The coldest equation

Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty — a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show. The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than Man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as poetry.

– Bertrand Russell

Fifty-four years ago, one of the landmark science fiction short stories was published, a story that has increasingly uncomfortable implications for everyone alive today. Tom Godwin’s The Cold Equations, with its unblinking depiction of humanity in an indifferent universe, marked a crucial step in science fiction’s coming of age as an art form as it evolved from escapist crap into a far more serious genre of literature.

Sadly, and perhaps inevitably, it is now time for humanity to take the same steps that science fiction did, and recognize the coldest equation:

Let me take a second to deconstruct this brutally simple equation and it’s inescapable implications:

First, if either our population or our impact per person rises (which they both are), and the other remains constant, then our total impact also rises. There is no flexibility here, no loophole or exception possible.

Second, if we can reduce either the average human being’s impact on the world or our population, and the other factor continues to rise, then we’re only buying ourselves time before we exceed the carrying capacity of the planet.

Just to be clear, I’m using “environmental impact” in a much broader sense than I normally do on this site. When people in the industrialized world think of “environmental impacts” at all, they usually associate that phrase with CO2 emissions or mercury pollution, smog over cities, polluted streams and lakes, or perhaps mountain top removal coal mining. I’m using “environmental impacts” to mean all those things as well as the consumption of non-renewable resources. Every day that goes by in which we pull another 86 million barrels of oil, 8 billion cubic meters of natural gas, and 8.5 million tonnes of coal from the earth and pour another 75 million tonnes of CO2 into the air we’re having a huge impact on not just the environment but also on its ability to support us as we live now.

The crucial detail in the coldest equation is one of human perception. We all make the same implicit assumption that is increasingly at odds with the world we’ve created: we assume that those elements of the environment we rely on to sustain us are effectively infinite. Ask almost anyone if there’s an infinite amount of anything on the planet, and they’ll instantly dismiss the question; they there’s no such thing an infinite resource, so it’s obviously a trick. But nearly every one of us in the developed nations lives as if the resources we consume and the sinks of the land, sea, and air we fill with our waste are, in fact, infinite, as if the price of everything we buy or sell reflects its actual worth in the long run. Sum all those countless consumption decisions and the lifestyles and cities and organizations and governments they created over centuries, each ultimately built atop that shakiest of conceptual foundations, and we see a terrifying emergent property, a planet of 6.7 billion people racing ever faster toward a Malthusian cliff. As I’ve said before on this site, we are simultaneously emptying the world of its non-renewable resources and filling its sinks with our waste.

But wait, people say, what about all that energy efficiency stuff and green technology you talk about? Won’t it help? Yes, in one particular and crucial way: It will put downward pressure on the average environmental impact per person and buy us time to figure out a way to control, and then reduce, our global population, as well as find ever more ways to reduce our impact per person. Right now, with the compound and interrelated terrors of peak oil and global warming and food and water shortages all suddenly looming at once, extra time is an exceedingly precious thing.

Which brings us to the thorniest issue, the West not wanting to give up their lifestyles, coupled with the sudden emergence of portions of China and India as a Western-style consumer class. The sheer number of people in these two countries, roughly 2.5 billion or 37% of all humanity, means that even a small portion of them buying their first car or shifting their diet to include much more meat, or their country going on a coal power plant building spree (as China is doing right now) has worldwide implications, enough to raise the global impact per person in our equation. This is only compounded by the US, consumer of 25% of the world’s oil and emitter of about the same proportion of the world’s CO2, refusing to change without concessions from China.

In thinking about this, I believe I know the answer to Nick Bostrom’s question about the Great Filter, as he detailed in his Technology Review piece, Where Are They?: Why I hope the search for extraterrestrial life finds nothing. He ponders where the other intelligent life is in the universe, and whether the Great Filter, the most difficult phase in our development, the one that kills off most intelligent races, lies in our past or our future. My guess is that we’re in it right now, that it began roughly in the time frame depicted in the opening scene of 2001: A Space Odyssey with the use of tools by protohumans, and that we’ve yet to complete the exam. The test is not, as so many have speculated, whether we can overcome our militaristic and territorial tendencies, although that’s certainly a major part of it. The test is whether we can conquer those demons and also take the next and much more difficult step, and learn how to cooperate globally to live in a sustainable fashion, even if only as an open-ended expression of enlightened self-interest.

This is an imposing hurdle. A very large portion of the people in our world have become so cynical, so enamored of one conspiracy theory or another, and so often victimized by genuine conspiracies, that they either can’t, or won’t let themselves, summon the trust and compassion needed for cooperation on the scale needed. Their experience and (sometimes selective) knowledge of history have taught them to see the world as a matter of Us vs. Them instead of Us and Them. Their fear, ignorance, and myopia effectively changes all human existence from being an infinite game, with no set ending and no definitive winner, to a finite game between us and our own inner demons, a contest we can’t possibly win.

All is not lost, by any means, if only because we’ve already displayed the kind of cooperation needed. Perhaps every environmentalist’s favorite example is The Montreal Protocol, which phased out the use of CFC’s, albeit with not enough attention to HCFC’s. But as humanity continues to develop, that undeniable, narrow success is like a young child learning to sing her first nursery rhyme, decades before we’ll know if she can become an accomplished opera singer.

Many people I speak with about energy and environmental issues dismiss it all with a wave of the hand. They’re simply too busy with jobs and the million details of caring for their family and household to be bothered looking more than a few weeks into the future. They are so focused on the hyper-local, in both spatial and temporal dimensions, so tightly held in place by the glass fist that is their here and now, that they fall prey to that easy assumption that they live in a world of virtually infinite resources and sinks, which leads directly to their not taking any meaningful action to help themselves or those they love, let alone humanity as a whole.

Yes, this all sounds incredibly depressing. And it can be, if one surrenders to the cynicism. I refuse to take that step, the spiritual equivalent of suicide, because we humans can be breathtakingly altruistic and compassionate over short enough time frames. Watch news reports of tornadoes in the US, the tropical storm in Myanmar, or the earthquake in China, just to name three painfully current examples, and you’ll see many people risk their lives for strangers. In 1972, when I was a child, my mother and I lived through the Agnes flood in Pennsylvania, and we saw many such acts first hand and benefited from a few. That experience and nearly everything else I’ve seen in my life convinces me that individually we have the right characteristics–the self-interest, the compassion, the intelligence, and the organizational skills–needed to save ourselves and each other from this colossal mess we’ve created. The question then becomes: Can we find a way, and quickly enough, to cooperate on a grand scale and focus our abilities to avoid falling prey to the coldest equation?