In Pursuit Of Waste

My latest progress in the pursuit of a simple, objective measure of values has yielded a testable model based on estimated distributions of resources throughout the global population. I’m presenting the model as a set of concepts and simulations for use in discussing and exploring ideas and explanations about the world as I’ve been doing in my first blog, Idea Explorer, and more loosely in my fiction as embodied in the BIOME/Lights Out books and the Simulated News blog.

To the extent that my current simulation is applicable to actual history, I can characterize my lifetime as coinciding with a period of human history when economic activity in the production of waste has had more value than people and is likely to result in the extermination of our species along with many others that are even more undervalued. I have personally pursued waste, which I define as resources that do not meet basic biological needs, and/or they eliminate the ability of others to meet those needs. In particular, I have devoted most of my life to the enabling and development of technology that can acquire and manipulate the world’s resources at an accelerating rate. 

One aspect of the simulated world’s future is rapid production of waste even as the world’s population crashes, which might be explained by the influence of artificially intelligent machines taking the place of humans to serve the purpose of their own continuation as the ultimate embodiment of waste. While I have not directly contributed to that, I have enough experience and knowledge to closely follow it and use some of its precursors in my own work, making such speculation more than an extrapolation of science fiction.

Interest in the role of values in the determination of humanity’s fate has always had an emotional component, alternating between the elation of discovery and the guilt of being part of a global killing machine that enables that discovery. What felt like a binary choice between personal longevity and happiness aided by employment of technology and waste creation, and long term longevity of the biosphere that encompasses and nourishes life, has been largely verified by study and evidence. Hope has driven the search for a third choice that optimizes both, and frustration has accompanied failure in that search. 

Technology as the answer to many of humanity’s wants, fulfilled by waste, has sabotaged our desire for a long future that only a replenishable and diverse habitat can provide. In the terms of the simulation, serving the value of waste ultimately overwhelms the values of habitat and people. By pursuing waste as a default in a culture where personal survival is contingent on it, contribution to the demise of life has been all but inevitable.

Doubt

 

As always, I am open to pleasant surprises; but I am under no illusion that they will be just that: surprises.

The last few years have been rough for much of the world. My instinct to hunker down and try to weather the storm of disease, social unrest, and environmental disaster, while using my particular skills to search for ways to extricate us all from the worst of it, appears to have been a good one. This, despite the fact that the “storm” is most likely to intensify and overwhelm even the most careful and fortified among us. There is no safe place to go; and luck is not on our side.

I have avoided the worst consequences so far, but symptoms of advanced age remind me that even in the best circumstances my time would be about as limited. Doubting myself more than I doubt others has been forced into reverse, so that now I see that window of time being pushed closed by people I expected to be at least as responsible and caring as I think I am. I find myself doubting what until now I never imagined doubting: that humanity has what it takes to survive, and that we are even worthy of it.

Awareness borne of experience and indulgence of curiosity has revealed the scope of threats to longevity and the networks of causes that have both created and amplified them. That awareness, which I once perceived as a valuable tool for collaboration toward workable and working solutions, has become a source of physically painful stress, triggering a fight-or-flight response that cannot be acted upon, while the third option of living with the threats is intolerable due to their nature - and mine.

There are patterns in history that reveal what appear to be fundamental aspects of human nature. Chief among them is that we, like other creatures, seek to procreate and dominate the environments we occupy. What saved us until recently was the existence of predators and limited resources that kept us from succeeding beyond what the rest of life could tolerate. 

Invention of technologies that could harness the forces of nature, coupled with our willingness to use them to meet our ultimate goals, enabled us to attain what no other species could: global dominance. Unfortunately, wisdom and empathy weren’t up to the task of keeping us from destroying those on which we depended for survival. Those qualities were overwhelmed by an illogical yet basic belief in our innate superiority over those we inaccurately perceived as not being like us, or as part of us, or as valuable as us. And now, they are dying; and because we are also part of them, so are we.

My doubts aside, future experience will determine what is accurate and who is accountable for whatever fate awaits us. Perhaps foolishly, I refuse to give up on the possibility that something good is ahead of us, rather than locked into unreachable pockets of the past.