again to see how the numbers stack up.

Back to SuperClass:

So now we have a small (< 1% ?) class of incredibly wealthy individuals who, through corporate boardrooms and private equity organizations like Carlyle, effectively own a significant percentage of the world’s capital and more importantly its resources. The rate of privatization in the developed world has been heavily criticized for a long time, but continues apace. The effect of this is privatization has been to turn Earth into a virtual farm system. You’ve been livestocked. You are a domesticated consumer animal on a giant farm. They own everything you need to survive, so in effect, they own you.

Friday 3^rd March 2011

After a ridiculous week in Gibraltar we finally got underway.  We picked up 750 litres of diesel and got out of the harbour past the assorted tankers and cargo boats and motored down by Tarifa at sunset and out into the Traffic Separation Scheme. We listened to the Tarifa multilingual epithet fest on VHF as the tanker crews cursed each other in broken English: You stupid, move to starboard! Where did you get your license you idiot? And the sun went down and fell into the sea.

The Traffic Separation Scheme (TSS) was as busy as usual and so the night’s watches were nerve wracking as we made our way across to the south side until we could turn to our course of 240 ° and head for Gran Canaria. I woke at 0600 for my watch, the sun coming up through cumulus anvils piling up like mad sculptures at 25000 ft and it looked like squalls and thunder on the way.

I talked to my old friend Jed Riffe on FB, and he’s researching this whole issue of the SuperRich as well, and maybe there’s a film in there somewhere.

I’ve been reading a piece by John Mauldin, a finance newsletter guy, for the last day or two. It’s by Dr Michael West, called “New Cardiovascular Systems”. Dr West is CEO  of Biotime Inc., and has launched a subsidiary called ReCyte Therapeutics, to commercialize endothelial stem cell therapies to reverse senescence in the cardiovascular and immune systems. For some reason this has been largely ignored by the press, which I think is incredible. This is a huge deal.  He can reset the telomere clock, and do it from adult cells. Whoah! Assume that this technique works and is available in 3 years. Will it be available on the NHS, or on the health plans offered by most American HMOs, or the Tunisian Health Service? I doubt it. Hell, the NHS is balking at knee replacements for the boomers, much less cardiovascular replacements. So who will be the first to have access to ReCyte’s Telomeric reset? The SuperClass, in a private clinic in Switzerland – or maybe the black clinics of Chiba.

Never mind the wrinkle creams darling, this technology will reverse aging. The one consolation for the poor has always been that at least in the end the rich were mortal like them. You know, the whole “you can’t take it with you” thing. Suppose the ubiquity of mortality is obsolete. Not only will the rich live better and a little longer or enjoy better health, they’ll become a different kind of being altogether. Let’s assume that the technology gets more sophisticated, what’s the limit? How long can you extend life? The SuperClass will not only be separated by comfort and luxury, they will become a super species. The rich really will be different: yearly full body MRI, cell repair, cellular nutrients, cloned organs…Are these the first immortals?

Recyte is typical of a range of accelerating medical advances, which will be taken advantage of by the SuperClass, and they will begin to leave the rest behind. The average lifespan in India or Africa will stumble along at around 40, and the lifespan of the SuperClass will be 150. That’s an unbridgeable gap. The SuperClass will be able to keep their money for decades longer. What this does to families is anyone’s guess. What if Rupert Murdoch lives to 150? He’ll own planet Earth and call it EarthCorp.

Saturday 4^th March 2011

Running down the Moroccan coast on a sunny afternoon, about to cross the 35 deg N latitude. Thinking about being a little south of San Francisco and the life there in contrast to the life a little east of me. The southern Mediterranean is on the boil and Europe is going to be swamped. And as any survivor of the Titanic will tell you, desperate people will sink a full lifeboat trying to climb on board, and then everyone dies. The history books are rife with stories of ancient states being inundated by refugees from famine and collapse.

I’m about half way through The Limits to Growth. In case you don’t know it, it’s the seminal ecological analysis circa 1972 written by MIT faculty for the Club of Rome, and derided by conservatives ever since for its inaccuracies and flawed predictions.  There are no predictions in the book, and it was meticulously researched. All I’ve come across so far is some carefully worded analysis, that looks, with 40  years hindsight, incredibly good. Ferchrissake, they were doing this stuff on computers in 1971! Do you know (or remember) what computers looked like in 1971? It was before monitors! They must have done this stuff on keypunch machines, and a lot of the numbers still look very good. That’s good, but in a bad way. They were right on about population, CO2, pollution – not in an exact quantitative way, which they weren’t aiming for, but as a human behaviour pattern. And the general drift is that for the first time in human history we’re hitting hard limits. I wonder what would have happened if we’d taken them seriously.

Saturday 5^th March 2011

We’re about 40 miles or so off Casablanca, doing 5 knots under a dull grey sky on a dark flat sea.

Limits to Growth: It’s when you get to Chapter 3, Growth in the World System that the most important ideas in the book are laid out. The “standard” world model and its feedback loops have been explained and to my eyes it seems sensible and scientifically prudent.  They include energy, resources, capital, population, and food. All this is put together and it’s clear that, exact details aside, the general behaviour of the model leads to the end of growth and the collapse of industrial civilization before 2070. They run a series of alternatives, some of them patently nuts, such as limitless resources, perfect birth control, zero population growth etc., and the behaviour of the model is more or less the same: collapse.  As they say about the graph of it all (figure 35), “let us begin by assuming that there will be no great changes in human values nor in the functioning of the global population – capital system as it has operated for the last one hundred years”.  It’s 40 years later and no, we didn’t change how we operate. Looking at figure 35 it’s clear that by the early 21^st century resources are declining exponentially and after a while population crashes. And that’s exactly what’s happening.

Afternoon watch, 1430.

We’re going in towards the coast at 140 deg, trying to pick up some coastal wind. We just saw the yacht Velsheda, on the bow about 2 miles off. It looks like she’s on the way to Las Palmas to fuel up on her way to the St Bart’s Bucket regatta on 24^th March. The Bucket is a tremendous gathering of the SuperClass for a 3 day race round the island. The world’s largest sailing yachts, millions of dollars worth of some of the most advanced materials and design available. If only NASA could still afford technology like that, we’d be colonizing Mars.

It’s ironic that at this moment I’m reading “the basic behaviour mode of the world system is exponential growth of population and capital, followed by collapse”. I wonder if the authors foresaw what the peak would look like and whether they imagined the degree of excess. Back in 1971 the Super Yacht industry was in its infancy. Oh baby, look at ‘em now.

Sunday 6^th March 2011

I finished Limits this morning. The last chapter is called The State of Global Equilibrium: they foresaw that the way out of our predicament was to initiate a world culture of stable equilibrium. Boy, it’s lucky that’s what we did, huh? Oh no, wait, that’s not what we did. It’s as if the politicians, business titans, et al, who read this book in 1972, if they read it, plainly decided that just because some folks from MIT with IQs twice their own thought they knew what they were talking about, they knew better. Yeah.

We might have had a shot if we’d listened. In 1950 the population of Africa was around 221 million and India was around 330 million. Even by the 1970s it would have been manageable. But it would have required a fundamental and rapid shift in 5000 years of religion, superstition, cultural beliefs and assorted mumbo jumbo.  Maybe it would have taken a kind of cognition of which humans aren’t capable -yet. Even harder, we would have had to persuade the Corporations, who were just getting their teeth into the idea of “global” (read the advantages of authoritarian labour management), and for whom growth is a religion on a par with anything the deserts of the Middle East have inflicted on us, to understand that infinite growth inside a closed system is unrealistic. Or to put it another way, silly.

So we ignored everything the good MIT folks who wrote The Limits to Growth told us. And nothing bad happened. No population problems, no resource shortages, no pollution issues or climate disturbances. Ha! Stupid MIT people.

You have to love this kid

 

You thought I was kidding about the Coca Cola

Didn’t you…

Living in the End Times

I know what you’re thinking: one too many evenings listening to aid worker’s or soldier’s  or environmentalist’s dirges about the horror…the horror (whispered in a marlon brando voice), and he’s gone over the edge. Nick’s been overwhelmed and staggered off into Jesusland. But no, I have not come to that sorry pass, yet.

This is much worse.  Living in the End Times is not a book hot of the presses in some Christian university madhouse in Florida. It is a startling new book by Slovenian Marxist philosopher and critical theorist Slavoj Žižek, who teaches at so many universities in so many countries he must live out of a suitcase.

I reproduce here the clip from his publisher, Verso:

‘Zizek analyzes the end of the world at the hands of the “four riders of the apocalypse.”’

There should no longer be any doubt: global capitalism is fast approaching its terminal crisis. Slavoj Zizek has identified the four horsemen of this coming apocalypse: the worldwide ecological crisis; imbalances within the economic system; the biogenetic revolution; and exploding social divisions and ruptures. But, he asks, if the end of capitalism seems to many like the end of the world, how is it possible for Western society to face up to the end times? In a major new analysis of our global situation, Slavok Zizek argues that our collective responses to economic Armageddon correspond to the stages of grief: ideological denial, explosions of anger and attempts at bargaining, followed by depression and withdrawal.

After passing through this zero-point, we can begin to perceive the crisis as a chance for a new beginning. Or, as Mao Zedong put it, “There is great disorder under heaven, the situation is excellent.” Slavoj Zizek shows the cultural and political forms of these stages of ideological avoidance and political protest, from New Age obscurantism to violent religious fundamentalism. Concluding with a compelling argument for the return of a Marxian critique of political economy, Zizek also divines the wellsprings of a potentially communist culture—from literary utopias like Kafka’s community of mice to the collective of freak outcasts in the TV series Heroes.”

We’ve come full political circle. When the Marxists are singing from the same hymn sheet as the Christians you know everyone is spooked. There’s a growing consensus among people who think beyond the next commercial break in X Factor that we’re not in a recession or a depression. We’re at something altogether different and given our species’ history of dealing with radical change, it’s reasonable to assume things will get bloody before they get better.  Which comes about a decade late, but welcome to the party.

What’s worrying me more than the imminent collapse of our economy is that there is now a new kind of Super Duper Capitalist version gathering steam. I’m not sure, but it looks like the people who made a pile because of the inability of our economy to deal attractively with zero margin/scalable businesses, mostly internet, like Bill Gates, Meg Whitman et al, are now convinced that because they are geniuses (after all they must be) they should run the world. I was at a TEDX conference recently at London’s Science Museum, in which Mrs G, Melinda, told us over satellite link from New York that her model for defeating poverty worldwide was Coca Cola Inc.  Said without a trace of irony. Coca Cola? Are you pulling my nipple ring? A company with a  human rights record that makes the Chinese Communist Party look like your favourite auntie? Take a peek at Killercoke.org and tell me this is the model of our new Hyperdrive Capitalism – and I’ll believe you.

I’ve always given Polybius’ Anacyclosis some credence, but according to this new model we go from Oligarchy to Democracy and instead of going into Ochlocracy, we go into Oligarchy II. Given the tremendous gini coefficient numbers, maybe we’ll have a kind of combined super elite, bio enhanced oligarchy living in heavily guarded enclaves, with Mob rule on the outside. Oh, that’s London now. Silly me.

For real dark side entertainment, catch Slavoj Žižek on YouTube. Killer.

Oh, I found Living in the End Times on YT.

HaHaHa – Jimmy Carter, comedian

We asked for signs the signs were sent — Yeah the widowhood of every government — signs for all to see.

Leonard Cohen, Anthem, 1967

I know Jimmy was never seen as one of the great presidents, but this little UTuber lets us know that he was a peak oiler before everyone. Go Jimmy. If only we’d listened in 1977. 33 years of innovation we didn’t bother with.

Note: we were using 16 mbd in 1977. Now the US uses more than that alone.

Africa

I wrote the other day that there was a rumour Labour had allowed virtually unlimited immigration because immigrants were more likely to vote Labour in future and that any objections were likely to be branded racist. The very next day the Telegraph reported that not only was it true, as the following extract makes clear…

“It called for increases in foreign workers to meet the Government’s “economic and social objectives” but also stated that the public would be opposed to the shift because of “racism” and urged ministers to try to alter public attitudes towards immigrants…It emerged earlier this month that another draft of the same document suggested Labour’s migration policy over the past decade had been aimed at meeting “social objectives” as well as economic needs – but again passages were removed.”…

Worse, Andrew Neather, a former advisor to Blair, Straw and Blunkett, added that the sharp increase in immigration over the past 10 years was partly due to a “driving political purpose: that mass immigration was the way that the Government was going to make the UK truly multi-cultural”.

It beggars belief. Whether or not the British people wish to change their culture to make it more multi-cultural is entirely up to them, and I assume they voted as such, but that’s not the point. What this document implies is that everyone who is deeply concerned about the biosphere’s ability to manage super-exponential population growth, and opposes immigration on such grounds is inherently racist.

This makes it impossible to ever take anyone in government for the last decade seriously at an ecological level again. Unless they have more luck than the gods of probability have ever seen, they’ve set Europe up for the Balkans on Steroids.

Back in the real world…

I want to return to the problem of Africa. First because it’s in the worst shape, and because many of the same issues come up in thinking about other collapsing regions, like the middle east. I’ve just discovered some research which throws some light on the troubles that Africa is in.

Research led by Dr. Marshall Burke of the University of California, Berkeley, has shown that the critical component in the endemic wars of sub Saharan Africa is temperature. The team combined historical records of conflict with rainfall and temperature records. A 1°C rise in temperature produced a 50% greater probability of conflict.

The reason seems to be the reliance of the majority of Africans on crops which are sensitive to small changes in temperature. On the one hand it’s good to get some hard data, on the other it’s a nightmare because it means that as temperature increases in line with global warming Africa becomes even more unstable than it is now. Assume Dr. Burke’s analysis is correct and that, as he says:

“…when you put things like economic growth and better governance into the mix, the temperature effect remains strong.”

Then it means that Africans find themselves in a classic adaptational trap. Their cultural history and traditions will not necessarily be helpful, because their environment is changing rapidly, too rapidly to allow for natural rates of adaptation. Since half of the world’s failed states are in sub Saharan Africa, and many of them have barely any government, it may be we are already too far into the cycle of collapse to have any effective remedy for the whole population. I’m not suggesting a scenario in which International development projects, African aid, rock stars, and the UN continue as they have; the same sad story about which we can do little. I’m suggesting a radically worse situation in which the world comes to terms with its first billion person famine, the complete collapse of society and agriculture, and the effects of the inevitable billion plus diaspora on Europe.

It is absolutely critical that Africa is stabilized to the extent possible. Clearly the traditional approach of giving billions of dollars in Western taxpayer’s money to Dictators such as Omar Bongo, President of Gabon, who brought $1m in shrink wrapped notes into the US in a suitcase, isn’t working well. Or Teodoro Obiang, son of Equatorial Guinea’s President, who moved $100m in “suspect funds” into the US, including $30m for a nice little place in Malibu. Or Jennifer Douglas, fourth wife of a former Nigerian vice-president, who helped her husband bring $40m into the US. According to a Senate report this week many other African leaders have moved hundreds of millions of dollars out of the countries they were supposedly leading, with the help of US professionals. Read the full story here and feel your eyes roll. Let’s take it for granted, until we have better data, that buying Teodoro a Malibu villa (oh, and a $38m airplane, sorry I forgot) probably isn’t the quickest route to avoiding the world’s largest ever famine and its inevitable diaspora. It’s why I’ve come to the conclusion that western government sponsored Aid must be stopped. It’s failed both the  recipients and the western taxpayers.

Despite the almost irresistible glamour of Bob and Bono, I’m not a huge fan of celebrity advocacy either. I remember a difficult meeting at the LSE in which Medecins San Frontieres was represented, talking about how to manage the often counter productive campaigns with celebrities. Perhaps it’s as Bishop Tutu says, that it’s important that we are “listening to what Africans actually want, that Africans drive their own development.” But I doubt it, because if that was working, then it really wouldn’t be a problem. The problem is that Africans haven’t driven their own development. Are we going to recycle the same post-colonial arguments again? It’s been 50 years. But in the end Desmond may be right for reasons he may not like. It looks like that Africans will have no choice because the rest of the world is too busy. What Africa needs isn’t more help. I think the people of Africa have endured all the help they can stand.

What Africa needs is intelligent systems. I’m a huge fan of small independent humanitarian organizations who engage local populations long term and personally, and it’s those organizations that are coming up with the solutions. Like kiwanja.net which enables humanitarian groups and those they serve to use communications technology in imaginative ways. We need to flood Africa with technology and knowledge systems. They need knowledge and they need friends who will work on a local level to stabilize populations. The Africans will figure out what new crops to plant, how to educate themselves, and how to manage their environment. They have to because years of paternalism, patronizing missionaries, the UN, and crooked tribal presidents, now living in Malibu, haven’t.

To come back to the African diaspora in Europe: As I said in my last post, I’m am afraid that this year, or very soon thereafter, we will see a backlash against this migration from Africa as the financial conditions in Europe worsen.

Ghost Acreage and British Immigration

I want to talk about a couple of things before I get down to Immigration in Britain and Ghost Acreage.

Last night I saw Avatar, the new James Cameron film. A truly remarkable piece of media. As I sat and watched the blue people in their perfectly realized forest ecology I thought ‘at last, we can do 3D biological reality’. Aside from the obvious impact on the entertainment industry I think it shows that computing got fast enough for us to be able fully implement an intelligent planet program. Just in time. We need to be able to produce and model large complex biologically coherent systems, like our own. We are approaching full neurological/cognitive immersion and it will change us fundamentally as a species. Cameron deserves to be congratulated on making this monster for $250 million. Well done.

The other thing is I’ve been spending the morning looking at the Burtynsky book, Oil. Rather than the rush of Avatar I sat and looked at the photos one at a time and had time to contemplate what the Oil civilization looks like on a global scale. We can’t go on doing this, it looks ridiculous. Do we really need to turn the left hand side of Canada into the world’s largest toxic lake district? We know better now.

Lastly, a quick word about today’s report on the BBC news site about Methane hydrate releases. This is very serious because we have no idea how quickly this quantity of Methane being added to the atmosphere and ocean can push us past some unseen tipping point into a temperature environment we can’t adapt to. I honestly believe we can technologically adapt to a new earth environment, but biological adaptation takes time and an enormous methane exhalation could radically alter the time frame against us.

Immigration in Britain and Ghost Acreage:

Which brings me to the real topic I want to talk about: Ghost Acreage in a world past Carrying Capacity. It’s probably helpful to define some terms here. Carrying Capacity is simply the population of any species that a given environment can support indefinitely. The term comes from shipping, as in ‘how much can she carry without sinking?’ In other words the maximum load. It all depends on what a species is taking from the environment. Populations tend to rise until they reach carrying capacity and then some critical resource, be it food, water, or something else, like oil or uranium, is sufficiently depleted that population is forced to adjust to the new depleted environment. Unfortunately populations tend to ‘overshoot’ the carrying capacity and subsequently crash, rather than adjust gradually over time. For those interested in serious chat about overshoot, William Catton is your man.

But how can a population exceed carrying capacity? In the natural world it doesn’t happen, but in the human world it does. Because of the concept of Ghost Acreage, which means the additional external acreage necessary to support the population. How does that work? Britain is a good example of a discrete ecologically defined habitat. Let’s just look at food. Estimates vary, but 35 million is a reasonable guess at the population that the island could support indefinitely, compared to its current population of 60 million. The UK imports around 40% of its food, so it seems about right. Okay so where is all the rest of the food coming from? Thailand, Brazil, India, Kenya, the US, etc. That’s Ghost Acreage – the land (or some equivalent) that’s not in Britain, but that it’s using to feed itself. Which means the people in those countries aren’t using it to feed themselves. This assumes that the countries supplying Britain with half its food have the spare acreage to do so, while maintaining the health of its own population. Aye, but there’s the rub. Population growth, especially in the developing world, has long since used up what spare capacity there was. Those people aren’t exporting food they have to spare (including the US, which is destroying its topsoil). The elites in those countries are exploiting landless labourers. We are in effect exporting hunger, drought, and ecological degradation to support our current population.

In an ecologically rational world, there can be no argument that we are entitled to run our population at someone else’s expense. It’s ironic that the countries and cultures from which we draw most of our immigration are also those we use for ghost acreage to support our over population. By allowing immigration, and thereby increasing Britain’s population, we are impoverishing another country’s population, which makes it less attractive to live in, and encourages further immigration (legally or illegally) to already over populated Britain (or another part of the developed world). It’s classic positive feedback.

What makes the situation even more bizarre is that as we impoverish people from the countries supplying us with ghost acreage we send aid, which runs to about £9 billion/year in Britain, and when the situation deteriorates to the point where the country fails, we send in the military and/or deal with the mass migration that results.

Britain is just a good example of the developed world. The current political environment in most of the West reflects the utter ecological illiteracy necessary to maintain the dogma that immigration is vital to the nation. On the contrary, it is lethal to the country’s ability to support itself, and lethal to the impoverished countries supplying the ghost acreage. As such it’s hard to see the ethical case for allowing immigration to either Britain, or the rest of Europe, which shares similar population dynamics.

It’s time we stopped the political equivalent of magical realism in thinking about immigration.

The Lie

Where was I? Oh yes, the lie. It’s not so much that the truth hurts, it’s that it’s so boring and pompous. Yes, the Cadillacs may go creeping now through the night and the poison gas, but that’s no way to encourage the young people. Endlessly telling them that the most ecologically sensible thing to do is commit suicide is no help. So we’re going to lie and see if we can turn it into the truth.

There are two competing trajectories, critical paths if you will, amongst the futurati. The most popular at the moment is 6 degrees of Apocalypse, you oil drunk fools, you will die horribly. The other, much less well known, is the Singularity: Humanity stands on the verge of the most thrilling period in its history. Now I ask you, which sounds like more fun?

In case you’ve been on a Buddhist retreat for the last 150 years in a Bhutanese cave I’ll run through the anthropogenic climate catastrophe for you. We were running out of whale oil and it looked grim, until Colonel Drake discovered real oil, which was a great relief to us, and the whales were thrilled to bits. We made Cadillacs and giant roads to drive ourselves to death on. We built towns in the middle of nowhere for no other reason than that we could. We found that Oil was the greatest aphrodisiac ever, so we all had way too many babies. We invented plastic which is shiny, cheap, lives forever and now we have a giant island of floating plastic rubbish in the Pacific the size of America. In the process we pumped billions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and poisoned the ocean, which turns out to have been a mistake. Now it looks like the average temperature on earth will make Reykjavik look like St Tropez  and civilization will drown in warm plastic soup. Which sounds terrible of course.

Okay, now for the lie, the Singularity. It’s really about the convergence of computing, space travel, biology and nanotechnology. Or utilitarian transhumanism if you want to get philosophical about it. Here’s what happened – just the highlights.

Computing: In the second world war a gay English cryptographer called Alan invented computing. Which was pretty incredible considering he was busy beating the Nazis at the same time. After the war the English, rather than develop a gigantic new industry and make billions, hid the computer, called Colossus, in a colossal warehouse like the one where they put the Ark of the Covenant at the end of Indiana Jones and refused to talk about it. When they realized Alan was gay they took away his security clearance in case he became a communist and he was so miserable he committed suicide. Which tells you a lot about the English.

But luckily computing continued to develop in America and we got ENIAC, IBM and mainframes. The spooky part is that in the mid 50s some boys were born within about a year of one another: Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Bill Joy, Scott McNealy and of course Steve Wozniak. Between them they gave us pretty much all the rest of computing, including the internet. Makes you wonder about cluster reincarnation. Nah, probably just a coincidence.

Anyhow by 1965 Gordon Moore, one of the founders of Intel, realized that semiconductor capability was doubling about every two years. He called it Moore’s Law (no surprise there) and the amazing thing was that it seemed to work not just for semiconductor capability, but the whole course of technological development for the last 40 years. In a few years it’s very possible we’ll make a machine smarter than us. Not science fiction, but really.

Biology: Then shortly after the war four scientists at Cambridge discovered DNA. Watson, Crick, Wilkins and Franklin. There’s an argument that Rosalind Franklin was really behind it all, but we’ll never know. We all know how guys are about girl scientists. Suddenly we could understand everything Darwin had been trying to say: we had a language of biology – molecular biology – and it went ATCG. Everything changed in the lab. By 2000 we’d mapped the human genome, three years earlier than anyone thought possible. Thank you Mr. Venter, who is now finding genomes all over the world’s oceans on his giant yacht Sorcerer II.

Nano: In 1959 Richard Feynman gave a talk called There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom in which he said he saw no reason we couldn’t manipulate matter at the atomic and molecular level. Not only was he one of the funniest men in science, he was also one of the smartest. He’d discovered Quantum Electrodynamics so when he started talking about molecular size engineering no one just laughed him off. But it wasn’t until the invention of the Scanning Tunnelling Microscope that we could see what we were doing. By the 80s Eric Drexler had published Engines of Creation and really got down to some detail about how we could proceed. 20 years later and we can build things at the molecular scale. It’s called Nanotech because it deals with structures less than 100 nanometres in size. That’s 0.0000001m. We are on the verge of mastering matter. In 10 years we’ll be there.

And then there was space. Space got off to a good start and when I was a kid lots of us thought we were on our way. It wasn’t to be. Arthur Clarke was maybe the only one who foresaw that there would be a hiatus after the moon landing. Me? I was packed and ready. We were going to live in space stations at the Langrange points and go out into the Galaxy. It was disappointing, but in the meantime things were going on. We got very good at satellite technology and NASA sent probes out into the solar system. What most people don’t know is that in the background big things have been happening: space drive. One of the overwhelming problems with space travel is the time it takes. 2 years to Mars. But a Venezuelan Chinese astronaut, Frank Chang Diaz, has developed plasma drive – VASIMR – and it works. Okay, it’s not Warp Drive, but it’ll get us out there.

You see what’s going on here? While a lot of us were having sex in the back of the Cadillac, some of us were getting some work done. In the last 50 years we’ve discovered more than in centuries before. I talked the other day about how the human cognitive system doesn’t like a downer, well it has a worse problem. It doesn’t have a good intuitive grasp of exponential change. It’s an evolutionary thing. We’re built for a linear change environment, so exponential change sort of creeps up on us and then we get surprised.

For the last half century technology has been accelerating – but it’s been the slow acceleration. Exponential curves have this inflection point where it’s going along slowly getting bigger and then boom, it heads for the sky. That’s where we are, the inflection point. These technologies are at the point of converging and the rate of change becomes almost instantaneous. Science fiction stops being in the future.

So what was the lie? It wasn’t. I was kidding you.

But doesn’t that sound like more fun than hunkering down in the disused nuclear bunker with the last three cans of organic carrots?

The Lords of the Aether

I am flattered and terrified that the Lords of the Aether appear to be reading my blog. How else to explain the immediate synchronicity, but to assume the intervention of those of the psychic realm? I’d no sooner posted a little piece on Simon Cowell’s phone-in democracy than here he was being interviewed by Newsnight’s favorite dominatrix Kirsty Wark. He actually intends to make a show in which “big issues” are discussed and voted on by the X Factor demographic. Can you imagine? In the last UK election 24 million people voted. In the last X Factor 20 million people voted. Which means he now has the ability to clone the entire parliamentary process and produce virtually instant referenda. The gothic edifice of representative democracy is technologically obsolete. In the days of the horse and carriage we had to have representatives because there was no other way to approximate the so called voice of the people. Now Simon can just ask the people and they can phone in the vote. Immigration, the War for Oil, the European Magisterium, The Underclass, The Overclass…sorted in no time. Go Simon.