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Today’s Contemplation: Collapse Cometh CLXVII–The Future Ain’t What It Used to Be

November 30, 2023

Today’s Contemplation: Collapse Cometh CLXVII

Tulum, Mexico (1986). Photo by author.

The Future Ain’t What It Used to Be

Today’s Contemplation is my brief comment on an article posted on Facebook by Tristan Sykes of Just Collapse.

The article in question (short and concise) is an update of the World3 model used in creating the various scenarios in the 1972 The Limits to Growth study using the most recent empirical data.

While the authors make clear the uncertainty involved in a data’s trendline after it reaches its ‘tipping point’ (although one could argue there exists great uncertainty in any such modelling beyond the present; complex systems with their nonlinear feedback loops and emergent phenomena are impossible to map out with ‘perfect’ accuracy), the interesting — but not surprising — thing to note is that virtually all of these projections exhibit not just shifts of their peaks into the future but ‘higher highs’ followed by temporally-contracted declines (i.e., a quicker ‘collapse’) resulting in ‘lower lows’.

‘Deniers’ will argue this highlights the fallibility of ‘doom-based’ narratives’ and ‘bargainers’ will likely suggest this buys humanity more time to ‘mitigate/manage’ our predicament. But, perhaps, this merely points out how non-linear system-feedback loops behave.

As Donella Meadows argued in Thinking in Systems: A Primer: “…Delays that are too long cause damped, sustained or exploding oscillations, depending on how much too long. Overlong delays in a system with a threshold, a danger point, a range past which irreversible damage can occur, cause overshoot and collapse.”

The delays in these peaks that are projected are looking to allow us to go further into overshoot — providing fodder for those rationalising away our predicament — and most likely result in a ‘correction’ that will most certainly ‘dampen’ adaptive responses as the time to do so will be shorter. Such a situation may also possibly feed into further negative feedback loops as attempted adaptations could be quite maladaptive (as many (most? all?) have been the past few decades given the influence and direction of our societies’ wealth-extractors who are leveraging our predicament at every turn).

While it is indeed difficult to make predictions, especially if they’re about the future, overshoot and collapse remains the predicted ‘conclusion’ of this business-as-usual scenario, despite the uncertainty painted by the authors.

As the saying goes, the future ain’t what it used to be; it seems to be getting worse by the day…

The Next Ten Billion Years

June 12, 2021

The Next Ten Billion Years

This is a post that I published on “Cassandra’s Legacy” in 2012. It was one of the most successful posts ever published on that blog, it was reposted, discussed, and criticized in several places, including a long rebuttal by John Michael Greer, “The ArchDruid.” I commented on Greer’s comments here. I think it is appropriate to repropose this rather ambitious description of the history of the universe on my new blog, “The Seneca Effect,” after I explored some similar arguments in recent posts (The Great Turning Point of Humankind, Long term Perspectives of Nuclear Energy, and “Star Parasites“).

So, here it is, just slightly revised and updated with respect to the initial version.

The next ten billion years

It is not surprising that we found the future fascinating; after all, we are all going there. But the future is never what it used to be and it is said that predictions are always difficult, especially those dealing with the future. Nevertheless, it is possible to study the future, which is something different from predicting it. It is an exercise called “scenario building”. Here, let me try a telescopic sweep of scenario building that starts from the remote past and takes us to the remote future over a total range of 20 billion years. While the past is what it was, our future bifurcates into two scenarios; one “good” and the other “bad”, all depending on what we’ll be doing in the coming years.

The past 10 billion years

– 10 billion years ago. The universe is young, it has existed for less than four billion years. But it already looks the way it will be for many billion years in the future: galaxies, stars, planets, black holes and much more.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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