Towards a Sustainable World

“As children of the Earth, we are also children of the stars…. Through the light of the stars, through what they teach us about other worlds and the possibilities of other civilizations, we can learn what path through adolescence we must take. And in that way, we can reach our maturity. We can reach our full promise and possibility.

We can make the Anthropocene into a new era for both our civilization and the Earth. In the end, our story is not yet written. We stand at a crossroads, under the light of the stars, ready to join them or ready to fail. The choice will be our own.” – Light of the Stars

I have had the book The Light of the Stars on preorder for months, authored by astrophysicist Adam Frank. I tore through this book in less than three days, and it has left my head spinning. I wanted to discuss my impressions. I really enjoyed this book!

More than that, it has been really relevant to the work I have been doing right now. I know it might not seem like it just yet, but I am working towards a synthesis of a lot of different ideas right now. These ideas cut across huge categories, and spin out from my understanding of animism. What I am working on now cuts across cosmology, ecology, science generally, as well as anthropology and animism. I am exploring many questions that cover our place in the Cosmos, the future of our civilization, and how science and animism are two complimentary ways to understand these topics.

Adam Frank’s book lands solidly across all of these ideas. If the quote at the top of this page is any indication, the scientific and animistic aspects of this book are very present. Even though this book is about science and not animism, there are plenty of implications for the latter. As I have written about many times before, my animism is scientific, and has implications for almost every discipline. While science tell me about the world, animism is how I relate to that world.

Which is why I was so struck by Frank’s book. I would recommend you pick up a copy, because I will not be able to cover even a portion of it here for length reasons. If you want a short version, there is a great Youtube video that outlines the basic ideas, and plenty of news articles are at the bottom of this post. Yet, in brief, the bulk of the book is about astrobiology, exo-civilizations (alien civilizations), and what we can learn from the fate of other worlds, and the possible civilizations that might dwell there.

A good portion of the book is about how an high-tech, high energy civilization would change the climate of the planet. In short, this book is about the Anthropocene, and the fate of our civilization when faced with realities such as Climate Change, and what, if anything, we can do about that?

Different Scenarios

“But we should recognize that creating climate change wasn’t done with malevolence. We are not a plague on the planet. Instead, we are the planet. We are, at least, what the planet is doing right now. But that is no guarantee that we’ll still be what the planet is doing one thousand or ten thousand years from now.

…that Carl Sagan already understood, is that humanity and its project of civilization represents a kind of “cosmic teenager.”.. But like a teenager, we lack the maturity to take full responsibility for ourselves and our future.” – Light of the Stars

(Graphic from Here)

One of the great parts about this book, is that Frank and others have just started modeling the various trajectories our civilization could take. I have included a graphic that plots out each of these trajectories pretty clearly.

The first is the die off, which is in many ways similar to Greer’s Long Descent. It means that climate change starts to take a serious toll on our populations, and basically humans start dying off. It’s disturbing that Frank identified this as one of the most common scenarios. But that is not a pleasant future, nor one to be hoped for. It is hard for me to imagine 7 out of 10 people I know and love have perished. That I think is a future that is best avoided, if we have any control over the matter. Which, of course, I think we do in some measure.

The second scenario is my preferred trajectory, the sustainability curve. It means we have acted with enough forethought and wisdom to prevent either slow, or catastrophic collapse. I think we as a civilization and as a species still have the ability to carve out this future for ourselves. We have the technology today, what we need is the will, and as Frank points out, a better narrative on what we want that future to look like.

The last two scenarios are the full extinction scenarios. That means we so overshoot the capacities of the planet, that regardless if we change to renewables or not, that the collapse of our civilization and probably the extinction of our species is our fate. That is a grim future indeed, and one that also serves best as a warning.

Kardashev Scale

“If we take the astrobiological view and start thinking like a planet, we see there’s no such thing as “no impact.” Civilizations are built by harvesting energy and using that energy to do work. That work can be anything from building buildings to transporting materials to harvesting more energy.” – Light of the Stars

I have talked a lot about the Kardashev Scale quite a bit on this blog before, and something Michio Kaku has explored in some depth. I’m not going to go into any real depth about that here, but Frank certainly uses it to build his central themes. For example, a Type 1 civilization can access all the energy resources of their home planet. Civilization as a project turns energy into the capacity to work, whether that work is building, farming, or exploring space.

Our civilization is not yet a Type 1, as we are about a type 0.7, with 100-200 years to go until we are Type 1. That means we have a fair bit of energy at the disposal of our civilization, but Frank makes a very important point about the Kardashev Scale. Energy use of a civilization must obey the second law of thermodynamics. There is no such thing as a free lunch, as the use of energy creates feedback, primarily in the form of waste, and especially heat.

As we know from the science of climate change, that waste heat can be trapped in the atmosphere by carbon and other greenhouse gases. Obviously, the carbon and the heat are both products of our fossil fuel driven civilization. As Frank points out, the greater the energy use of a civilization, the greater its entropy; mostly in the form of waste heat.

This does not mean we cannot, or should not, chart out a course towards a Type 1 Civilization. Only that, as Kaku and Frank seem to agree upon, is that we are navigating a very crucial bottleneck right now. How we chart that course has massive implications for our future.

“That sounds pretty good. In just a couple of centuries, we are going to become a true Type 1 cosmic civilization. The problem, of course, is that we may never get there. Our project of civilization has a bottleneck to navigate right now, and our progress through it is anything but assured.” – Michio Kaku

There are nor guarantees about our future, but if we are to have a future at all, we must look a little beyond the Kardashev Scale. As Frank rightly points out, we need to consider our civilization against the capacities and limits of the planet. As such, Frank proposes another way of looking at our planet.

Planet Classifications

“Sustainable Civilizations don’t “rise above” the biosphere, but must, in some way, enter into a long, cooperative relationship with their coupled planetary systems. But what does that look like?”

What Frank proposes, is another way to classify our civilization as part of the whole planetary system. We need to consider more than just the energy usage, but also how the feedback of energy use on our planetary system. We need another kind of map to a Type 1 civilization, a more long-term and sustainable vision.

Frank proposes a different means to classify planets and their energy use. He uses five Classes of planets, 1 through 5.

A Class 1 planet is similar in many ways to Mercury. The energy systems of the planet are fairly simple, so the planet as a whole limits work (energy use) and system complexity. It’s pretty much a dead planet. A Class 2 is a world with an atmosphere, but no life. Venus and Mars are great examples of a Class 2 planet. Sunlight and atmosphere allows for gas and water flows, and more work to be done in the energy system.

Class 3 planets have a thin biosphere. Life has gotten a start on these worlds, and life has an effect on the planetary systems of energy flow. But life does not dominate the planet. Earth during the early Archean was approximately a Class 3 planet. Frank also points out if life was present on early Mars, that too would be an example of a Class 3.

Frank describes a Class 4 planet as a planet that has been “hijacked by life”, with a thick biosphere. These are deep ecological networks that all feed into one another, and feedback into one another. Earth, up until the appearance of human civilization, has long been a Class 4 planet.

Across the first four classes, we see an increase in complexity and energy flow as Frank rightly points out. A Class 1 planet doesn’t do much work with the energy it received from the sun. By contrast, a Class 4 takes all that solar energy and puts it to use in the networks of life; growing, eating, dying, and back again. This relationship between complexity, work, and energy flows granted Frank and his collaborators the vision to speculate on what a Class 5 planet might look like.

Just as a Class 4 world channels more energy into work and complexity than a Class 3, a Class 5 would go beyond the energy capacities of a Class 4. A Class 5 planet is a world with a planetary civilization, that not only has more energy at its disposal, but also has the agency of a complex civilization. Frank calls a Class 5 world an “agency dominated” planet, a planet that has intelligence. A Class 5 is where the biosphere has become part a noosphere, an area of networked intelligence. It is the where a world starts to “wake up”, and becomes more like a single organism.

“Class 5 Planets might be seen as worlds that have evolved a noosphere. The pervasive wireless mesh of connections that constitute today’s internet has already been held up as an initial version of a noosphere for Earth. Thus, we might already make out the contours of what a sustainable world will look like.”

An Awakened Planet, Towards a Class 5

“So, we cannot bring the world to heel. Instead, we must bring it a plan. Our project of civilization must become a way for the planet to think, to decide, and to guide its own future. Thus, we must become the agent by which the Earth wakes up to itself….

Science has given us a new perspective, a new vision, and a new story to help us find a way forward as we face the challenge of the Anthropocene. But this can only happen if we listen carefully and truly make this new story our own.

It is time to grow up.”

If a Class 5 is an “awakened planet” Frank goes on to ask the question, where do we stand right now? Well, just like on the Kardashev scale, we are between a Type 0 and a Type 1 (Type 0.7), on Frank’s on classification system, we are between a Class 4 and a Class 5, a hybrid planet.

The planet has not fully “awoken” just yet, and that it contains a civilization that is not yet sustainable. We are a hybrid planet, clearly leaving a Class 4 as we move into the Anthropocene, but our civilization is not yet a fully integrated and sustainable part of the planetary system. It might never be, as failure is certainly an option. We not ever make it to a Class 5 Planet, just as Kaku said there is no guarantees of ever seeing a Type 1 civilization.

Our cybernetic (of life and machine) Gaia is stirring, but it is not yet out of the birth canal. The transition from Type 0 to Type 1, and from Class 4 to Class 5, is not yet assured, and we are still in the weeds as a species. Energy flow, complexity, and the work we do as part of the planet must be sustainable. A Type 1 civilization must be sustainable, a integrated, networked, extension of the planetary system. As Frank so eloquently puts it;

“To truly come into a cooperative coevolution with a biosphere, a technological civilization must make technology – the fruit of its collective mind – serve as a web of awareness for the flourishing of both itself and the planet as a whole.”

It is time for our species to mature, as part of our planet. We are still in our adolescence, but we can see young adulthood in the distance. That is the next step in our planetary evolution, if we have the wisdom to make it through this transition.

In my next post for this series, I want to start filling in the details. I want to synthesize the ideas of Kaku, Bar-Yam, and Frank in a more unified way. From there, I want to continue refining this vision down to more specifics…

What does a cooperative, sustainable relationship with Earth actually look like?

Thanks for reading!

Sources/References;

Light of the Stars, by Adam Frank. 2018.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/12/opinion/earth-will-survive-we-may-not.html

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/05/how-do-aliens-solve-climate-change/561479/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uoISn18qP_E

http://www.rochester.edu/newscenter/astrobiology-alien-apocalypse-can-any-civilization-make-it-through-climate-change-322232/

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Towards a Networked World

“We, each of us, are parts of a greater whole. Still, this relationship is shaping and will continue to shape much of our existence. It has implications for our lives as individuals and those of our children…

On a global scale, human civilization is a single organism capable of remarkable complex collective actions in response to environmental challenges.”

– Y. Bar-Yam

In the last part of this series, I left off with a quote by Harding that suggested that while science and technology has made us quite clever, these things alone have not made us wise. He went on to suggest that the fusion of animism with science would ask us to replace mechanistic understandings of the world, with more animate ones. In short, Harding asks of us to consider the planet as one whole being, a planetary organism.

This is an important place to start our discussion, as it will have huge implications to explore in the rest of this piece. More importantly, this is the point where animism (as I understand it), is going to be central to our understanding of the future of ourselves and the planet. It means, our civilization is in fact an extension of nature, and of the evolution of our planet. Civilization is the next step, an emergence out of cosmic physics and evolutionary biology. It emerges from our own nature, as social human beings enmeshed in the planetary systems of Earth.

Yet, just like evolutionary process, so too is our own unguided. Whether we succeed or fail as a civilization, and as a species, will be influenced by how well we are adapted to our environment. In other words, our fitness to be part of the planetary systems. If we are unfit to our environment, unable to find a balance, unable to adapt, we will perhaps go the way of countless extinct species.

One way to understand this is to look at Kaku’s planetary civilization, a Type 1 civilization that is truly global. By necessity, I think this would have to be a sustainable civilization, that has become well adapted to the planet as a whole. A Type 1 civilization, as I envision it, would have to adapt to to the planet, and become an integrated part of the whole. We are not there are the moment, and we may have a century or more before we get there.

So the question becomes, what might be some of the steps we need to take to be a more integrated and harmonic part of the planetary organism?

If you ask me, part of the answer will be to take our place as a kind of planetary “nervous system.” Our human civilization might become the “thinking” part of the planet, that integrates all the parts, and keeps them regulated. Just like our own bodies, the health of any individual system is vital to the health of the whole. The nervous system cannot survive without support of the bone and blood (geology), the respiratory system (forests, ecologies, weather), or the circulatory (oceans, waters) systems.

Going a step farther, this also includes our own selves, and the sociopolitical makeup of our societies. In short, how we organize ourselves matters. More importantly, there are likely better ways to manage a planet. Some time ago, I wrote about the End of Nations, in three parts. The gist of this all is, that Nation-States are the result of specific historical processes, but they may not be the best way to regulate a planet. There are plenty of thinkers, scholars, and scientists trying to come up with other ideas.

Which brings us to the article I want to discuss today. Our civilization, when compared with any other time in history, is much more complex. The article that highlight this fact is called Complexity Rising, by Y Bar-Yam. The quote at the top of this piece comes from the same article.

The article itself is very dense, and I will not have the space here to cover it all. Yet, if the quote at the top of this piece is any indication, what I want to explore today is the complexity of our current civilization, and what this might mean for our future.

In order to move this this conversation forward, I want to draw your attention to the above graphic. This image from the article speaks volumes about what I want to talk about, and in a way that allows me brevity. Bar-Yam lays out the case for the historical changes of our social structures. Moving from left to right, we can see the steady rise in complexity, from hunter-gatherers up to the Industrial Revolution. By the time we get to the last panel on the right, we see something very integrated, networked, and dare I say… organic.

Right in the middle there is a spike in hierarchy. This is the Industrial Revolution. During the industrial revolution, as I talked about in more depth in my End of Nations series, hierarchical and bureaucratic structures exploded. Part of the reason is because industrial economies are more complex, and need more actual governing. The rise of the Nation-State was connected to the rise of industrialization, as the graphic clearly shows.

We are still in the industrial mindset, somewhere around the peak of hierarchy on the graphic. (It could be we are going down the slope.) We are still living in the social and political structures that were created in the Industrial Revolution. But we are also moving towards a planetary civilization, a Type 1 civilization, and I think that is represented by the far right on the graphic. A truly networked civilization.

Also, I think that the graphic is very consistent with Kaku’s “birth pangs” of planetary civilization. Do you see the drop on the far right of the graphic? That indicates a breakdown of hierarchies, as we transition to more lateral and networked world. Those hierarchies are present in our governments and social institutions. That is the world as we know it, and I think it is already breaking down. But overall, I think that breakdown is a good thing in the long run, because the other side is a more equal, egalitarian, and networked world.

(The Transition, breakdown of hierarchy and rise of the more networked connections.)

There is a lot of talk in pagandom about long descents, storms a’ coming, late stage capitalism, rise of hierarchy, fascism, oligarchy, ect. I think there is some truth to these things. For instance, I think we are in a time of birth pangs, a new world awaits at the end of a messy process. It’s not going to be easy, but I don’t think it’s the end of the world either.

The drop after is the transition. That’s the storm. That’s late stage capitalism. That’s the birth pangs of transition. Like a cocoon of metamorphosis. We can already see some evidence of that transition. The EU is at least a prototype of a what a more networked world might look like. A post-nation kind of integration. .

“Even so, the EU may point the way to what a post-nation-state world will look like.

.., further integration of Europe’s governing systems is needed as economies become more interdependent. But… Europe’s often-paralysed hierarchy cannot achieve this. Instead… the replacement of hierarchy by networks of cities, regions and even non-governmental organisations.” (From End of Nations)

I prefer ideas that are more democratic, more autonomous, but also deliberately networked. Networks of cities and regions could be all these things, as well as more flexible and adaptable to complex problems such as climate change. Nation-states have a real structural problem dealing with many of these challenges. They are centralized, and inflexible. They were not designed to handle these kind of challenges, and are often paralyzed in dealing with them. Nation-states, and even international institutions are often too hierarchical to deal with problems that require complex and nuanced solutions.

Type 0 Civ = Industrial Revolution

Type 1 Civ = Networked World

Blue Line = Approx current location

Kaku estimates 100 – 200 years to Type 1

But there is another thing that is important to point out here. As you can see from the graphic above, there is a long gap from the decline of hierarchy, to the rise of replacement hybrid lateral structures. I will be talking a lot more about what that looks like in a future post, but for now I can say that that transition will not be fun. The decline of hierarchy may well mean the decline of Nations, which on the whole may not be a bad thing in the long term, but it will be chaotic in the short term. This breakdown could also affect other massive hierarchies aside from governments; but also large corporations and international institutions. That could be bad news for a lot of people.

As such, I think it is important, while hierarchy declines, that we focus on building alternative hybrid and lateral structures. Things like cooperative workplaces, and community organizations that can help mitigate the gap. More on that in the future too.

The short version, is that I agree with aspects of both Kaku and Bam-Yam. A planetary civilization would be more networked, and less hierarchical. But how can we start the synthesize these two ideas?

Towards Synthesis

“Like it or not, our societies may already be undergoing this transition. We cannot yet imagine there are no countries (States). But recognising that they were temporary solutions to specific historical situations can only help us manage a transition to whatever we need next. Whether or not our nations endure, the structures through which we govern our affairs are due for a change. Time to start imagining.” End of Nations

It certainly is time that we start imagine what the future might look like, and this is a theme I will revisit in future posts. We need to imagine big, so that we can then use that big vision to create small, manageable goals. That way we can create a better tomorrow, after a bit of a slog through the transition.

With that all in mind, what does that vision look like? Well, at least for me, we can start bringing together all the various threads I’ve lain out in this post and the previous one.

From Kaku’s work, we can run with the idea that we are on the path towards a Type 1 Planetary Civilization. This civilization will be more integrated, more multicultural, more scientific, and more tolerant. The transition to a Type 1 civilization will take the next century or two, and we are already seeing the first aspects of that in things like the internet and the EU.

But Bar-Yam in this post, adds more onto this vision. The EU may be an early prototype for a Type 1 civilization, but it is also the prototype for a post-national world. A world that is more networked, more integrated, less hierarchical, as well as egalitarian and democratic. Bar-Yam also points out, that we are already undergoing this transition. The old world is breaking down, and the new one is on the way. But it is a not guaranteed and we are at a crucial juncture.

I think on top of all this, the new world will have to ecological and sustainable as well as democratic. With integrated and flexible networks of power, our civilization would be more adaptable and able to respond to climate change. As was pointed out by Bar-Yam in the very first quote at the top, our civilization, and our planet, function together like one large organism.

Any civilization that we build on a planetary scale must include human as well as non-human concerns, and this is at the heart of my animism. A future planetary civilization would be networked, democratic, egalitarian, multicultural, and sustainable. That is what a planetary civilization would truly look like to me.

In short, we need to “think like a planet”, and this is our bridge towards the next big author I want to discuss in tandem with this one. In a future post, I will talk about Adam Frank’s new book, The Light of the Stars.

It is my hope that it will help to pull all these assorted threads together, so that we can move towards a synthesized vision of the future.

Thanks for reading!

Sources/References;

http://necsi.edu/projects/yaneer/Civilization.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_civilization

https://fireiceandsteel.wordpress.com/2017/01/04/end-of-nations-part-1/

https://fireiceandsteel.wordpress.com/2017/01/18/end-of-nations-part-2/

https://fireiceandsteel.wordpress.com/2017/02/01/end-of-nations-part-3/

Liminal Worlds, New Novel!

 

Here we go folks!

Today I am releasing an all new novel! It is a cyberpunk/solarpunk crossover I have been working on for the last year or so, and I am really excited to bring this one to you!

I’ll be talking about this more in future posts!

$2.99 for Kindle here!

Or $14.99 in paperback here!

Synopsis:

The ‘Net went big, in a big way.

The greatest integrated digital network the world had ever seen, a fully immersive digital world, complete with fully virtual reality experiences, forums, and social media. It connected the globe in a way that had never been done before. It made the internet of the early 21^st century completely obsolete. The world changed, almost overnight.

There were only two problems. First, the ‘Net had been an accident. When the Cyber-Tek nanotech facility exploded, it polluted the land, air, and water with tiny self-replicating nanite machines. In a short time, they were everywhere, and found within everything. Plants, animals, and soil. The other problem; the nanites were also collective learning machines. The more of them there are, the more intelligent they became.

But that wasn’t such a bad thing. On top of layers of broadband, satellite, and cellular communication; the nanites found their own home. That is how the ‘Net was born.

That is where our story begins.

Welcome to the late 21^st Century.

Towards a Planetary Civilization

“The culmination of all these upheavals is the formation of planetary civilization, what physicists call a Type I civilization. This transition is perhaps the greatest transition in history, marking a sharp departure from all civilizations of the past…

Every headline that dominates the news reflects, in some way, the birth pangs of the planetary civilization” – Michio Kaku

 

Recently, I have been rereading (my first time was in community college) Michio Kaku’s Physics of the Future, and I have to say that I have been getting a lot more out of it this time around than I did the first time.

You see, I have been giving a great deal of thought lately about what kind of world would I create. If I had the power to imagine what the future would look like, what would it be? It should come as no surprise to anyone that reads this blog that I have a fairly optimistic attitude towards the future. Or at least, a kind of pragmatic optimism. In short, I don’t think we will likely ever see a perfect utopia, but I don’t think there is anything that stops us from trying.

Our culture, as it is, is chock full of dystopian stories and grim predictions. There is not shortage of pagans and thinkers that think there is a storm coming, whether this is due to climate change, peak oil, late stage capitalism, or what have you. The end is nigh! Or at least, that is what they keep saying.

This is not to say there is no truth in these claims, in fact I think there is a fair bit of truth in some of them. We live in troubled times, especially if you are like me and live in the United States of America. There is a certain darkness that hangs over all that we do.

Yet, at the same time I think there are reasons to hope. I think there are reasons that this darkness will pass, and that there is a more optimistic dawn on the other side. The reasons for that, if the quote at the top of this article is any indication, is because I think we are moving into the transition, and towards a Type 1 civilization. Which is where Kaku’s book comes in.

A Type I civilization, as Kaku describes it, has access to all the energy that reaches the planet from the local star. In our case, that would be the sun, or about 10^17 watts. On a sliding scale of Type 0 to Type 1, we are estimated to be a type 0.7. Kaku predicts, that we will reach that status in the next century or two.

But the transition from our current state of civilization, to a Type 1 civilization will not necessarily be an easy process. If we extend the metaphor of birthing a new world, there are also reasons to suspect it may well be a messy process. We could in fact even fail, and fade as a civilization entirely.

As such, over the course of the next few blog posts, my intent is to lay out some of my ideas on what that transition and the next world might look like. After a certain point, this will be speculative. It is, at best, what I hope the future might look like. But what kind of sci-fi author would I be if I didn’t imagine what our future might look like?

Besides, there is a great deal to be said about imagining future worlds. Our stories can serve as guides, and help us figure out what kind of future we would like to live in. If all our stories are doom and gloom, blood and fire, then there is good reasons to suspect our future won’t be all that great. We should take great care to ensure our dytopian fictions don’t become self-fulfilling prophecies. I think dytopian fiction best serves as a warning, of futures best avoided. No good will come of us if the world looks like Fallout, Mad Max, or even The Long Descent.

As such, let’s look a little deeper into what vision Kaku lays out for us on our path towards the future.

Planetary Civilization

“The transition between our current Type 0 civilization and a future Type 1 is perhaps the greatest transition in history. It will determine whether we will continue to thrive and flourish, or perish due to our own folly.” Michio Kaku, Physics of the Future.

Kaku lays out a Type 1 civilization as a truly global and planetary civilization; one that is scientific, pluralistic, multicultural and tolerant. I would go on to add it would also have to be more democratic (in the ideal sense), more autonomous, and more networked. I will explore these ideas more deeply in the next part of this series.

There are lots of aspects of that already taking shape. The internet is what Kaku considers to be a Type 1 kind of communication system, allowing people across the globe to communicate in real time. He also suspects that a single language will become the common global language, and the top contenders right now are English or Mandarin. I guess that all depends on the how the geopolitical landscape plays out.

He also points out that a common language will not be the death of all others. In fact, tools such as the internet may provide a means for a kind of linguistic renaissance. In my imagined future world, English/Mandarin is only a common language, and does not dominate the others. The vast majority of people would be bilingual, or even multilingual, allowing for a diverse interplay between local and global cultures. It could actually, if played right, result in the resurgence of indigenous, minority, and even new local cultures.

Kaku also thinks that a planetary civilization will lean towards greater political and economic integration. The EU may be the blueprint for this, and may represent one version of a post-national planetary civilization. He also points out that certain cultural aspects have become quite global, such as the Olympic Games and musical trends such as hip-hop and rock & roll. Environmental problems such as Climate Change are also being addressed on a global scale.

None of this necessarily means there will be a One World Government, but that the shape of a future planetary civilization will depend on a lot of factors. These trends may be historical, cultural, and/or national. In many ways, the shape of the future is still being determined and is very difficult to predict.

However, Kaku does claim that Nation-States will become less relevant and central to political power in the long run. They will likely still exists, albeit in diminished form. As economies further integrate, and scale up, more power will likely fall on larger regional and more local forms of governance. For now, suffice to say this is the “upshift” model of State decline. Collapse, on the other hand, is a “downshift” model. I do not see this as necessarily a bad thing, and my own thoughts will appear in a later parts of this series.

No Guarantees

All throughout the book, Kaku is careful to point out that there is no guarantees that we will ever reach a Type 1 Civilization. We could fail, and our civilization (and maybe well our species), could go extinct and crumble into dust.

The point is, we are facing one of the greatest transitions in our history. Our decisions, right now, as a species will determine what that future looks like. Will we trudge our way through, and see the dawn of a planetary civilization, or will we fail, and fall into some long (or catastrophic) descent into irrelevance. There are factors both for and against both scenarios, and ultimately it is here that speculation fails. We don’t know how exactly how the future will play out, and honestly, I think it will be a little bit of both. But more on that in a later part.

There are a lot of factors working against a multicultural, tolerant, and democratic society. Because the sad truth is, not every one wants that kind of world. Some people want a “simpler” life in some form of primitivism, some want the world of 1000 AD. In addition, many of the factors pointing towards a planetary civilization run into the dialectic of reactionaries.

Just for example, we can see the rise of thing like “Incel” as a reaction against growing trends towards women’s equality and feminism. We can also see Straight White Males (TM) openly reacting against LGBTQ rights, and against gender equality more generally. White Supremacy is in open revolt against diversity and multiculturalism, and we can see that in the current immigration crises. Christian Fundamentalists are reacting against a world full of “sin”. Hell, the rise of Trump combines all of these reactionaries in a disturbing and obscene way.

But those like Trump and others, are only a symptom a lot bigger than any individual. They are reactions, rebellions against the inertia of world history. More than this, they also are symptoms of toxic systems struggling to stay relevant, such as capitalism and White Supremacy. It would take a much longer to tease out all the interrelations between many of these topics, so let’s move on.

Wisdom

At the conclusion of the book, Kaku says it is wisdom that can help us navigate the coming decades, and only with wisdom can we possibly find our way to a planetary civilization. This wisdom could take a lot of forms, but I think one way is to take a longer view, and to shape new cultural narratives. In short, and in no uncertain terms, I think animism is one of many things that will help us find our way through uncertain weather.

Here, Stephan Harding lays out it so wonderfully;

“Clearly, modern science and technology have brought us many benefits and are without doubt among humanity’s greatest intellectual achievements, but they have also unwittingly contributed to the massive global crisis we are now facing. In essence, science has made us clever, but it has not made us wise. If we are to have any chance of surviving the looming catastrophe that science and technology have inadvertently helped to create we will need more wisdom, not more analytically capacity, of which there is a plentiful supply…

…And so, along with a growing number of fellow scientists, philosophers and activists, I believe that we now urgently need to develop a new approach in science that integrates analysis with wisdom, fact with value and nature with culture. We think this can be done by replacing our demonstrably unwise (and until recently, unconscious) assumption that the world is an inert machine with the arguable wiser and more accurate metaphor of the world as a vast animate (and hence “sentient”) being. Thus, strange and trite as it may seem, the survival of civilization itself could in part depend on a fusion of science and animism.”

This is where we must end off for the time being, but I am not willing to let this stop here. In the next part of this project, I will run with a lot of what I raised here. I will talk more about the (speculative) future of our civilizations, and I will also talk more about the Earth as an entire planetary system, as an organism in a wide sense, and the animistic implications that emerge from that.

Thanks for reading!

Sources/References;

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_civilization

Michio Kaku, Physics of the Future. 2011

Harding, Stephan. Towards an animistic science of the Earth. Within, “The Handbook of Contemporary Animism” Edited by Graham Harvey.

Complex Gods & Spirits

“Gods are not separate disembodied ideals, but are instead the emergent agencies from the vast networks of ancient entanglements within which we are embedded…” – Mathieu Thiem, from “Interanimism”

(Image from Here)

Hello again folks!

I am working on a lot of different facets of a deeper dive into my animism right now. I apologize if it seems like I am all over the place, but I swear there will be a cohesion to all of this when I am done. My recent manuscript on animism has really got me thinking, and I want to dive deeper into all of complexity and nuance of how I understand animism. Who knows, it all may be the foundation of another book. *shifty eyes*

So, let’s jump right in it today. Some time ago, I wrote about all the various social and scientific theories I bring into my animism. Systems theory, complex systems, cybernetics, actor-network theory, and agential realism. There is a lot there if you care to (re)visit it.

But today, I want to dive a little deeper into how all that informs my animistic views of the world, and especially gods and spirits. My animism is built on relationships among persons. This can be be human persons, as well as non-human persons. My worldview is more than big enough for the beings we call spirits as well as gods.

You see, my animism is a complex one that allows me to look at ecological systems in the same way I look at civilizations and technological systems. It allows for a nuanced, systemic, and holistic view that covers ever aspect of the human and non-human beings on this planet, and off into the great Cosmos. Yes, it even allows me to contemplate those beings we might call gods.

It starts with the idea that the world is made up of complex systems. These systems make up our own bodies, with atoms in molecules, molecules in cells, cells in organs, and eventually the emergence that is ourselves. Emergence is a real foundation to my understanding of gods and spirits. The idea being that once you get enough “parts” in a network, new properties and characteristics emerge. We are more than the sum of our cells, more than our DNA, and the gods are more than just stories on a page.

They are emergent agencies that result from complex systems. Now, those systems can take a variety of forms, ecological as well as cultural. I will be exploring that all more in a moment, but for now there is a few other things I want to set up before we dive deeper.

There are complex systems around us all the time, from cities, to the human brain, and to the universe as a whole. Our cells are nested within our bodies, and we as human beings emerge from the relationships of trillions of cells. In the same way, are we the “cells” of the gods and spirits. To put this another way, we are the “components” that make up their complex systems. We are the cells in their collective agencies.

Now agency is a pretty simple concept, as it is the capacity of an actor to to act in a given environment. Atoms are agents, cells are agents, we are agents, and the gods are transpersonal agents. We are the cells in their multicellular being.

On top of this, complex systems (such as planets, cities, gods), have a form of what we might call a memory. Like an archaeologist digging into the layers of the Earth, the history of past civilizations are recorded in the memory of the planet. Layer by layer, we can see the story of what is remembered. The same is true in our own bodies, as our DNA contains layers and layers, some from our deep mammalian past, and deeper into the origin of life on this planet. If you dig even deeper, the elements in our DNA connects us to the very beginnings of the universe. That is what a complex memory looks like. Just as importantly, it gives us a sense of time. Systems can contain the history of past arrangements, a past, a present, and eventually a future.

If it is not clearly spelled out, this can happen at a variety of levels, and scales of being. That is why I think the basic concept behind orders of magnitude is a useful way to organize my thoughts on this.

Orders of Magnitude

(Order of Magnitude Image from here. It’s a huge and oblong image, please click on it.)

The image above is a big one, with a lot going on. This is a scale that considers the Order of Magnitude of the whole universe. In short, it is looking at reality from different levels of scale, grouped in powers of ten based on size. At the 1 meter scale we find a human being, in this case a small one. That is because this is the “center point” for this scale, one meter, or about 3 1/3 feet.

In orders of magnitude above and below humanity, we increase or decrease in scale. If we jump up a power of ten, we get to the 10 meter scale, which here is represented by a dinosaur. If we jump down by a power of ten, we arrive at the 10mm scale, or about the size of a human fingerprint.

This scale is useful because it allows us to consider the entire cosmos at a variety of different scales, from the quantum to the cosmic. I just finished reading a book called The Zoomable Universe, that explores everything we know through different orders of magnitude. It has been fascinating to think about this through an animistic lens, and how I understand where I stand in relation to everything else.

For example, we can consider gods on a very similar type of scale. I think of gods as emergences, arising out of complex systems of relationships. Some of these are solidly grounded in ecological (non-human) systems, and some are grounded in cultural (human) systems. It is useful to think of the ecological and the cultural as two points on a spectrum, and not as a dichotomy. Here, we can set up a whole range of god-like beings, from mountains to those like Odin, and anything in between. There is plenty of room for overlap here, or human – non-human combined systems. Gods in this way, can fall anywhere on the spectrum. More “wild” cultural gods like Skadi might fall somewhere in the middle or towards the ecological ends, where gods of civilization would be skewed more cultural. In this case, let’s use a god like Odin, who as chief of the Norse gods, is a pretty fair canidate for a “cultural” god. He embodies many aspects of Old Norse culture.

Why is this useful? Because on the whole it is all about the scale of a given system of relationship. Gods are generally considered as beings that are “greater” than ourselves, greater in scale and scope. That is where Orders of Magnitude become useful. Gods exist on “higher” scale than humanity, just like we as humans exist on a greater scale then the cells in our body. That is the principle of emergence, in which the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

So, if we jump up from humanity to the 10 meter scale, do we find gods here? This is the dinosaur level, and it might certainly be fair to consider dinosaurs as a type of gods. They are very dragon-esque, yes? That kind of scale comes with a certain kind of power.

At the same time, in a 10 meter space you can only fit a handful of (adult) humans. Maybe five to ten at the most, if they get cozy. Assuming around two meters of space per human, +/-. Yet, what might those ten humans do now that they have gotten cozy? Might they develop shared ideas and beliefs, common stories, and maybe even some sense of a small community? This is what a lot of pagans might consider a group spirit, which is fair to call a culture, even if a small one.

But what emerges from that tiny culture? Is the agential emergence of networked relationships of ten humans enough to make a god? Maybe, in the sense of egregores, a tiny one. The god of ten people in a complex system. A god at the scale of ten meters. Perhaps here, we can see the beginnings of what we would call apotheosis, in which a god is born. Obviously there is more complicated facets here, but let’s keep thing simple for now.

Cultural Gods & Spirits

(Social Network, from Wikipedia. Maybe our hypothetical village?)

Let’s go even bigger than that though. Let’s jump up another level, to the 1 kilometer level. How many humans can we fit in this kind of space? Well, if we figure two meters per adult human, we could probably fit up to five hundred people in this space. On the scale, this appears as the size of a meteor crater. Now, let’s assume a little bit less than five hundred people, so they have some space for things like houses and that kind of thing. So let’s halve the amount, and run with about 250 human people. A tribe shall we say?

Part of the reason I am using 250 is because this is the upper limit of Dunbar’s Number, which is the suggested cognitive limit of the number of stable relations a given human can maintain. In our little tribe, we are going to assume everyone knows everyone, and they get along reasonably well without being to factioned, and share a common set of beliefs and cultural ideas. They are, for our purposes, a fairly unified whole. Might be unrealistic, but stay with me.

Alright, so these people share a common culture; they have songs, stories, and dances. Shared works of art, and a common and language. They are also a pretty tight-knit community, and so they share meals together and sit around the fire at night weaving stories together. They also share rituals and ceremonies, and through all this they weave together the spirit of the village.

Or, shall we say a communal god at the scale of a kilometer? The god thus is the emergence of a complex series of networked relationships among the people of the village. Over time, this god changes and grows, and develops a history and set of stories associated with the people and their ancestors.

In even more time, those people continue to multiply and go on adventures to conquer new lands, or maybe even to convert people to the worship (and relational maintenance) of their god. In this way, we can scale this idea even further, to kingdoms, empires, and even nation-states. Yeah, I would suggest that things like cities as well as nations have collective spirits we might call gods.

Things like capitalism and socialism have communal god-spirits* of relationship too. The complex concepts might be considered incorporeal spirit-gods in their own right, as such ideas certainly have influence in our times.

Christianity for instance, has a billion people within it’s sphere. What kind of scale does God the Father, and Christ the son exist at in this context? It’s something certainly worth considering, and translates into a real social and cultural force. But that is well beyond the scope of this post. Let’s move on shall we?

Ecological Gods & Spirits

 

(Eco-cultural Island, my own design. Gods may be represented by the large colored circles. The small colored circles represent smaller scale beings in a network. Individual groves, water spirits, villages, that kind of thing.)

(Green = forest, Red = village, Blue = Water, Brown = Mountain. Notice the overlaps.)

As we jump up in scale, we come to the size of about 100km, or if we are following the scale about the size of a decent island. It is at this point that we have to consider all I have said in a wider animistic context. In previous sections, I talked about small groups of people, as well as a small village, but I confined myself to just human relationships.

As such, in an animistic worldview, I have left out a very important facet of the world; namely non-human persons. In the context of our small village, I have neglected the fact that these people are also in constant relationships with their environment; with the non-human and other-than-human world. They need food from the fields, timber from the forests, and waters from the river.

This expands greatly their web of relationships, and with the non-human persons of nature; plants, animals, rocks, waters, and air. These too, must be considered in an animistic context, because they are beings, spirits, and agencies in their own right. These persons, are also part of the same complex system and relational networks as the humans.

So while the god of the village is firmly planted in the cultural realm of the humans, the shaman of the village knows that other gods dwell just beyond the village as well. The shaman takes a deep trek into the woods, and here he finds the forest god. It emerges, just as the village god, from the complex networks of the forest. But this time, these are not human networks, but the complex ecosystem of fungi, bacteria, sun, air, water, trees, plants, and animals. This forest god, the shaman knows, is the god of an ecology.

Now, that may be an oversimplification on my part, but it sets up an example of the idea I have already discussed. That is, that some gods and spirits are the agencies of complex ecological systems and may well be distinct from cultural gods. Of course, there can be huge amounts of overlap. The idea of complex systems and animism more generally, is that we are connected to everything. At no point are ecological and cultural systems fully separated.

The reason I mention this is because it goes a long way towards explaining what in common parlance is often called Genius loci, or a spirit of place. Spirits are not necessarily dependent on the presence of humans to exist. They can be firmly grounded in ecosystems, whether or not humans are even in the area. Here we could further our distinction (as well as overlap) between ecological, and cultural god-spirits.

The collective, communal spirit of the tribe that lives on The Island is primarily a cultural god. It is the complex of human story telling, and human history. However, such a cultural god with also have strong overlaps with the ecology of The Island, and that too would become part of the spirit-system. Thereby we can see an enmeshed system at different scales, of human, ecological, and finally Island. At the scale of the Island, the Island spirit would thus include both the ecological as well as the cultural god-spirits at smaller scales. The whole, simply, is greater than the sum of the parts.

Global Gods & Spirits

Which means we can jump up another level, to the scale of 10,000 KM, which encompasses the scale of much of the planet. Here we are at the scale where all the ecological and cultural god-spirits start to blur together. While we can clearly see these beings at the scale of the village and even a bit at The Island, at the Planetary scale all ecological and cultural systems become part of the same whole. Which makes the Spirit of the Earth** something quite different in scale and scope.

It is fair I think to consider most pagan gods as cultural beings, and ones relatively small in scope. For example, when you consider that there are maybe a million or so pagans on the planet, and the Christian and Islamic gods alone can count a billion each towards their practice. Well, there is a noticeable difference in scale between Allah and Odin, if we consider worshippers as part of a given gods being/body/system. In this way, we are all part of the body of a god. We are all part of the complex community and system of worshippers that help to define those beings.

This is not to say that gods are “just” their worshippers, as they are greater than the sum of the parts. But just like in our own bodies, the parts matter, and contribute to the whole. That means, for say Odin, the complex mass of humans are part of that relationship. All the history, lore, UPG, SPG, and modern practices go into the “body” of Odin. The same is true of Christ and his Father.

In fact, with all the various traditions histories and (sometimes) conflicting narratives, we could ask the honest question of whether all Christs or Odins are the same, or if they are different beings with divergent systems? I mean, I have said before that I don’t think Comic Book Loki, MCU Hiddleston Loki, and Norse God Loki aren’t the same being, even if they share parts of a history and a name. Could there be a Baptist Christ, a Methodist Christ, and a Catholic Christ?

I don’t know, and that is well outside the scope of this piece. Less I get off on a tangent, I intend to stay on point. That point is, that Christ is probably bigger than Odin, as a measure of relative complexity and scale. At least when considered on human components of their being. Ecological non-human components would take a whole other essay.

But, in terms of collective complexity, the Planet exceeds them all, and indeed also contains them all within the complexity of the whole. Earth, as a god-spirit, is in this way “bigger” than all of our human gods, and bigger too than the forests, rivers, and oceans, that make it up. It is, in no small way, a whole organism.

Cosmic Gods & Spirits

But the scalability of complex systems does not end here. We can take it all the way up to the Cosmos as a whole. Such a being, made up of all cultures, all planets, all stars, and perhaps more than one universe, is similar in many ways to Olaf Stapledon’s Star Maker. Such a being would be so far beyond my comprehension, I don’t even care to speculate. Perhaps a Cosmic Spirit, Great Spirit, Star Maker, might warrant the label of capital “G” God, and certainly there are those that would argue that point. Me, I don’t know.

Because after a certain level of complexity, it is beyond our cognitive capacities as individual humans to comprehend. I cannot fully understand the complex system that is my local city, much less that of the entire planet, and certainly not that of the entire cosmos. As much as I might try (and I will), I don’t have the faculties. It would take a being far greater than myself to be able to understand that kind of Cosmic Complexity. Maybe nothing short of a Cosmic spirit can understand such a thing.

I know this was a long one, and I applaud you for grinding through it. As I said at the beginning, this is part of a larger somewhat related series of posts, that is going to range from future worlds, to animism, to left-of-center politics. I’m working towards a synthesis of my animistic beliefs, and the future I would like to live in.

Thanks for reading!

Notes:

*I have used god and spirit somewhat interchangeably through this whole piece. That is because I view gods as basically “big spirits”, or spiritual beings at a higher level of complexity than humanity. Spirits, when I use the term, tends to refer to those at an approximately equal or “lower” scale of complexity. Gods are “greater”, spirits and ancestors are “equal to/less than”. It’s a matter of relative scale for me. IE, the spirit of an island I will probably call “god”. An individual oak tree, probably “spirit.”

** I personally prefer not to gender the planet, though it is often common for pagans and others to refer to the planet as “Mother Earth” “Gaia” or “Terra”. Even the name of Earth is actually a Anglo-germanic name for a goddess. I have trouble relating these concepts to the planet as a whole, because it is bigger and more complex than human genders, and includes countless species that don’t confine to these norms. Where I do use pronouns for the planet, I tend towards “they/them” because it is a complex pronoun that can speak of the planet in a singular way, a plural way, and a neutral way.

Sources/References;

https://fireiceandsteel.wordpress.com/2017/09/07/a-cybernetic-animism/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_system

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actor%E2%80%93network_theory

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_Barad

https://wovensong.com/2017/05/23/interanimism-on-the-mutual-inspiration-of-a-dreaming-earth/

https://fireiceandsteel.wordpress.com/2017/04/19/the-spirit-networks-and-emergence/

https://fireiceandsteel.wordpress.com/2017/05/02/the-spirit-networks-and-emergence-part-2/

https://fireiceandsteel.wordpress.com/2017/05/30/the-spirit-networks-and-emergence-part-3/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agency_(philosophy)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_magnitude

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genius_loci

Shifting Narratives, Future Worlds

“We possess the power
If this should start to fall apart
To mend divides
To change the world
To reach the farthest star
If we should stay silent
If fear should win our hearts
Our light will have long diminished
Before it reaches the farthest star” VNV Nation – Farthest Star

 

Image from Here

Hello again folks!

There has been a lot on my mind recently, and I am struggling a bit in typing it all out for you. I hope you forgive me for not getting work out as often as I would like. All that aside, I would like to jump right into it today.

Recently, I have been diving deep into my summer reading list. There is a lot of good stuff on my list right now, and that gives me plenty to think and write about. Which is good news for you, as there is plenty of material for me to sort through for this blog.

At the current time, I am rereading two books. In the blue corner, I have Physics of the Future, by Michio Kaku. In red corner, I have The Long Descent, by John Michael Greer. I first read Kaku’s work when I was still in community college, and it had a big impact me on the time. Well, after over ten years I feel it is time to revisit it.

At the same time, I read The Long Descent more recently in 2016, and you can find my early thoughts previously on this blog.

In order to set up a foundation for future blogs, I would like to talk about these two books in a bit of dialectic fashion. That way, I can seek a kind of dialogue between the two books, and perhaps gleam a little bit of knowledge from each one in a sythetic kind of way. It’s kind of like idea-based alchemy!

Now, as a brief introduction, these both are very different books, yet both deal with ideas about the future. Even though they both are considered to be non-fiction, there are elements of any speculative work that fall into the fictional realm. The reason for this, of course, is because the future has not yet come to pass. Whenever we speculate about the future, it is inevitable that we will be sometimes be right, and often be wrong.

Still, I think there is something to be learned by setting this two books in dialogue with one another. This is because Kaku’s work is fairly optimistic, and talks about a future where our civilization has progressed a great deal in many ways. On the other hands,. Greer’s book sets up a future where civilization is in decline because of factors such as peak oil. Following the course of past civilizations, Greer envisions a Long Descent into a post-civilization world.

I think it is fair that we set up Kaku’s work on the utopian end of the speculative scale, and Greer’s work on the dystopian end, even if it is a slow motion dystopia. Let’s examine both in more depth shall we?

John Michael Greer, The Long Descent

Greer’s work is well written and well researched, and then extrapolates that research into a grim future. His argument is based on the trajectory of some past civilizations, such as the collapse of the Western Roman Empire or the Mayan civilization.

The bulk of The Long Descent sets up a future based upon the implications of peak oil. Greer covers the facts behind the Hubbert Curve, and other aspects that sooner or later, the oil that drives our civilization is going to run out, and that process will precipitate the long slow decline of our civilization.

In addition, Greer sees no way we can get around this fact, calling peak oil a predicament to which there is no solution. Alternative energy will not save us, nor will anything also. Our best bet, is to prepare for the inevitable decline, which none of us will live to see.

It is a grim future indeed, that reads a lot like a dystopian novel.

“Map the likely results of current trends onto a scale of human lifetimes and a compelling image of the future emerges. Imagine an American woman born in the 1960’s. She sees the gas lines of the 1970’s, the short term political gimmicks that papered over the crisis in the 1980’s and 1990’s, and the renewed trouble in the following decades…

Her great-grandson, born in 2040, manages to avoid the smorgasbord of diseases, the pervasive violence, and the pandemic alcohol and drug use that claim a quarter of his generation before age 30. A lucky break gets him into a technical career, safe from military service in endless overseas wars, or “pacification actions” against separatist guerrillas at home. His technical knowledge consists mostly of rules of thumb for effective scavenging…

For his great-granddaughter, born in 2120, the great crises are mostly things of the past. She grows up amid a ring of villages that were once suburbs, but now they surround an abandoned core of rusting skyscrapers that are visited only by salvage crews who mine them for raw materials. Local wars sputter, the oceans are still rising, and famines and epidemics come through every decade or so, but with global population less than half of what it was in 2000 and still declining, humanity and nature are moving towards balance…

This process I’ve named The Long Descent – the declining arc of industrial civilization’s trajectory through time.” Pg 32.

This is not to say some aspects of TLD are without value, and the whole thing should be dismissed out of hand. There are a lot of great recommendations on community building, resilience, and energy efficiency that I think are important. I will expand on this in a future post, when I examine both these books individually.

Michio Kaku, Physics of the Future

This transition is perhaps the greatest transition in history, marking a sharp departure from all civilizations of the past…

Every headline that dominates the news reflects, in some way, the birth pangs of the planetary civilization” – Michio Kaku

It must be admitted that there is some truth in all the dystopian narratives that surround us. We very well could screw things up and slip into some Long Descent type future. As I’ve point out in my post on that topic, that scenario does a very good job of setting up the problems of peak oil. Still, as with most dystopia, I think it best serves as a warning rather than a prophecy. The Long Descent, is the kind of future best avoided, and if we play our cards right, I think it can be. That is where Kaku’s book comes in

In fact, Kaku’s book agrees on some of the point on the chapter concerning the future of energy. Kaku follows many of the same avenues as Greer, as he discusses the Hubbert curve, and our dependence on fossil fuels. If we have not peaked already, we will soon.

“This means that in the near future, we may be entering a period of irreversible decline” – Michio Kaku.

This fact alone has huge implications for the future; from political volatility, to conflicts over oil supplies, and a high confidence in the fact that oil prices will surely rise. There are huge implications for our economy as well as the world political organizations. If we follow the trajectory of The Long Descent, the decline of oil will be a centuries long decline in our civilization.

But…. And this is a huge but.

Kaku agrees with many of the implications, but his trajectory into the future is very different. Where Greer sees a decline in civilization that takes centuries to hit rock bottom, Kaku sees a transition to a truly planetary civilization. With a rise in renewable energy in the short term, and fusion and other sources in the long term. He sees the rise in oil prices as the means that will make renewables even more viable and economical, and quickly jump in to replace our oil based infrastructure.

This will be combined with a transition towards fully electric transportation, which of course will be powered renewably, by wind, solar, and other forms of energy, In fact, we can already see this transition in process. Project Drawdown bases its projection on the year 2050, as does The Solutions Project. The UN Sustainable Development Goals, which include the transition to clean energy, are based on meeting the goals by 2030.

At every level of human society, we are seeing the transition take place in real time. Local, regional, national and global. Entire nations are already planning their phase out of the Oil Age, and pushing renewable energies as well as electric transportation.

Towards Synthesis

So where do we end up with these two distinct views of the future? The truth, is likely found in the interplay between the two. At the current time in our history, it is pretty hard to see the future as bright and shiny as Kaku, as we face a lot of serious challenges to our existence. Peak Oil and Climate change chief among them.

At the same time, it is hard for me to agree with the doom and gloom that permeates Greer’s book. I don’t see peak oil as the end of the world, though it may certainly drastically change our the form of our civilization. I think the Long Descent should serve as a warning, and something we can absolutely mitigate. Contrary to many of Greer’s claims, the future is not inevitable.

As such, reading between the two options of Greer and Kaku, a few ideas can be synthesized. That the future is not likely a straight shot of progress towards a gleaming utopia, nor a long descent into some kind of post-civilization dystopia. Most importantly, we are making the choices right now that are going to shape what that future looks like.

We have a lot of choices and actions that can be done today, and many of them are in fact already in process. The old world, the Oil Age, is passing away, and we can already sense the stirrings of the next world to come. Birthing is not a clean process, and sometimes it is even messy and bloody. But I think we can survive it, and not only survive, but flourish.

As such, in the coming posts I want to examine both the Long Descent and Kaku’s Future in a little more depth.

Thanks for reading!

Sources/References;

Michio Kaku, Physics of the Future. 2011

John Michael Greer, The Long Descent. 2008

https://fireiceandsteel.wordpress.com/2016/05/10/some-thoughts-on-the-long-descent/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utopian_and_dystopian_fiction

Updates 5/17/18

Hello again folks!

I’m working on wrapping up a lot of different projects right now. So here are a few updates, as I try to get moving here again.

The Indiegogo campaign I ran for my most recent novel was a success. Even though I did not reach my full goal, I raised enough money to fund cover art and design, which is the largest expense of my books at the moment. In addition, I reached THOUSANDS of people, and that is a wider network than I could have imagined. It is really exciting to see my potential audience being that large, as it I never expected I could reach that many people.

In addition to the novel, I have also finished with a full manuscript on animism. Yes, I will have a book coming out about animism, though it may be a year or two down the road at this moment. It will encompass a lot of the ground I cover here at this blog, as well as a lot of new territory too. I am really excited about it, and hope to be able to talk more about it soon.

On top of all of that, I am hoping to return to more regular blogging on this platform. My manuscript on animism has really broken my head open, and there are a lot of threads I want to chase down. Many of these threads are outside the scope of that manuscript. In many ways, my recent manuscript is a “101 – 201” type of animism for a general audience. I have spent the last 6 years or so on this blog developing that kind of material.

I may even start to synthesize some sort of “101” level posts for this blog, in order to help clean up some of my earlier work. It is always amazing to me how much my thoughts have grown and developed since I first began this blog. With my recent work, I really think there is a lot of potential, and I have perhaps outgrown some earlier posts. We are all always learning and growing, right?

So, for some forthcoming blogs, I am hoping to dive a little deeper into what my animism really looks like. Maybe 301 – 401 level stuff, eh? My rough goal of course is to not only dig deeper, but to integrate more ideas into the greater whole. I also want to return to my blog series on the UN sustainable development goals, as well as my Walking with the Ancestors series. Those projects have lain dormant for a bit.

There is a lot of work on the horizon, so I am hoping you all will join me as I move forward this year.