Collapse of the First Global Civilization

Part 1: The A3 Discoveries

In 1964, two Eagle Scouts were selected by national competition to accompany U.S. Navy explorers on an expedition to the North Pole. I was one of them. We were promised it would be a NEW ‘Journey of Discovery’ — a Lewis and Clark adventure across the Arctic Ocean. A Journey of Discovery it was. But NOT the one of progress and wonder that was promised. The natural wonders of the Arctic were breathtaking. But what the non-native humans brought there was a world of LIES, corruption, incompetence, violence and domination.

In 1969, I graduated with two degrees in Aeronautics and Astronautics from MIT — yes, a true MIT rocket scientist. For 40 years, I chased an illusive professional career. I rode the high tech wave at the cutting edge of science, engineering, nuclear weapons, fusion power, robots, computers, medicine and psychology. Like the Journey of Discovery that Darwin made on the Beagle and Einstein made into the cosmos, my career exposed me to many major discoveries. But, unlike the joys of exploring flora, fauna and the mysteries of the cosmos, the business journey, like my experience in Alaska, showed me that humans had created a civilization of lies, corruption and incompetence. I looked for wisdom. I found mostly deceit and superstition. A frightening question kept glaring at me: “how could society even function with so much misinformation?” It put me on a life long quest. I dug into every facet of human knowledge. I took a LOT of notes!

I came to realize that the real frontier for society’s passage into a just and beautiful world wasn’t in some far off frozen place. It is right here, surrounding us — like a choking fog. Searching to understand this unknown evil took me to the fundamentals of knowledge. 10 years ago, I brought all my notes together. As with many successes in scientific research, I was extremely lucky. The synergy of the right fundamental information, as it did for Darwin, led me to many major, profound scientific and philosophical breakthroughs. I call these the A3 Discoveries. Finally, logical answers can be provided for some of the greatest unanswered questions of the ages. Explanations can be provided for the great riddles of our time.

The title of this series is Collapse of the First Global Civilization. Pretty scary statement. Unfortunately, this is not an exaggeration just to get your attention. Human civilization, as we know it, is about to undergo a serious crash that will kill over half the world’s population and HURT almost everyone on the planet. Why will the collapse happen? Simple. The population of the planet is too large. We are using up natural resources faster than the planet’s natural processes can replace them. We are running out of the vital natural resources human civilization needs to survive at our current level of consumption. AND, the collapse is not hundreds of years away. It has already started and will explode over the next few decades.

“Don’t we still have time to react?” “React” can be a very misleading word. If we use it to mean just do something, sure we can. But if we use it to mean escape tragedy, unfortunately, the answer is not “yes” as you are frequently told. It has to have elements of both yes and NO!

Let me address one of the great LIES you see and hear every day in the news. Every day there is a new story about “climate change”, the economy getting worse, and wars expanding. People ask, “is it too late to turn this around?” Well intentioned environmental groups like 350.org and the Climate Reality Project are quick to answer, “NO. It’s not too late! IF we act FAST.” This is a lie! We have been hearing these words since the 1950s. This is “crying wolf”. They are saying it because they want to attract attention to their specific effort. Sure, what they are doing is important. It is important that we take serious action now. Many causes are important and valuable. But not the way they are leading us to believe. They each want to solve their own specific issue. They believe, if they do that, the collapse will be averted. Nothing can be further from the truth. Why? Because they are not providing a solution for the whole SYSTEM. Without that, each of their efforts will be dwarfed by the bigger collapse.

Answering the question, “is it too late”, takes two answers: Answer 1 — I’m sorry, but it is already too late to stop the collapse; and answer 2 — Yes, there are many things we still need to do. They are very important. Let me discuss these briefly here.

Answer 1 — it is already too late to stop the collapse.

The activists don’t want to tell you the truth about this. First, they think it would scare you away from trying— that you’d get discouraged. But more important, they really don’t understand the details themselves. The generalization they use is, “we need to act right away to avoid the worst”. They never tell us what the worst will be.

My reason for saying it’s already too late is based on the fact that the seeds for a collapse were put in place in the mid 1940s when the population of the planet went above 2 Billion. Here’s a graph of world population taken from Wikipedia.

The 2 B value was chosen because it was the approximate carrying capacity of the earth in 1945 with the technology and industry of that time. That is, in a 1945 world, the earth could still sustainably replenish its natural resources at a rate sufficient to support up to about 2 B people. BUT it was also a post WWII world. The primary focus of world governments was stopping future wars. The focus was setting up the UN to address global political problems and creating stability in a world recovering from the mass devastation and hostility created by the war. Science had not advanced sufficiently to understand the impending global resource crisis. Nothing was done to slow population growth.

From the late 40s through 1953, international scientific cooperation was minimal. This ended with the death of Joseph Stalin. Scientific cooperation expanded rapidly after that reaching a milestone in cooperation with 67 countries participating in the International Geophysical year that ended in December, 1958. Notably, both the U.S. and Russia launched their first space satellites that year. The primary goal of the effort was to establish data sharing systems among the countries. This exploded research efforts on the state of the earth and humanity. By the mid 60s, it was already clear humans had already created serious problems. These were not so much climate problems as they were natural resource problems. By 1968, a group of industrialist who called themselves the Club of Rome, were concerned that the industrialization of the globe could cause severe problems for humanity in the not so distant future. They commissioned a groundbreaking study of global society. The predicted results were devastating for humanity. They published what they found. The world refused to listen, or implement other studies to confirm or deny the results. I’ll discuss this more in the next post.

Without scientific reasons to slow population, “end of the war” politics actually ushered in a baby boom. The reason human civilization was able to exceed the 2 B sustainable level is because the earth still had easily accessible natural resource reserves. Over hundreds of millions of years, nature had essentially created a stockroom of supplies for us. So, if nations understood the problem and took action to slow population growth after 1968, and growth stopped in 1984 at 5 B, and then came down again to 2 billion people around 2024, humanity could have made it without a disaster. That didn’t happen. In fact, the population problem was completely ignored. As of 1984, the population was still growing fast, and now exceeds 7 B! This is called “overshoot” which means it far exceeded the earth’s carrying capacity. Overshoots are always followed by collapses. So, the collapse is coming. Notice the green projection on the graph. Even the U.N. which provided the data for the graph, has acknowledged that a collapse is possible.

Answer 2 — YES, there are things we can still do. But these can only address minimizing the human disaster and determining whether the survivors can create a world of peace and harmony for their future. This is clearly worth doing even if it only allows 1 billion people to make it. If we don’t, only a small number of humans will survive, and they probably will emerge into a new dark ages. Why? Because there won’t be enough natural resources to do much else for a very long time. This could mean thousands of years, not hundreds of years. The earth can’t recover any faster than that.

SO! We ought to get started right? THAT, of course, is the BIG CHALLENGE. For the last 40 years, human society, including all the governments of the world, all the university professors, all the leaders in the environmental movement and all the media celebrities were not able to prevent this collapse to begin with. What changes are they going to make to unite the people of the world to work together? What changes are they going to make to even figure out what the right path is to the peaceful, harmonious and sustainable new world? I’m not saying they don’t want to find a solution. I believe they really do. They just don’t understand the problems.

That’s where the A3 discoveries come in.

Back to the Cradle of Democracy

Back to the Fundamentals of Society

In the remainder of this series, I’ll dig into explanations that have never been discussed before. And no, I won’t leave you hanging waiting for the next post to know what they are.

Modern society is collapsing all around us. We see the collapse unfolding every day. The explanations are related to MAJOR FLAWS in most of the basic institutions modern society rests on: government structures, religions, educational institutions, business, the media, our fundamental concepts of freedom etc.. We hear lots of people telling us about individual flaws all the time. But we never hear the real explanations about why the flaws are there to begin with. That’s because almost no one knows the reasons. That’s why I had to go back to the basics of knowledge. It’s almost like the old Zen saying, “Those who tell, don’t know; and those who know don’t tell.” In this case, the problem is, the few who do know are trying to tell us. But the pervasive control of the media by industry, academia and politics prevents those who do know from having a voice. The people in power don’t want the reasons discussed. It would turn the world they control upside down. The wealthy would no longer hold power. So, they fight both truth and knowledge. I’m not saying this is a conspiracy. It’s not. It happens just by each power holder defending their own position. But they won’t be able to hold out any longer when 7 billion people start starving.

So, what are the A3 Discoveries? Here are brief summaries of the ones I will discuss in more detail in following posts:

1. HUMAN POPULATION, which has been made a “taboo” subject in western society, is the most critical factor in the coming collapse. 7 B people are already too many for the available natural resources. Notice, the Chinese have not shied away from addressing this.

2. We have been lied to by governments, education and the media about FREEDOM. With high populations, people are brought into frequent interaction. It is impossible for people with very different beliefs, who find themselves in close living conditions, to have freedom to practice those beliefs. No system of government has made this clear to its people or created a system that provides a workable solution.

3. TECHNOLOGY has introduced extreme COMPLEXITY into society and everyday life.

4. HUMAN BRAINS, which have not evolved much since the Stone Age, are NOT CAPABLE of understanding high complexity well enough to keep it from harming them.

5. SYSTEM methods exist that can deal with the complexity of life.

6. HUMAN PSYCHOLOGY prevents individuals from seeing the potential harm of complexity. Their psychological need to feel secure misleads them into believing that they are in control of the physical gadgets, legal situations and financial products they can so easily purchase. When they are harmed, their psychological need for security requires that others must be blamed for their failures.

7. Humans can not escape numerous strong SELF PRESERVATION INSTINCTS that have been hard-wired into the human brain over millions of years of evolution. One of these instincts is the drive to win through deceit.

8. The LAWS of our society are TOO NAIVE to create processes that automatically eliminate the value of deceit, and thereby stop it.

9. FLAWED ELECTION PROCESSES preferentially select leaders to make our laws who’s minds are incapable of understanding the complexity needed to produce the laws.

10. DEMOCRACY, as it is now implemented around the world, is incompatible with freedom. None of the alternate forms of democracy, in use or proposed, solve this. A new form can be created that is compatible with freedom, and can eliminate the breakdown of governments we are now seeing.

11. The fundamental STRUCTURE OF BUSINESS is based on a bartering, authoritarian, bacterial model. But, most people can’t even envision another approach. Other approaches can be created, which incorporate neither socialist nor capitalist flaws. This can eliminate the tragedies of modern business without excess regulation.

12. Humans initially LEARN LANGUAGE in a non-logic-based way that provides a survival advantage. It leads directly to conflict. This can’t be changed because it is part of the human brain structure. But when this is understood, education can counter the conflict behaviors it generates.

The combination of these discoveries and a few more can resolve all the issues that have created the coming collapse. If human society is to emerge into a better place after the collapse, implementing many of these discoveries will be essential. In this series, I will explore each of these issues in more detail and how they interact as a system. Hang on for the ride. Nothing I will present has been discussed before. I hope it gives you new ways of thinking about the world we live in today.

Be sure to read Part 2 of this series. Additional material can be found at A3Society.org

Thanks to FreeDigitalPhotos.net for the first two images.

Index To Written Parts Of The Series

This series addresses the current environmental crisis in light of major new discoveries about human culture: the A3 Discoveries. You can find the other parts which have been written as follows:

Part 1 , The A3 Discoveries, introduced the two major reasons the First Global Civilization has started into collapse: over population vs. limited resources, and complexity vs. limited human brain ability. The A3 discoveries were also introduced. They will be used throughout the series to explain in more detail why these two problems are causing the collapse and how society can best get through it. This part also explained how the world, until just after WWII, still lacked an adequate scientific understanding to see how human civilization was approaching a limit to sustain human life.

Part 2 , Population and Resource Limits, discussed how the scientific studies finally started coming together in the late ’50s to expose the impending problem. The studies quantified how our current world population is using resources faster than the earth can replenish them. The studies showed that the “storeroom” of critical supplies nature created before humans arrived is running out. Humans, however, were not able to accept the new scientific observations.

Part 2 then briefly explains why the new science alone was not sufficient to successfully change human behavior. Even though people throughout the world see evidence right in from of them, because of limitation of human thinking, most humans aren’t able to understand the science or VISUALIZE the implications. There are some people who did understand it and tried to explain to the world the impending ecological crises we face.

In 1962, Rachael Carson write the book Silent Spring about the world wide death of birds due to DDT. Large public protests occurred. It still took over 10 years of protests, the establishment of the Environmental Defense Fund, and many expensive lawsuits for the US to respond with a national ban on DDT. A similar process occurred after the publication of Farman’s 1985 report on the Ozone Hole. But, the phase-out of Freon only started in ’94 with a “directive” from the UN, with further enforcement by the EU in ’97. However, this problem has still not been put to bed! Only as recently as 2007, at the Montreal climate summit, did most of the countries in the world agree to stop fluorocarbon use. But even then, the complete ban date was kicked down the road to 2020!

For the last 40 years, world governments, university professors, leaders in the environmental movement and many media celebrities have talked about the problem. But they have made very little progress. Society, however, has made major breakthroughs before, like putting a man on the moon. So, why have these 40 years of talk been so unsuccessful?

Part 3 , Complexity and Stone Age Brains, explained the concept of the “Stone Age brain” and how the limits of current human brains are not capable of dealing with the complexity of modern technology or the complex social structures we have set up. Human brains are fine tuned for quick responses to dangers immediately at hand. If your house catches fire, and you see the flames, your brain will instantly think of many ways to get out. When the problem is very complex, and the details can’t be directly observed, human brains don’t do so well.

Part 4 , The A3 Brain, Human Consciousness and the Crisis of Psychology, went beyond the simple inability of human brains to understand complexity and discussed deep psychological barriers Stone Age brains have that block people from taking action.

Part 5 , Language, Government Gridlock and the Breakdown of Communication, dug into a never before understood problem of human language that has gridlocked governments around the world and prevented humans, the media, academia and public spokes people from being able to understand each other.

Part 6, The Failure of Democracy, digs into the major flaws pervading one of modern society’s most fundamental and cherished institutions: DEMOCRACY! These include: the conflict of government and freedom, majority rule, Lynch Mob Democracy and human rights, the lies of governments, and Direct Democracy.

Additional parts will be added to this list as they are written. Check back here for updates.