One of the space people responded to this by saying:
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Climate Change is but a minor symptom caused by our rapid approach to the “Limits to Growth” as defined by MIT in 1972, and revisited as recently as 2017 in World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity: A Second Notice | BioScience | Oxford Academic. Many decades of ferocious arguments have raged in front of my eyes over climate change, whether it’s happening or not, and what to do about it, none of which have significantly altered the trends illustrated. There are many other dangers our civilization is facing, discussions of which fill countless storage devices across the net, but only one solution set that feasibly and humanely resolves them all. You'll find the working summary at astrilis.org/A18ProSumRPR.pdf the web site at astrilis.org and the introductory video at AWGBriefIntro - YouTube and I look forward to seeing your responses to what is merely the tip of this iceberg!
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My response:
Thank you, ..., for your very sincere and important effort to get us thinking about what we are trying to do here. I certainly looked carefully at your link, and remembered the many
other things I have read through the years related to it. I immediately remember the "Limits to Growth" debates, and the two latest novels by Dan Brown, Inferno and Origins (though I was thinking more about Origins this morning, as it connects more to my own current activities.)
Re limits to growth: I was once the lead analyst for the long-term future at EIA/DOE, the part of the US Department of Energy responsible for independent nonpolitical predictions and analysis, which produced the Annual Energy Outlook for Congress and the public, and many special studies. At one point, I was commissioned by the Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) to try to do an objective evaluation of the whole series of reports from the Club of Rome.
What I remember most from that evaluation was a kind of serious joke summary. "A group of serious concerned rich businessmen decided to commission a study to tell them what the future of the world should be. First they went to wise aging intellectuals in Italy who wrote a clear and simple report saying 'the world is coming to an end.' (The Limits to Growth, like Brown's novel Inferno). Next they went to American engineers who said it might be saved, but only with an incredible unintelligible complex Rube Goldberg. (Second report to the Club of Rome, quite different from the first, and much more detailed.) Then they went to Latin America, which said the only way to save it would be by going macho and nuclear in a way which looked as if it would blow up. Then they went to the Japanese, who said we should not predict the world but should control/optimize it, and that survival demanded turning the US back into an agricultural nation primarily dedicated to sending more food to Asia."
I would suggest two important modifications to your message here.
First: climate change is NOT just a symptom. In www.werbos.com/Atacama.pdf and /E/GridIOT.pdf, I explain why H2S formation in the ocean in coming years is MUCH more than just global warming, and much more serious than sea level rise flooding all the coastal cities of the world. That's not about global warming. I have heard ponderous experts debate "Is it possible that warming will go so far that it might someday shut down the thermohaline currents which bring oxygen to the Pacific Ocean? Could it ever go so far, in the worst case, threatening the very lives of every species of mammal on earth? Well, maybe, you never know.." But in fact, IT HAS HAPPENED ALREADY!!!!!! Is it just the consequence of the broader syndrome in the piece Dwight cites? If we develop geoengineering to stay alive, would be just be patching up a symptom?
Well, there are times when symptoms have to be treated, urgently, EVEN IF they are just symptoms. Once the patient is bleeding to death, bandaids or even torniquets may be essential, first, before the deeper problems can be solved.
Second: SPACE IS NOT THE SOLUTION TO THE LIMITS TO GROWTH KIND OF PROBLEM. I too strongly support the effort towards sustainable human settlement of space, and growth into space, but we should not imagine that this important goal is the only one we need to work for. It is not a silver bullet to solve all the problems of humanity.
For example, we need to accept the reality that the population growth of humans WILL go to zero. The book by Meadows, explaining Forrester's "Limits to Growth," says many silly things, but it also makes a clear and inescapable point about population growth, that it WILL go to zero, and that our only choice is between a kind of soft landing or a catastrophe.
Back when those books came out, and people proposed that space could give us a third alternative, Asimov (or was it Sagan?) put out a calculation showing that sustained population growth of... 3% or 1%... would require that human expansion into space would have to exceed the speed of light, to continue more than just a few centuries. We should never forget that calculation.
HOW COULD WE MANAGE A SOFT LANDING? That is a very serious question, calling for much more careful and complex analysis than I will even attempt this morning.
There are growing political conflicts right at present (CNN in the background..) showing signs of going grossly unstable, capable of threatening our very existence, connected to bigger but less visible conflicts about who will control the coming INternet of Things (IOT)... and I agree with Dwight that these threaten the very existence of our species even more than the H2S syndrome does, on a shorter time frame. Last month, at IJCNN2018 (the world's top technical conference on neural networks, the core technology behind "the new AI"), I was asked to give a plenary talk addressing the IOT side of this, building up to six key slides depicting the challenge and what might be done about it in a constructive technical way. (www.werbos.com/IT_big_
In the end, there are just a whole lot of concrete things which need to be done, and I again thank ... for trying to mobilize more energy to get more of the necessary things done.
Best regards,
Paul
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