Establishing ever increasing wellbeingResolving the human predicament

Establishing ever increasing wellbeing

The book suggest that to change this decriptor from negative to positive, would require a rapid population decline.

I have shown why this decline would have to proceed down to a global population below 1% of present or 50 million people.

Even if we found a way to reduce the global population to 50 million. There are some large challenges left to be addressed. What would be the design of such a global community? What would be the steps in the transition from the present to that community.

Most individuals would have to relocate to allow the world's renewing resources to facilitate their ever improving North American lifestyles.

If people were thinly distributed over the entire earth then transportation costs would isolate people and prevent them from enjoying the benefits that only come from denser populations. For example symphonies, opera, great universities, and synergistic manufacturing and technology .

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that we are worse of each year. If the number is negative homo sapiens are choosing behaviors similar to species that did not have our species thinking and forethought capacity. We are acting like a species whose evolutionary progress fills an opening niche in the ecosystem until full.

Then as the niche widens the species population and footprint expands. As it narrows the population and footprint contract.

In some cases a species unknowingly contracting its own niche when its waste products poison their their own niche. And like a species that was susceptible to their niche closing enough to cause extinction.

Today our species is playing out this dance in the ecosystem with some additional twists. For example, our species is unique in that the individuals do not live at subsistence. Each can consume many times the resources required for the minimum. This variation means that one individual can consume the resources that could support another but by purchasing or taking them by force from an economically or physically weaker person, that second person perishes.

The killing process ( pushing the weaker person off the plate) can be done efficiently. That is few resources are consumed in the transaction. For example a market processes. Or it can be done in efficiently, taking by force process consumes a large percentage of the supporting resources, destroys infrastructure, and depletes human capital.

These processes, while being part of all human history, they obviously decrease the cumulative percentage wellbeing improvements described above.

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Because it can control its numbers, and because it

For humans, living above subsistence, a narrowing niche would mean a contraction of supporting resources. the market distributions systems would cause a worsening of wellbeing for the poorest, a die-off and then a conflagration of conflict. Civilization would collapse leaving a community with less technology, and less potential for advancing technology. Much smaller future generation would be trapped at a lifestyle and technology far below what we have now.

While this is a highly probable scenario, there is a second, maybe less probable one. In the second, people will live an ever improving lifestyle with ever improving technology. The second future is what we all want. It's what most of us expect.

However, what humankind fails to realize is that the path between what exists today and what we want for our children tomorrow, follows a path, which includes a rapid decrease in human numbers down to below 1% of the existing global population.

It also includes moving the remaining global population, industry, the arts (old and new), educational facilities, managing institutions, to the most benign environment. By benign I mean, best climate, best food production, most efficient transport routes, and access to renewable energy sources like hydro etc.

We have to move to the new location, the stocks of previously mined and processed materials that will allow this community be self sustaining through recycling -- for example, steel, aluminum, plastic, potash, molybdenum, zinc, copper, etc would all be stock piled in large quantities with expectations that for this small and declining population and with careful recycling, they would not have to mine lower and lower grade ores to supply the communities needs.

To make this transition we may have to use part of the remaining non-renewable energy resources

So in this part of the book I sketch out the parameters of such a sustainable society living on 1/20 of the existing human footprint. Whose peaceful existence is dependent on two parameters. 1) a limitation on the separation between the rich and poor a genie number of ( xx) and 2) that each individual experience an improvement in well being each year.

The first part of the book suggested that the initial population for this community would be below 80 million.

Thus far i have not suggested where this community might be located. How the population and infrastructure would be distributed over this area. How this enterprise would be powered. How it would grow food. How it would transport goods and people within community. And how this population would interact with the vast area of earth that would exist outside the community's boundary.

Certainly energy, until advancing technology harnessed fusion, would limit this interaction. The initial criteria that the community would not exceed the 1/20 of the present human footprint would shape operations of this community.

So let us compute some of the parameters of the community so we can see where an how it might exist if we could find a way to bring 50 million people together with the remaining bounty of the existing earth with all its infrastructure and stock piles.

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Humankind has several paths into the future. While new technology could play a significant role in shaping our future, raising or lowering our total human footprint is the dominant variable that will determine how our children fair. We need to cut total consumption by a factor of 20 to save the environment. We need to reduce stratification of wealth by a factor or 4. And we have to put in place a means for all the living people to improve their condition.

Driving a high mileage car, changing light bulbs, recreating nearer to home, and eating less meat will reduce a personal footprint. However, these acts will not affect total human footprint. One of those billions, climbing the wellbeing ladder, with no car or little access to meat will succeed in consuming your leavings.

Don't forget you and everyone else is working day and night to improve their wellbeing. The money you did not spend in gas is now buying a extra day at Disneyland. Getting better gas mileage never reduced your footprint.

Given zero sum game conditions, the dominant control process is number of people. As the number of people goes up the amount of space (or resources) per person goes down. Zero sum game processes, those that make the rich richer and poor poorer creates losers of wellbeing. Scarcity increases. Increasing scarcity creates increasing conflict which creates increasing scarcity. This feedback loop collapses civilization.

In the collapse, technology will be lost. Also lost will be the infrastructure to advance technology. Unless a new technology is discovered that miniaturizes the footprint of an individual, or allows transport of a large portion of the present human population to another space (off world or a new space or time dimension) humankind, like all biological species before them, will establish a human population limited by the earth's renewable resources. In the end each remaining person will exist near subsistence.

The death throes of the a collapsing civilization will consume the remaining fossil energy and water resources. Over harvesting will deplete supporting species. Created waste will poison the air and water. Soil productivity will lower through lose and diminished mineral value. Humans will displace and thus extinguish many species.

These loses will lessen the chances of humankind creating a technology that can break out of the resulting subsistence living.

This is not the only path forward for the human experiment. Humans can create extremely high living standards if they elect to decrease their total human footprint below the earth's renewable supplies.

The required reduction in footprint is large. The existing total human footprint is probably more that 20 times what the earth can support. The existing population must be reduce to a 1/20th.

Further to accommodate the natural processes of wealth stratification the 1/20 will have to be reduced to a quarter. A new population 1/80 of those present or about 100 million is a good step toward a community which is both sustainability and peaceful. Even 100 million will be too many if individuals are allowed to strive to improve their wellbeing.

One might ask what is the design of a community of 50 million people on earth. Where and how would these people live.

The site (or sites) would have to minimize the transportation costs, the heating and cooling costs because the energy would all have to come from renewable sources like hydro, solar, wind, tidal, geothermal, Nuclear, like petroleum and coal, might be considered non renewable at least with our present science.

Each form of renewable energy would have to be able to rebuild itself on the energy it produced. Not just the energy of fabricating, installing generation equipment, and transmitting the energy, but also the energy required to maintain the manufacturing and transportation infrastructure (e,g, roads manufacturing buildings and tools.) The produced energy would have facilitate the lives of all the people in the Energy supply chain. And all this support energy would be required before the first watt was passed on to the first consumer.

Assuming we could attain a population of 70 million people in 70 years, how would we move these people and all their supporting infrastructure, including arts, technology, manufacturing plants, universities and food growing and processing capabilities into these consolidated and optimized areas.

How would we use the remaining cheap fossil resources to make this transition? How would we make this transition and still have some left over to do the things that can only be done with fossil resources?

These are important questions that should be answered. The answering will not only help in designing the logistics of the physical transition to a sustainable human experiment, but psychologically help us cope with giving up the old cultural patters and adopting new.

-----second copy of extras

Then as the niche widens the species population and footprint expands. As it narrows the population and footprint contract.

These processes, while being part of all human history, they obviously decrease the cumulative percentage wellbeing improvements described above.

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Because it can control its numbers, and because it

To make this transition we may have to use part of the remaining non-renewable energy resources

So in this part of the book I sketch out the parameters of such a sustainable society living on 1/20 of the existing human footprint. Whose peaceful existence is dependent on two parameters. 1) a limitation on the separation between the rich and poor a genie number of ( x) and 2) that each individual experience an improvement in well being each year.

The first part of the book suggested that the initial population for this community would be below 80 million.

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These loses will lessen the chances of humankind creating a technology that can break out of the resulting subsistence living.

The required reduction in footprint is large. The existing total human footprint is probably more that 20 times what the earth can support. The existing population must be reduce to a 1/20th.

One might ask what is the design of a community of 50 million people on earth. Where and how would these people live.

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The book suggest that to change this intergenerational descriptor from negative to positive, would require a rapid population decline.

I have shown why this decline would have to proceed down to a global population below 1% of present or 50 million people.

Most individuals would have to relocate to allow the world's renewing resources to facilitate their ever improving North American lifestyles.

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Thus some of us live lives far above subsistence. If 99% of our supporting resources disappeared the last 1% would sustain us.

Of course, some people on the globe live right at subsistence and if any supporting resources were lost they would perish.

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Humankind, like other species, evolved from and in an environmental niche that provides support.

Today, humankind supports itself on non renewing resources from that niche. When these resources are exhausted, humankind will have to adjust its total human footprint downward to a level that can be continuously supported by renewing resources. At present technology that appears to be 1/20th of its present size.

Few people living today have expectations that they will experience diminishing wellbeing at that transition. On the contrary, most expect the future to bring them increasing wellbeing. Each person, working to increase personal wellbeing, contributes to an increasing total human footprint. This, contrary to their expectations, hastens the arrival of the transition and expands its disruption.

Given estimates of peak oil production, and other supporting resources this transition will probably occur within this century.

Additional mechanisms are at work to move the date earlier and make the transition harder. For example, each global inhabitant has not been equally successful in mining the niche's resources. The very rich people consume the niche's resources hundreds of time faster than the very poor. This separation motivates the lessor consumers to expand their wellbeing which increases total human footprint.

As this total human footprint approaches the niche capacity, increasing scarcity frustrates peoples efforts to move upward. Eventually scarcity becomes so sever acquisition of one person means a lose to another.

The losers increase social conflict. Increases in social conflict cause increases in defense. Part of the niche's resources are diverted from supporting wellbeing to defense. This increases scarcity, which increases conflict, which increases diversion. This downward spiral culminates in the collapse of civilization and a loss of its technology.

Without civilization's organization and technology the niche's resources can support a much smaller population at a much lower wellbeing.

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If the above analysis is correct, the human species today is at a fork in the road. It can proceed along its present path, hope for some super technological breakthrough, and if the breakthrough does not come in time -- accept that a small remnant of humankind will be locked in some dark age existence.

The alternative path requires finding the means to reduce humankind's total footprint until it equals the supports provided by a niche absent the exhausted non renewables.

In the book I have argued that rapid population decline can be used to implement the required reduction in footprint. I have suggested that a global population below 100 million, probably 50-70 million people could live a peaceful North American life style on the renewable resources.

70 million is 1% of the existing population. The one percent was arrived at by multiplying the 1/20th required to get the total footprint below the sustainable niche services, times an additional 1/5 drop in population to reduce scarcity enough to prevent a social conflict death spiral.

I cautioned that 70 million was just an intermediate target. Should the average wellbeing of these 70 million individuals rise above the present North American lifestyle then successive reductions in population would be required to prevent having our kids live in a dark age.

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you have learned that temporal character of the human predicament does not leave us much wiggle room AS TO which behavior we take and when we take it.

You have read essays that show the human experiment is headed for something like a car accident. The before accident environment tells us little about the meaning of the crash. Our genetic driven brain, something that evolved over millions of years, was selected for survival in systems that did not have these dynamics.

Similarly our Culture, be it spiritual, or religious, or political, was not designed to choose behavior that will respond correctly to systems with these dynamics.

Only the part of our brain that produces forethought can help us and that part is constantly being told to be quiet. Our forethought brain is accused of creating behaviors that are insensitive to our culture's design and the opposite of its approved behaviors.

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It is easy to see how I have arrived at the following simple view of the predicament.

The vitality of the earth's human experiment is improving, worsening or remaining constant. One way to measure this trend is to take each set of parents on earth and measure the percent that their kids will live better or worse than themselves.

This percent would reflect changes in health, longevity, the ratio of labor to production. Changes in the enjoyment and participation in the arts. Changes in the ability to contribute to the advancement of science and technology. Changes in social conflict. Changes in benefits or liabilities produced for future generations. And changes in the earth's system's to maintain their own bio diversity, waste recycling capacity, and other chemical balances.

Averaging these numbers for all families gives a net improvement or decay of wellbeing in the human experiment. A positive percent would mean every year wellbeing is better than the last. A negative percent would mean each year the human experiment is worse off.

Admittedly that is not the way most individuals have measured the improvement of wellbeing. Most individuals are more immediately and locally focused. Which explains why some people in some places think the world is a bowel of cherries ready to be picked. They think they are good pickers and cherry pie makers. The rest of the individuals don't see any available cherries to be picked and know it's getting harder just to maintain last year's wellbeing.

Anyone counting noses can see that the "cherry pickers" are a small group and the vast majority of the world's parents think their child will not achieve their current wellbeing. The average number indicates dismal negative numbers for the human experiment.

The most likely outcome of these negative numbers for our children will be a rapid rise in scarcity, an explosion of anarchy, collapse of civilization, major die off, leaving many orphans to scavenge in the ruins of mighty cities and destroyed country sides.

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In this section I would like to present, if we were lucky enough to find away to rapidly get the global population down to 70 million, where would they would live, how would they produce food, and other goods and services. How would they educate their young, recreate, and advance the arts and sciences and maintain and improve their infrastructure. What energy source would support this community.

This design is only half the challenge of this community, the other half would be, how would 70 million people from the four corners of the earth collect themselves together at the location, with their technology, art, science, educational institutions, manufacturing plants, research labs and assets amassed from the fossil energy era.

In this plan how would we use the last remaining fossil energy to implement this transition and still leave some future projects.

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These mechanisms only partly define the human predicament. An other part of the predicament is that the decision makers choosing between normal actions and those provided by the alternative have no perception of these mechanisms.

Choosing the alternative path implement rapid population decline depends on finding a way to make these mechanisms self evident to the decision makers.

The best way to implement rapid population decline, without increasing the death rate, is to decrease the birth rate. This means changing billions of personal decisions to have children.

I have already described multiple mechanisms for understanding how RPD saves our experiment. How it might be implemented.

However in this last portion of the book I I would like to describe the world after an RPD of this magnitude

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For most specie's, the number supported is the niche's services divided by the a single member's subsistence consumption. Before this carrying capacity is reached, increase in population result from births exceeding deaths. When the niche's services won't support any additional members the population stops increasing.

Since there are few controls on number of births, the strong survive and the weak perish. deaths equal births.

If the niche varies in size due to climate variations a change in deaths adjusts population.

If the niche closes entirely, one of the environmental supports exhausts, the species goes extinct.

These rules govern the existence of all species. However, for humans there are some unique additions to these rules. Humans can live above subsistence. That is any individual can consume more than he or she needs for subsistence. This changes the calculation of a niche's carrying capacity. Instead of niche support divided by one subsistence consumption equals population supported, the number supported by a niche also varies with the actual consumption of each living member. It is the sum of the personal consumption's of members in the population that equals the niche's support. Since a human can consume a 1000 or more times that what he or she needs for subsistence, carrying capacity of humankind's niche could support a population 1000 times smaller than it could if all members were consuming at subsistence.

The most important consideration brought forward in this book, "Rapid Population Decline or Bust," is that individuals can change their well being dynamically. For example, if the niche is full, or near full, or locally full, or temporarily full, then a change in personal consumption means a redistribution of supporting resources. The resources flow from one person to another. When one individual's consumption goes up, other individuals goes down.

People who experience diminished quantities of support are unhappy. If it happens to those at subsistence levels of consumption they die. If it happens to those living above subsistence they shift relaxation time to production time. If they have no time to shift, they try to change in efficiency of production or consumption (doing more with less.) But when these processes prove more difficult than taking resources from others by force, then social conflict becomes the distributor.

Social conflict not only moves the loser to lower consumption, it consumes the niche's resources. It wastes part of the niche's resources -- effectively making it smaller.)

There is one more difference between most biological species and the human species in how they fit into their niche. The human species has cognitive processes that allow it to see its path into the future as constrained by the niche. Humans can include costs and benefits (that accrue in the future to members of their group) when determining the value of a present behavior.

In reference to rapid population decline or bust, this cognitive process, this forethought, can recognize the meaning of changes of wellbeing of one individual to another, the depletion or exhaustion of nonrenewable, and the limits of technology in keeping pace with the expansion of human footprint.

Forethought tells us that the niche will not support all of us in a manner in which we would like to live. Any consumer that survives is responsible for the death of any consumer who can not maintain a subsistence level of support from the niche.

Here is where the forethought becomes an important element in the human experiment. If one can see in the future that most people slide downward in wellbeing, anarchy erupts, civilization collapses, most of the population dies, and most of the infrastructure is wasted will little chance to rebuild it, then one can measure the results from behaviors that rapidly bring down population and prevent those events.

The least violent of these behaviors is very low birth rates. Implementation of low birthrates will require a clear view of the black future and the effects on it of low birthrates. As the percentage of the population that attains this clarity ranges from just a few to universal, the attainment of low birth rate ranges from autocratic processes to anarchic processes. Somewhere in the middle, is Garret Hardin's model for social control of the individual's behavior, Mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon.

As stated in the introduction, this book contributes to creating the majority that coerces the minority to have a very small number of children and produce very rapid population decline.

The future of the human experiment depends on understanding four concepts, 1) the trends that create the future. 2) the behaviors that control these trends. 3) the breath and depth of a working system (creating a clear definition of the target community -- so as not to be distracted by false goals,) and 4) changing human consciousness so that humanity adopts behaviors that move toward the the human experiment toward -- ever improving wellbeing.

for the human experiment for without it all the intermediate goals for our children are moot.

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-- toward blackness or toward ever improving wellbeing

The vitality of the earth's human experiment is improving, worsening or remaining constant. One way to measure this movement is to take each set of parents on earth and measure the percent that their kids will live better or worse than themselves.

This percent number would reflect changes in health, longevity, the ratio of labor to production. Changes in the enjoyment and participation in the arts. Changes in the ability to contribute to the advancement of science and technology. Changes in social conflict. Changes in benefits to future generations due to consumption of non renewable resources. And changes in the bio system's capacity to maintain its own bio diversity, waste recycling capacity, and system balances.

Combining these numbers for all families gives a net improvement or decay of wellbeing in the human experiment. A positive percent would mean every year wellbeing is better than the last. A negative percent would mean each year the human experiment is worse off.

Admittedly that is not the way most individuals have measured the improvement of wellbeing. Most individuals are more immediately and locally focused. Which explains why some people in some places think the world is a bowel of cherries ready to be picked and they are good pickers and cherry pie makers. The rest of the individuals don't see any available cherries to be picked and know it's getting harder just to maintain last year's wellbeing.

Anyone counting noses can see that the "cherry pickers" are a small group and the vast majority of the world's parents think their child will not achieve their current wellbeing. The collective number indicates dismal negative numbers for the human experiment.

The book suggest that to change this descriptor from negative to positive, would require a rapid population decline.

I have shown why this decline would have to proceed down to a global population below 1% of present or 50 million people.

Most individuals would have to relocate to allow the world's renewing resources to facilitate their ever improving North American lifestyles.

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Then as the niche widens the species population and footprint expands. As it narrows the population and footprint contract.

These processes, while being part of all human history, they obviously decrease the cumulative percentage wellbeing improvements described above.

------------

Because it can control its numbers, and because it

To make this transition we may have to use part of the remaining non-renewable energy resources

The first part of the book suggested that the initial population for this community would be below 80 million.

---------------omit below ----------

These loses will lessen the chances of humankind creating a technology that can break out of the resulting subsistence living.

The required reduction in footprint is large. The existing total human footprint is probably more that 20 times what the earth can support. The existing population must be reduce to a 1/20th.

One might ask what is the design of a community of 50 million people on earth. Where and how would these people live.