Computing Sustainability

What does it mean for an activity to be sustainable? Just that it can be continued for a long time!

There are many facets to be unpacked here. What's a long time? If my guitar has good sustain, it means that I can play a note and hold it for maybe ten seconds. When looking at the sustainability of fossil fuel combustion, the time horizon is more in the zone of a century.

What is going to put a stop to the activity? The vibrating string on my guitar just diminishes gradually and then goes silent. Looking at the nuclear weapons strategy of Mutually Assured Destruction, the main concern about its sustainability is the possibility of global nuclear annihilation. Looking at the whaling industry, the main concern is the extinction of whales of whatever species.

There are two aspects to the cessation of the activity. We might rely on that activity, and so we will suffer when the activity stops. If the activity stops because the activity has caused enough of a disaster that it is no longer possible to continue the activity, we may well suffer directly from that disaster.

What puts a stop to an activity might not be a consequence of the activity. I like to go hiking through the vacant lots on the hillside to the north of our house. Around here the vacant lots are getting developed quite rapidly. In a few years, I will no longer be able to hike through those lots. My hiking activity is not sustainable, but not as any consequence of the hiking itself.

What's the scope of the activity? Lots of people might be doing the same sort of thing. Or other people might be doing something similar. Fossil fuel combustion is an activity with a rich scope. I drive my car a few hours a week to shop, meet friends, etc. This activity of me driving my car, that has negligible impact on the global environment. But around the world, billions of people are similarly driving their cars a few hours a week. The total impact of everybody driving, that is considerable. And then fossil fuel combustion also includes coal and gas burning power plants, ocean freighters, jet airliners, gas powered residential furnaces, oil fueled industrial boilers, etc. When I consider the sustainability of my driving habits, it makes sense to see this activity as an instance of a larger pattern, and to think about the sustainability of the larger pattern. It's not like everyone else is going to stop driving just so I can continue!

To decide how sustainable an activity is, that involves predicting the future. My hiking is not sustainable because those vacant lots will be developed. But that is my prediction of the future! Maybe those lots won't get developed!

Long term sustainability of activities embedded in complex systems: this sort of puzzle is really unsolvable in any definitive way. It might seem clear enough that, between the depletion of fossil fuel resources and the climate consequences of CO2 emissions, our driving habits are not sustainable in the long run. But maybe fusion power will come to the rescue, with electric vehicles taking over, and we can continue our happy motoring lifestyle. Some sort of scenario analysis needs to be brought in. To know what the future will look like is impossible. But we can more practically sketch out some manageable number of scenarios, combinations of gross features of our ways of living. Looking at the sustainability of whatever activity, we can evaluate that against each scenario. The answer will be relative to the scenario.

Digital electronic computing is a vast and diverse activity in the world these days. How sustainable is it? What might put a stop to it? Probably some amount of computing will continue for a long time, if only at a small scale. But, could the dominance of computing in our society be toppled? How could that happen?

One plausible future scenario is that climate change continues as people continue to burn fossil fuels as long as possible. People stop large scale burning of fossil fuels because climate change destroys our industrial capabilities. Could we continue computing if lose the industrial capability for mining coal etc.? An aspect of computing that is not so visible is the way digital electronic microchips are made. This involves massive technological investment. We will only be able to make computers, and hence be able to compute, if our industrial and technological capabilities are maintained at quite a high level. Certainly if there is just a blip for a few years, computers are quite durable so there needn't be an interruption in our computing capability. But if chip manufacture fails for decades, the impact will be massive.

The unsustainability of computing due to the collapse of our industrial capability, this can be like the unsustainability of my hiking because the vacant lots got developed. My hiking is no causal factor in the development of the vacant lots. Similarly, the collapse of industrial capability could be a result of factors entirely different than computing, e.g. fossil fuel combustion and climate change. But it could also be that computing contributes to its own demise.

Computing could cause its own demise quite directly. We are already seeing the pollution of the web from all kinds of computationally created dangers. Spam, misinformation, fraud, viruses, fishing... the list is constantly growing. The web could get to be so dangerous that usage declines dramatically. The economics of chip manufacturing requires huge volume in order to amortize the huge investment in design and process development. If the demand for hardware declines, the unit cost will rise, further reducing the volume. This can become a vicious cycle that could have massive impact.

A less direct causal path, whereby computing contributes to its own demise, is where computing weakens society, and the weakened society can no longer adequately support the computational infrastructure. A very simple example would be how people lose the ability to do mathematics without digital electronic support, and thus lose the capability to debug software. A more complex example would be where the political polarization driven by misinformation in social media etc. leads to the destruction of universities so there are no more engineers to maintain chip manufacturing facilities. A yet more complex example would be where that political polarization prevents effective response to climate change, which leads to the collapse of our industrial capabilities, including chip manufacturing.

Whether any of these rather wild scenarios could come to pass... Yogi Berra had it right: nothing is harder to predict than the future!

Fission Power

Evidence continues to mount that fossil fuel combustion is causing climate havoc. Floods and droughts, damage to cities and farms: it is becoming clear to more and more people that we need to wean ourselves off fossil fuels somehow. This is, however, an enormous challenge. We humans live very large on the earth nowadays, in our combinations of large populations and comfortable lifestyles. We consume energy globally at a rate of about 20 TeraWatts. We cook, heat our homes, drive our cars, run our factories... energy is fundamental to our modern way of life. Most of this energy comes from fossil fuels: coal, petroleum, and methane. To avoid enormous difficulties from any total change to our way of life, we need to substitute non-fossil sources to continue to provide energy at the required scale. Maybe in the future we will develop new sources, but in the next few decades at least we will need to rely on existing technology. Renewable sources such as solar, wind, and hydro are already in widespread use. Energy storage systems can help bridge the gap between fluctuating supply and fluctuating demand. But how to scale up renewable sources to meet the requirements of our modern society remains a daunting challenge. Nuclear fission is another existing technology that already provides steady reliable power at large scale. It is an very real option on the table for addressing climate change.

When your credit card bill is due and your checking account is empty, it is tempting to pay one credit card bill by borrowing from a different credit card. The general temptation is to solve short term problems by creating even larger long term problems. It's not an entirely invalid approach, but it's definitely smart to go down that road with eyes wide open. If we do choose to ramp nuclear power up by the factor of about 25x that would be needed to meet our energy needs, how might that move fit into a longer term strategy?

The long term strategy for modern society is rather cloudy but still worth considering. There is not going to be any kind of consensus possible, but that shouldn't stop a person from thinking about it. Some of the main options:

• The world is due to end quite soon, so a long term strategy has no application.
• We cannot have any idea about the future. Long term planning is an absurd pretense.
• Technology will continue to advance at an ever more astounding pace. Any problems we create now will easily be fixed by the people of the future with their capabilities that will be almost miraculous by our present standards.
• Maybe after a few thousand more years of expanding population and increasing comfort, humanity will start to bump up against actual planetary limits, but there is no point in worrying about that now.
• We are clearly hitting real planetary limits already. But it takes time for us to shift our various systems, such as agriculture, to more sustainable patterns. We cannot continue to consume energy at today's rate, but we need a few decades to shift. The immediate dangers of climate change mean that we need to shift to non-fossil sources sooner than we can reduce our energy consumption. Nuclear power can provide a bridge from today's unsustainable way of living to a future sustainability.

It's worth thinking through what nuclear power would look like under these various scenarios. To ramp up nuclear power by 25x over the next decade or two is already a daunting prospect. If energy consumption continues to double every 50 years or so... what this would mean exactly in terms of uranium mining, waste management, fuel transport, etc. - I don't have answers, but it would be worth exploring such possibilities.

To flesh out such visions of how nuclear power could be scaled up in the future, perhaps the baseline assumption might be that everything goes according to plan. But effective engineering requires us to think about what might go wrong. If we are considering the option of walking down a tightrope to get to our destination, we'd be wise to understand how high off the ground that rope is!

Some of the unpleasant surprises worth considering:

• Natural disasters such as earthquakes can cause radioactive material to escape containment.
• Safe management of nuclear material can require a somewhat advanced level of industrial capabilities to make available the necessary equipment and materials. Even with scaled up nuclear power, other factors could cause our industrial capabilities to be significantly reduced.
• All kinds of human bungling are not just possible but unavoidable. People are not perfect - not even close to perfect.
• It's not just that people make mistakes. People will quite deliberately act to benefit themselves at whatever cost to others. It may be possible to build a very safe reactor, but it will cheaper to build one that is less safe.
• People are always involved in conflicts at every scale. Nuclear technology can be weaponized in any number of ways. Of course we have very many nuclear explosive devices already built and ready for action. But the more we have fissile material circulating and the machinery for refining it etc., the easier it will be to build more explosive devices.

  Weaponization is not limited to nuclear explosives. Depleted uranium is already in widespread use in various types of bullets and other projectiles, just because of its metallurgical properties. Easy availability of radioactive materials will make them attractive for all sorts of uses. Various sorts of dirty bombs, conventional explosives coupled with radiactive shrapnel, are also straightforward possibilities. We have seen in the Ukraine where Russian troops occupied nuclear power facilities, because Ukrainian forces would not likely attack them there because of the risk of releasing radiative materials into the environment.

• Nuclear technology can be a source of conflict. A nation might be developing nuclear technology for entirely peaceful purposes, but this unavoidably also increases their ability to build nuclear weapons. Their enemies will be motivated to attack and destroy their nuclear facilities, to cut off that nuclear capability.

It's also important to think about how we should evaluate consequences. We could just decide that it is too difficult to wean ourselves off fossil fuels, and just accept the ensuing climate change. We could cut our energy consumption dramatically to avoid climate change, and just accept the ensuing disruptions to our way of life. Or, if we decide to scale up nuclear power and some of the possible negative consequences arise, how bad could they be? Nowadays I see folks arguing that nuclear war wouldn't be so bad. Perhaps any cost short of human extinction should be considered acceptable. Even if ramping up nuclear power leads to human extinction... well, humans will surely go extinct sooner or later anyway, and if nuclear power improves our lives before that point, maybe it is a worthwhile bargain.

Understanding the various risks is very difficult. Many of the numbers involved are simply unknown, especially when the time scales involve many thousands of years. But there are also more complicated sources of uncertainty. Government inspectors will help prevent dangerous cost-cutting in nuclear facilities, but then government inspectors are themselves corruptible too. Nuclear advocates will point out that there have been no documented fatalities due to plutonium toxicity. But of course the people that handle plutonium employ many safety measures. Is plutonium safe because we know how dangerous it is? It's a bit like how the Mutually Assured Destruction provided by nuclear weapons has made the world a safer place, in some sense or other.

How can we decide what to do, in a game with such high stakes, with such high uncertainty, faced with such paradoxical logic? At least if we can get some common understanding of the predicament, that might be a start!

Steady Growth

There is a notion around that humanity requires steady growth to be healthy and happy. Steady growth clearly cannot continue for long on a finite planet. So there is another related notion around, that interplanetary colonization is required for humanity to be healthy and happy. Even the solar system is finite of course, so interstellar colonization is a natural next step. Why not intergalactic?!

But there are other physical limits that will constrain growth. Of course it could be that we will discover that our notions about physical limits are not accurate. But then our notions about the need for growth could be wrong, too. Any and all of our ideas could be wrong, but still, we're thinking beings; if we expect to succeed with interstellar colonization, we'd better hone the precision of our thinking!

One of the most fundamental physical limits in our theories today is the speed of light. Perhaps we'll find a way to colonize other galaxies, but it will take us a very long time to get to any of them!

Steady growth generally means exponential growth. Over a generation, the growth in whatever segment of the population will grow in proportion to the size of that segment. If health and happiness is to be equitably distributed, and if health and happiness requires growth, then growth will be exponential.

Physics comes in because humans, whatever else they might be, are also physical objects. The disciples of Ray Kurzweil might quibble: perhaps humans, in essence, are actually information. But even information requires some minimal physical substrate to be stored and processed! In any case, I am certainly not proposing that the specific numbers of my back-of-envelope calculations here should be taken with any seriousness. My point here is that steady growth will eventually bump up against the physical limit of the speed of light. I invite everyone to run the numbers as they see fit.

Suppose humanity's domain is some large sphere, centered on the earth presumably, and stretching out through interstellar space toward the distant galaxies. Since humanity is steadily growing, its domain is also growing. If humanity is growing exponentially, the volume of its domain will also be growing exponentially. Of course humanity can grow, to some extent, while in some fixed domain. That's what we've been doing on earth so far.

What exactly the carrying capacity of earth is, that's difficult to say. But, again, there are physical limits. The earth's mass is about 10^13 times the total mass of humanity. If the population grows at a steady 1% per year, then in about 3000 years, the total mass of humanity will exceed the total mass of the planet earth. Obviously we will run into serious trouble long before that; it is difficult to predict the exact course of our battle against limits to growth. The point of my quick calculations here is that they set some quite hard bounds. If humanity is to continue to grow at a steady 1%, certainly before 3000 years have gone by, we will need to be well down the road of interplanetary colonization.

It's easy to run similar numbers for the solar system. In less than 5000 years, the steadily growing mass of humanity will exceed the total mass of the solar system. Probably we will not find a way to digest the sun, so we will need to be colonizing distant stars well before then.

So let's say that we have spread out in the galaxy out to some radius R. If humanity is growing at 1% per year, the volume of its domain must also be growing at 1% per year, and then the radius will need to grow at 0.3% per year. Once that radius hits 300 light years, that steady growth will require the radius to grow more than one light year per year, i.e. faster than the speed of light!

So a reasonable bound on steady growth of 1% per year is that the domain of humanity will hit a hard physical limit at radius 300 light years. That's a volume of about 3 x 10^61 cm. Given the rough density of galactic matter, the total mass in that volume would be about 3 x 10^40 grams. A human weighs about 10^5 grams, so that would be a maximum population of about 3 x 10^35... assuming humans have incorporated all material into their bodies! Today's population is about 10^10, so that's a population growth of a factor of 3 x 10^25. At a steady 1% growth rate, we'll hit the speed of light in about 6000 years.

Of course these rough calculations involve many very unrealistic assumptions. There is no way that humanity will absorb into their bodies the entire mass of galactic matter inside a sphere of radius 300 light years. But even if they could, we'd hit the speed of light in 6000 years, given a steady 1% growth rate. 6000 years is already not an absurdly long time - it's roughly our historical horizon. Absurdly generous assumptions about the success of humanity's battle against the limits to growth already run into limits that are not absurdly far away.

The Need for Growth

I've heard many times people say that our economic system requires growth in order to function. Usually people explain this by saying that the only way that interest can be paid on debt is if the money supply increases. This is not true, though. In a debt-based money system, the sum of money accounts is always zero. People who owe money need to be able to provide goods and services that people who have lent the money will purchase, but as long as that is true, there is exactly enough money floating around to pay any debts that are floating around. Understanding this, we can see that paying interest doesn't require a growing economy. So, is a growing economy actually required at all?

Here's a different notion of how our economic system requires growth to function. Our system requires inflation to encourage people to spend and invest. In a deflationary environment, it's better just to hold onto money - in which case, the economy freezes up completely. Inflation has two different meanings that are of course related. One meaning is an overall increasing level of prices. Another meaning is an increasing money supply. If the supply of dollars goes up, then the value of each dollar goes down, which means prices go up.

Our economic system needs prices to go steadily up in order to encourage people to spend and invest, which is what keeps the economy functioning. Prices will go up as the money supply goes up. The money supply goes up as debt goes up. This is what a growing economy is. I.e., our economy indeed requires growth in order to function.

Freighter Grid

One way to move data from one computer to another is through an electronic network. Another way is for the source computer to write the data to some physical medium, e.g. a USB flash drive, then for someone to carry that flash drive over to the destination computer, which can then read the data from the device. That's "sneaker net" - you can move the data faster if you are wearing running shoes!

One of the challenges with energy in general is that places rich in energy are often far from the consumers of that energy. Of course, over time the consumers tend to relocate closer to the sources of energy, e.g. towns spring up where river flow can be dammed or where coal is nearby. Canals and rail lines can be built to carry coal, and pipelines can be built to carry petroleum and natural gas.

Electric transmission lines are another way to move energy. Rather than moving coal by rail, coal burning power plants are sometimes built near coal mines and the generated power moved across those long wires.

Moving energy is particularly difficult when the sources are widely distributed or rapidly changing. For example, natural gas fields are located in remote regions of Siberia. It is not cost-effective to build the very long pipelines that would be necessary to move this gas to existing customers. Gas-burning power plants could be built, but then very long electric transmission lines would be necessary, and those would also be too expensive. Natural gas is also a feed-stock for various plastics and nitrogen fertilizer, so another way to exploit the gas resource is to put a chemical factory at the gas field and then transport the materials produced, which embody the energy of the gas in a much more compact form. Aluminum ore is widely distributed, but aluminum production requires a lot of electricity. If aluminum ore is located near the gas field, then an aluminum plant can be built near the gas field. A paper mill is a similar way to use remote energy resources, allowing energy to be moved in a more compact product form.

At some point though customers want electricity itself rather than paper or aluminum. There are surely many windy places located on remote coastlines. One way to exploit this resource would be by transporting batteries back and forth between producers and consumers. Large ships could carry these batteries, loading up charged batteries from remote coastal areas, carrying them to ports near urban areas where they could be discharged into the power distribution grid, then carrying the depleted batteries back to the remote coastal areas to be recharged.

Today, battery power is generally too expensive to be used for bulk power. In most places batteries make better sense for providing ancillary services such as spinning reserves or power smoothing, though in remote areas battery power is already less expensive than alternatives. But as fossil fuel use becomes more limited and as battery technology improves, transmitting power by transporting batteries - "freighter grid" - seems to be a very practical way to keep the electricity flowing!

Retrenchment under Limits

The graphs in my previous post looked a bit off: the long-term balance could grow without limit. Once the long-term balance grows large enough that the interest earned at each step exceeds the penalty for transfers to the short-term balance, then collapse becomes impossible.

The long-term balance corresponds roughly to altitude in the flight power curve model, while the short-term balance corresponds roughly to speed. One good flight strategy is to stay at a high enough altitude that recovery is possible from a stall. More altitude makes it possible to recover even from a series of stalls. But ultimately altitude is limited by the reduced air pressure. In a real economic situation there is a similar problem. The more one invests, the more one is pushed out on the risk-return frontier. The easy pickings are exhausted.

To model such limits, I tweaked the structure of my simple model. When the long-term balance is low, it earns a reliable 5 percent. But as the balance grows, there is an increasing probability of a smaller return, to the point where it becomes possible to lose up to 15 percent of the balance in a single step. So the average return gradually declines, as the long-term balance increases, from 5 percent to -5 percent.

Here are four different runs, all with the same threshold. Most likely there are smarter strategies that can outperform this simple threshold strategy. But this new model does seem to be more realistic.

Retrenchment

Jane Austen’s Persuasion begins with retrenchment. Our heroine’s family needs to cut expenses to avoid bankruptcy. But how drastic a cut is really required? How drastic a cut can really be tolerated? Do we need to reduce fossil fuel consumption in order to avoid a climate catastrophe? These are instances of a fascinating class of problems. The power curve in airplane flight is another nice instance. I first learned about this from Ran Prieur’s blog.

I find simple mathematical models helpful in understanding these sorts of puzzles. Here is a first attempt to capture the core structure.

In this retrenchment model, the state of affairs is a pair of numbers that I call a long-term balance and a short-term balance. The long–term balance earns steady interest while the short-term balance earns no interest. Money can be moved back and forth between the accounts. Moving money from the short-term balance to the long-term balance is free, but a penalty is incurred when moving money from the long-term balance to the short-term balance.

The evolution of the system consists of a series of alternating moves. First the world makes a move: interest is earned on the long-term balance, but also a random transfer occurs on the short-term balance. This random transfer might be positive or negative. Then the account holder makes a move: funds can be moved between the balances. After this, both balances must be positive or the sequence ends.

The core problem is to devise a strategy to keep the sequence going. Keeping funds in the long-term balance is good because interest is earned there. But funds must also be kept in the short-term balance in order to cover random negative transfers. The penalty incurred in moving funds from long-term to short-term make it prohibitively expensive to move as frequently as a small short-term balance would require.

The effectiveness of any such strategy depends on the details of the random transfers, for example whether the transfer at one time is correlated with the transfers in the recent past. In a realistic scenario the nature of this random sequence will not be known. The best a strategy can do is to look at the past and infer that the future won’t look too much different.

I coded a simple little simulation. Here the transfers are drawn from a Gaussian distribution and are not correlated across time. The strategy was very simple: when the transfer pulls the short-term balance below zero, move enough funds from the long-term balance to bring the short-term balance up to a fixed threshold. When the short-term balance rises above this threshold, move the excess funds to the long-term balance. As long as the short-term balance is between zero and the threshold, no funds are moved to or from the long-term balance.

Here is one sequence that emerges from this interplay:

Here are two runs where the sequence of transfers is exactly the same, but the threshold differs by less than 1%. The slightly higher threshold maintains a slightly higher short-term balance, thereby incurring fewer penalties for the movement of funds from the long-term balance.

Needs and Wants

We all, humans and other living things, go to considerable effort to acquire food and whatever else we need or want to be able to live and to live well, or at least better. Our complex biological and social structures seem primarily to have taken form, by whatever means, in order to enable us more effectively to fulfill those needs and wants. We have hands in order to grasp.

The natural distinctions seems to be that needs are fundamental requirements and not legitimately subject to question, while wants are optional, negotiable. Perhaps we could extend this ranking by putting luxuries at another step past wants.

This notion, of need and want as differing in degree, misses important logical structure: a want is an end; a need is a means. Curiously, this makes wants more fundamental than needs. A need is a means to fulfill a want. I want to stay alive, therefore I need food. Some wants seem essential; what we need to fulfill those essential wants become the unquestionable needs. Inessential wants then become the conventionally questionable wants or luxuries, and whatever is needed to fulfill those wants, those needs are barely worth discussing.

These core wants and their ancillary nonnegotiable needs, though, are not fixed truths. Indeed, they arise interdependently with the biological and social structures that fulfill them. In a stable world, these structures do seem like fixed truths. But no world is stable across all time and space. The structures that define and fulfill wants and needs vary from place to place and from time to time. Understanding this variation can help one respond to such changes. One can imagine even managing such processes of change, pioneering new social or biological structures to facilitate new patterns of wanting and needing. For example, Shakyamuni Buddha’s creation of the Buddhist monastic order can be understood from this perspective.

For most of us most of the time, though, there is sufficient challenge just in responding effectively to the structural changes that we encounter. A general sort of wisdom involves recognizing that things that appear fixed are instead impermanent, arising and dissolving in dependence on a variety of connected factors. For example, consider how essential it has become to have internet access, when the internet hardly existed thirty years ago. As pay phones have disappeared, cell phones too have become essential.

I am not merely a biological being, I am a social being. I identify with my role in society. The things I need in order to maintain my social role thereby become essential needs. Occasionally one hears in the news about some enormously wealthy person whose needs have somehow become subject to public judgment, usually in some case of family law. It boggles the mind how a court can determine that a person actually needs $10,000 a month or whatever absurd figure. But to understand that a person’s identity is wrapped up in their social role, that understanding starts to make clearer how such needs could be considered legitimate.

Here is definitely a place where each of us has remarkable power to steer change. I can change my social role; I can become a different person. Of course this is never easy. On the other hand, sooner or later each of us will face such a change at the profoundest level as we undergo the process of dying. Given that we can’t hold on forever anyway, maybe a bit of letting go along the way shouldn’t be so unacceptable!

Society provides the stage upon which each of us plays our individual role, but the fabric of society is spun and woven from that very role playing. Of course these structures are all entangled in a boundless web that encompasses the diverse human cultures around the world together with biological, geological, and even astrophysical processes. If we can understand how our most essential wants and needs are in fact evolving parts of this vibrant network, perhaps we will be able to dance more freely with the changes we experience.

Portfolio Management

All too often life is a struggle just to get through the day, to dodge bullets or find food or gather fuel for the warmth to survive. But then, too, it can happen often that we find some options and opportunities for acting with an eye toward the future. What can we do now to make a brighter future?

For an action in the present to bear fruit in the future requires some sort of persistent change in the situation to carry that connection. The resources that we bring to a situation can be viewed as a portfolio. Our actions add and remove assets and liabilities from our portfolio, changing the position from which we will encounter future situations. How can we improve our future position?

Exchangeable Goods

The marketplace is home to many situations that help to brighten our day, providing food or clothing, etc. A marketplace is a place of exchange. Money provides a common medium for exchange; exchange can take place both to and from money. We might bring in a pile of books which we exchange for money at the book dealer, then take our money to the fruit seller to return home with a bag full of peaches. For happy outcomes in a marketplace situation, we need to bring something with exchange value. So, one core component of a portfolio will be a store of exchangeable goods.

Of course, exchangeable goods come in a very wide variety. Financial institutions continue to extend this variety at a bewildering pace. The exchange value of a good depends on market conditions which are always changing. Many financial instruments generate interest or dividends alongside their resale value.

The great virtue of exchangeable goods is their flexibility. It’s hard to know exactly what I might need in the future, but whatever exchangeable goods I might have, as long as they have sufficient total value, can readily be exchanged in the future for whatever it turns out I come to need. That very flexibility has a disadvantage too, as the exchange value of goods fluctuates unpredictably.

An exchangeable good has substance beyond its mere exchange value. Gold coins leave scarred earth and poisoned water in their wake. A deposit account at a bank is not merely a number in a file: the deposit account enables the bank to lend money, facilitating further economic activity whose ripples will radiate along untraceable paths. Stock purchases support the activity of corporations.

Accounting can be a useful tool but, like any tool, it has real limits. . There is a sense in which each of us must tend our own garden, but ultimately the actual situation we face is not limited by the boundaries of my garden versus your garden. Accounting can help broaden our view of a situation by keeping track of the many details. The challenge is to avoid getting lost in the details and thereby narrowing our view of the situation and becoming blind to crucial elements and connections.

Useful Goods

There are many goods that we can store for the future, not to take to exchange at the marketplace, but instead to use ourselves somehow. We can store food to eat in the future. We can store clothing to wear in the future. We can store fuel to burn in the future to stay warm. We can store tools to use in the future, for chopping wood or sewing clothes or growing food.

Useful goods have a stability of value that exchange value cannot provide. The nutritional content of a can of beans is not subject to monetary inflation. On the other hand, the can might rust and lose its integrity so the beans spoil. That’s a large part of what makes gold so useful as money: it doesn’t corrode.

Skills

Skills can be divided into two types: those whose value is principally in exchange, and those that are directly useful. If I know how to grow my own food, that is a skill that I can use directly to create happier experiences in the future. Knowing how to operate some large piece of industrial equipment is a skill that I might be able to use in exchange for money with which I can then buy food etc.

Skills can provide a sort of security that no store of goods can match. A farmer or engineer or artist might become a refugee and forced to leave behind all their gold coins and all their cans of beans. But their skills can be very valuable in their new location and enable them again to survive and thrive. The value of those skills does depend on the situation though. An expert coffee farmer’s knowledge won’t go so far in Canada, for example.

Health

Physical health gives a person the capability of responding to situations effectively. A healthy person can apply the skills they have, can adapt them, and can learn new skills. A healthy person needs fewer resources to engage with situations comfortably and happily. This creates a self-amplifying feedback loop: a healthier person becomes more able to produce a surplus that can be dedicated to further good health; a less healthy person cannot so easily produce a surplus and may even find themselves trapped in a deficit situation when can then have a further negative impact on their health.

Community

Friends and family, people who will help you when you can’t help yourself, are valuable beyond any price. It is our place in our community that gives our lives meaning. Community is the vehicle for giving as much as for receiving. Community is the stage on which our lives unfold. Community is the context in which our identity is situated.

In our modern world there is an institutional dimension to identity and community. For example, our credit record is an aspect of our identity. One can move to a new town on the other side of the country and use bank references etc. as a starting point.

An older sort of community connection is based on religion or ethnicity. A style of dress, knowledge of particular songs or myths, everyday ritual habits such as a prayer before meals, these can provide entry into community.

Spirit

The world is a notoriously unreliable place. Whatever beautiful castles one manages to construct, at some point they are sure to tumble down. And yet, somehow, underlying the turbulent waves of experience, there is some kind of truth, some essence, something really beyond our capacity to grasp or beyond any possible grasping. If we can let go of the constant chase after the ephemeral and deepen our experience to live in a way more consonant with that underlying ungraspable reality, there can be an unshakable undertone of happiness that can continue despite the inevitable unending stream of alternating successes and failures. This consonance can grow with cultivation and become the most profound wealth.

Energy Needs

How easy is it to supply our typical energy needs? The electric power utilities do that routinely these days. Should we be surprised by that?

There are two pieces to this puzzle. The first: is our typical energy usage a good approximation to our actual needs? The energy we typically use is just what is needed to support our present lifestyle. Many societies, with lifestyles quite different than ours, have survived over many generations on much smaller rates of energy consumption. Do we need to maintain our present lifestyle?

The second puzzle piece: how much energy do we typically use? In the United States, a typical household consumes about 10 kilowatthours each day. Since there are 3600 seconds in an hour, that is 36,000 kilowattseconds, or 36 million joules. How much is that?

To get a feel for it, suppose we wanted to store that energy in a household pumped hydroelectric facility. Suppose we built a reservoir 10 meters high, on top of the roof of the house. How big would the reservoir need to be?

The energy in the reservoir is mgh, where m is the mass of the water, g is the acceleration of gravity, and h is the height of the reservoir. g is about 10 meter/sec^2 and we have h as 10 meter. So 100m = 36,000,000 or m = 360,000 kg. A liter of water weighs a kilogram, so that would be 360,000 liters of water, or about 90,000 gallons.

A typical backyard swimming pool contains about 15,000 gallons of water. I.e. our household hydroelectric reservoir needs to hold about six swimming pools of water in order to supply a day's worth of electricity.

Maybe better not to put that on top of the roof!

Traps

A fascinating puzzle came up yesterday in James Howard Kunstler’s talk at the Woodstock Writers Festival. Sometimes we can move ourselves from a comfortable situation to an uncomfortable situation but can’t manage to move back to the comfortable situation. Moving from situation A to situation B can be a lot easier than moving from situation B back to situation A. How does this directionality arise?

It ought to be possible to study this from a systems theory perspective, to look at various concrete examples and then abstract the general patterns involved. I propose calling the broad class of patterns traps. A trap is a system of states and actions where moving from happy state A to unhappy state B is much easier than moving from B back to A.

One general feature of traps must be that, to quote Mr. Kunstler, the move from A to B “seemed like a good idea at the time.” This is why a systems-theoretic analysis of traps is important. Falling into a trap is easy. To avoid falling into traps, we need to cultivate an awareness of what traps look like. The best way to escape a trap is not to fall into it in the first place.

The first step of this project is to compile a catalog of realistic traps, from which we might be able to abstract some general patterns.

Time Lock

A simple trap is where external conditions change so that the path you took simply disappears. For example, falling rock could seal off a mine passage.

Starvation

To cross a desert one must take care to pack enough supplies to make it across. There is a point of no return where you don’t have enough supplies to get back where you started from. If you don’t have the resources to get to a resupply point, you’re stuck.

Slippery Slope

Sometimes moving from point A to point B doesn’t require any effort at all, but moving in the other direction is impossible. By the time you realize you’re moving, it’s too late to do anything about it.

The Ratchet

Many doors have some kind of asymmetrical triangular latch. When the door closes, a gradual ramp on the latch pushes the latch into a free position where the door movement is unimpeded. Then when the door is fully shut, the latch snaps closed. The ramp on the other side of the latch is vertical or perhaps even has a negative slope. Trying to push the door open won’t move that latch. Shutting the door is easy, but opening the door is difficult.

It seems that this pattern is based on inelastic collisions. The smooth ramp allows energy to be put into the latch, moving it to the free state. Then when the latch snaps shut, that energy is dissipated. The sharp reverse side of the ratchet doesn’t provide a way for energy to be put back into the latch.

Burning Bridges

It is possible to move forward in a way that actually destroys the path backwards. For example, one might be driving across a desert. Starvation, the previous pattern, is just running out of gas. But if one is somehow actively destroying the vehicle along the way, that adds an extra feature. Jettisoning supplies or equipment would be an example. Stepping on a mine would be another example. The damage done makes getting back impossible.

Getting Lost

Sometimes the path back to a comfortable state is easy enough but there are very many paths available and most of them don’t lead back. The problem is to figure out which is the right path to take and there just aren’t any clues.

Sunk Costs

An inability to find the path back to a comfortable state can arise because of perceptual distortions that arose as the path out of comfort was traversed. So, for example, each step along a path might strengthen one’s commitment to the correctness of the path. To turn around would be to admit one’s error, which could be too painfully shameful or embarrassing.

Rise and Fall

The varying prosperity of a nation or a civilization is a matter of endless speculation. Every culture seems to have myths about origins and surely many provide a picture of their destiny. One particular class of modern prediction came into prominence in the early nineteenth century with the writings of Thomas Malthus, who foresaw that an ever growing population could not be supported with finite resources. Two hundred years later the human population of our planet continues to rise, so one does find some space for questioning the wisdom of Malthus. More recently, books like The Limits to Growth, by Meadows et al., have tried to sketch the most likely trajectories of our present world using more quantitative methods. Certainly they don’t offer much precision with their wide range of scenarios.

Probably the most notably success in forecasting the end of a period of growth was that of M. King Hubbert, who predicted the 1972 peak in U.S. petroleum production some ten years beforehand. Of course petroleum is not the nation and the nation is not the world, but the U.S.A. was the leading petroleum producer in the world for decades and petroleum is a key resource. The present situation with global petroleum production is a bit difficult to read. Part of the problem is the definition of petroleum. For example, the tar sands being mined in Alberta are surely quite a different sort of material than the classic gushers of the early Texas days, but all the same the end product is automotive fuel etc. so it is not so clear that the distinction makes a difference.

This problem with definitions is hardly limited to fossil fuel resources. A similar problem comes up in economics, when trying to establish a consumer price index. It is easy enough to assemble a shopping basket of typical consumer goods and to tally its price. But the typical shopping basket of one decade is not the same as that of the prior decade, and once a hundred years have passed the baskets have drifted into mutual unrecognizability. If passage on a sailing ship from Boston to Philadelphia cost 10 dollars 100 years ago (I am just guessing here) and today airfare from New York to London is $1200, then how can we compare the purchasing power of a dollar 100 years ago to that of today?

It is not utterly unreasonable to invent some scheme for answering such questions, but it will necessarily be an invention rather than a discovery. We might be able to gather enough data to measure with reasonable accuracy the median income of families 100 years ago and families today. Does the median family of today live better than the median family of 100 years ago? No amount of data gathering can answer that question!

The immediate impetus to my thoughts here was an essay by James Howard Kunstler, “Are You Crazy To Continue Believing In Collapse? That it hasn't happened yet doesn't mean you're wrong.” My reaction to that title is perplexity, because, from my perspective, the collapse is well underway. When did it start is hard to pinpoint. World War 1? The peak of per capita petroleum production in the late 1970s? The peak of conventional petroleum production in 2005?

My perspective is hardly unique to me, of course. For example, long ago Sun Ra taught us, “It’s After the End of the World, Don’t You Know That Yet?”

But I don’t claim that my perspective is accurate. I don’t really think any sort of real accuracy is possible. Is the median family prosperity greater today than it was 50 years ago, is it greater today than it will be 50 years in the future? The easy challenge is the quantitative one. But how all the numbers should be interpreted as quality of life or standard of living or prosperity, that is not a question with a meaningful answer. It’s not just that the ways of living 50 years ago are not available to us today, they don’t even make sense. Of course 50 years is not really over the horizon. Extend the range to 200 or 300 years and the impossibility of comparison is plain. Here by comparison I mean e.g. to determine in some absolute objective fashion that one way of living is superior or inferior to the other. Comparison is certainly possible in terms of a thousand details. It’s the summarization of these that necessarily involves value-based judgments that can hardly take any stand outside the situations being judged. Most likely few modern people would choose to live back in the eighteenth century, if they understood what that choice really meant. But likely, too, that few people of the eighteenth century would choose to live in the twenty first.

Even though we are presented with a steady stream of advances in every facet of life, still it can be that in fact we are already well into the process of collapse. To illustrate the real possibility of such a paradoxical combination, I offer this audio analogy.

Fragility and Transcendence

Dmitri Orlov posted a great talk on the difficulty of predicting the timing of system failures. The challenge he identifies is that systems are designed and constructed on the basis of a model of the way the world works, the interactions between the system and its environment. As long as reality matches the model tolerably well, accurate predictions are feasible. But it is always possible for reality to diverge from the model, throwing the system into uncharted territory where even the modes of failure are unknown, much less their timing.

As David Loy pointed out in his Buddhist History of the West (SUNY 2002), the character of a culture is largely a matter of a strategy for systematizing experience, a struggle to impose an orderly understanding of and control over phenomena. Our modern industrial culture is yet another such strategy, remarkable for its mechanistic materialism, its vast breadth and lack of depth. Life in general consists of an endless series of attempts to repair the breakdowns of the ever-shifting strategies.

Is it possible to build a model from which reality will never diverge? If instead every possible model has some limited scope beyond which the risk of divergence becomes non-negligible, can a model incorporate an accurate definition of its own scope of validity? Can any sort of higher level meta-model of the models themselves somehow extend or transcend the limits of those models, or is any meta-model really just another model with the same inevitable sorts of limits as any other model? Such fascinating and challenging metaphysical questions have been explored deeply over the millennia. In the Buddhist tradition, these discussions revolve around the topic of emptiness and the two truths (relative and ultimate). In the European tradition these are core philosophical questions in the realms of ontology, epistemology, and philosophy of science.But whatever one's metaphysical approach might lead one to expect, our experience continues to be one of constant surprise and breakdown. Whether or not a universally valid model is possible, no such model is in our grasp.

In Buddhism, one's understanding of the inescapability of constant breakdowns and one's approach to managing the repair process are at the core of its transformative project, liberation from suffering for oneself and those with whom one shares those struggles. Our present struggle itself is, at every moment, a perfect example displaying the true nature of reality, a doorway to understanding and effective engagement.

While every moment brings some such struggle with that kind of precious potential, our present crisis of industrial culture, where the breadth of our social-technical systems is amazingly exceeded by the scope of their breakdowns, from the nuclear meltdowns of Fukushima to the massacres of the Syrian civil war, from the collapse of financial institutions in New York to the collapse of ice shelves in Antarctica, the magnitude of our present crisis perhaps brings an opportunity of parallel magnitude, to see in this crisis the stamp of reality, the nature of samsara, the clear understanding of which and effective engagement with which are its transcendence.

Networks of Correspondence

My friend David sent me this link to a video on the Transition Town movement. How communities can prepare for a radical decline in energy availability is surely a question that deserves great attention. There are many types of communities, though: not all are constrained to a small geographical region.

Advances in communications technology have been at the core of the transformation of community during the industrial revolution, from the telegraph through radio and telephone to the internet. But long distance communication goes back to ancient times: the famous post office motto is a description of ancient Persian letter carriers by the ancient Greek, Herodotus. It is quite conceivable that our modern person-to-person media of telephones and internet could well collapse as the resources required to maintain their infrastructure become increasingly scarce. A worthy challenge and opportunity is to find a way to use our present infrastructure as a scaffold to reconstruct the more robust system where ideas are exchanged via the physical exchange of ink on paper, via the post office, via snail mail.

There are many reasons to exchange letters and many general types of relationships with the people whom one might write to. The primary sort of exchange relationship is with people one knows primarily face to face. Perhaps a family member has moved away, or perhaps one maintains communication with people one has met while traveling. At the other extreme, one might exchange letters with representatives of various widely known institutions such as departments of the national government.

Between these extremes are networks of people with some common interest. e.g. scientific or artistic. Modern science was born with the rise of published printed journals that could broadcast ideas across large international communities. These journals grew out of networks of exchanged letters, which continued to thrive alongside and as a foundation for the printed journals up until the era of email. A beautiful vestige of this practice is the archive of Edsger Dijkstra.

Another recent technology that may well not long survive the resource peak is the photocopier. Nowadays there is a quite smooth spectrum of printing technologies, tailored for print runs of every size. Simple printing technology is good for large numbers of copies where the large set-up time can be effectively amortized, so that may well continue, as it has, for centuries. The real ferment of fresh thinking doesn't happen at that large scale, though. Vital culture can happen on a limited budget, but only with effective structures in place to make the best use of those resources.

Three practices necessary to an effective percolation of ideas through a network of correspondents are: a distributed set of address books, sufficiently cross-linked; a regular practice of letters being forwarded so that a single letter has multiple readers; and a regular practice of copying letters or extensive parts of them.

Keeping track of the locations of people has some challenges. People move from place to place at various time scales and it is not efficient to broadcast each move to every possible correspondent. There are also safety issues with broadcasting addresses too widely. To send a letter will generally involve several steps of forwarding, each step facilitated by a correspondent incrementally more intimate with the addressee. Some system is needed whereby copied and forwarded letters include enough network tracking data so responses can be sent back to the original author.

In the best of worlds, such a network of ideas being exchanged would already be up and running as internet and telephone systems crumple. Bits and pieces of such older systems still exist, e.g. telephone trees as an earlier form of an email distribution list. While our advanced technologies continue to function, these more primitive and resilient systems will have the form of a Creative Anachronism or some similar entertainment. But, like amateur radio or backyard gardening or bicycling, snail mail networks could very well take over as a core cultural practice, and on an almost unforeseeable time table, as resource constraints make it difficult or impossible to recover from the various inevitable failures of the more advanced technologies. Resilient technologies have failures too, but recovery is less expensive.

The Human Factor

I was out on my bike yesterday, out to Boiceville and back, delivering a small package to the high school. On my way back, I was having trouble getting my right foot off my pedal. I use Time ATAC pedals which usually work perfectly. Most often my foot is off the pedal because I am on a hill too steep for me to climb without taking a break or two. So on one of my little breaks, I looked at the bottom of my shoe. These pedals couple to cleats that are bolted to the bottoms of my shoes. There should be two bolts on each shoe, but my right shoe only had one bolt remaining, and the cleat had rotated around that one bolt. I reoriented the cleat and tightened the remaining bolt and managed to get back home - with more trouble from the hills than the pedals! I stopped at my Local Bicycle Shop and sure enough they had a spare bolt of the right size and shape, so that got my shoes back in business. I still have a lot of work to do to get strong enough for our local ups and downs!

The effectiveness of my bicycle really depends on a network of spare parts, maintenance supplies, and people with the expertise to use them. This is true of most any technology. On a much grander scale, this dependence is being made clear in Japan, with the problems at the Fukushima nuclear plant. Indeed, it is an interdependence. The nuclear plant requires some power source to pump cooling water, while the plant is itself a major power source. The plant's functioning is tied to its environment in many ways. Its geological environment was the immediate source of the present catastrophe, so that relationship is all too clear. But the human environment, the social context, is perhaps the most crucial facet upon which a nuclear plant depends.

I must say, I am thinking of the current pared down staff of fifty at the Fukushima plant, and thinking of their families. This staff is putting their own lives at grave risk in order to prevent this crisis from further escalation. These people are true heroes. I am praying that they can maintain clear thinking under such extraordinary stress, and that they get the support they need to succeed in their mission, to cool those reactors down, and the used fuel. I pray also for their families, that they can soon be reunited with their loved ones, with all in good health.

In weighing our options for future use of nuclear power, we need to consider what sort of arrangement could provide the greatest safety, or at least understand clearly and weigh accurately the risks involved. Since the earthquake was the primary cause of the Fukushima catastrophe, it's easy to put as a top priority: don't put nuclear reactors on geological faults. But it is very dangerous to get too focussed on the most recent failures of some technology, becoming blind to other key factors that simply haven't made themselves so obvious so recently.

The human side of nuclear technology is an essential factor to consider when weighing the risks in such systems. How might the society using a reactor fail to manage that reactor safely? War or plague or famine could weaken the society so they just don't have the capability to maintain regular servicing or to respond to some minor emergency. Technology for manufacturing spare parts might have been commonplace when the reactor was built, but could become obsolete and therefore prohibitively expensive. Various types of financial and political collapse could eradicate the engineering and managerial expertise required for such a complex system.

Nuclear Guardianship recognizes that while we have a choice whether to build new reactors, we have already committed ourselves, for many generations to come, to maintain the nuclear materials we have already generated. How can we be sure that future generations will be able to manage the nuclear wastes we leave behind? Some of this waste will remain highly toxic for tens of thousands of years, i.e. longer than recorded human history. This is already a daunting task.

The most likely way that buried waste might resurface is through human intervention. People fail to do good not merely through incapacity. Violence has been part of the human condition as long as there have been humans - that is at least a plausible hypothesis. There is a lot of trouble one can create or threaten with nuclear materials. Part of the challenge with nuclear technology is how to make sure the material and the expertise don't get into the wrong hands, the hands of people that might misuse it. Of course, misuse is a curious concept. One might classify any military use as misuse. Or perhaps military use is proper use if that use is by friendly agents, and only constitutes misuses if it is by enemy agents. Who can actually decide whether and how to use nuclear technology in the future?

Geology is a difficult science - earthquakes and tsunamis are impossible to forecast with any precision. But human behavior is so much more complex and unpredictable. If we don't want to build reactors near geological fault lines, shouldn't we also avoid building them near human fault lines?

Solar Fruit Dryer

The current process by which food is provided to most folks in the United States is one that uses large amounts of petroleum, from the farm through the distribution network to the home. As petroleum and other sources of energy get more scarce, we will need to find new ways - and return to old ways - that are less energy-intensive. These changes will be required through all the stages of growing, preserving, and distributing food.




Here is a simple design for a solar fruit dryer. The lower part is a trapezoidal solar collector. The top surface of the collector is clear glass. This covers a space for air to flow, in from the bottom, up through the collector as it is heated, then into the drying chamber above the collector. The bottom surface of this air space is a metal surface painted black, to absorb sunlight and turn it into heat. Below the metal surface is a layer of insulation, so the heat from the metal surface goes into the flowing air above it rather than the outside air below it.

The heated air rises and flows from the solar collector into the drying chamber. This air passes over several trays of drying fruit. The air is dryest as it enters the chamber, so the first tray it encounters is that with the dryest fruit, i.e. the fruit closest to the end of drying process. As the air rises, it passes over successively less dry fruit. Finally the air rise out through the top of the drying chamber and into the chimney.

The chimney is simply a vertical tube that helps the rising air accumulate lifting power to keep the steady movement of air in at the bottom of the solar collector, through the dryer, and out at the top of the chimney.

The drying chamber has a door allowing new trays of fresh fruit to be added at the top and trays of dried fruit to be removed from the bottom. As trays are removed from the bottom, the remaining trays should be shuffled down, creating space at the top for the fresh trays to be added.

The next stage of development of this idea will be to tune the relative sizes of the components, to allow maximum throughput of fruit with the least expense. A moderately sized unit ought to be inexpensive enough to build that this tuning can effectively be done experimentally.

The grand vision is that the dried fruit can be taken by bicycle to local farmstands to be sold, and then fresh fruit to be dried can be brought from the farmstand on the return bike trip. Mix in canoes as needed!

The Illusion of Peak Petroleum Production

The United States produces considerably less petroleum per year nowadays that it did back around 1970. Similarly, production is in decline in the North Sea oil fields of Great Britain and Norway. Still, though, global production is holding reasonable steady. What does the future hold? Can we expect new technology to continue to open up new resources - or perhaps it's just some yet hazily perceived geological process that will continue to bubble up new oil fields as fast as we can burn through them.

Speculation on this topic generally focuses on some supposed "peak" in production, a point where petroleum is getting harder to extract at a rate faster than our extraction technology is improving. The peak is the point where petroleum production reaches its maximum, after which production will forever be less than that peak. Knowing when that peak is to occur - or has it already occurred? - should help us plan ahead, or so one common brand of thinking goes.

It seems obvious from a mathematical perspective that petroleum production must have a peak at some point. If one accepts that the time interval over which production occurs is bounded both in the past and in the future, at the very least by the emergence of the planet earth from the debris left by the last local supernova and its disappearance in the thermonuclear fire of the next local supernova, and if we represent production as a series of numbers, perhaps the daily tallies, then some number from that finite set must be the largest. Perhaps that maximum occurs multiple times, but if the tallies are given with sufficient precision the likelihood of a repeated number diminishes to insignificance.

What we're interested in, though, is not the mere existence of that peak, but its timing. That, I want to argue here, is chimeric. At a very practical level, the time of the peak may very easily jump across decades, depending on accounting details buried deep in the footnotes. Once you start to play along, the game is so easy that you will surely be able to generate many more accounting tricks than I will suggest here and you will be able to cause the peak to jump across decades all by yourself. But let me make the first few moves, in case they're not immediately obvious.

First, the tally intervals need to be established. This involves setting both their duration and their exact start points. For example, a yearly tally might start on January 1 but perhaps some other date is preferable. Given that production is spread across the globe and undertaken by diverse organizations, the exact start and stop points of the intervals might vary by time zone or by fiscal years in use. The final tally for e.g. 2008 might be the sum of production by all the producing organization, each in their individual fiscal 2008, many of which might be mostly in calendar year 2007.

In any year, the production rates day by day will surely not be constant. One year could have a total production less than some later year, but the first year might easily have a day whose production total exceeds that of any day in the later year.

The sequence of production tallies using one rule for intervals might have several similarly large numbers but only one true maximum. By changing the accounting rules, the numbers will all change a bit, easily by several percent. There won't be an exact correspondence between the two sequences of numbers, because they are defined over different intervals. But if there are two numbers very close in size but quite far apart in timing, a small adjustment can bring the smaller number up a few percent and the larger number down a few percent, so the maximum production tally can be shifted to a very different timing in the sequence.

Petroleum product has ramped up to current levels over almost 200 years. It seems likely enough that production rates are not likely to double yet again from current levels. Nor does it seem likely that production will plummet in just a few years. We are almost certainly faced with decades of fluctuating production, a bumpy plateau, before a slow decline sets in. There isn't a clear line between the plateau and the decline - such a distinction can only be made precise by arbitrary choices of accounting rules and curve fitting parameters. The exact intervals over which production is tallied, that is a first such accounting rule by which such neat distinctions as peaks and plateaus can be manipulated.

Another crucial facet of production accounting is gross flow versus net flow. What is most interesting to society at large is the net output of useful petroleum products such as gasoline, kerozene, etc. that the petroleum industry makes available for end uses such as transportation, heating, etc. Gross production would be the total volume of material extracted from oil fields etc. There can be a lot of variation in the amount of end product made available from whatever fixed amount of gross production. Some crude petroleum may be lost in transportation - more will be lost, generally, from remote fields. Crude petroleum is a class of material which covers a lot of variation - not every barrel will yield the same amount of refined product.

Some really difficult accounting comes into play when considering internal use by the petroleum industry of refined product. However much gasoline etc. is used by the petroleum industry in exploring, extracting, transporting, and refining operations, that much gasoline was not provided for end use by society at large. But how can one really draw a line where the petroleum industry starts and stops? What about the refined product consumed by e.g. the steel industry in producing the tools and structures it provides to the petroleum industry? Should we deduct that petroleum to determine net petroleum production?

As petroleum gets more and more difficult to extract, the petroleum industry will consume more and more resources per barrel of oil. However the exact accounting is performed, a steady gross production will be yielding a declining net production. But the details of the accounting will generate significantly different sequences of net production tallies, which will likely give peaks at very different times.

The exact timing of peak petroleum production is an artifact of arbitrary details of statistical analysis and accounting. The exact timing of the peak is useless for any kind of planning purpose. What is much more useful is a rough forecast of production, something like average production rate decade by decade for the next century. Today we are producing around 85 million barrels per day of crude. In the decade 2030-2040, is this likely to increase to 90 or 95 million or more, will it hold roughly steady, or might we see a decrease to 75 million barrels per day or even less? These are meaningful questions, however difficult to answer. Guessing the timing of peak production is a waste of time.

A Thousand Words

A picture might help help clarify the idea about random walks in multidimensional spaces. Here A is some state of affairs in the past, and B is the present state of affairs. There is a region around B that represents the possible states of affairs some relatively short time in the future. In two (or more) dimensions, most of these next states are further from A than is B. If the direction of the next steps we actually take is purely random, we will most likely end up moving further away from A. I.e. a tendency to move further and further from the way things were in the past does not imply any consistent direction of movement.

Branching Possibilities

Science and technology seem to be the paradigms of progress. Whether other institutions will advance to ever greater levels of excellence and accomplishment, by whatever measure, doubt seems not to be out of place. But how can science and technology ever go backwards?

The trajectory we've traced through past time does have a directed one dimensional appearance. Surely there is just one set of events that actually happened in e.g. 1752 and some other actual events in 1753 and all the events of 1753 happened after those in 1752. Time advances forward inevitably, therefore progress is inevitable - temporal progress, at the least. The twentieth century did a good enough job teaching us that society in general needn't progress with time. But it also brought us from light bulbs to cell phones - and advances in the nineteenth century were similarly dramatic. How can the twenty first not continue the trend?

This apparent trend is an illusion. Looking back from the great accomplishments of our day, one can find tiny seeds fifty and one hundred years ago from which they have grown. But many other seeds from those past times failed to grow. Many technologies that were thriving at that time have since disappeared. For the most part, these are technologies that would serve little purpose in our time, so their disappearance is small loss. But this kind of pattern starts to look more like a random walk, rather than movement in any consistent direction. One can look further and further back in time and see that we have moved ever greater distances from those earlier states of affairs. But... just because we are moving further and further from the past, doesn't imply that there is any correlation between the direction of the next step and the directions of any past step.

Consider the way distance works in a multidimensional space. Let A be one point, representing a past state of affairs. Let B be another point, the present state of affairs, some considerable distance from A. Now look at a small sphere or ball around B, representing possible states some relatively short time in the future. Most of that sphere or ball will be further from A than B is. The higher the dimensionality, the greater the fraction of the sphere that is further from A. That is, purely random movement will most often lead to states more and more different than past states. This appearance of a trend of increasing difference does not imply movement in any consistent direction.

Of course, movement in science and technology is hardly random. Nor is it predetermined and inevitable. How social institutions such as these steer themselves or are steered, somehow through the collective actions of large numbers of persons along with happy and sad accidents of equipment behavior etc., that is a huge tangle, surely beyond any ultimate resolution. But to realize that multiple paths are possible and that our actions are crucially consequential in determining which path we actually take, this is the central purpose of my exploration here.

The range of possibilities has a hierarchical structure. At a small scale, any individual researcher is confronted daily with choices about how to proceed - which tests to perform to diagnose some equipment malfunction, etc. At a larger scale, a research team needs to choose which research projects to pursue. At a very large scale, society needs to decide what kind of scientific and technological institutions to permit and support. In all these cases, the menu of options that presents itself is not likely to be the menu one would most like to see. There are practical steps that one can take at any given time, but they generally will bring surprising results - pleasant and unpleasant.

We seem to be caught in a trend of increasing financial constraints. Maybe this will turn itself around soon, but maybe not. What kind of science might work best on a tight budget? Maybe we need to constrain ourselves to funding the least risky projects? Or maybe this is exactly the time to be planting many small seeds. Risk evaluation is itself inherently risky! We may not want to run the risk of putting all our eggs in a basket that we think we know is safe!

Connected Crises

I'm not a fan of the automobile, but still I put on my share of miles, ferrying our teenager to the pool and back, buying groceries, participating in group Dharma events, etc. It's hard to find time to get out for a walk, with all the driving I do! But it really wouldn't be practical to walk to many of the places I go, or even to ride a bike. The pool is five miles away - sometimes we ride there, but there are some narrow busy twisty roads along the way, which are even more treacherous in the rain.

In my bachelor days I lived for years without a car, relying on walking, biking, and public transportation. But that was also in the Portland, Oregon area, where the roads and the rails and the weather make that easier than almost anywhere else in the USA. Now, trying to support the expanding horizons of a teenager etc., in a much less hospitable environment - certainly it would still be possible to live without a car, but at a much greater cost.

The automobile can stand as the common denominator between two of our major long term crises, health care and climate change.

The health care crisis is extremely complex, of course. It is clearly not sustainable to have health care costs as a growing fraction of the GDP. And the services provided don't seem to be optimally distributed - certainly many people are under served. It may seem harsh to suggest that some people might be over served, but it does seem that we need to look carefully at what we expect from the health care system. Old age, sickness, and death can be managed to some extent, but not utterly evaded. A desperate grasping at some ideal of physical health, is not healthy at a more meaningful level.

Another difficult component of the health care crisis is preventative medicine, or really just healthy living practices - diet and exercise being the cornerstones. The simplest way to manage these is to incorporate healthy eating and movement as an integral dimension of one's life, rather than as some separate health care activities. A great way to get exercise is to walk to the grocery store and then carry one's groceries back home. But there needs to be a grocery store within walking distance!

One can always choose where to live with grocery store proximity as a highly ranked criterion. But there are many other important criteria, such as proximity of one's job and family, cost and availability of housing, etc.

In a way it seems so simple - if we just rearranged our culture so that all the facilities one needed in regular daily life were accessible by foot or bike, we could make huge dents in both the health care crisis and the climate crisis. But our culture is such a complex system, with so many interlocking components each holding the others in place, so that nothing can change very much without everything else changing too - the problem seems insurmountable.

Of course this is always the nature of things - liberation has always been right in the palm of our hand, yet how many of us manage to find our way clear of this vicious cycle of suffering and confusion. And yet, if we just tap our courage, keep our goal in mind and boldly take the steps at our feet, miracles do happen!