My Thoughts on Planet of the Humans
And what kind of human can make a civilization sustainable
By MARTIN REZNY
So, green energy is mostly green in the sense that it exists to make more money for billionaires, who would have guessed. As someone who has spent a lot of time watching the visions of optimistic futurists like Isaac Arthur, I would like to focus on what the documentary doesn’t focus on — the ways in which technology can help us transform into a sustainable humanity.
To be clear about my position, while everything depicted in the film was factual, in a pretty damn good display of serious investigative journalism, it is the author’s ideological position that remains unexamined and is mostly communicated through appeals to emotion. The idea of infinite growth economy being a suicide method may be valid, but the idea of stopping growth via population control and energy conservation is anti-life too.
Here’s exactly what I mean — it’s not a good idea to stop trying to find ways to harvest and manage more energy to sustain a bigger population over the long term, the bad idea is to mismanage it by living vastly over your current energy budget. To argue that an industrial civilization is inherently immoral is ignoring the fact that nature isn’t a nice and happy place for any creature to live in. Stagnation will also result in a species dying off, just not as quickly.
Technology controlled by billionaires seems to me to be the core of the problem, the profit motive driving its application. If the decision process started from a scientifically rational place, we would focus on the true solution in the mid to long term, nuclear power. Whatever issue one may have with current nuclear plants, it’s only an engineering problem, much like making the green technologies actually sustainable is entirely possible.
The Solvability of Technological Challenges
Here’s an example for you. Are you worried about nuclear meltdowns? Fine, let’s design nuclear plants to not be able to do that, like by switching from Uranium to Thorium. Which is three times more abundant, while its waste, less of which is produced, stays radioactive for 500 years instead of 10 000. Oh and the nuclear byproducts are also harder to turn into nuclear weapons. This should be absolutely doable, meaning we wouldn’t even need to keep hoping for fusion, which would truly solve all of our foreseeable energy needs.
In terms of fixing green power, first of all, the best options are those barely mentioned in the documentary — hydro, tidal, and geothermal. Hydropower is also currently the best way of storing electricity. But sure, they’re limited. In theory, the Sun should be able to give us all we could need and then some, so not being able to exploit solar energy properly is frustrating, given that the Sun is basically a huge fusion reactor in the sky that we were given for free.
These are the engineering problems with solar power that are fixable:
- No power at night — we absolutely could make solar collector stations in space, it’s just too expensive right now. If we bring down costs for launching stuff into space enough, or if we start mining materials in space, it will become economically feasible. Mining materials in space to build infrastructure in space would also cause no pollution on Earth at all, apart from what was needed to launch any related missions. So even if these stations were not very durable, this would be an ecological solution. Moving most of industry into space is how you get sustainable growth. For a limited time, sure, the universe itself is limited, but why give up now.
- Intermittency — Space-based solar power addresses this problem as well, and for good, since it’s always equally sunny in space, but the more short-term solution is supposed to be battery storage, what Elon Musk bets on. Right now, lithium-based batteries are the best, and lithium is rare, which is a problem, but good-enough batteries from more common materials are possible and being developed. However, the problem is not inherently that you have to mine materials to build such devices as the documentary implies, what matters is how much you need to mine, meaning how much devastation and emissions it will cost you to create and maintain enough battery storage. Sustainability means that you don’t cause more damage than the ecosystems can handle. There is a level of efficiency at which battery technology would be ecologically sensible enough.
- Negative impact of solar panels on the environment — similarly to what would make batteries viable, you can make solar panels more ecologically sensible if you manage to improve what they’re made off or their performance. Organic solar cells of sufficient energy conversion efficiency already exist that use carbon instead of silicon. If what you don’t like is that you have to chop down vegetation to build solar plants, even in the desert, then why not cover buildings and various city surfaces with them? How the plants are built is a solvable engineering problem as well, it just requires understanding ecology and applying that understanding.
- Having a baseload non-green plant running all the time — essentially everything I have mentioned so far is a solution to this. Solar collectors in space solve it, sufficient battery storage would solve it, and nuclear power is clean enough to be considered a solution, for the short term at least. What you want to look at is a comparison of life-cycle greenhouse gas emissions of energy sources. Nuclear is comparable to wind (which is the best there is), followed by tidal and hydro, concentrated solar and regular solar (in the middle), and then followed by biomass, gas, and coal (each several times worse than the other). To use some numbers, nuclear is 12, coal 820, but even switching from coal to gas is progress. Nuclear meltdowns are scary, sure, but that’s a subjective effect. Objectively, they’re safer even than wind turbines. Already, and they are improvable.
The Solvability of Human Nature
Now that I have addressed the anti-technological bias the documentary is built on, I still have to agree with its conclusion. All the technological progress in the universe won’t be able to save us if we don’t change our mentality about growth. We should be able to produce more energy more ecologically in the future, and I didn’t even get into how improving efficiency of any technology we have would help us do more with less, but unless we develop a concept of “enough”, our wastefulness and greed will always overwhelm our capacity.
It is quite certain that all the technologies mentioned so far can be improved, it’s not at all certain that our politics, economy, society, and psychology can be improved, at least not necessarily in time. The current limitations imposed on us by the coronavirus pandemic show that if we wanted to, we could reign in our energy usage tomorrow and keep it that way however long would be necessary. Just the cutting of nonessential travel and industry has reduced our emissions by 8–25% and wildlife is showing its capacity to quickly recover.
If we wanted to, we could use public transportation more and travel abroad less, we could eat less meat and waste food much less, we could start buying just as much material goods as we actually need, and the list goes on. These are entirely possible things, given sufficient motivation. Like to maybe invade natural habitats less so that new pandemics wouldn’t become a regular thing in the near future. How hard would it be to get most humans to do all that?
I personally have no idea, mainly because I have always preferred to live like this. I don’t want to have or use a car, if for no other reason, then because I don’t want to drive to go places. I don’t feel I need air conditioning. I’ve never been a big fan of meat, so I only eat just enough of it. I buy new stuff only when the old stuff breaks down, and I always try to buy the most durable stuff. I hate shopping overall. I’m also not a fan of traveling anywhere by plane. Besides, I care about ideas, who I am, not places, where I am. The current crisis and quarantine has therefore barely affected me at all.
To me, wanting to act differently is irrational. Why would you want to risk your life needlessly for something trivial like a vacation or getting to work? Why would you want to make yourself unhealthy? Don’t you understand that material goods are meaningless, except if they fulfill a function, and then you only need a specific amount of them? I may see some merit in wanting to explore the world physically, but even that is more precious if it’s limited.
Then again, I’m not what you would call normal, so I don’t expect anybody else to follow my example. Except maybe I should, if most us not being like this means that our civilization is going to self-destruct. As with all transformations, I think the main problem is that they look more impossible the more you focus on the end goal, as opposed to the immediate next step. Little by little is the only way to achieve any lasting personal change.
Here are some entirely doable next steps:
- Curb advertisement — before trying to get people to actively believe in doing their part in saving the planet (meaning ourselves), we can definitely at least stop prodding them constantly to be infinitely wasteful. Fewer ads would help, as well as a qualitative transformation of what ads are. It’s not inherently a problem to promote that something exists so that people know about it, the problem is when ads (and businesses behind them) keep inventing fake problems that can only be solved by more consumption. Some sort of legislation could take into account how essential or frivolous the thing being promoted is or how manipulative the methods employed by the ad are. Or, if legislation is a no-go, people can be educated and motivated to boycott and avoid ads however they can. There are, after all, other ways how to support what you support financially.
- Make doing the right things easier — often, all the people need to change behavior for the better is to make choosing it less than very difficult. Eating less meat, for example, or less of any type of food that’s wrecking the environment somewhere, needs to be helped along by good affordable alternatives being universally available. Conversely, you could stop subsidizing meat and make its cost be reflective of how much more environmentally costly it truly is. Or make sure that people have enough money to pay extra for more environmentally viable products, like by introducing universal basic income or a functional social safety net. Or you could specifically subsidize what they should ideally be doing. As much as I personally dislike social engineering like this, you gotta help people help themselves if the alternative is something they will like much, much less.
- Make science more integral to culture — this has arguably already been happening for a while and it seems to be working with young people. The more content there is like the HBO Chernobyl show as opposed to reality TV bullshit on everybody’s minds, the more likely it is that people will become aware of real problems and get on board with helping to prevent or solve them. The main obstacle in making this more effective are the scientists themselves, however, since trust in science is set back every time a presumably scientific authority sells out to big money, like it was with the green power lobbies mentioned in the documentary, to some political player, like with WHO and China, or to intelligence agencies, like with all the engineers happily working on our total surveillance (not to mention that the distrust of NASA or skeptical organizations isn’t baseless). In short, scientists who are already very motivated need to clean house.
- Keep appealing to moral responsibility — in the end, most people would like to think of themselves as good people. As the quarantine started in my country, it took about a day or two between people thinking that face masks are silly, and thinking that people not wearing them are assholes. People also made face masks for each other. If you give people something doable to do and explain very clearly that by not doing it, they’re harming everyone else, most people will want to do the right thing, and if they’re able to do it at all, they will do it. The main obstacle to that being effective is the big money creating constant mass confusion about what’s the fundamentally right thing to do using media, but that seems to be gradually failing, quickly when confronted with an immediate tangible crisis. Fortunately in the case of problems other than pandemics, you don’t have to get through to almost everybody, just a plurality. Decreasing the harm to the planet by tens of percent should be enough, for a while.
The Black Swan Song of Capitalism (as We Know It)
There are of course many people who would absolutely hate and vehemently oppose everything I just mentioned. I wouldn’t necessarily say that they’re wrong, the issue is that for everything, there is a season, and then it ends. There are some once great, useful ideas the time of which now seems to be passing, for better and for worse. Collectively, they seem to be all of the philosophical underpinnings of what’s usually called capitalism:
- Growth is good — yes, until you grow up. We have grown up. Now the name of the game is maintenance. Ideally, until an entirely new type of civilization is born and eventually outgrows us, but only because it will be designed to withstand being bigger without collapsing in on itself. The only thing that tries to grow without limit or any consideration for sustainability is cancer, and that only kills the host faster.
- Excellence should be rewarded — yes, until the whole mechanism of reward becomes completely untethered from reality and when all of the money ends up consolidated in a monopoly with almost everyone having only debts. Then you need to restart the game by wiping out debts, breaking up monopolies, and rethinking what’s actually essential and deserves reward. This pandemic made it very clear who is essential.
- Lack of ambition should be punished — this is closely tied with how the reward mechanism got completely out of hand. If you only give money to people who would do anything to make more of it, you get sociopaths on top ruining the world. People who want to focus on raising family, helping others, or creating art rather than career clearly shouldn’t be punished for that. Moreover, punishing them by denying them livelihoods or healthcare puts everyone in danger, just like without them, you have no real economy.
- Everything should be commercialized — clearly, there are areas where profit as a driving force doesn’t do any good. Education and healthcare, gradually more essential as the world becomes more interconnected and technological, are only good enough when everyone has them. If you make them for profit, everyone can’t have them, as artificial scarcity is what enables profits. At the same time, science is only ever hindered by the profit motive, since actually solving problems closes markets. In the future, we need people to run themselves out of business by ending threats.
There will be many people who currently have money who will lose it if we redesign our economy by abandoning eternal growth, elitism, poverty as punishment, and profit motives in some areas. There will also be people who are currently starting out their career who will be denied some of the opportunities they were hoping to take advantage of. There will be need to limit some freedoms, which will be unfairly harmful to some people who just wanted to express themselves and now won’t be able to. That sucks.
But that’s the thing, any type of social organization and change thereof makes life suck for someone. Deciding how to run the society is not a clear-cut choice between doing it right and doing it wrong, it involves moral dilemmas. The reason why the communist experiment failed was that in an attempt to maximize the happiness of the majority of the population, the elites were stripped of everything they had. The problem was that it included essential elites, people who were skilled and knowledgeable. This in turn resulted in everyone being ultimately worse off in time, due to the rise of incompetence.
The question is, if we do something to redistribute the wealth and power in a way that will shift it away from billionaires, bankers, and big corporations, what will we lose that is in any way beneficial? If we disempower the type of person driven by profit and nothing else? What are these people contributing? As our current predicament shows, we definitely need manual laborers and medical workers, that much is certain. We certainly seem to need more scientists, and to make them financially independent of business interests. It’s not that we should get rid of elites, we just have to prioritize the helpful ones.
This would also mean that what has to end is not capitalism as such, but our current specific version of it, in all of its aspects that promote privilege, denial, fraud, obscenity, and incompetence. If we won’t do it by choice, crises like the current pandemic will likely keep spiraling out of control until we do something, or we will fall apart as a civilization. By “we”, I of course mean humans. The major obstacle to which is that the older generations are larger, which is why they had their way their whole lives in democratic societies, during which time the wealthy elites kept filling their minds with garbage.
I’m sorry if it sounds like millennial angst against boomers (a garbage divisive framing pushed by the media in and of itself), but it is simply an objective fact. Media are a tool of the wealthy to push their narratives, the main one of which was to normalize a lifestyle of unchecked consumerism. It also doesn’t help that the older generations also have a tendency to misunderstand how to use new media properly, as they didn’t grow up with them, resulting in them falling for internet disinformation more easily. This is not a reason to hate on “boomers”, this is a reason to start talking, helping the truth attend to itself.
If we only agreed on something, we could be any kind of humans tomorrow.
