Up next in 10
Predictions for the collapse of our civilization
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
22:23
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
29:05
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
29:24
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
29:36
area about 7,000 years ago that when they analyze the DNA of humans they find
29:43
that the human population had shrunk to like a few thousand about 70,000 years ago so human Homo sapiens came real
29:51
close to extinction back um another possibility is incurable
29:56
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
30:10
thermonuclear war is one that was a big concern from the 50s through the 80s and
30:15
so forth um so probabilities for those are possible possible it's now kind of a
30:23
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
30:39
to 100 years but whenever these things happen I recall the a quote from Robert
30:48
a hline a very famous science fiction novel they all survivors so even in
30:54
these Jurassic things you like I said from that massive volcano uh eruption uh
31:00
there were a few thousand survivors okay uh all right level five uh humans
31:08
survive but civilization doesn't uh one scenario is Theus of nonrenewable
31:14
resources uh and there any more which I'm going to list from the next slide oops
31:20
oh said P job
31:28
what I'm sorry p p page up button oh page up okay okay um so nonrenewable resources
31:38
by their definition when they're used up they're gone so probability of that is 100%
31:44
uh it doesn't seem to be preventable because uh the depletion is driven by
31:49
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
31:55
plant Supply and the population demands energy to be uh
32:03
so ultim population is driving the completion of of non reable resources uh
32:09
and that's one of the factors that was in the model that that might talk um so
32:15
one of the impact is that it's going to be scrambled to find substitute materials is going to be wars fought
32:22
over scarce non renewable resources and so forth um world too uh the reason
32:29
Japan attacked us at Pearl Harbor was because they do not have any natural oil resources they NE to get the oil from
32:37
Indonesia uh they wanted to take over the Indonesian oil fields and to get to Indonesia they had to go through the
32:43
Philippines which the US owned at that time so they needed to negate the US's
32:50
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
32:57
what that's how so World War II from from that side was was uh started
33:02
because of resources so as these resources run out we're going to see more and more of this uh it's really
33:09
worrisome that there's a huge reservoir of uh recently discovered natural resources underneath Afghanistan what's
33:16
going to happen to all those resources who gets to control it is going to be a interesting
33:22
question all right so some of these resources we're going to see running out in the next 30 Years uh but some others
33:30
that may take a few year thousand years before we run out of others um and Recovery only if we can
33:37
transition to 100% renewable resources Society okay are you saying you think
33:42
there 100% possibility of civilization collapse because of this no I'm saying there 100% probability that we will run
33:49
out of natural resour non renewable resources um but yeah like I said the
33:57
the recovery if we can get to 100% renewable resources then civilization can continue um one of the books in my
34:04
bibliography uh several books that talk about will the industrial society
34:10
survive uh after oil is all gone and fosil Fs are all gone uh so that's
34:15
that's that's an open question and it would be something interesting study and talk about
34:20
now I added a six uh level of uh catastrophe in other words Regional
34:27
civilization collapse it's not in as AOS this but um it's the case that uh so
34:35
many of the people when they talk about threats to civilization they are threats that will affect one uh Regional area
34:41
but but not another you know the collapse of the mans didn't affect the uh growth of civilization in Europe for
34:49
example um so over population followed by a population collapse is one scenario
34:56
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
35:10
um so the over population that is a problem that uh I
35:16
don't see a a a solution to that uh uh it's driven by human nature desire to
35:22
reproduce again it's that that those uh Predator PR like that might show going
35:28
through Cycles like that we just haven't hit our first cycle yet and so that's that time scale is is
35:35
50 to 100 years um like I said population is going to cycle up and down
35:40
okay all right so here's some other possibilities climate change for the runaway greenhouse effect uh drought uh
35:48
depletion of the ozone layer depletion of drinkable fresh water um what computer people call
35:55
Singularity and what I call artificial intelligent Singularity to distinguish it from other
36:00
singularities uh is when 30 40 years from now computers are going to be more
36:05
intelligent than humans and what happens after that is uh still uh uh open to
36:12
Wild conjectures uh okay you know another uh
36:19
possibility is uh someone generates a microorganism against which you have no
36:24
defense um and poor education on the global scale uh
36:32
you know if we could get the whole world educated up to approximately level that we have in invest Society a whole lot of
36:39
troubles would go away um okay next one
36:45
and thing that frightens me now that for example Road Runner email has been down
36:51
for the past week what happens if we get a global system computer crash um
36:58
and we got ter been down for the last week pardon yes what's been down for the last we oh Road Runner email
37:05
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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