Population Collapse and Spiritual Suffering

  By several measures, the earth is overpopulated.  In just 200 years, we have run through most of the easily extractable fossil fuels and metal ores, we have decimated numerous animal species, and we have polluted the atmosphere and waters beyond the tipping point where global warming became self accelerating, resulting in run-away global warming, widespread aridification and flooding storms.  The Amazon is drying up and southeast USA suffered epic floods last week.

Lately several factors have conspired to inhibit population growth of advanced nations.  Significant are women’s education, women’s employment and social media.  Numerous experts find the fertility deficit regrettable.  Economists warn that declining fertility results in too few working citizens to support the retired citizens, financially and practically.  Social security will go broke and caretakers will not suffice.  Also important is the social pathology associated with mating failure.  Finally, neighborhoods, even cities with abandoned homes quickly become socially dangerous bankruptcy hot spots.

In my opinion, the ecological benefits of reduced population justify the unavoidable suffering associated with it.  I challenge fellow julepers to imagine ways to minimize that suffering.  Here are some random thoughts:

1)  Social Centers scattered liberally among neighborhoods.  These would be spaces to facilitate innocent interactions among neighbors – board games, music making, dancing, theater.

2)  Community gardens and garden-support clubs.

3)  ? ? ?

Restraint needed

Catastrophes for our grandchildren because their predecessors (we) could not decide rationally to restrain their (our) appetites and share with descendants:

1)  Fossil fuels will be largely depleted and total energy supply will be insufficient for modern conveniences, like transportation, indoor comfort, mechanized farming.

2)  The atmosphere will have enough CO2 to render much land and water inhospitable to humans and human-supporting life: Too hot and too acidic.

3)  The demands of data storage (exponentially growing cloud: Google, YouTube, AI, smartphone, blockchain) will overwhelm energy-supply systems (fuels, grid).

4)  Excessive information technology will dominate the human experience, resulting in ennui, envy,  loneliness, meaninglessness and procreative insufficiency.  

5)  Tribalism (ethnic, religious) will result in more barbaric conflicts as the environment degrades.

Of these mega-trends, the only desirable one is procreative insufficiency, sad though it may be – desirable only in that it will diminish the energy shortage.

Strategic Food Reserves

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Emerson_Humanitarian_Trust

Virtually every scientist knows that our civilization is on the edge of massive harvest failures.  We can’t predict when and where failures will happen, but we know that continued global warming will render large areas too hot or dry or flood prone for their historical crops and livestock.  Yet we have no strategic food reserves.  We abandoned such safety measures in favor of price manipulation back in the 1990's.

        Hopefully, farm practices can adjust to gradual changes in climate, but there will always be periods of mismatch and low production.

I believe that we should have an international convention to identify areas of Antarctica where vast numbers of grain-filled shipping containers sealed with nitrogen gas can be parked without upsetting local flora and fauna.  The convention could supervise rational allocation of container-parking spaces among participating nations.

Nations owning the reserves would be able to use them to satisfy their own needs and to sell or lend them to other nations – those with fertility rates below three babies per mother.  The reserves should not be sold to nations with higher fertility rates.

We could experience a temporary crop failure due to global warming and the opposite.  For example, a large volcanic eruption or a large asteroid collision could bring on a year or more of dark and cool summers.  A large solar storm could disable much of our communications and control apparatus at a critical time.  And then there is the threat of nuclear winter.

It is irresponsible not to have a generous strategic food reserve.  Any significant food shortage will result in a breakdown of social order the likes of which cannot be imagined.

The distribution of fertility rates is presented in the following map:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d7/Total_Fertility_Rate_Map_by_Country.svg

Sad Truth

It’s worse than inconvenient.  It’s devastating and inevitable.  Our quest for satisfaction is rapidly depleting the resources needed for our descendants to satisfy needs, desires, comforts, etc.  Our institutions (religions, governments, schools) reflect our primitive tribal instincts and so cannot respond rationally.  Astrophysical and geological events will destroy us even if we could respond rationally.

Given these facts: What matters?  What should we care about?  What should we do with our temporary existence?  I would argue that suffering matters, that we should care about and try to minimize unnecessary suffering.  That would be worthwhile.

Most suffering is out of our control.  Wild sentient animals suffer much of the time with hunger, fear, exposure, disease, parasites, injury, etc.  Western societies generally recognize a duty to treat domesticated animals humanely.  Modern medicine is advanced though poorly distributed.  But we haven’t figured out how to prevent crime and war.  We harm each other unnecessarily and often regrettably.  We don’t have the institutions to address the suffering coming our way due to over consumption and resource depletion.  Every effort to address this problem is met with political opposition.  The promise of tax breaks prevails over reason.  No political system and no religious movement promises better outcomes.

We need a new institution built with new technology.

15 Recommendations:

 

1  Respect truth

2  Revere justice

3  Relieve suffering (famine, disease, injury)

4  Restrain primal urges (greed, fear, tribalism, procreation)

5  Resist mischief (it's usually regretted)

6  Regard beauty

7  Remain curious

8  Restore balance

9  Reduce, Reuse, Repurpose, Repair, Recycle stuff

10  Reject social media

11  Stay inventive

12  Save nature

13  Share burdens and benefits

14  Seek meaning

15  Sing sentimental songs

This list attempts to identify satisfying life choices that support civilization.  What have I missed?  What doesn't belong? 

Israel/Palestine

 What decision by what Israeli leader since 1946 might have resulted in durable peace and justice from the river to the sea?

Proposed test for light-speed symmetry

It is said that we don’t know the actual speed of light going from a source to a target; we know only the two-way speed going from a source to a target and reflecting back to the source.  Conceivably light is faster in one direction than the other.  Perhaps one could test whether light has the same speed in opposite directions by use of the spinning photosensitive disc illustrated below.

The idea is to send a pulse of light simultaneously leftward and rightward from a single, middle source over a fast spinning photosensitive disc.  If the disc spins fast enough, the light pulse should leave an arc shaped mark on each side, left and right.  If light’s leftward and rightward speeds differ, then the arc will be flatter on the side of faster light speed, like the purple-dot path compared to the green-dot paths.  One will not know which side is faster unless the light leaves a side-specific signature, eg a left-right color difference.

         In this illustration, the disc made one quarter rotation as a light pulse (green dots) went from center to left edge and from center to right edge.  It is depicted as it was at the end of that quarter turn.  The purple dots show the path of the right-side pulse if it were twice as fast.  They advanced with the disc as the slower and later (green) exposures occurred.

        Considering the speed of light relative to the speed of a matter disc, this experiment would require extremely fine resolution, since the disc would advance only a few atoms as the light pulse traveled from middle to edge.  But such resolution may be possible, as it was achieved in the LIGO gravity-wave sensor.

        An analogous experiment could be done with a  fast-sliding photo-sensitive sheet instead of disk, or with a fast-rotating photo-sensitive cylinder as illustrated below.  Perhaps the moving photo-sensitivity could be electronic rather than massive, given the speeds implied.