A Non Injury Producing Civilization

By Jack Alpert www.skil.org

[I spent part of Xmas day making a readable transcript for what posterity may consider the most import video on YouTube. It is preceded by Jack Alpert’s intro to a potentially viable plan to unwind our mess of fine messes we’ve managed to bury ourselves in high and deep, a predicament that could have human extinction as outcome (in addition to the Anthropocene mass extinction event we are presiding over). Merry Xmas humans. If you value posterity, read/view Jack’s offerings, including links. Also see, if you haven’t, Jack’s shorter video, Civilization’s Running Out of Gas Story.]

For this and other videos in the order Jack would have them viewed, click for a list.

Any path forward includes rapid contraction of the human footprint down to a level that fits into the niche nature provides (including the contraction of fossil fuel support). Any plan to direct this decent seems difficult to implement. Social contracts that facilitate transition to and maintenance of the proposed non injury producing civilization impose such extreme constraints on normal behavior they may well be assumed unimplementable, however, if you wish to see some potentially viable social contracts, view the second half of the video that follows.

On St Mathew’s Island in the Bering Sea, the US Coast Guard brought 29 reindeer to graze on the island’s moss, to provide an emergency food source for men stationed there. Several years latter the men left leaving the reindeer. The herd, grew too large for their natural moss food supply, ate it to destruction, and perished. Humans on earth are about to share that reindeer experience. We are consuming our supporting resources to exhaustion.

We are too big for our ecological niche on earth. We are consuming our renewing resources like clean water and soil to destruction. We are consuming fossil and uranium energy to exhaustion.( more)( more). The solar and wind renewable energy sources won’t be able to replace them ( more)( more). And we are dispersing to the point of lost utility our non renewing supports like phosphorous, and rare earths.

Baring some technological breakthrough, the earth, at the end of this century will support a lot less people. Our population, according to UN projections might rise to 9 or 10 billion persons by 2050 ( more), after which, according to my calculations, might descend to 600 million who live like 17th century serfs( more). This decline, without extreme restrictions on births, will result from starvation or conflict deaths ( more).

Few want to believe my scenario. Most want to believe technology will make “tomorrow better than today.” When previous civilizations overshot regional and technological limitations and collapsed, they rebuilt themselves better than before. People believe they and their children will slip through this century’s bottleneck and be the survivors in the next even better civilization.

My computations suggest only radical changes in human behavior resulting from a change in social organization can reduce overshoot to zero, avoid the tragedy, and implement an ever improving civilization. However, these changes appear too difficult to implement. Our genes are against them. Parts of our evolved brain are against them. Our culture is against them. Our institutions are against them. Most people see my proposed changes as expensive extravagances that obtain nothing of value — specifically they see them avoiding no meaningful liabilities.

Little is going to change unless:
a) autocratic action or
b) a ground swell of new learning among billions of individuals,
implements a civilization that modulates what is considered normal, and approved, personal behavior.
For example, we need collective human behavior which:
a) lowers the human footprint below earthly supports. And,
b) maintains these conditions thereafter.

If this change is to depend on collective will, rather than autocratic rule, billions of individuals have to know/believe:
injuries exist on our civilization’s path that are worth avoiding See Part 1 of 6
an alternate design of civilization exists that does not create these extreme injuries See Part 2 of 6
forces exist that produce and maintain this design See Part 3 of 6
a social contract exists that creates these forces See Part 4 of 6
A global constituency can implement this social contract See Part 5 of 6)
There is a process for creating the individuals that fill this constituency. See Part 6 of 6)

Follow the hyper-linked parts 1–6 above to see the remaining portions of the paper.

This is the end of the introduction of the paper. See original paper at link below.

Originally published at https://skil.org.

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Jack’s work 600 word summary

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A Non Injury Producing Civilization

CACOR (CAnadian Club Of Rome) Oct. 5, 2022

Transcript:

0:10
This civilization is on course, to starve to death almost everyone living during this century. Let me explain. Civilization is a collection of people. Births add to this collection, old age death subtract from it, food deliveries, feed it. If food deliveries are too small people starve to death.

0:35
Let me present to food delivery systems. The first delivers food without using fossil fuels. It was practiced in fertile river valleys, using people with hose and draught animals. All of Earth’s valleys together, fed at most 600 million people.

0:58
The second delivers food using fossil fuels. Today it produces enough food to feed 8 billion people. If during this century, fossil fuel deliveries declined to near zero. And if other energy delivery systems wins, solar nucular and fusion cannot replace them. Food production could decline back to that produced by the valleys, which fed only 600 million people.

1:31
Of the 8 billion living today, some die of old age, most could die of starvation. Those born after today could also starve to death. This century, loss of fossil energy could result in eight to 10 billion starvation deaths.

1:52
While these deaths could result just from loss of fossil deliveries, our civilization could also create deaths from anarchy, civil wars, migration, resource wars, nucular winter, climate disruption, biodiversity loss, pollution, and water scarcity. Maybe we are under estimating our predicament. And maybe we are overestimating our abilities to muddle through.

2:23
Maybe we should be designing a new civilization where people do not die tragic deaths.

What would be that civilizations normal conditions? What would be that civilizations operating rules? These questions have been contemplated for decades. William Catan, and David Pimentel, now deceased, were part of the original team. There are numerous others that weighed contributions.

2:52
This video is not about the extensive information and computations created by the team. Some of these calculations were only back of the envelope. Some became outdated by 20 years of advancing technology, some have become outdated by environmental disruptions. This video is just my narrative of the team’s process. It will help you visualize this non injury producing civilization.

3:23
The video has two parts. Part one describes the civilizations mass and energy flows, and part two describes the human behavior that directs these flows. The mass and energy flows are similar to the description NASA engineers may have created when they designed the space station. Their model contain many variables which describe the stations infrastructure, production activities, population and supplies.

3:53
Their gray arrows describe the flows of astronaut labor to each activity. The red arrows describe the flows of energy to each activity, and the blue arrows describe the flows of mass from supplies to each member of the population to each productive activity. And each part of the infrastructure the blue arrows are bi directional to noting that mass flows both in and out of each variable.

4:23
For example, water is delivered to the astronauts from supplies and their waste pass through a recycling activity, and the water is returned back to supplies. The engineers ran this simulation until it showed living on the space station would not injure the astronauts.

4:43
When our team created such a simulation to describe Spaceship Earth. Infrastructure included farms housing markets, hospitals, transport schools, communication conduits, civic facilities, the theatres research and development labs, factories recycling military forts, wells, mines, refineries and power plants. The last two are our civilization sources of energy.

5:15
Activities included construction, maintenance, and operation of this infrastructure, plus activities that produce food goods, civic services, education, health care, entertainment, conveyance, communication, r&d, extraction, recycling and defense.

5:37
Population was divided into four classes, people in development, people at leisure, people working, and people in retirement. The supplies included extractions from the Earth’s crust, minerals, metals, oil, gas, and coal and uranium.

5:57
Revenue from the Earth’s natural capital systems, for example, soil, air, water, flora and fauna and stockpiles of materials, which have already been mined and refined, but are not embedded in either infrastructure, or produced inventory. When we ran our simulation starting with today’s data and operations, it showed that human injury was produced because of declining energy deliveries, climate change, diminishing our quality, species extinction, soil damage, following water tables, increasing inequity and rising conflict.

6:35
Our team began manipulating the simulation to discover the energy and mass flows that do not create injury. Our search revealed a city state on Earth, circa 2100, where a population could live without producing injury, as long as it was operating in isolation from competitors. And the city had no access to fossil fuels, uranium fuels, fusion processes, or solar and wind machines.

7:12
Instead, the only concentrated power source is hydroelectric dams, like those already in place. We were aware that existing dams over the course of the next 300 years with silt in diminish their energy deliveries and people would begin experiencing injury. However, 300 years that advancing technology might bring fusion or some other energy source online, and injuries from decreasing hydro energy might be avoided.

7:42
We assume these initial conditions, all of this infrastructure is in place. All of this production and recycling processes are working. All of these people have jobs, food, education and health care. All of these stockpiles have reserves to allocate there are no mines or wells contributing to the stockpiles, nature services are being utilized that below the renewing rates, and the only source of dense energy is from hydro electric dams.

8:12
Let me show how we imagined the civilization size. That is how many people with what services with support from what collection of dams. To estimate the population, we needed to know how much energy it takes to support one person how much it takes to support him and his goods, build and maintain his home deliver prepares food, making clean his clothes, create his toys, power his services, maintain his military and government, create maintain his infrastructure, provide his entertainment and recreation and deliver 12 to 20 years of full time education.

8:54
To estimate this energy per capita, we took all the energy use for a year in the United States from all sources to produce all services, then divided it by the US population 306 million people. After some conversions, the calculations suggested that 96,000 kilowatt hours of energy was expected to support each person.

9:20
Then we calculated how much energy could be delivered by a collection of existing connected hydroelectric dams. We then divided it by 96,000 kilowatt hours, and the calculation suggested a population of 6 million people. Because our hydro powered civilization converted primary energy into completed tests differently than the fossil fuel powered USA. We had to make some adjustments in the population estimate.

9:52
For example, fossil fuels 83% of energy used by Americans when burned to make electricity and Run transportation converts only 1/3 of its energy to work, the black. Two thirds of its energy converts to waste heat, the gray. Conversely, the energy and water behind a dam converts two thirds of its energy to work. Only 1/3 is wasted. So kilowatt hour coming out of a dam generator took half the input energy than a kilowatt hour coming from a coal fired power plant. Using hydropower instead of fossil fuels to produce current in a transmission line almost doubled the estimate of our imagined civilizations supportable population.

10:42
Substituting subway transport for roads, bridges, cars, and parking garages increased our population estimate. Since we imagined an isolated and dense community there was no need for airports and airplanes. This increased our population estimate. Not including mining, refining and military increased our population estimate.

11:06
Strategically locating our civilizations work farms manufacturing and services to minimize transport distances increased our estimate. High rise buildings use more energy in elevators. However, if the elevator exit people at schools offish shopping, or subway, total energy for these living situations might be lower than suburban living. This increased our estimate of population.

11:37
Choosing a location with mild weather, lowered heating and cooling needs this increased our estimate. Advances in technology for example, changing lighting from incandescent lights to LEDs increased our estimate. Choosing dams that provide lease grid losses, easy access to maintenance trains, low distance the generator and turbine repair service increased our population estimate.

12:07
Some dams in the United States were not worth including in our power grid. For example, the Tennessee River dams in the long run required more energy to support them than they delivered. Something we did not consider 15 years ago was that changes in the weather would reduce water flowing into dam resesvoirs. Had we considered it, it would have decreased our population estimate.

12:31
When making steel or concrete using electric grid energy rather than oil or gas energy, takes more energy and lowered our estimate of supportable population. energy required for extensive recycling reduced our population estimate.

12:48
There were many changes in the processes that supported the city’s population. Some took more energy some less and some the same. Each made the supportable population estimate go up or down. While our calculations were crude. When we identified the best dams in the Pacific Northwest, the Colorado River and Quebec hydro their combined energy was enough to support a 10 million person civilization at modern lifestyles, if we excluded cars and planes.

13:24
Ten million was the minimum size of an isolated self contained civilization that could create modern healthcare, European housing high tech jobs, postgraduate edge, urban living Symphony tickets, and the ability to launch kids.

13:41
If the population was smaller, many of these services could not be provided. We discovered that there were only three places on earth that had enough hydro electric production, connectable in a grid, to support 10 or more million people, the Pacific Northwest in North America, China and South America.

14:05
These three sites had such small ecological footprints that it left 90% of the Earth’s land area void of human inhabitants, the demands on the environment would be well below ecological production. Eco sustainability resulted from limited energy deliveries.

14:26
My narrative so far discussed only the energy and mass components of the team’s imagine non injury producing civilization. The other components include non entry producing behaviors of 10 million people and the processes that ensure these behaviors are taken.

14:44
Finding the process that constrain normal behavior to facilitate a non injury producing civilization was not a simple task. It is not the same task as finding these constraints for our present civil zation Our experience was not going to help us.

15:04
First, the injury events unfolding in our imagined civilization have never previously happened. We had to discover them through simulation. Second, the behavior constraints that would avoid these injuries had never been imagined, let alone tried. Third, to know if any behavior constrained candidates would be effective in preventing injury, we had to simulate 10 million sets of these behavior, the new energy mass civilization.

15:36
We discovered our constrained candidates by tracing the maps, energy flows, mass flows, conflict creation processes, constituent preferences for activities, and civil management. The short narrative in this video cannot provide all of the thinking and discovery that happened over the last decades. However, I can describe some behavior constraints, which have left out of civilizations designed would produce gross injury.

16:04
I will focus on behavior constraints that prevent community created injury across generations. And I will not discuss, though they are important, constraints that prevent injuries to individuals or small groups. Let me describe some behavioral constraint candidates we discovered when we traced energy flows.

16:29
We found our annual energy budget was fixed, human behavior could not increase it. Behaviors that would open new coal mines or drill new oil wells were constrained. Instead, the sun evaporated ocean water, lifts it into the air moves it inland over the mountains, rains it down, and streams guided into reservoirs behind dams. Because dam energy was not adequate to both support civilization and build more dams, dam building behaviors were also constrained.

17:09
Second, we discovered that energy potential of water behind the dam had a finite life. But water can produce work if it passes through a turbine. However, if it spills over the top of the dam, it produces no work. We had to curtail behaviors like saving water for next year, that would cause water to spill over the top of the dam.

17:34
Our plan was to have these turbines produce 96,000 kilowatt hours 10 million times. If we did not put in some new behavior constraints, some energy would be wasted in conflict, some would be wasted in inefficient structures like freeways and suburbs. Some would be wasted in repairing things we needlessly broke, for example, pollution cleanup,

17:59
I will come back to describing the constraints we imagined to prevent wasted energy. Let me focus on the behavior constraints of turbine production that was not wasted. Part was allocated to providing civil services to 10 million people. Each person received basic housing, heat, light, water, garbage, and so on, and full health care.

18:29
Transport, free subways — there were no roads, cars or planes; 25 years of education, and public advancement of the arts and sciences. The remaining not wasted kilowatt hours were divided equally among 10 million people.

18:48
The energy was given like cash in the form of kilowatt hour tokens. Each token was a demand on energy stored in water behind a dam, which meant it was dated for exploration. The implied behavior constraint was use it, accomplish something with a turbine output, or lose it water flowing over the top of the dam.

19:19
These energy tokens could be exchanged for food, goods, services, or applied to personal projects. This flow of tokens forms the dominant constraint on behavior in this civilization because it directs actual activities.

19:36
Food purchases directed agricultural activities that determined if cherries or apricots were grown by farms. Goods purchases directed manufacturing of toasters or sweaters, and service purchases determine the production of symphonies or rock concerts. Personal expenditures drove the invention of new product or the advancement of the arts and the sciences.

20:06
Kilowatt hour tokens form an additional constraint on behavior. Goods and services are denominated in energy units produced by turbines. Token flow, turbine output, caps energy consuming activities. Energy flow, contributed more behavioral constraints. However, they will not be presented in this narrative. Next, we will use mass flows to imagine additional behavioral constraint candidates.

20:42
In our imagined civilization, masses source from stockpiles and revenue from natural capital, no mass is extracted from the Earth’s crust. Mass flows through Blue channels to civilizations, population, activities and infrastructure. And since there are no blue channels running off of or onto the map, human behavior must cause everything to be recycled back to its original source, and no land outside of the boundary can be annexed, and no mines or wells can be drilled.

21:22
An inspection reveals civilization’s mass has only four classes: unused land, stockpile materials, minerals or land embedded in either an individual’s projects or civic projects. We imagined a behavioral constraint that gave control over the transfer of empty land or stockpile material into the possession of an individual or a civic project to a committee representing the next 100 generations.

22:00
The committee in determining if a transfer can take place, visualized if the material can be recycled to its initial condition, or if the land can return in its original condition. For example, one fossil fuels would never be transferred, they cannot be returned in their original state.

22:23
Two, the best use of a mass asset is determined by its benefit to the next 100 generations. And three, high bid for lease of returnable mass determines which project gets possession of a unit of mass.

22:44
Four, when leases expire, there’s no auto renewal, the asset is assigned to the highest bidder for the next period, and five, the 100 year committee also sets and collects prepaid fees to ensure materials get recycled, or land gets restored at the end of the lease, something like a damage deposit or a cleaning deposit and an apartment lease.

23:12
That way, if the material or land is abandoned by the Lisi, it becomes a civic responsibility to return it to its initial condition. If you have not noticed, giving control of mass flows to the 100 generations committee converted all 10 million people living in this civilization to being lesees, the only private property owners in this imagined civilization are the next 100 generations.

23:50
Thus far, we have used energy flows and mass flows to discover additional behavior constrained candidates that limit injury by a civilization. Next, we traced conflict creating processes to identify them.

24:09
The first behavior constraint candidates we discovered were already built into the spatial layout of three city states. We named it isolation. Because the location of cities was far apart and there was no transportation connecting them. Also since each city state was not allowed to acquire resources outside of its own designated boundaries, resources supporting one did not overlap resources supporting the other there could be no conflicts over resources.

24:42
The second set of behavioral constraint candidates are discovered by tracing hierarchical processes that create conflict. One behavioral constraint limiting increases in hierarchy was already in place, minimum basic income providing an annual delivery of kilowatt hour tokens to each individual that could not be reduced in number or an energy equivalent limits impoverishments that could increase hierarchy.

25:14
Even when basic income people traded their tokens for labor services or goods from other people, it did not increase hierarchy. Each party felt parity. However, trading personal labor for wages to complete civil jobs does give the labor seller additional tokens or energy slaves.

25:41
To limit these increases, the team imagined a constraint on the maximum wage paid for a civil job. For example, the highest paid wage for a civil job could not be more than x times minimum basic income. Two additional constraint behaviors, limit increases in hierarchy: fair hiring practices and distributing civil jobs and allowing a labor market to determine the wage paid for each civil job.

26:12
The constraints included fixed term contracts open competition and each jobs contract renewal and market determined wage subjected to wage gap. We were surprised when the labor market paid the garbage collector who does not want to do his job a higher wage than a research scientist who loves her job and would come to work without pay.

26:37
We learned from our simulations that high levels of minimum basic income changed how people valued their time and chose their activities. With caps on maximum civil pay, and the civil sector being the biggest distributor of kilowatt hour tokens, a large middle class is maintained, which in conjunction with high minimum basic income flattened increases in hierarchy.

27:06
Genetic behavior, which encourages superiority and dominance normally increases hierarchy. However, when it increases invention, and efficiency in production processes, it lifts all boats. However, with the sale of goods and services, manufacturers and resellers can accumulate dated kilowatt hour tokens which have to be spent or lost.

27:32
These disenfranchisement do increase hierarchy, the team searched for behavioral constraints that limited the disenfranchisement while keeping the benefits of advances in invention and efficiency. We found these behavioral constraints by tracing the token flows, which facilitate leasing of mass consumption of energy, paying of wages and amassing of profits.

28:02
There were already several token flow constraints built into the structure of our proposed civilization. Rain limited, the total annual flow. Expiration of kilowatt hour tokens prevented token saving, and no private ownership of bass prevents wealth accumulation. Further, the value of math is determined by leases created by the 100 generation managers, the value of a token is equal to a fixed amount of energy.

28:36
We discovered that the acquisition of a single individual’s wages and profit in tokens is not completely constrained by these relationships. Also, a person’s annual flow of tokens from comerous produces a purchasing power far greater than that of an individual with minimum basic income plus civil wage tokens.

29:01
In making their purchases, they create more stuff and be market distortions which cause disenfranchisement and investment advantage. More stuff envy increases hierarchy but not the kind that creates conflict that waste energy. Investment advantage is often hidden in inventory and contractual barter. So these by themselves do not create a dangerous hierarchy.

29:32
However, purchasing power that increases the market price of an item, enough to disenfranchise a buyer from his normal purchases may be the most dangerous hierarchy producing process. The team wanted people to get rich so they could provide civilization with invention and efficiency without letting them create high levels of disenfranchisement.

29:57
What kinds of constraints do this? We look for behaviors that would not inhibit a person’s motivation to create these productive processes or damage existing production processes. The constraints we discovered, we called intergenerational wealth dilution. We imagined two delusions both have to do with dilution not diminishment of the processes value stream at the end of the process creators life.

30:36
The first was limitation of the disbursement size. Remember that the rich person owns no mass, he or she leases it from the 100 generation. If he or she has a production facility mass, it is also leased, so the inheritors are taking on the responsibility to pay these leases.

30:56
The value to the inheritor of the inheritance is the expected net token flow after paying these leases. The proposed constraint was that this inherited token flow is limited in size to a simple multiple of 96,000 kilowatt hours.

31:16
A very wealthy person like Bill Gates must give his entitlement in his Microsoft produce token flow away in small pieces. This means to a very large number of people who each receives some multiple of 96,000 kilowatt hours, instead of creating one heir with a token flow 200,000 times bigger than the biggest civil servant. There are now 50,000 people with incomes maybe four times the highest paid civil servant. This intergenerational dilution caps, for the most part, the token flow hierarchy of a civilization. There are a lot of richest people.

32:05
The second behavioral constraint we imagined is that intellectual property not mass property at death moves into the public domain or comments. The people who are beneficiaries of Bill Gates can still sell the Microsoft product or support of the product at market value, but they can no longer have civil law to protect themselves from competition or the products from duplication, patent or intellectual property rights expire at the death of the creator. We discovered more constraints on behavior created by commercial processes. However, in this narrative, I present just these two.

32:57
So far, we have derived constraint behavior candidates from energy flow, mass, movement, and conflict processes. Next, we will consider behavior because straight candidates derive from constituent activities.

33:17
There are many places to search for candidates. Let me present three: habitat considerations, personal responsibilities, and motivations for action. Inspecting habitat, lead us to constraint behaviors related to mass conservation. Since everything must be recycled, there is no throwing trash over the fence. Since humans are mass and mass belongs to the next 100 generations, individuals cannot live and die outside the boundaries of the city state.

33:55
Since all possessions are leased, not owned, they cannot be permanently removed from the city state either. Further investigations revealed the importance of habitat density maintenance. If our civilization spread out into the suburbs, it would dilute health care, education, transportation and other services. So we imagined constraints that prevent this suburbanization.

34:23
Next we derive constraints from personal responsibilities with mass ownership assigned to the next 100 generations. With the current mass holders being only a lesee, they required extra constraints on the lesees behavior came into focus. limited liability corporations, as they are defined today would never qualify for a lease.

34:49
If a group of individuals pulls their personal least mass to make goods to sell. Each Individual is an independent mass provider. To the productive process, and each personally prepaid recycling fees and must pay annual leases.

35:08
If the group’s activities corrupts the individual’s leased mass, the individual personally faces cancellation of the remainder of his lease, the forced Return of the remaining lease mass, and confiscation of his or her prepayment to the recycling trust.

35:28
The personal responsibility constraints on behavior discovered because they were related to mass also apply to intellectual property. Civil protections could only be assigned to individuals, not to groups or to corporations.

35:45
We have looked for behavior constraints using habitat considerations and personal responsibilities. Next, we will investigate behavior constraints based on the individual’s motivation for action. People’s motivation for choosing activities in our imagined civilization is partly the same as what we have today, kilowatt hour tokens accrue from wages and sales of production.

36:15
However, this motivation is abridged when minimum basic income provides most services, through civil actions, and a stipend for market participation. This raises the question is a civilization with a large minimum basic income fair?

36:36
To make the determination, the team did a little thought experiment to put minimum basic income into a fairness perspective. Each of the teams members asked him or herself what portion of the services he or she consumed, results from his or her direct work, and what portion results from work done by his or her invisible 125 energy slaves.

37:05
We accomplish this by asking what services would go away if we lost our energy slaves? Car heat, light, grocery store, health care, education, almost everything, we realized most of our goods and services were created and delivered by our invisible energy slaves.

37:26
If in our imagined civilization, the water behind the dam was the invisible energy slaves, and they were given equally to each individual, where is the unfairness? Thus, since more than basic needs are covered without shame, and there is no requirement to work for additional income, people can spend their time creating good deeds, and art and science, which reap only non energy personal rewards.

37:58
Again, I apologize for not being able to present everything that the team considered. We are nearing the end of my narrative about our search for behavioral constraints that create a non injury producing civilization.

38:13
The last search area focused on constraining the behavior of civic managers. There were two civil managements in our imagined civilization, the dam’s energy distributors, and the mass conservers. Some constraints for the energy managers were already built into the new mass energy structure, some additional constraints are still needed to manage their human nature.

38:41
I describe the constraints provided by structure first, the only levers energy managers can pull were changes in allocation of kilowatt hours for an established list of civic services. The managers could maintain, increase, or decrease energy flow to each of the civic services. The dam energy distributors have three responsibilities.

39:10
The first is shifting energy among alternatives civil services, for example, changing golf courses into soccer fields or vice versa, or more difficult choices like changing allocations of energy from hip replacements to kidney transplants.

39:27
The second kind of decision shifted damn energy allegations between personal stipends and civic services, for example, like changing the number of years of free education per person from 25, downward to 24, or upward to 26, with a commensurate change in stipend tokens.

39:49
A third area of behavior constraints that inhibited injury production was giving energy distributors control over population size Because dam energy was fixed, and each person was allotted 96,000 kilowatt hours, and a lot been for a newborn was available only if someone died. Therefore, we imagine giving civil management the task of making births equal to deaths. This meant controlling the number of births.

40:20
Well, none of us wanted to tell a woman she could not have a child, upon inspection, we realize that we did not have the expected problem of too many births, we had the opposite problem too few. In our small civilization, where each of the 10 million people was needed to make a developed civilization fully operational, too few births meant we would lose services. If the population went down. For example, we would lose the first chair violinist in the symphony. This meant to have that violinists we needed an average of tubers per woman.

40:59
We discovered that in a developed society, about a third of the women by choice or health chose to have no children. And a third of the women chose to have only one child. To achieve six births for any three women, the third would have to have five children. Of course, if she did not want five, she wanted four, that would be all right if another one would have six. If a woman did not want four, but wanted three, you would be okay if another one had seven. And for any woman that wanted to it would be okay if another one at eight.

41:38
This meant not only could every woman have as many children as she wanted, there was a good chance that there would not be enough births to maintain the 10 million person population. This condition gave the energy distribution, civil management and additional responsibility, provide incentive to some of the women to have an extra child.

42:02
Now let me address additional behavioral constraints required to adjust problems created by human nature of the energy managers. By reviewing present civilizations representative decision making processes, it appears our representatives are indifferent to the injuries they create or allow. Instead, they are focused on providing benefits to financial and cultural groups that keep them in office.

42:33
If we did not want our energy managers creating injury, we had to change the constraints so they would not be responsible to these constituencies, and would not have to horse trade their votes or stand for reelection. This meant changing their selection processes and their deliberation processes.

42:57
We considered suggestions by Kim Stanley Robinson in his Mars trilogy. His civil servant managers were randomly conscripted from the adult population like jurors, they had no special skills, knowledge or motivations for power. For the task of maintaining or changing the flows of energy allocations, for a list of civil services, any adult was equally adequate. He or she came prepackaged with personal preferences.

43:33
We imagined these constraints for each selected manager: serve only once in their lifetime, duration of service was fixed with unpaid deliberations were not public, and votes were not publicly even to the other managers.

43:54
Each vote holds constant raises or lowers the token allocation for a civil service. Since the total energy flow is fixed, cumulative changes for a series of allocations has to balance. The legislative agenda follows a sequential list of civil services. Each new manager gets to vote on elements of this list, as they are sequentially attended to.

44:23
He or she has no control over which portion of the list will be addressed during his or her period of service. Just as a juror does not get to seek the kinds of trials on which they serve. New or extinguished civil services are not covered in this narrative.

44:43
Each chooses his or her own staff to help with their research. However, the staff serves it no pay is isolated from outside influences, lobbyists, serves for a parallel time period of the Energy Manager they serve you And each cannot staff another manager in their lifetime.

45:06
The team discussed hundreds of ideas to constrain the energy managers behavior. However, they could not be included in this brief narrative. Next, let me describe behavioral constraint candidates that could be applied to the civil management group charged with protecting the mass assets for the next 100 generations.

45:30
First, let me describe some of the decisions they make, they could be shaped by behavioral constraints. In leasing the 100 generations assets to the present generation the mass management team decides Best Alternative project for the asset using the view of the next 100 generations and best chance of return of asset without damage.

46:00
Mass that could not be recycled. For example, fossil fuels would not be leased. Because oil once burned, cannot be returned in its unburned condition. Phosphorus might not be least if its use puts it at risk of dilution to a point where it could not be recovered and returned to storage.

46:22
To ensure that the least mass was returned in its initial condition. The managers established prepaid recycling fees like an apartment cleaning deposit, except that the posit is made in energy units. For example, energy and it’s facilitate the recycling and return to storage of the original lease mass, while the mass conservers and force this mass distribution and reclamation within the civilizations boundaries, mass beyond this boundary is treated by the management group as if it is already leased to the external environment.

47:02
The civilization exports no mass, and no mass is imported. Ecosystem water and air that do pass the boundary are monitored by these managers who assign import and export duties if any, like the energy man, just the mass managers were susceptible to their own emotions experience and cultural immersion. Without some very special behavioral constraints, their normal choices would create injury.

47:34
The proposed constraint on behavior would have to prevent each manager from acting normally, that constraint would make each manager act as if their unborn distant cousins are more important than their living families, act as if they personally were going to live not tomorrow, but in 200 years.

47:58
The constraints would cause the managers to see and prefer our reject outcomes that have never existed. Our initial analysis suggested that constraints could not exist. How does an individual use values that have never existed?

48:22
Maybe an AI could make rational decisions without these human limitations, AI might be able to create values, which are extensions of our rationality, not our visceral feelings created by selection, experience or cultural bias, all of which are tainted by a yet to be evolved cognitive ability that gives abstract future events meaning in decision making.

48:50
For more details, see 50 years of work at skill dot org. I have come to the end of my narrative.

49:00
Let me summarize, we used flows of mass and energy to discover behavioral constraints that contribute to a non injury producing civilization. We propose several dozen behavior constraints that if omitted from any civilization, would cause injury to the population or the ecosystem. The constraints are necessary but not sufficient to prevent all injury. They were not designed to prevent battery theft or discrimination. The mere installation of the constraints caused injury.

49:40
Like installing a stop and go light at a busy intersection to prevent injury, our proposed constraints abridge normal freedoms. Which brings us to the first crux of implementing our proposed constraints. For people to implement additional constraints on themselves or others. The injury Created by the constraint must appear less than the injury resulting from no constraint. For example, the injury or putting on a seatbelt must appear less than the injury of not wearing it.

50:12
The injury from having to stop at a traffic control light must appear less than the injury of the intersection without the light. Which brings us to the second crux of creating a non injury producing civilization. The chooser must be able to give meaning to abstract injuries have a not yet occurred event.

50:35
The chooser must be able to compare the imaged injury to injuries created from a not yet tried constraint. Finally, the comparison is complicated because the two abstract sets of injuries do not happen in the same timeframe, or to the same people.

50:55
To help incorporate these competing abstractions into the design of a non injury producing civilization, it might help to visualize how civilization works. It’s complicated.

51:10
There are lots of cities, farms, manufacturing facilities, mines, wells, and many transportation systems. If this is your view of how things work, it gives no indication of where the world is going. To overcome the failure of vision, this video breaks the whole world into a few simple interacting chunks, and uses them to show which behaviors create which conditions.

51:39
Let me begin by using four simple machines to describe the whole world humans, plants, weather and animals. Plant machines convert sunlight into food. Whether machines convert sunlight into wind, rain, rivers, and valleys. Non-human animal machines convert solar created food into meat. Human machines gathered plants and animals and use them to replace worn out machines. Using all the surface of the world, sunlight can support 100 million machines, the same sunlight can support 100 million Hunter and gatherers.

52:36
When human machines do more than hunt and gather, they also burn wood plant crops and domesticate animals. And this configuration spreads over the whole earth, sunlight supports 600 million.

Next, imagine that each human machine has to attach tags, something like your car’s gas tank, one filled with coal, oil, gas and uranium, and the other with minerals and metals. With these tanks, each human machine can provide more than a few replacement machines.

53:19
They can produce goods and services. And they can produce machines that perform all kinds of additional processes. When the tanks of each machine is full, 7.8 billion of them can be productive on Earth. However, when any machines tank runs dry, its production ends. Of the 7.8 billion machines 600 million solar powered machines keep producing, while 7.2 billion machines with empty tanks stop.

54:02
To prevent this civilization contraction, some machines were set up to work extracting resources from the Earth’s crust, transporting it, refining it and piping it into their tanks. Some were set to work, building and maintaining the supporting infrastructure. And some were set to work manufacturing replacement machines using crustal resources that tanks of 7.2 billion machines can be kept full.

54:37
Sunlight supports the rest. However, there is a problem. These energy and material delivery machines were designed to do their extraction from the richest locations in the crust. Those having the shortest transportation distance and those where it was the easiest process. When these locations are mined out or pumped dry, the machines had to move their extraction activities to reservoirs, and ore bodies that were deeper, smaller and less dense.

55:16
That required greater mining infrastructure, additional transport, and more processing. On this path to ever lesser quality mining sites, means the consumption of the machines tasked with obtaining and delivering energy and materials eventually exceeds their production. Add their tanks are empty.

55:45
While the 600 million sunlight powered machines keep producing, everything else stops. Let’s assume that the machines could foresee this decline in delivery of energy and materials to 7.2 billion machines and the contraction of their civilization.

56:08
They try to create new machines like solar panels, wind turbines and fusion reactors, and new infrastructure to support them. They hope this new production will replace the energy and materials that can no longer be delivered from the crust.

56:27
However, if these efforts don’t keep these tanks full, this machine civilization will contract to just the sun powered machines. Now, does this simple big chunk model help us see how our world works? Let’s replace these machines with people.

56:52
Earth is feeding 7.8 billion people. People are mining minerals and pumping energy reservoirs until they can’t. The development of alternative energy and material delivery systems don’t seem to be coming online fast enough.

57:13
So in our future, maybe in 2100, when we cannot extract crustal resources, sunlight will feed 600 million people like 17th century serfs. Most of the global population that lives after 2050 will experience starvation. And during the next 80 years, eight to 10 billion people could starve to death or die in conflict over food.

57:42
Maybe this chunky model can tell us some other possible futures. In 2100, the sun will still be shining, ocean water will still be evaporating. Rain will still be falling in the mountains, rivers will still be filling existing reservoirs behind dams. These dams will still be creating enough electric power to allow 50 million people to live almost our present lifestyles.

58:14
That is if they will confine their homes to three specially designed cities located to obtain their energy from today’s hydro dams, and they will constrain their behavior as defined by some new social rules.

58:33
These social rules have some other benefits. They prevent civilization from returning to bad conditions. Because civilization contraction does not include collapse. The arts and sciences are not lost and continue to advance, which means new energy sources might be implemented.

58:55
The ecosystem can recover because of the footprint of 50 million people constrained to live in three city states uses less than 2% of the globe’s land area; 98% reverts to the state, resulting from no human inhabitants.

59:15
During the contraction from 7.8 billion people to 50 million. The new social rules of behavior allow people to die of old age instead of starvation and conflict. In making these predictions, this chunky model has not included the effects of advancing technology.

59:36
For example, dark energy or fusion energy deliveries change these predictions. However, should these advances not arrive on time, this chunky model predicts 7.8 billion sets of human behavior will determine if civilization contracts to either 600 million serfs or 50 mil In moderns.

1:00:01
Humankind has the chance for a bright future, however, they have to choose behavior very carefully

1:00:20
Thank you for listening. I hope this video has helped you visualize a civilization where people do not die from starvation and conflict. This video is the second of a three part series. Video one, our civilization creates injury, video two and non injury producing civilization. Video three transitioning our civilization from injury to non injury.

1:00:46
Skil’s goal is to help you understand we are under estimating our predicament who is going to get injured and when and we are overestimating our abilities to prevent these injuries. Stanford knowledge integration lab was founded in 1978 at Stanford University. It is now a not for profit Research Foundation, with no affiliation to the university.

Comments

The condition of 600 million serfs/elites — a maximum population causing maximum harm to the Gaian system long term, AND/OR 50 million (a maximum) living like moderns with information (the flower and fruit of the modern techno-industrial form of civilization) and knowhow preserved (to be added to as the millennia pass), are two possible pathways. The third is human extinction. Believing that “we are so fucked” produces the third outcome.

China has the goal of achieving an ecological civilization written into its constitution. If at some point in the next few years, the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) realized that if they wanted to live some sort of modern life, that constructing one of the three possible city-states was something they had better do, they could make it so.

In the West, 10% of billionaires might want to live in Oregon if retiring on Musk’s Mar’s colony wasn’t looking like it‘s gonna happen (and tax payers would pay for most of the megacity if some politicians were told they would certainly have a fine place in the new city).

That 8 billion humans will have a place anywhere is not. To minimize a die-off, a condition that will come anyway whether by a rapid birth-off with most deaths by old age, or chaotic collapse where billions die of starvation and conflict, depopulation and contraction of the global economy will come anyway (posterity will have to pay our overshoot debt).

If one, two, or three city-states pass through Catton’s/Wilson's bottleneck, or only a remnant population passes through to continue a slow race to the bottom (extinction) over a 500 to 1000+ year period, both are possible futures. Adding 1–3 eggs to the basket that currently includes only one non-viable egg the size of a planet, could have a viable outcome. Adding 25k WMU (watershed management unit) eggs could too.

While perhaps 600 million serfs/elites could, for a time, live outside Jack’s megacities, a viable form of renormalized humans (the fourth pathway) would total 7–35 million if they leave room for Nature (to persist, as if they don’t, long term, they will not). Otherwise they will build empire and try to figure out how to conquer Jack’s city-states while laying waste to a recovering planet for the retaking.

We are playing, BADLY, a high-stakes endgame. Billions will not persist. It’s complicated and failure to persist in a viable species appears locked in, but we don’t even know enough to know that it is too late and that we can do nothing that could have a viable outcome for posterity and the biosphere.

— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —

“The first thing you have to realize is that you are an animal.” — David Suzuki

“If society does not succeed in changing attitudes and institutions for a harmonious descent, the alternative is
to prepare information packages for the contingency of restart after crashing.” — Howard T. Odum, systems ecologist

“One thing that being a scientist has taught me is that you can never be certain about anything.
You never know the truth. You can only approach it and hope to get a bit nearer to it each time.
You iterate towards the truth. You don’t know it.” — James Lovelock

“Education: that which reveals to the wise, and conceals from the stupid, the vast limits of their knowledge….
I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.” — Mark Twain

“Self-education is… the only kind of education there is.” — Isaac Asimov

“The more he became truly wise, the more he distrusted everything he knew.” — Voltaire

“Knowing that you do not know is the best.
Not knowing that you do not know is an illness….
True words are not pleasing. Pleasing words are not true.
Those who are right do not argue. Those who argue are not right.
Those who know are not learned. Those who are learned do not know.” — Lao Tzu

“Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of our language.” — Ludwig Wittgenstein

“Modern science should indeed arouse in all of us a humility before the immensity of the unexplored and a tolerance for crazy hypotheses.” — Martin Gardner

“To know that we know what we know, and to know that we do not know what we do not know, that is true knowledge.” — Nicolaus Copernicus

“I never submitted the whole system of my opinions to the creed of any party of men whatever, in religion, in philosophy, in politics, or in anything else, where I was capable of thinking for myself. Such an addiction is the last degradation of a free and moral agent.” — Thomas Jefferson, 1789

“It is said an Eastern monarch once charged his wise men to invent him a sentence, to be ever in view, and which should be true and appropriate in all times and situations. They presented him the words: “And this, too, shall pass away.” How much it expresses! How chastening in the hour of pride! How consoling in the depths of affliction!” — Abraham Lincoln, 1859

“Unless the next generation thinks better than we do, they will continue to create conditions of scarcity, violence, and environmental destruction for future generations…. If we raise the level of temporal cognition in most members of a future generation, they, through collective action, would be able to end these unwanted conditions.” — Jack Alpert

“The only thing that gives me hope is that we don’t even know enough to say it’s too late.” — David Suzuki, 2022

“We have to apprentice to nature, not presume to manage evolution.” — Rex Weyler 2023