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Predictions for the collapse of our civilization
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Jun 5, 2025
Four talks at the June 17, 2014, meeting of the Central Texas Chapter of the World Future Society. Speakers were: 1. Mike Ignatowski - Overview of article predicting collapse 2. John Duncanson - A choice of catastrophes 3. Paul Schumann - Strange behavior of a simple complex system 4. Jon Roland - How might modern civilization fall? http://constitution.org/col/jdr/hmmcf.ppt
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festivities for today before I came to Austin I lived in Upstate New York and I would go to the
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New York City futurist group they had a a large city to draw on and they would
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occasionally have some well-known speakers come and speak at their monthly meetings but the most common format of
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the meetings was actually to draw on the local population expertise and they
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literally had a topic picked and they give people six minutes to talk on it
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they try and get five six seven people to come in and give six minute presentations on it it's it's really
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actually a challenge to do something creative and interesting in just six minutes it's very hard to do um so that
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that was always interesting to watch to see how people cram things into six minutes as
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much as they could uh we don't have quite the population of New York City to draw on so we'll give people 10 to 15
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minutes to talk on our little panel discussion here and it's not really a
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panel discussion in the sense we're all sitting up here in front we just have four speakers who are going to give their own version of the topic
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tonight so let me introduce Joyce Joya who is agreed to be our
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moderator um if you don't know Joyce she's strategic business futurist
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president CEO of the Herman group uh the first Road Warrior of the Year named by
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USA Today author of The Herman Tren alert author of Five Books certified
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speaking professional Certified Management Consultant and so on and so forth Joyce
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we're glad to have you here thank you very much for agreeing to moderate the
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group I goty to stay in the middle so the camera yeah you're going to have to move it
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John when it your speakers start because that thus they would be standing in front of their slides okay good evening
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everyone I just before we begin I'd like to share with you a conversation that I
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had and some news you probably don't know that the world future society as of
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July 31st will have a new president and that new president is a wonderful woman
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named Amy zman who most recently has been working with the war College in
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excuse me in Washington DC and I share this with you to let you
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know that Amy and I had a conversation about the chapters and one of the things
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that we agreed on is that the chapters are a very important aspect of the
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National Organization and she is committed to
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supporting the chapters and probably that will be through me since I'm the
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board member the national board member with wfs who is assigned to Liaison with
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the chapters so wanted to share that with you before I begin I'm privileged today to be
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moderating four fascinating speakers three fascinating
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speakers Mike owski Paul Schuman and John Duncan and if you'll tell me the order
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is this the correct order that was a order but you want to do Carrie first oh Carrie Carrie has an announcement two
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announcements two announcements okay take it away Carrie very exciting news
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uh last year uh some of most of you probably know uh that U Central Texas future society and World future Society
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were both in kind sponsors to our many trans conference second Min trans conference
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2013 uh this year 2014 I called up uh Jeff uh Cornish yesterday and told him
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wow I understand that you're looking for sponsors for the July World future Society conference up in Orlando uh John
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and I and uh David Snider are giving a master course there uh and so we're
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going to both be there um we're looking to uh get you guys inv with our mini
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Trend conference 2013 again uh 2014 on September 26th we have several people
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here in town that are involved with the conference we talk some more and he h
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read my understanding my understanding and he he's sometimes hard to understand is that we're going to be
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sponsoring them the real future society and and they're going to be sponsoring
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along with the central Tas is uh World future Society our Ben trance conference
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so we're going to be trading sponsorships so it's really exciting
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that uh that that's going to happen uh the second thing is I hope that's okay with you
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guys the second thing basically what I'm going to do is uh I'm going to be there the whole time John's only going to be
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there part of the time but I'm think that we'll get a booth and we'll really try to uh to push and if any of you guys are there maybe can help me BO stand at
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the booth and maybe can help but we'll be pushing people coming to Austin to come to the mini trans conference here
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so that you know we'll have some push from the the national and the international people the second thing
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is I think I've got a commitment from Brett hurt to be one of our Keynotes
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David Snyder who of world future Society Fame is going to be our morning keynote but I think I got I have read h of bring
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to be the afternoon one I I I we tried to get Jim TR finally said today I wrote
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her and said wrote the secretary and said I need an answer by tomorrow she wrote back she couldn't do it so I
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Linked In with Brett hurt and said I'd like to connect with you because I'd like to invite you to be our keynote in
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September 26th uh can I get your can you answer back so I can email you an invitation he wrote back and he said it
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looks like I can do it send me the information so anyway I'm really excited about that so you guys will be involved
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with that too and hopefully we can all get lots of business and lots of Contex out of
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thank you thank you Carrie our first speaker is Mike
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Ignatowski Mike is currently fellow design engineer at AMD
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and he his work is in advanced memory systems and high performance Computing
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prior to that Mike sent spent several years with IBM
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and most recently was at the IBM Watson Research Center as a research senior
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technical staff person did I get all that right very good his topic today is
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an overview of a NASA sponsored article predict predicting collapse and various
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reviews take it away
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Mike thanks Joyce there was an article that came out back
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in in March this year on this topic which created a lot of interest some
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people were very enthusiastic about it appeared in a lot of newspapers a lot of
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blogs a lot of online journals and some people were very critical of it a lot of emotions on both side but I thought this
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is something that we should address because it's actually such an interesting topic and the title was the collapse of
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civilization or not depending on how you want to interpret the results I'm going to stand on this side
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here so was I'm going to give you an introduction to the paper some of the claims it made and then we're going to
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go on to three other speakers who we're going to talk different views on the same topic this is the paper that
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started off a lot of this interest um human nature Dynamics published March
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19th of this year and it was partially funded by NASA and I'll I'll I'll tell you about what
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the paper said then I'll tell you about the two false statements on this first
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slide so the introduction of the paper is written by uh three academics uh they
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talked about the fall of various societies they gave a list of quite a few they basically made the argument
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that this is the common fate of societies they will eventually fall and collapse happened throughout history and
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there's no reason to believe that this could happen again to our
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society so they had this computer model they worked on and it started off very
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simple they if you're familiar with the uh Predator prey model simple set of equations it looks
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at the balance between predators and prey and I always think of this as wolves and rabbits on an island
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someplace as the wolf population grows starts eating most of the rabbits rabbit population declines then the wolf
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population also declines through starvation which then allows the rabbit population to go back up and it's a cyclical thing and this is a very common
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behavior in population Dynamics um if you change some of the parameters to
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this for example if the Wolves reproduce more slowly and the
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population go slowly instead of being cyclical it kind of uh smoothly goes to
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a sustainable level if the wolf population reproduces very quickly then
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these swings can be much more violent and you can actually get a situation where the whole population collapses and
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all the rabbits are killed so they took this and added a lot
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of details to this and tried to apply it to human societies now I I'll try and explain these charts real quickly h on
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the condition that you don't ask a lot of technical questions look at the shape of of the curve and the pretty colors
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don't ask me to explain the values on the aises at all um but they looked at a set of people in
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this case they call them commoners workers and how they impacted on nature
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I like to think of this as say it's a small village that got most of their
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food from a lake large lake and this was the uh number of fish remaining in the
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lake as the population increases the amount number of fish reduced a little
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bit but eventually you reach some stable curing capacity where the the population
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of people and the amount of fish in the lake were in nice equilibrium and they
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also add model this thing called wealth think of this as saved wealth um as in
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the population learned how to smoke and preserve the fish so they could save some for uh lean times
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and they looked at a bunch of different scenarios so so here's one where the the
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number of people the commoners actually went well above the curing capacity of the lake and kind of decimated the
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number of fish in the lake but they had this big wealth saved up of of preserved
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fish in their Huts so they could keep growing even though there not much fish in the actual Lake and just living on
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this saved well eventually that ran out and they had no fish left in the lake no
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saved wealth and the population just crashed from starvation and one of the lessons they were trying to show here is
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if a civilization goes way above its carrying capacity because it's utilizing
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some sort of stored or saved wealth peak oil um the results can be disastrous
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when you run out of that saved
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wealth and now they started adding complexity to this model of civilization they added non-w workers and in their
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mind these were people like managers and hedge fund managers bankers and so
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on who didn't actually do work they didn't actually pull any fish out of the lake so you get things like this the the
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number of workers were somewhat reduced because now you had to support all the non workers
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too in their mind these were the takers and the common workers were the
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makers interesting Twist on this how come the carrying
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capacity uh I I think it's this plus this is the caring
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capacity then they added inequality to this so these non-workers the Elites in
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society hedge fund managers what would happen if they started consuming a lot more than the
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common workers and you get situations like this where now think of this as a measure of
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how much uh resources each group is consuming the
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elites ended up consuming a large portion of resources in the society and
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in fact this chart kind of force the elites to limit themselves otherwise the
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number of Elites would just keep drawing and they consume everything so you can get a stable situation only if there's
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some constraints on the amount the elite people can consume and if you don't put
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those constraints on it it it actually runs up to a peak real quickly and the
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only way they can show an interesting graph is let's keep the elite very low at the beginning very small number of
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them then the commoners can grow uh start exploiting nature and
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things look stable for a while but eventually the elites will continue to grow and there a point where they just
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start consuming all the results all the resources there's no constraints put on them the commoners will have all the
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resources taken by leites they'll go downhill nobody's fishing anymore Elites
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can still keep gr because they're now living on the accumulated saved wealth until that runs out and then they crash
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too they say if you don't put constraints on the elites the computer model keeps predicting this type of
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pattern and there's no easy way around that so they sent the article to the
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guardian NASA funded study industrial civilization headed for irreversible
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collapse and they uh did quite a big deal with this in one of their online
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blogs um got a lot of attention and spread to other media New
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York Post NASA predicts the end of Western Civilization here's how NASA thinks
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Society will collapse The Daily Caller um online Journal NASA funded study the way to
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save Western Civilization from collapse is
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communism limiting the elites uh so NASA finally responded and
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said oh by the way uh we did not really fund this study we we funded some people to do
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these mathematical tools they took them completely separate from us and apply them to this study we do not sponsor
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this we do not support it it does not endorse or condemn it which is nothing
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to do with this nothing to do with us folks this separate um so it wasn't really an N sponsored study
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and it also turns out it wasn't a publish study they did submit it to a
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referee Journal but nothing has happened yet no decisions have been made the only way
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was published is they sent a copy of it to the guardian and the Guardian newspaper published it
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online so a lot of people jumped on this criticism there's no evidence that the
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El consumption caus ancient Society to collapse you have no supporting data for this in fact there's no historical
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empirical data at all in the model it's just a bunch of computer equations and what about technology improvements
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that's not facted at all and they tried to address this but just caused more
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complaints and and some of the attacks actually got personal they pointed out the lead author on this paper was
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actually just a grad student and and you shouldn't trust that at all
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and then the office back saying if you get to the point you're starting to personally attack the authors instead of
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their ideas you know you're might be in a losing situation terms of the ideas
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but what I thought was eventually good summary is they point out Empires rise
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and fall but civilizations nowadays seldom collapse States kingdoms collapse
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but the Dan societies generally just reach states of declining so England
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once the most powerful nation in the world World they didn't collapse they just declined somewhat before England
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France was the most powerful state in the world they didn't collapse they declined somewhat before
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that Roman Empire 300 years of gradual declining after its peak China has been
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through various Peaks and valleys for a thousand years now but a lot of people point out one common thing through all
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this is that overall human standard of living conditions throughout the world on the average continue to decrease so
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there's increase continue to increase yes so there is a lot of reason for optimism
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even though individual societies will go up and down and Empires will rise and fall over all the course of human
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history is continuously upward regardless of these
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predictions so that is kind of the summary of it is there any questions about the paper
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itself it's it's available online there's nowhere yet actually going to get published in a referee Journal at
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all but we'll see what happens I think there's been enough criticism people are probably going to be a little leery
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about actually U publishing in in their journal what organization originally did
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the work what organization
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apparently there's a collection of three academics that did oh no no Organization no Organization no and they didn't get
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paid for there is an organization that covered the
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publication basically in a blog this in a blog and there was an organization I
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forgot what the name was that they had associated with that a
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volunt voluntary situation it's very let me set up the
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next one John are you okay to to speak or do you
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want to yes [Applause]
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yes John wait a minute I need to introduce you stand
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by while you're getting that yes John is a basic thesis that you came up in your
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explain all this that if more people live a good life then you overdo the
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resources and that's why civilization is that the basic thesis
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their thesis was if resources get over utilized Beyond carrying capacity and
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particularly if there's great inequality in society that enables the resource
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consumption to keep going um above the caring capacity for at least the elites they both factors
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together the inequality and the over consumption result Beyond production
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consumption Beyond yeah unsustainable consumption yeah both together resulted in the
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collapse I I just read a book in macro history of China the main is look at the
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from a mro wheel to look at the ups and down in the Chinese history there it's
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about 300 year Dynasty the far have done a good job kill everybody else and set
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up his own Empire then the follow of the Sun and and down down the trend they
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over consume and also they mismanage the situation as the situation changes and
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one bad thing is they when they start consuming but they don't know how to tax
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they set up a good system in the beginning 20 years ago then by the end of the the dasty they they don't have to
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collect money Finance all the things they try to do the military and uh the all the disasters the the
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you know people are rooding and also dry they can't respond if they
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don't have respond right makes sense okay thank you very much our second
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speaker is John
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duncanson John is currently vice president of R&D for Falcon day
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Consulting they handle government contracts and usability
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analysis John has 26 years of experience in software development 5 years of
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experience in software usability and website usability and 15 years
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experience in software process Improvement he's also vice president of
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the Austin software process Improvement Network and their former webm for five
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years John's topic is a choice of catastrophes
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a very short summary of Isaac asimov's book a choice of catastrophes
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supplemented with up updated material from other sources more of a physicist
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Viewpoint than the socioeconomic slant of the NASA report thank you
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John yes please [Applause]
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you want me to Advance your slides do you need me to Advance your slides rather
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than huh that would be help yes
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okay okay when you're ready oops what just happened which one this one yeah thanks
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okay ready okay yes I'm not ready what happened it's on this side oh
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plug is on this side the other one oh oh you disturb it
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with your cell phone
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oh here we
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go oh my my my f
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five no I didn't touch anything there
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is okay we'll just leave it don't don't tou it'll go away I promise
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see okay all right now uh also in my background is that uh my degrees are in
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chemistry and chemical physics so what I'm going to present is like I said a
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physicist slant on on things one of the techniques that physicists used for a uh
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Loosely defined problem or a problem he hasn't got an answer for yet is to put limits or boundaries on on that problem
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and so uh that's also part of what I will be doing here um okay now here's a
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very short uh bibliography it's just some of the many many many books you can
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read about uh catastrophes and collapse of civilization uh like how civilizations
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rose up and uh and so forth uh now uh so
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Jared diamond is a very important author Michael roer um in fact he passed away
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just a few months ago um and Richard heinberg has written a lot of several
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books on the problem of uh running out of
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oil now uh just a very interesting coincidence that uh a few weeks before
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Mike sent out the notice I had picked up this book Isaac Asen a choice of contach
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started reading it so when Mike announced the topic of of tonight's uh
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session wow this this will really fit in that so next so what aamot has done is
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he has defined five levels of catastrophe uh first class is death of
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the universe civilization will definitely end when the universe is gone uh Solo
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System becomes inhabitable uh Earth becomes uninhabitable um but the solar system
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still survives uh just humans die out but still life on Earth survives uh and
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then humans survive but uh civilization doesn't and I've added a six class um
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that I'll show in a minute so in the first class uh death of the
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universe know all matter is going to end up being pulled into black holes uh and we're in an unbounded expansion called
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the Big Rip just everything will get torn apart uh probability of that happening is 100% it's not preventable
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impact is total Annihilation time scale though is trillions of years so uh
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recover is impossible but it's something we don't need to worry about that's good
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second second uh level is Sol comes un uh collisions of Earth that should be
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a star black hole or Ro Planet uh or
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supernovas or quazar IR Earth G they are very low probability events uh not
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preventable uh the Earth could be thrown out of orbit or these gamma radiations would destroy the atmosphere time scale
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manage to billions of years and again cover is
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impossible um becomes uninhabitable uh uh there there are a bunch of other
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possibilities I was down here but the one important one is that the sun's
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output is going to increase steadily uh over the next uh uh uh millions of years
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and so it's virtually certain it's not preventable what will happen is uh over
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the next 500 about 500 million years to a billion years uh the oceans will dry up and all that water will be uh
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vaporized and eventually just blown away by the solar wind so there'll be no water for it to support light um and
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again recovery is impossible one interesting sub fact is that is when you compare a half a
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billion years to the three and a half billion years that life has been on Earth this amounts to 15% of the time
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that life has existed so know words life on Earth is like 85% through its uh
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tenure okay next don't you want to talk about this other the other possibilities or do we not
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have time uh yeah we don't have time Mike said this is a teaser those the
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subjects for okay got it wait a year from now when I can do a full length talk good doesn't have to be a year from
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now but go ahead right okay uh humans die out um you have a massive volcano
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interuption uh there was a massive one uh 250 million years ago most of Siberia
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turned into one huge volcano and destroyed 90% of Life at that time um
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there was a uh massive volcano eruption they now think it's in the Indonesia
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area about 7,000 years ago that when they analyze the DNA of humans they find
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that the human population had shrunk to like a few thousand about 70,000 years ago so human Homo sapiens came real
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close to extinction back um another possibility is incurable
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disease pandemics that uh again uh medicine has not been able to
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come come up with any counter measures to That Could That Could right about human race and finally uh total
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thermonuclear war is one that was a big concern from the 50s through the 80s and
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so forth um so probabilities for those are possible possible it's now kind of a
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a low probability now that we've reduced a lot of the numbers of nuclear weapons uh um but okay that's the impact and the
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time scale for each of these is 100,000 years 10 100 to 100 to 1,000 years or 50
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to 100 years but whenever these things happen I recall the a quote from Robert
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a hline a very famous science fiction novel they all survivors so even in
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these Jurassic things you like I said from that massive volcano uh eruption uh
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there were a few thousand survivors okay uh all right level five uh humans
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survive but civilization doesn't uh one scenario is Theus of nonrenewable
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resources uh and there any more which I'm going to list from the next slide oops
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oh said P job
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what I'm sorry p p page up button oh page up okay okay um so nonrenewable resources
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by their definition when they're used up they're gone so probability of that is 100%
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uh it doesn't seem to be preventable because uh the depletion is driven by
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economics you know oil companies are going to be selling oil as long as uh uh oil is cheap and and and they've got a
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plant Supply and the population demands energy to be uh
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so ultim population is driving the completion of of non reable resources uh
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and that's one of the factors that was in the model that that might talk um so
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one of the impact is that it's going to be scrambled to find substitute materials is going to be wars fought
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over scarce non renewable resources and so forth um world too uh the reason
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Japan attacked us at Pearl Harbor was because they do not have any natural oil resources they NE to get the oil from
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Indonesia uh they wanted to take over the Indonesian oil fields and to get to Indonesia they had to go through the
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Philippines which the US owned at that time so they needed to negate the US's
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Naval power in the Pacific hence let's bomb all the ships of the of the us that are sitting in Pearl Harbor so that's
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what that's how so World War II from from that side was was uh started
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because of resources so as these resources run out we're going to see more and more of this uh it's really
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worrisome that there's a huge reservoir of uh recently discovered natural resources underneath Afghanistan what's
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going to happen to all those resources who gets to control it is going to be a interesting
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question all right so some of these resources we're going to see running out in the next 30 Years uh but some others
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that may take a few year thousand years before we run out of others um and Recovery only if we can
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transition to 100% renewable resources Society okay are you saying you think
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there 100% possibility of civilization collapse because of this no I'm saying there 100% probability that we will run
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out of natural resour non renewable resources um but yeah like I said the
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the recovery if we can get to 100% renewable resources then civilization can continue um one of the books in my
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bibliography uh several books that talk about will the industrial society
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survive uh after oil is all gone and fosil Fs are all gone uh so that's
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that's that's an open question and it would be something interesting study and talk about
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now I added a six uh level of uh catastrophe in other words Regional
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civilization collapse it's not in as AOS this but um it's the case that uh so
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many of the people when they talk about threats to civilization they are threats that will affect one uh Regional area
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but but not another you know the collapse of the mans didn't affect the uh growth of civilization in Europe for
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example um so over population followed by a population collapse is one scenario
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and much more in a moment um but we can
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be darn sure that we're going to go through these cyclic civilization ups and downs
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um so the over population that is a problem that uh I
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don't see a a a solution to that uh uh it's driven by human nature desire to
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reproduce again it's that that those uh Predator PR like that might show going
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through Cycles like that we just haven't hit our first cycle yet and so that's that time scale is is
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50 to 100 years um like I said population is going to cycle up and down
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okay all right so here's some other possibilities climate change for the runaway greenhouse effect uh drought uh
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depletion of the ozone layer depletion of drinkable fresh water um what computer people call
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Singularity and what I call artificial intelligent Singularity to distinguish it from other
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singularities uh is when 30 40 years from now computers are going to be more
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intelligent than humans and what happens after that is uh still uh uh open to
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Wild conjectures uh okay you know another uh
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possibility is uh someone generates a microorganism against which you have no
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defense um and poor education on the global scale uh
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you know if we could get the whole world educated up to approximately level that we have in invest Society a whole lot of
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troubles would go away um okay next one
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and thing that frightens me now that for example Road Runner email has been down
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for the past week what happens if we get a global system computer crash um
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and we got ter been down for the last week pardon yes what's been down for the last we oh Road Runner email
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timeable unfortunately I'm one of the victims of that
37:10
uh okay so we got drug cartels that lots of money terrorist lots of money uh
37:17
organized cyber crime uh and uh tra States so these are just
37:24
some of the possibilities of things that attack civilization so a whole whole
37:30
hour lections could be done on each one of these individually um so when we talk about
37:35
the decline of of civilization we want to want to ask how do you define civilization how do you
37:42
define levels of civilization um and we and when we talk
37:47
about natural resources we need to talk about energy use need to sustain civilization and how much you need to to
37:55
sustain a sustainable level uh and you another natural resource
38:01
problem there's like 40 years of known reserves of blood what happens when we run out of
38:08
that all right the N this is like like I said this is a teaser talk so this is to
38:14
be filled in later oh okay all right next one okay now John Barry one of our
38:21
members gave a talk a couple years ago on uh because he's a geologist and he
38:26
talked about the depletion of uh of mineral resource and some of the
38:31
highlight and his talk is available on our homepage under on the right under the uh me materials Tab and some of his
38:40
points were there no new fronteers to explore for mining uh all the highr ORS have
38:47
been found uh the the great abore is decreasing and cost increasing cost to
38:54
get the lower grade ores uh processed um a lot of land gets destroyed in that
39:00
process but he feels we won't see serious problems until about 2050
39:06
um next one uh now one problem that I find very
39:12
irking is people talk about well we're going to defeat the Mal malthusian dilemma that uh we can continue to
39:20
support population gr now in uh Isaac
39:25
asmar's book this was WR in uh 79 uh he and and he also published an
39:32
article in Parade Magazine around that same time that was the one that got me interested in this particular
39:37
calculation uh population growth is proportional to the amount of population
39:43
and that makes a geomet pression it's exponential growth no physical property
39:48
can grow exponentially forever um so he calculated for 2%
39:54
growth every 35 years had 50 billion people by 2100 over a trillion by 2280
40:00
in 1800 years the total mass of humanity would exceed the mass of the Earth and
40:05
in 5,000 years which is less than a history of of civilization the mass of
40:11
humanity would exceed the total mass of the nor Universe from this simple physical uh
40:17
like I said physics physicist put a limit or boundary on on parameters on a problem this is a proof that population
40:25
cannot grow forever and with de guaranteed to have either a level in the population or a a drop off like I said
40:33
the we haven't reached our first cycle in that uh population cycle uh model
40:42
okay and uh another area that uh when we talk about civilization sustainability
40:48
that we want to explore is energy use versus civilization level and you can
40:53
see through Through the Ages that energy level per cap always growing up and up and up so but so what happens when we
41:00
run out of fossil fuels that's a question to think about and I think that's the last
41:11
slide so what's the good news one bit of good news actually you
41:18
had one bullet that said third world nations are going to be much worse at all I just spent two weeks in on Nepal
41:26
tring the very rural areas very steep where sometimes had two different
41:32
languages within a 25 mile radius because not trans before transportation
41:39
and they're self-sufficient oh and I think they're going to be a whole lot better if when
41:45
the Tipping Point comes right they have farther to don't have as far to
41:50
Fall Like H Highline said they're always survivors so when Western Civilization
41:56
collapses these small islands of self-sufficiency are going to survive yeah yeah and also Nepal has a very
42:03
enlightened uh uh government policy instead of measuring gross domestic
42:09
product they measure gross domestic happiness oh I'm sorry one additional
42:15
really scary point that I don't think you mentioned and that is the possibility of carbon dioxide uh Runway
42:22
green greenhouse effect runaway oh there yes I did have one V point on that they Runway greenhouse effect you know we end
42:28
up like Venus uh and what's still not known to
42:35
to scientists yet is what is that concentration Tipping Point whether we've reached it or not or whether it's
42:41
it's another 100 parts per million still to go yeah one threat you didn't mention
42:48
was politicians which politicians you have a list there of things like drug cartels
42:55
have a lot of money can do dangerous things politicians up a lot of money it can do very D do very dangerous things
43:03
right yeah like I said my emphasis was more on the physical side of things things that we can Define boundaries to
43:09
and uh the whole socioeconomic political thing that's a whole big area on in
43:15
itself yes politicians have in in various points in history have uh
43:20
demolished their own civilization i i i some question about your population growth jaction
43:27
I what currently in the most Western World they kind of below 1.0 per family
43:33
children like in Hong 17 or in Singapore maybe they encourage more more children
43:40
oh they have baby bonuses in those places yeah they pay people for having children well that's more small island
43:47
country uh but most of Wern world are below below
43:53
1.0 and I think they only the third world may be Indonesia India the two
43:58
that not control yet but China start control but they have some problem they China had one child now they more male
44:04
than female a different kind of problem yeah China China China has realized that
44:11
their population can't run from can't consume resources forever they expect to be self-sufficient and so that's part of
44:18
why they're so deeply into solar energy and and and the life as well so uh
44:24
they've been trying to stabilize their population and um the the Western societies their their
44:32
population grow and even the US population grow would is has uh declined
44:38
except for immigration uh and it's really uh some huge percentage I don't
44:43
know 70 or 80% of population growth in the world since the 1950s has been in the third world countries so they still
44:51
haven't they they they still tolerate uh 10 children living in poverty
44:58
well you see if the majority move in the city that they are room to get more entertainment they don't have time for B
45:04
time yeah and they also get better paid cost more to Children right the cost of
45:10
w until in the city all right join me in thanking
45:17
John and will'll now take a very short break so that you can get coffee and Pie
45:24
if you wish I
45:51
put take one and pass it down please
45:57
so Paul yeah you got two things you sent me yeah I want
46:02
just one without the 350 on one
46:09
350 if we can bring it up on the screen without
46:17
starting this is this I think that okay G the first
46:25
couple seconds that's just in Middle when you're
46:35
ready tell me when you're ready you'll tell me when you're ready
46:42
and I'll
46:57
I I didn't go I just
47:25
went just mention there's a theme I ran into a couple of years ago that ended up
47:31
in inviting woman to come and speak to us she did Penny Kelly is a psychic who
47:39
had these visitors who told her about things to come that actually got me involved in
47:47
writing about this kind of thing as well and their story was that when the
47:52
economic collapse occurs and becomes all the guns and gangs and like that it
48:00
becomes so difficult to live well to have food enough to eat like that that
48:06
people become depressed and by virtue of their depression their immune systems
48:11
fall and they fall prey to ordinary diseases and there's a 30 to 50%
48:16
reduction in world population not as a result of war or genocide or anything but just because things get so bad that
48:23
people can't live very well a whole different scenario than I ever
48:30
thought very
48:38
interesting all right I'm ready to go when you
48:52
are our third speaker this evening is Paul Schuman he's a blogger on a website
49:00
called insights and foresight he also is affiliated with a
49:06
company that I believe is yours called local Advantage Paul is a multifaceted
49:13
professional whose expertise Embraces the gamut of technology and product development
49:19
manufacturing engineering and education he's a business futurist and
49:25
strategy development consultant who is also a former IBM
49:32
Employee he over the years he's developed many seminars and workshops for n NTU being National Technical
49:40
University and the largest of these was entitled leadership in the interactive
49:46
age Paul will be talking about this strange behavior of a complex system
49:53
complex systems behave in unexpected ways take it away
50:00
from I'm going to negate everything you said by saying that I'm now officially
50:06
retired so I don't want to do anything
50:12
um I warn you right from the very beginning this entire thing I'm going to say is all metaphor there's absolutely
50:19
no basis for what I G to say other than it's interesting and can we draw some
50:25
parallels and you can do that as a metaphor but don't leap to trying to
50:31
understand the exact nature of what the relationship might be when I was doing work on on
50:38
complexity science uh one of the things that popped up was this thing called the logistic
50:44
map and it's a very deceptively looking equation which is in the handout that I
50:50
gave you and it's a simple algebraic equation it says x sub n + 1 is equal to
50:59
R * x subn * the quantity 1 - x of so
51:05
it's a quadratic equation and uh it's a very simple quadratic equation you don't have a hand
51:13
out back
51:22
there oh the one the
51:33
resource what I'm going to show you is this this logistic map has a very narrow
51:39
range of application the variables for X are between zero and one the values for
51:46
R this Factor multip multiplicative factor between zero and
51:53
one um what it turns out is the R really is the measure of the amount of positive
52:00
feedback that's in the system the larger the r the more positive the feedback is
52:07
which means that each Loop you would think would get bigger and bigger in the
52:13
system and what I'm going to show you is a video that I put together by the way
52:18
painstakingly after thousands of calculations to be able to show this
52:25
um I kept trying to figure out how to display this so that people could grasp it and this is a little simple
52:33
logistical map where x sub Z is 0.5 and it's a range of R from 0.1 to 4
52:42
okay you start it up what you're going to see is x sub B
52:50
on this side and time on the other side
52:56
and here we're starting out at uh043 whatever it's growing and you see
53:04
that as this is growing for every value of R less than one it goes to zero over time so it dies
53:17
out then when you get above one
53:28
now it's at 1.3 you see that it's stable for a very
53:33
long period of time and each time you raise the amount of positive feedback in
53:39
the system the level goes up and it continues to rise uh with time
53:46
until it gets to two and then it's a completely flat and
53:51
stable circumstance when the r gets above two
53:56
you begin to see slight instabilities in the equation right here
54:02
at the beginning now you're starting to see there's a a few little Wiggles and Waggles at 2.6 it begins to show some
54:11
degree of oscillation it goes a little bit longer and when it gets up to three a very
54:17
interesting thing happens when it reaches three this is three coming
54:23
up three it's now split into two levels and the as you increase the
54:30
amount of positive feedback those levels grow wider and wider apart then they
54:35
split into fours and eights and by the time you
54:41
reach a little over 3.6 it's completely chaotic there's no pattern in it at all
54:48
and you're you're anywhere from zero to one when it reaches four it goes to
54:54
zero again and so you have total
55:00
collapse now if we can show this again we can come back and parp a little bit about it once you understand what you're
55:09
seeing there's several metaphors you can draw from this we often wonder why some
55:16
civilizations just never seem to quite make it over the
55:21
hump and that those are the ones that have a feedback posit positive feedback
55:27
of less than one is that right mhm it is it
55:34
was I press it slow for some reason
55:39
huh it's creeping so these are these are these
55:45
are civilizations or Pockets could be neighborhoods that actually even be
55:50
metaphor for an individual maybe somebody who's disadvantaged within the society that
55:57
doesn't have enough positive feedback to actually make it over the
56:05
home and it dies out and then when it reaches one now you have some growth
56:13
that is possible out of this uh out of this
56:18
civilization but what do we in our society now worship is
56:24
grow growth every year has got to be bigger and better than the previous year
56:30
well these are constant year to year over time span so and and if you kept
56:37
the r at one level like two it would run forever at two but it would never grow
56:44
right because it would always be that output of0
56:50
five so in our societies because we're constantly worshiping growth we keep
56:55
finding way to increase the positive feedback in the system so that we can
57:00
make it grow and you know you could say
57:06
metaphorically you know this is where we are right now we're split in so many
57:11
different ways in our society into layers of
57:18
people and we keep pushing it we haven't learn we keep pushing it it gets more complex splits into four eights
57:28
whatever and then comes chaotic at about 3.6
57:33
something and then disappears at po it goes from one to zero in in one time
57:44
period so um we know that in our society we have a
57:50
positive feedback system many of them as a matter of fact so this is a very
57:56
simple version of something whatever is the real world is
58:01
a lot more complex than this but I think there's some lessons to be learned here
58:07
about what you can do if you're in a situation where you're
58:13
in this constant grow you have to turn back the knob on the positive
58:20
feedback you've got to stop worshiping growth are you going to push the system
58:26
the complex system into an untenable operating
58:33
area does that make sense and that's all I have to say thank
58:38
you any question questions for panarchy theory has a very parallel
58:46
way of saying the same thing what what theory
58:51
panarchy label Rand
58:57
that they basically have looked at complex adaptive systems from cells up
59:03
through civilizations and it was a common pattern of growth and when get
59:08
things get a particular level of high integration high high coordination and
59:17
drive toward efficiency then res goes down
59:23
suity yeah one other thing I didn't say was that small changes in R depending
59:29
about where you are in that curve can make huge differences in the
59:34
output you know 0.01 can change the when you're in
59:40
that chaotic area can have a huge change in the in the output what exactly is a
59:47
positive definition of posit positive feedback it just just means that you're taking the results of of of your work
59:56
and feed it right back into the system again to get more out of
1:00:01
it and the stronger that linkage is the more positive feedback you have most
1:00:09
stable systems operate under negative feedback that's the traditional way of
1:00:14
running a system for years that when you built any kind of piece of electronics
1:00:20
or something you put you put control mechanisms in it so that it would
1:00:27
limit what what the output was they were negative feedbacks that's why stable
1:00:33
output yeah then you get a stable output
1:00:39
yeah yeah that's a great example where you have a microphone and a speaker and
1:00:44
they start to interact and it just loops and it goes out of
1:00:49
control so if you're making too much money if you're making get making too much too much grow it's not the amount
1:00:57
of money if we were happy living at one level of performance the system would stay stable
1:01:04
for a long time but because we're not worshiping the amount of money we're
1:01:09
worshiping growing more more more more more that it's pushing us toward a
1:01:18
unstable civilization that's the it's interesting
1:01:23
Paul because you see that played out in the the in the labor market throughout the world actually as we've been pushing
1:01:30
for higher and higher productivity and pushing people to do more with less it's
1:01:36
having devastating consequences right and you know these little
1:01:42
C cubby holes of civilization that you were talking about they're not worshiping grow they're just sustaining
1:01:50
right that's sustainability again that ideain they would like to be going for
1:01:56
grow they just don't have the wherewithal they're they're down in that bottom end they can't get over that
1:02:03
up they don't know what they have right yes our final speaker is John
1:02:11
Roland John is founder of the Constitutional Society a legal historian
1:02:16
and a computer professional with over 15 years of software design development
1:02:22
usability and systems engineering experience he's lectured on usability design
1:02:28
practices and Internet Security he developed and led software training courses taught workshops on user
1:02:35
interface design multimedia and usability and he's LED teams of up to 50
1:02:41
people his topic today is forecasting the future using computer
1:02:48
simulation past analysis of Fallen civilization critique of resource
1:02:54
depletion model and most likely threats not only that but he's going to give us the way
1:03:03
forward help me in giving a warm [Applause]
1:03:10
welcome thank you Jo
1:03:17
um we go to the first slide we have several past analyses of
1:03:25
civilization and when I say civilization I mean not
1:03:30
just an Empire or a uh country but uh an interconnected
1:03:39
interdependent economy and Society in other words where they're coupled
1:03:45
closely enough in their trade and production and so forth that they tend to rise and fall
1:03:52
together and the classic really original analysis of this although there were
1:03:58
others before it and since was the book Decline and fall of the Roman Empire by
1:04:04
Edward gibon about the time that this country was founded had a lot of influence on
1:04:09
our framers the he point Gibbon points out that the Roman Empire succumb to
1:04:16
Barbarian invasions due to gradual loss of civic virtue words they were mostly
1:04:23
destroyed from without but they were unable to defend themselves effectively
1:04:29
so the vandals and so forth overrun them overran them he attributes the to the
1:04:36
prian guard as the role of the primary Catalyst of initial Decay and eventual
1:04:44
collapse in other words their police force their Elite police
1:04:49
force and unfortunately uh in his time
1:04:54
Gibbon was not aware the many other economic political and ecological factors that uh affected and caused the
1:05:03
decline of the Roman Empire and such as excessive internal predation the very
1:05:10
economic model of over taxation overe exploitation essentially uh treating the
1:05:17
entire uh population as uh surfs except for the citizens of Rome
1:05:25
itself next
1:05:31
SL uh next one more recently was the classic and influential
1:05:38
study of history by Arnold toyy he examines many
1:05:44
civilizations especially the 19 major ones he also examines a number of others
1:05:50
he calls abortive or uh partial uh Egyptian andian cnic minoan
1:05:58
Sumerian Mayan hindic Hite helenic Orthodox Christian Russia Orthodox
1:06:04
Christian main body that is to say Western Christianity Persian Mexican
1:06:09
ucch Babylon and the surviving ones Western Far Eastern Hindu and Arabic
1:06:19
Islamic each Rose according to toin be by successive respon responses to
1:06:26
challenges that were great enough but not too great and fell when they when
1:06:32
stagnated for either a lack of challenge or they could not cope with greater
1:06:37
challenge so they needed not only challenges but a steady rate of
1:06:43
challenges that was just right goalie loocks challenges not too warm not too
1:06:50
hot and when the the challenges exceeded that
1:06:55
range of that with they fell with which they could cope the civilizations tended
1:07:03
to fall now initially in the beginning of the civilization the keys is of
1:07:09
leadership by creative [Music] minorities and not having too many hostile alienated external or internal
1:07:17
Barbarians in other words during the early period of the civilization if they've got if they have spent too much
1:07:23
of their time fighting against external enemies they can't really realize their
1:07:28
creative potential so they need a law in external
1:07:35
threats but those creative minorities tend to become dominant and
1:07:41
predatory they become less creative and but in the course of that they tend
1:07:47
historically to create a universal State and doesn't really mean the state covering the whole world but covers most
1:07:55
of the region at least in which their economy
1:08:01
operates uh the Roman Empire of course being a classic
1:08:07
example however even if they don't have
1:08:12
uh external enemies even internal enemies destructive Predators bring the
1:08:19
integration they can be external they can be internal but what usually kills
1:08:26
the civilization is this kind of interpre competition I mean inter Predator
1:08:37
competition so looking at external threats well competing civilizations we now have
1:08:45
four survivors uh and basically one of them is against the other three although that
1:08:52
may change we could have Alien Invasion either from space aliens or from other
1:08:58
parts of of this planet have Refugee floods just overwhelming border control
1:09:06
of course we could have nuclear war not necessarily total nuclear war but even a partial nuclear war could be
1:09:13
bad news there sudden disasters which we discussed earlier volcanoes impactors
1:09:20
that is to say asteroids climate earthquake disease Celestial be things
1:09:27
like gamerade bursters most are challenges that could
1:09:32
be met with sufficient preparation so real Challenge and threat is lack of
1:09:38
preparation yes we could actually survive a gamma ray burst it is
1:09:44
survivable uh so uh most of these you know unless the impactor were the size
1:09:51
of a you know hundreds of miles across we could probably even survive that we
1:09:57
might have to leave the Earth for a while and come back after we settled but it could be done and of course we can always simply
1:10:05
leave the Earth uh all surviving civilizations and
1:10:11
that words the last four survivors are weak on Preparation probably only the Western is
1:10:17
even thinking about preparation in this
1:10:23
area then we get to resource depletion challenges of course we had the limit to growth models which were very famous uh
1:10:31
back in the uh uh uh late 70s and early
1:10:36
80s uh we have the more more most recent paper that provoked this session what I
1:10:42
call the MRK paper because I don't call it NASA paper uh but what they have in common is
1:10:50
they ignore alternative the alternative of urban biospheres they assume that
1:10:56
people remain scattered across the Earth surface you can gather people into urban
1:11:05
biospheres and which are closed with with respect to resources and only lose
1:11:12
a little bit of energy and I discussed that in a earlier
1:11:17
paper from 1998 I think I wrote it called three futures for
1:11:24
Earth but but uh such an urban biospheres are very
1:11:30
expensive on a per capita basis we're looking at several million dollars per
1:11:36
individual so you're not going to take 7 billion people and put them in urban
1:11:42
biospheres in time to save all seven billion and of course that could create
1:11:48
problems with the ones you leave out because they might decide well if we can't be saved we're not we're not going
1:11:53
to let you live either so the limits to growth models this is a
1:12:00
classic example of a print out of the of the running of a System Dynamics model
1:12:07
they tended most of their settings parameter settings tended to predict
1:12:14
peaks in the 2000 to 2050 period uh with a population resources
1:12:24
and uh industry and all that pecking at about that time and then going into a
1:12:35
decline now the MRK paper starts with The Predator prey models where prey are
1:12:43
resources it examines nonrenewable renewable and stream resources in the depletion of each but here's where one
1:12:50
of the main ways it goes wrong it posits wealth income in inequality
1:12:55
as a predictor of destructive internal conflict now that can be a problem in some societies especially less developed
1:13:03
ones but what is missing or not understood by most of this talk you hear
1:13:10
now about income or wealth inequality is that at least in the developed
1:13:16
world the real inequality is not consumption wealth and income do not
1:13:23
correspond to consumption the people who have large wealth and
1:13:28
great incomes don't consume that much more than the people at the bottom of the heat they just
1:13:35
don't even the richest people in the world can only eat so much can only wear
1:13:42
so many clothes can only drive so many cars and most of the rest of us can do the same things so what they their
1:13:49
inequality comes in power over making economic decision
1:13:55
decisions and those who make those decisions don't necessarily make them to the disadvantage of the rest of us we
1:14:03
might not like the fact that they make them in the ways that they do in some cases but by and large uh the market
1:14:12
works so where does the the problem arise well
1:14:18
it can arise even in a developed country if when there is a breakdown an economic
1:14:26
collapse then the differences in consumption would become important now words after there's a
1:14:34
general collapse of the economy then you have a situation where the elites are
1:14:40
still eating and the rest of us are not and then we have a problem but at that point once the
1:14:47
economic collapse sets in the chances are it doesn't matter it's it's going to run to all the way down whether there's
1:14:55
conflict or not conflict just becomes an aggravator a amplifier of the
1:15:03
process so we can have we can contemplate Urban biospheres this image
1:15:08
represents One Design uh basically they're built
1:15:14
underground because if you are trying to envelop uh a City full of
1:15:23
people uh in a way that they do not lose any materials to the
1:15:29
environment the most effective way to do that is to seal them off underground if
1:15:35
you have them on the surface they're subject to weathering and other such things so there'll be a small loss of
1:15:41
materials to a high entropy State and if you do
1:15:46
this you could have a million such cities with a million people in them
1:15:51
each a trillion people all living quite comfortable lives using only no more
1:15:57
energy than we could get from the Sun some solar collectors and if for the few for the
1:16:04
small losses of materials we can get all we need from the asteroids a single asteroid we we figure
1:16:11
now we've done a spectroscopic survey of one of them seems to have more precious
1:16:19
metal content that has been mined on the earth in throughout history one
1:16:25
asteroid so the resources are abundantly you know they're relatively easily
1:16:31
reached so that's not a problem either but you can't leave people scattered on
1:16:36
the surface trying to dig you know to mine the soil for for nutrients for
1:16:43
their food another alternative of course is to build them in
1:16:48
space uh this also provides the opportunity for to move the whole city
1:16:53
away from the earth in case the Earth is threatened but again the the point is
1:16:59
that um they are self-sufficient with material with respect to materials they
1:17:05
use relatively little energy and that could easily be replenished and you could have a huge
1:17:12
numbers of them plenty of resources to build you know large numbers of them now
1:17:18
there is a problem with space cities in that for this kind of design because of
1:17:23
cosmic radiation you almost certainly need to actually build them inside of asteroids because
1:17:30
you need a certain amount of sheer bulk shielding uh in order to uh keep them
1:17:37
from being fried over a period of time some main threats to Modern
1:17:44
civilization well we have to lump Far Eastern Hindu with
1:17:49
Western uh because right now they are so coupled economically that uh uh and even
1:17:57
culturally now that they're really becoming one civilization Islamic is on an uncertain
1:18:05
course although it is becoming integrated with Western Civilization most of them they still has the strong
1:18:12
what I call kist movement these terrorists you know the people call
1:18:19
islamists or jihadists or whatever the better word for it is cism
1:18:25
because that it identifies them as having a political agenda there was a former formation of a
1:18:33
universal State headed by khin and this guy uh the leader of this
1:18:41
uh Isis this Islamic Islamic State of uh Iraq and
1:18:47
Syria uh has renamed himself Abu Bakr Al
1:18:53
bagdadi it's not his not his name at Birth Abu Bakr was the first
1:18:59
Caleb so he's adopted the mantle of the of the cffs obviously that's his
1:19:07
ambition um but within our civilization we have
1:19:15
several key threats one is nonviolent legal
1:19:21
predation uh rent seeking is kind commonly used term for that uh it's
1:19:28
legal nobody's knocking anyone in the head to take their stuff at least at
1:19:34
least not except perhaps using lawyers and policemen to do it but uh not
1:19:42
directly uh another is unmanageable complexity uh We've mentioned that and
1:19:51
Paul actually mentioned it more thoroughly in his talk some time
1:19:56
back um human beings evolve to live in
1:20:02
to solve the simple problems of a tribe or Village we have created a civil an
1:20:09
economy a civilization a technological structure which is so complex that no
1:20:14
one can understand it a few people can understand parts of it when you talk
1:20:21
about rocket science no one understands everything you need to know to put to send men to the Mars and bring
1:20:28
them back again each one understands one small part of the problem and works on
1:20:34
his small part and if they're not coordinated you have big mistakes things
1:20:39
fail and say F fell between the cracks but with societies generally
1:20:46
there is no such engineering unitary engineering approach
1:20:52
to an entire Society nor could could there be but they're inherently
1:20:57
unmanageable uh people might imagine they can and they get into a lot of trouble among themselves and with the
1:21:04
rest of us when they try but uh that leads to a problem of
1:21:11
incompetence in other words the fundamental inadequacy of human beings to understand complex
1:21:18
systems and to fall back on magical short-term thinking which I cite one example The
1:21:26
Cult of keynesianism which is now infected a large part of our policy making Elites
1:21:34
and leads them to think that they can go on taxing borrowing and spending Forever
1:21:40
Without limit and that nothing bad will happen if they do because of course KES did not look at
1:21:49
running his models to to completion you know to the to their l
1:21:55
he just projected a few years ahead and left it at that and his followers are
1:22:01
projecting many years ahead and not even thinking about the distant
1:22:06
future okay we have external barbarians calopus terrorists not all
1:22:13
terrorists are calopus you know you can have domestic ones too a kid uh
1:22:19
disgruntled kid working in his garage to create a new deadly plague or something
1:22:26
um but we also have internal barbarians which I would include General
1:22:32
things like lawlessness and Mal bred children uh in societies that have are
1:22:40
very tight control over the upbringing of their children you tend to find very
1:22:45
low rates of crime very high rates of civic virtue but if and usually this
1:22:52
happens when they become urbanized there's a degradation over the uh
1:23:00
quality of child raring as a result of which you get a lot of Lawless children
1:23:08
that become Lawless adults and you can get entire societies where uh crime is so
1:23:16
prevalent that it becomes impossible to do anything else and all these refugees
1:23:22
we get from Central America well they're not directly pleading
1:23:28
hunger okay if you ask them why they're coming here because they're mainly playing criminal
1:23:35
violence and if they were really so malnourished the you on this edge of
1:23:41
starvation they wouldn't be able to make the track to the United States so uh but that lawlessness is
1:23:49
preventing those countries from creating jobs from uh
1:23:55
solving the problems of their societies and that is preventing the up
1:24:03
the people generally from realizing a decent life uh they also have the problem of
1:24:10
excessive taxing borrowing and spending uh that has to be limited if it's not
1:24:19
and of course all the demands are for more taxing more borrowing more spending
1:24:24
at least more more borrowing and more spending uh eventually you reach
1:24:31
overshoot there's also a problem with official immunity if if officials cannot be held
1:24:38
accountable for their misconduct then they become a Master
1:24:45
Class A a special kind of elite and which reduces the rest of us to their
1:24:53
servants the then of course we have ignorant apathetic voters who sometimes think that
1:25:00
uh corrupt criminal officials are cool and then there is a problem of easy
1:25:07
prosperity in addiction to entertainment we actually have seen this
1:25:12
before in various civilizations where people are so
1:25:17
prosperous that they become decadent and we can see that here even
1:25:24
though most Americans are hardworking people so many of them are so absorbed in entertainment in recreation in uh
1:25:33
idle Pursuits that it is degrading them in a in a variety of ways including things
1:25:40
like child Rarity so we here's a graphic for rent
1:25:46
seeking these are various words that are related to it uh rent seeking is an
1:25:52
economics term but uh some of these are more familiar terms
1:25:57
and although they doesn't it doesn't show how they all interact with each
1:26:02
other these are all different aspects of red seeking
1:26:07
Behavior which is not new by the way in feudal times the feudal Nobles the
1:26:12
Warlords were rent seeking on their vassels we have a problem of
1:26:18
unmanageable complexity this graphic is trivial
1:26:24
okay if you really wanted to represent a modern economy or uh Society or whatever
1:26:32
there would be millions of factors like this all
1:26:37
intertwined not only beyond the grasp of human beings and human minds but even
1:26:44
not even M simulatable on a computer at least not not current computers and let
1:26:50
me turn off my cell phone here
1:27:01
okay uh we have a debt bubble this simplifies it greatly but uh
1:27:07
what essentially shows is that historically Deb has got isolated
1:27:14
somewhat and now it is heading off Beyond limit eventually that collapses
1:27:22
probably fairly soon and debt includes things like the odd currencies the
1:27:28
dollar bills in your pocket these are all debts okay this is the
1:27:35
debt and uh it's not just shares of stock or Securities or other financial
1:27:43
instruments D complex derivatives it's all kinds of things that there's no
1:27:48
natural check on the growth of them except collapse
1:27:54
and of course we have nuclear terrorism uh there are at least 40 suitcase nuclear devices that were
1:28:02
missing from the Russian inventory uh we know that Al-Qaeda and
1:28:07
other such copis groups have been trying to get a hold of them there was a report
1:28:13
from one terrorist we captured um
1:28:18
uh that six or seven of them were brought into the United States by by his
1:28:25
people uh through the agency of Latin American Smugglers so far they haven't been set
1:28:32
off but you can just imagine a scenario where suddenly one day uh we lose a city
1:28:40
and then a couple of weeks later we lose another one some random cities W in the country no one knows where the next
1:28:46
one's going off and do this every week or two or so until they run out of nukes
1:28:54
maybe 40 of them you can imagine the effect that would have on this country or on the world of course they're not
1:29:01
planning to confine them to the United States they want to take out Europe and a Australia and China a lot of other
1:29:08
places uh and they imagine they actually believe that if
1:29:15
they did this that we would surrender to them so official immunity there is a
1:29:22
famous quote uh this is the way law enforcement people are being taught say don't worry
1:29:29
about being held accountable for your misconduct because you have have qualified
1:29:35
immunity which is a practical matter is almost total immunity as long as you've
1:29:41
got a supervisor who says that whatever you're doing was part of your job nobody
1:29:46
can touch you maybe you can sue the agency that you work for but you can't do anything
1:29:53
to you to you individ ually and chances are nobody will or
1:29:58
can okay the way forward it's too late to avoid global
1:30:03
economic collapse we're about at least 40 maybe 60 years too late we would have
1:30:11
to have made different decisions decades ago because there's a
1:30:16
very long latency in any intervention in this these systems of course we wouldn't
1:30:22
have known what to do then we still don't but we can prepare to endure come
1:30:29
out with Lessons Learned and needed reforms in other words we Face a dark
1:30:34
age but it there can be light on the other side of the tunnel if we're
1:30:40
prepared to come out on the other side with the lessons that from it and
1:30:47
reforms that are needed to prevent it from happening again you know we some
1:30:52
sometime point out that we did learn things from the collapse of the Roman Empire during the Renaissance there were
1:30:59
a lot of Renaissance Scholars who examined the Rin Empire in his fall and
1:31:05
Tred to to learn from that and to correct some of the mistakes that to
1:31:11
avoid some of the kind of same kind of mistakes that were made and of course our own country is an example of that
1:31:19
the founders of this country were intense students of previous Empires
1:31:25
what went wrong with them and what needed to be done to avoid them okay so we we can help one another
1:31:32
become good Preppers we can educate for austerity and adversity we can move
1:31:37
toward strict constitutional compliance without which laws and institutions won't be ready we move away from Fiat
1:31:45
currencies and pay off debt we can prepare for decades of char
1:31:52
chaos not just Mons secure sources of water food power medicine secure reliable Communications
1:32:00
like Mesh networking that does not depend on backbones organized for Mutual
1:32:05
defense secure reliable easily maintained transport and hoard border good barter Goods what are barter
1:32:13
Goods well basically everything that people need to survive I see it could be
1:32:21
rounds of ammunition it could be cans of food it could be tools you know things
1:32:26
you can barter with yeah things you can exchange that people will actually find useful gold and silver is probably not
1:32:33
good for that purpose at least not for the first few decades it'll be more important to have
1:32:39
rounds of ammunition than than bars of gold wow because you can't eat gold yes
1:32:46
and so here are a few of the some of the kind of reforms uh that are going to be needed
1:32:52
and I have a at constitution.org pretty well laid out people keep reading them
1:32:59
and glazing over when they do and says Ah but uh I'm sorry they're tough but uh
1:33:06
you you you either apprehend things at the level of complexity that you need to in order to be effective or you will not
1:33:14
be part of the solution so
1:33:21
finally epida for Humanity they were smart enough to create problems for themselves they weren't smart enough to
1:33:30
solve thank you let's give a round of applause to
1:33:37
all of our presenters please and thank you all for coming can
1:33:44
I do a quick survey of people I you're like me your head is spinning now between all of
1:33:52
this Doom and Gloom scenario and positive outcomes and in spite of all
1:33:59
this the amount of violence is the in the world is being reduced the amount of
1:34:04
poverty in the world is being reduced so question for everyone
1:34:11
2050 let's make a prediction average quality of life better or worse than it is now or
1:34:20
who take a pick either for the average American or or
1:34:27
worldwide worldwide it's easy yeah what is it better it's better
1:34:33
okay but average americ is not not so much for us yeah I would say I would say
1:34:39
worse by 2020 yeah 2030 probably but by 2050 no it's going to fall apart by
1:34:48
then I said
1:34:53
I see I see that is when our natural resources nonrenewable resources
1:34:59
problems start to really hit us we figure out new ways to solve
1:35:05
that well if we can believe you know nobody mentioned pet Peter diamand's
1:35:11
book abundance right nobody mentioned
1:35:16
it Peter wrote abundance Peter diamandis wrote a book called abundance where he
1:35:24
posited that technology and human Innovation
1:35:30
will collaborate to create new systems and processes to solve all of our major
1:35:40
challenges I wish I could be as optimistic as he is but course he
1:35:46
doesn't specify how and we actually can identify
1:35:52
constraints on Poss possible technological developments for example the main area
1:35:59
of progress since the indust middle of the 19th century has been in the
1:36:04
efficiency of conversion of energy from one form into another the middle of the 19th century was less than
1:36:12
1% uh by the beginning of early first third of the 20th century we had gotten
1:36:18
up to about 20% and now we're approaching 30 but we're we're not going to reach 100 and
1:36:25
we're not going to reach a 30 fold increase so most of the potential for
1:36:31
improvement along that line has been realized that that mine has has been
1:36:38
largely played out so technology is the exploitation of
1:36:44
opportunities but none of those opportunities are unlimited and we do have more
1:36:49
opportunities ahead of us but they're not necessarily in the direction that provides relief for all of our problems
1:36:57
at least not easily like getting as minerals from asteroids well you got to get to the
1:37:04
asteroids and for those of you who as I sent out the little thing there handed out want to know about uh protecting
1:37:11
against increasing sophisticated terrorist attacks next Friday a t it's going to be on the bio it's kind
1:37:19
of on the biotech scene so I I have to say that think what's going to save the
1:37:25
world I think what's going to be the change who knows maybe it won't happen but I think that the growth of social
1:37:31
entrepreneurship and the fact that you are are grabbing hold of that and
1:37:37
running with it that is going to make the
1:37:43
difference well personally I don't think that far ahead 2050 maybe 20 30 or
1:37:49
something like that but I still see I I did some traveling last few years I still we see a lot of natural Resort
1:37:55
that we have not explored like the deep sea the mountains people can leave in the mountain if we improve our
1:38:01
transportation system you don't have to live in Flat Lands so there are a lot of um Mountain Resort they can use the
1:38:08
forest the mineral the water The Collection water system the
1:38:13
transportation system witness the fall I think that's still a lot to explore even China they say old po but they still a
1:38:20
lot lots of land are not being used but the amount hard to reach but they
1:38:25
improve the transportation system they can do it they try to build more City and more City right now that's a current
1:38:30
policy but they don't want to think about using the current resource to let people leave outside themselves to me
1:38:37
one of the most amazing and under reported stories of this spring that happened right here in Austin is that
1:38:44
the Austin electric company signed a contract to get solar power cheaper than
1:38:50
wind cheaper than gas and cheaper than coal wow that happened this spring
1:38:57
W the electric car is now on the edge of taking you know I did a I help my son my
1:39:05
nine-year-old do this report on electric cars and we went down and looked at the Tesla and all that kind of stuff we've
1:39:11
gotten so used to plugging in our our phones that the electricity and and this guy uh Elon R musk musk Elon
1:39:21
Musk changes com yes they're coming so there's optimis I think there's there's
1:39:28
optimistic things out there there's one technology we didn't talk about tonight
1:39:33
that I think is Far and Away more optimistic than almost anything else
1:39:39
I've seen and I wouldn't be so high in it except I really read his book carefully Eric Drexler who as you know
1:39:46
was the profit of nano technology has a new book about atomically precise
1:39:54
manufacturing wow by 2025 2030 if things continue to go and of course if big
1:40:02
variable is whether the economy stays put long enough so this thing could happen but as I started looking at the
1:40:09
details of the development curve even if the overall economy doesn't stay
1:40:16
together if there's enough pocketed economy that can keep that developing um and then
1:40:24
really work for the highly developed Nations first but uh that has
1:40:31
some very positive things and we're going to L on Mars in the next 30 40 years so maybe we can
1:40:38
just create a society
1:40:43
there and by the way one problem with the uh MK case
1:40:49
study when they say on non workers the elites consume almost nothing it's
1:40:58
insignificant most of those non-workers are children the Aged the sick and the
1:41:07
congenically unemployable that's me and some rich people yeah well most
1:41:15
rich people actually do work there are a few idle ones but most of them are actually productive people about the
1:41:21
second generation gener they don't you can add College stud to that too I
1:41:30
think well thank you for thank you everybody thanks for all our speakers
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