I spoke at a conference in Aspen, Colorado, a few years back. One of the other speakers was the late great biologist and naturalist E.O. Wilson, who was still as sharp as a tack despite being in his eighties.
For those of you who don’t know who E.O. is, he was famous for his work on socio-biology. Socio-biology is the idea that evolution didn’t just drive the development of our biology; it also drove the development of our social systems and behaviors. When I first read about socio-biology, the idea resonated with me, not because it was a full explanation for who we are today, but because it was another well-reasoned demonstration that human society and behavior have deep historical roots. There are profound reasons we act and interact the way we do, and although we can modify who we are and our forward trajectory, we aren’t blank slates.
Wilson’s talk was excellent. However, at the culmination of his talk, he made the point that as a newly minted global species (we are everywhere on the planet, and our activities have a planetary impact), we are not alone. Two other species, termites and ants, have been at a global level for millions of years, and this success was only possible because these species have learned how to live sustainably.
Wilson concluded that if humanity aspired to become as successful as a global species, like termites and ants, we also needed to become sustainable by changing our behaviors and altering our social organizations. I was dismayed when I heard this. The idea struck me as fundamentally wrong since to become sustainable through integration with the global ecology, the changes we would need to make would strip us of what it means to be human — many of the attributes we consider essential run counter to sustainability. To become truly sustainable, we must become as structured and simplified as termites and ants — a forced and permanent erasure of dangerous qualities such as freedom, intelligence, knowledge, technology, and belief.
Civilization as a Dissipative System
Recently, I stumbled onto another reason to reject wholesale sustainability as a goal for our civilization. I found it by looking at the problem of a global society through the lens of the fundamental laws of thermodynamics. Thermodynamics (energy cannot be created or destroyed, etc.) allows us to see the problem of our global civilization in a larger contextual frame than the one we use to discuss it currently.
To fully unlock the thermodynamic frame for our analysis, we need to borrow the concept of dissipative structures from the Nobel Prize-winning chemist Ilya Prigogine. (this might be a bit difficult to understand, but bear with me on this). Ilya argued that there are thermodynamically open systems that operate far from thermodynamic equilibrium (a place where no spontaneous change occurs). These dissipative systems build complexity spontaneously by swapping energy (in) and entropy (out) with larger external environments.
For our purposes, we can characterize human civilization as a dissipative system. While our civilization increased in complexity through spontaneous reorganization, the global ecosystem served as our larger external environment. We could exchange energy and entropy with this environment without running into problems (except locally). That changed when we became global when the global ecosystem integrated with our civilization. We were no longer a thermodynamically open system but an isolated one.
Typically, at the point when a dissipative system becomes isolated, it collapses as it stops generating new complexity and starts to shed the complexity it has already built. That’s where we are now as a global civilization. We can see it all around us, from mandated reductions in consumption to a sudden reversal in population growth to growing social disorder as we turn inward. NOTE: This psychological inward turn is a big reason for so much discontent, from those promoting it to those upset by it.
The reason for this is two-fold. First is that to truly persist as a species within the confines of the earth (sustainability), we need to limit ourselves to the level of complexity the earth’s ecosystem can support. That means no technological development beyond (at its best) where we were in the 1600s. In other words, everything we have built since then needs to go. Unfortunately, that system can’t support a billion people, let alone eight. It also means that nearly everyone would need to become a farmer again.
The second is that dissipative systems, like our civilization, have an arrow of time. They only move forward in one direction, and there’s no going back in an orderly way; there’s only wholesale collapse. You can sense this in the inability to articulate a meaningful description of a sustainable global civilization. From everything I’ve seen, there are only vague appeals to some imaginary future. This lack of clarity is because it is impossible to roll back the complexity we have built without causing the entire structure to fall apart.
Expand
Fortunately, thermodynamics does point to a solution — a way out of this mess. The answer is for our civilization, our dissipative system, to expand into a larger environment; space. This solution doesn’t require us to colonize other planets; we are far from being ready for that now. However, we must expand into near space to gather energy and externalize our entropy. Expanding into near space would allow us to move forward on the arrow of time. We could accelerate our energy acquisition (space-based solar power is the best bet now that Elon is collapsing launch costs) while externalizing our civilization’s entropy (both physical and psychological). In short, on this path, there’s no limit on how far we can go until we hit the limits of our sun and solar system. It is also a path that reduces what we do on earth to a local problem. As a local problem, it’s possible to find ways to reduce our impact on the global ecosystem without reducing our forward velocity.
If you are having problems following this, here’s an analogy that may help. Think of human civilization as a baby in the womb. We’ve grown mightily over the last nine months, and we’re hitting the limits for how much more we can grow. We are running out of space leading to psychological distress, and we are burdening our mother in ways she can’t sustain. Faced with this problem, most of us are demanding that we find a way to stay in the womb. It’s the perfect place; it’s warm, safe, and feeds us. We need to stay here, they insist, and to do that, we need to get smaller to reduce the burden we represent.
A vanishingly few of us disagree. We point out we can’t stay, and we need to start to leave, or we will die and likely kill our mother too.
Yes, I too fear we are most in danger of the global system losing back pressure and collapsing in on itself. Two steps forward, one hell of a step back!
The genius combo of deploying particles in the upper atmosphere, limiting nitrogen fertilizer usage, imposing widespread energy scarcity, and disrupting global supply/shipping could wind up being more like falling down the whole staircase.
Yes, the swarm’s ennui in this late age is earnestly seeking some new frontier expanse. Meta utilizing VR tech sees potential in providing this “space” for us digitally in the short term.
I must admit I see your article as paralleling Elon Musk’s same optimism to colonize Mars. They both conjure hope in a Genesis 2.0 story, serving as a unifying meta narrative for the 21st century. You know, the sci-fi adaptation where Noah’s distant sons build a space ark to survive a coming prophetic cataclysm and then journey to inhabit a new promised land? Perhaps it will be like GK Chesterton’s story in Orthodoxy of the man who (re)discovered England and bring us all the way back to our beginnings?
Back on solid ground, I remain overwhelmed by the task of even envisioning the supply/build logistics needed for a single space colony at city scale. The first iterations would be quite harsh environments with numerous critical points of failure. Space being a most unforgiving, frozen hell that is constantly trying to kill us (and our integrated circuits) in comparison to life beneath the cozy atmosphere/magnetosphere of Earth.
I remain most immediately concerned by those who admit to varying degrees of their desire to be like “gods” today. Thinking directly of the weird little guy speaking at the WEF lately. Anyway, I genuinely believe we have a much longer timeline than the one that the doomsayers are insisting upon right now.
Can we please delay turning over our critical decisions to the Hal9000? The same goes for the impulsive beta-fiddling with our genetic code and the open-sourcing of bio weapons capabilities?
I do join you in the resolute optimism that humanity can and will break out of our current dissipative system again. It is indeed what separates us from the insects! Enough of us will no doubt figure out how to “network swarm” for good? Ha!
I find myself persuaded superficially, but I have so thoroughly bonded myself to the furtherance of symbiosis, that I am likely to keep it as a primary personal focus. I am clearly integrated with civilization to which I have found no desirable alternative. For over thirty years I have been wrestling with the reality that civilization is headed for collapse. The distress our inability live as people with a place on this earth is a tremendous source of personal distress. I feel like it is almost too good to be true that we can reconcile the limits of a finite planet containing a civilization dependent on growth by growing beyond the limits of the planet. It would be such a relief to focus on being a frugal and conscientious ancestor to future generations by reducing waste, maximizing symbiosis, and also providing a better life for the world that is to come. I don’t think this resolves the declining rate of return to complexity. What could do is increase our access to energy to offset our entropic inefficiencies. I want us to have a future, as sustainable as possible. It’s time to transcend our solar limits, seeking integrity with the earth we hold sacred.