Wood grain in concrete

 

This is wood grain in concrete: an impression of the wood form that the concrete was poured into. It is a modern fossil.

Long-Range Forecast Revised

Long-Range Forecast Revised

 

There is a global baby bust in progress. Birth rates are falling all over the world. The reproduction rate is less than replacement all over the developed world. It is still above replacement in Africa but will fall below replacement soon. Therefore global population will peak before the end of this century, probably around 8 billion, and then fall.

Why is this happening? I speculate that the baby bust is caused by ecological distress transmitted to humans via price signals. Economic pressures drive urbanization; and in an urbanizing world, children are expensive, but not useful, and therefore demand for them falls. That is “Gaia’s Revenge”. The biosphere is shutting down human reproduction; this control is done via market mechanisms.

 The Gaia-triggered, market-mediated disinclination to breed manifests in many ways, depending on the culture.

 In East Asia, young adults take a Daoist path, and allow themselves to be losers at reproduction. In Japan such young men are called “Grass-eaters”. They stay at home, work little or not at all, and forsake cars, houses, love, marriage, and family. In China, young people “lie flat”, or “let it rot”.

 In America, young adults prefer individualism. They fail at reproduction (as the biosphere signals to them via the market) by succeeding at some other game. Therefore the popularity of gender minorities, all non-breeder. Gays and lesbians are almost conventional; now we see deconstruction of gender itself, including, tellingly, asexuality.

That’s on the cultural left; the cultural right also hates kids, because America hates kids. America aborts them pre-birth, and shoots them post-birth. So there are no “pro-lifers” in America. Everyone agrees on the need to get rid of unwanted humans; so the debate is about when and how; pre-birth, by abortion, or post-birth, by guns. I call it the ‘guns-vs-abortion-debate’. It’s about a detail of timing. The aim in either case is population reduction.

 Note that over 60% of all gun deaths in America are suicides. This reveals the true heart of American gun culture; it’s not about self-defense, it’s about self-slaughter. Sometimes it involves others, such as massacres, or suicide by cop. All of it very much in obedience to Gaia.

 Some resist Gaia’s call, but do so in impractical ways. In particular, forced-breeders want a free lunch: an expanding population without a sustainable economic basis. They seek this aim by state power, the ‘Ceausescu strategy’; but the biosphere controls human behavior via market mechanisms, and the invisible hand of the Market is quicker than the all-seeing eye of the State. Are you for 86? War on abortion pills will do no better than the previous wars on drugs. 

 An honest pro-natalism would subsidize families with less environmental impact. The New Deal was pro-natalist, until we reached our ecological limits. To expand those limits, pro-natalism needs family-friendly investment in clean sustainable technology; a Green New Deal.

 This could ensure that the baby-bust population decline of the latter half of the 21st century will converge, from above, to a sustainable 500,000,000 global population, as suggested by the Georgia Guidestones. They also recommend rule by reason. However, the Georgia Guidestones were blown up by persons unknown. I would like so rational a resolution of our Malthusian limits; but I expect more ‘natural’ behavior from humankind.

So I have revised my long-range forecast. I blow off a stable demographic transition, from below or above. Instead of an ecologically unsustainable population explosion, or a terminal population collapse, or convergence to peaceful stability, we will instead experience all-too-natural population chaos. There will be overshoots, like half of last century and the first half of this, alternating with undershoots, like the second half of this century and half of the next. These vacillations will be unpredictable; they will have sensitive dependence on initial conditions; small causes will have large effects. I speculate that we are witnessing only the beginning of the population chaos, lasting perhaps for thousands of years.

Population chaos will put humankind and nature under stress; this will force both to evolve quickly. Humankind’s overshoots will increase variation for humanity and selective pressure for nature; humankind’s undershoots will increase variation for nature and selective pressure for humanity; put variation and selection together and you get evolution.

 Therefore the extinction event that we’re causing has only begun, but the rebound will be swift and innovative, as it was after the last five mass extinctions. The next ecology will be based, in part, on our pests and weeds: the species that live with us and survive all of our attempts to exterminate them. I foresee an ecology evolved from mice, rats, feral dogs and cats, raccoons, coyotes, crows, pigeons, flies, ants, roaches, crabgrass, dandelions, poison ivy, and kudzu.

 For ourselves in the long run, I have good news and bad news. The good news is that far-future humankind will have superhuman powers. Our distant descendants will be superior to us in their intelligence, creativity, resilience, wisdom, health, empathy and cunning. Their immune systems will shrug off cancer, airborne Ebola, and radioactive fallout. They will be poets, artists, musicians, athletes, acrobats, and lightning calculators from childhood. They will have profound spirituality, superb sales resistance, and a magnificent sense of humor. That’s the good news. The bad news is that they will need all of those superhuman talents, and more, to survive long enough to reproduce.

 

 

How Athena Punished Pythagoras

How Athena Punished Pythagoras

 

Sing through me, O Muse, of a sage’s high hubris, and a goddess’s elegant revenge! Sing through me of Pythagoras the would-be number-lord, and Athena’s diagonal retort!

Pythagoras was a sage of ancient times. He and his cult of followers lived together in a cave near Athens. You’d expect them to forbid eating beans, which they did, but not for the reasons that you’d expect; for Pythagoras preached reincarnation, and he feared that some deceased friend might reincarnate as a bean. 

Once he was visiting the Athenian marketplace, and he witnessed a man beating a dog. Pythagoras said, “Stop! I recognize his voice.” For Pythagoras, irrationality times irrationality often yielded rationality. 

Pythagoras discovered that two strings under the same tension produce harmonious chords when plucked, if their lengths are in simple numerical ratios. He also discovered the theorem now named after him: in a right triangle, the sum of the squares of the lengths of the sides equals the square of the length of the diagonal. Therefore, for instance, the 3-4-5 triangle, for 3^2 + 4^2 = 5^2. Likewise the 5-12-13 triangle, and the 20-21-29 triangle, and many more.

Emboldened by this triumph of arithmetic over both music and geometry, Pythagoras preached that number rules the world. He and his followers researched the properties of numbers, so that they may rule numbers, and by those numbers, rule the world.

When wise Athena, goddess of Athens, heard about this, she was incensed. “He, a mere mortal, would rule the world by number? How dare he! Measures must be taken.”

Now, you’d expect that a wrathful wisdom-goddess bent on punishing an over-reaching geometer would send him a diagram that drives him mad. That is true; she did send him such a diagram. But you’d also expect that diagram to be an eldritch abomination of Lovecraftian complexity; and you would be wrong!

The diagram that Athena sent to Pythagoras was plain and simple: nothing but a square with unit sides and a diagonal. Then Athena taunted Pythagoras: “If you are so wise, O numerologist, then tell me; how long is this diagonal?”

Pythagoras deduced that its length was the square root of two; but when he tried to reduce that to a ratio of whole numbers, he failed! All of his followers tried, and they failed too. Then they and Pythagoras learned a terrible truth; that the square root of two is not a ratio of whole numbers. That simple diagram displays, plain as day, a length that defies Pythagoras’s teachings!

Terrified, they called such a number ‘irrational’, but it was the Pythagoreans themselves who became irrational. The cult swore each other to secrecy; but one of them threatened to tell the world, and they threw him off a ship at sea. Few nowadays show such devotion to mathematics! The murder stirred up mass passion against the cult. A mob pursued Pythagoras. He might have outrun them, but he ran up against a field of beans. He feared even to touch bean plants, so the mob caught him and killed him.

Thus died an over-reaching arithmetician. Since then wise Athena has negotiated a truce with Pythagoras’s followers. We mortals may swiftly approximate the square root of two, to any finite number of digits desired; but its infinity of digits is known all at once only upon Mount Olympus. So now we are reformed Pythagoreans. We believe that infinitely deep number rules the world, of which our knowledge is finite. 

Honor Wisdom!