Esra Boaserup came up with a novel idea in the 1700’s. It analysed how populations grow over time, and what causes them to shrink. A population can grow exponentially until it reaches some theoretical threshold which causes it to level off. This threshold may be defined by the available space the population has to live in, or the amount of food it has to eat, or the prevalence of big things with teeth that happen to eat it. If that threshold somehow moves (more space becomes available, or the things with teeth suddenly increase their abundance) then the population in question will move with it – it’ll either increase or decrease, depending on that threshold.
The work of Boserup and Malthus in a nutshell. The pink line represents some theoretical maximum of available resources, and the blue line a population of individuals. At first a population will increase in the normal exponential way until the threshold is attained. There might be a little wavering about, but eventually the population will settle down at its theoretical maximum. If the threshold increases, the population will increase (after a short time-lag). Likewise, if it decreases, so will the population.
In terms of Humans, our population has done just that. It has increased exponentially until it has reached some threshold. The only problem is that it hasn’t actually reached the threshold yet, and there is no reason for the population growth to diminish. This threshold, in my eyes, is defined by a cheap source of energy. Basically oil, which we dig out of the ground and use for whatever. We can live in incredibly high density levels (the most dense is that of the Macau region of China (which includes Hong Kong). As of September 2009, it was sitting at around 18 500 people per square kilometre), or in extremely hostile conditions (Antarctica, or the Moon), where people would never normally live. And the only reason we’re able to do that is because we have the energy required to make it possible. The only problem with this energy is that it will run out. The Threshold that defines our population will come thundering down, bringing our population down with it. In short, when the midden hits the windmill and it no longer becomes economically viable to dredge that black sludge out of a rock, there’s going to be a crash of population on a global scale. Millions – probably even billions – of people will die. Starvation, famine, war. The whole nine yards. We’ll go back to the middle ages – a period in history when we hadn’t yet discovered oil and started basing out lives on it. And the change will happen terrifyingly quickly.
But in the last few years, some clever people in lab-coats have suggested that they may have the answer – hydrogen fuel cells. Im not going to go into too much technical detail, but these things basically take the most abundant element in the universe – hydrogen – and turn it into cheap energy. Fantastic. The only problem so far is a few little difficulties in getting hydrogen stored safely. Get this wrong, and things can go less than well.
But get it right, and we can produce electricity to move cars, heat houses, light cities, smelt metal, power particle accelerators… whatever we need. Instead of basing out society on the necessity for oil, we base it on the necessity of hydrogen. The Threshold defining our population won’t move much due to this change, but it will stay where it is – it won’t come crashing down until we run out of hydrogen (which is so unlikely, the Earth will probably turn into a teapot before we do).
But is this a good thing? Yes, the untold millions wont all die. But the problem is that, OK we base our society, our economy, and everything else on the availability of cheap energy, but we have a lot of other stuff that we need at a pretty fundamental level as well. In 2005, China used around 44.7 kilograms of paper per person. During the same year, each American used 297.1 kilograms. Doing some simple maths, we arrive with the idea that if every Chinese person lived like an American, their paper consumption would be around 1300 kg per person per year. What about meat? Or wood? Simple products that we do need to survive, but are not necessarily available in a similar form to oil. Yes, they can be sustainably produced. But a lot of them aren’t.
I guess what Im trying to say is that Im not yet completely convinced that hydrogen fuel cells are the ultimate cure-all that the world is looking for. There’s a lot of other stuff that we need that has been left out the equation.
“We do occasionally confuse the paper work”
Daniel Crawford was a man of simple taste. He’d grown up in a devout Catholic family, on the Eastern Seaboard of the United States. As a teenager he came to the realisation that he would be happiest in his life if he dedicated it to the servitude of God. He entered himself into the Church, and was ordained and licensed at the tender age of twenty one. He moved to a small village outside Boston and became the head of its Parish by the time he was thirty. His life had been given to preaching, helping, providing a guiding hand to those who needed it.
Today was going to be one of the most important days of his life. Sadly, he did not know it – this was because it was going to be the day he died. He had come up to Boston to do some business. Everything had gone smoothly, taking a little longer than he’d expected, so he decided to treat himself to a sit-down, a newspaper, and a coffee, before getting into his little Morris to take himself home again. But he must remember to pick up a nice mackerel for his wife Mary before he did. He took a short cut down an alley, to get to his favourite little diner a bit quicker.
That morning, he had made the decision to leave off his dog-collar, and go in mufti. It was a hot day anyway, so it was certainly the more comfortable option. And he was quite sure God wouldn’t mind. As he stared down the barrel of the six shooter the mugger was pointing at him, he began to regret that decision.
“Listen,” he tried to explain to his assailant. ”Im a man of God. I wont harm you.”
“You’re a man of God? Oh yeah? Then Im Richard the Lionheart.”
“I’ll give you what you want, just dont hurt me.”
“C’mon, Bill, get a move on!” hissed the assailant’s accomplice, from near the end of the alley where he had been posted as a lookout.
That was about all that Father Crawford remembered. As Bill turned to tell his friend to quit rushing him, he squeezed the trigger slightly – but very crucially – too much. The gun went off, and Bill became a murderer. He’d never meant to.
When Daniel thought about it later, it was difficult to tell how long he’d… been away for. There was a time when he’d clearly been on Earth, alive, breathing, and doing all the normal things. Then there was the time when he was here. The place where he’d gone to after he’d died. He had assumed it would be filled with clouds, and angels playing harps. It wasn’t. But in between those to times had been… nothing. He had no feeling, no sensation, no concept of time passing. It had been a bit like being asleep. There was before, and there was after, but there was no during.
When he did… arrive, he was not immediately confronted by St Peter, as he’d expected. This man was… not what he’d expected. He was bigger for a start. And dirty. And covered in leather and bits of metal. He had a sword in his belt, and he smelled like he hadn’t had a bath in some time. Which was probably a fairly accurate assumption. If this was bad enough, the room in which he was standing was worse. It was a huge hall, pillared like something out of a book in which a small group of men, elves, magicians and such like go on a long walk in order to put a ring in a volcano. All around were trestle tables, loaded with… he would have said food, but meat would be more accurate. Men and – he noticed – a few women were eating lavishly, drinking what looked like some sort of beer or ale in lavish quantities. In fact they would generally throw it vaguely in the direction of their open mouths, and what missed would generally land on somebody else anyway. Some of them were fighting as well.
The smelly man in front of him did a double take.
“You’re Daniel Crawford?”
“Um….” said Daniel. “Yes?”
“Oh… er… right. Sorry, its just you look a bit… small.”
Daniel didn’t hear – he was staring at the scene around him.
“Well, just so long as you’re here, that’s the main thing,” said the man. He looked a bit put off.
“Um… yes. Sorry what’s just happened? Is this a dream?”
The man laughed uproariously.
“Is this a dream? Oh that’s rich! Yes, I suppose you could call it a dream – the best kind there is. Your dead!”
“I beg your pardon?”
“What?”
“What did you say? Im dead?”
“Well, yes, what did you think?”
“Oh. Um. This isn’t exactly what I expected.”
“Well, you’re here now and that’s what’s important.”
Daniel stood and thought for a minute.
“But where are all the angels and harps and things?”
“What?”
“I thought I’d be going to Heaven.”
The man stared back blankly.
“Come to think of it, where am I actually?” asked Daniel.
“Um. This is Valhalla, the hall of the Gods.”
Daniels mouth opened very slightly. He closed it again, so he wouldn’t have to taste the air.
“Ah,” he said. “Do you have a vegetarian option?”
The Ultimate Type of Government
Several and a half metric years ago, some Mediterranean men wearing the ancient equivalent of bathrobes sat down and invented a thing called democracy. In a nutshell, this was a government system that put someone in power by voting for him. And anyone could vote. Unless you were too young. Or a women, slave, insane person, from another country, believed in the wrong gods, one of the lower classes, poorly thought of, didn’t like grapefruit or didn’t wear a bathrobe.
We are now reaching a point in history where this doesn’t seem to work very well. OK, some tweaks have been made in the intervening centuries, but simple demographics and the exponential rate at which the human race is expanding means that soon it will simply not be possible for everyone to have a voice. I suggest a change.
(I would also like to point out at this stage that Im not the first person to come up with this. I got it from somewhere, but cant remember – it was a long time ago).
To start with, there needs to be a place. Lets call it a Kingdom. This needs to be run in accordance with a set of laws – the normal situation. It is ruled by a Leader – we’ll call him (or her) the Ultimate Dictator, because that’s exactly what they are. One person in charge, and they have all the power – in the immortal words of Sir Terry, its a system of One Man, One Vote – He is The Man, and He has The Vote. All the eggs in one basket. Whatever you want to call it.
However: when the Ultimate Dictator comes into power, he is fitted with a collar filled with high explosives of some kind or another. This is radio controlled, and detonated by a series of buttons, placed on every street corner in the Kingdom. Someone presses one of these buttons, and his head is blown off. Messy, but quick and painless – he wont see it coming.
I can see what you’re thinking: “this wont work. As soon as you have a new Ultimate Dictator, some yobbo will just blow his head off for a laugh”. But this is where it gets particularly cunning: the person who presses the button becomes the next Ultimate Dictator.
One of two things will then happen:
1. All the people who are hungry for power (and should therefore be kept as far away from Positions of Office as possible) will kill each other off in a day or two. This will leave the Kingdom governed by well thinking, incorruptible, well meaning and intelligent individuals.
2. You’ll end up with a Kingdom having a population of one. Which solves the problems of governance, economics, employment, job satisfaction… pretty much everything except a wild night out on the town.
Wasted potential
On the 28th of June 1914, a young Bosnian Serb called Gavrilo Princip succeeded in assassinating the Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria. This act triggered one of the deadliest and most depressing periods of turmoil in human history – World War 1. The Entente countries spearheaded by Britian, France and Russia did battle against the Central Powers of Germany, Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire. It lasted four, long terrible years, and tore Europe to shreds. Millions were killed, largely due to massive advances in military equipment, which was placed under the control of men who had been trained for warfare in the previous century. The British heavy metal band Iron Maiden later wrote the epic ballad Paschendale, about the battle of the same name – more men lost their lives here by drowning in the mud than by any other cause. This particular event was also noted because it wiped out an entire generation of men from Canadian Newfoundland, creating obvious demographic problems in later years, where women could only marry men nearly twice their age.
Why did it happen? Herbert Hoover, the US president who took office just eight months before the stock-market crash of 1929, once said “Older men declare war, but it is the youth that must fight and die”. Wasting no words about it, I think he hit the nail bang on.
Young men, brimming with potential were conscripted into a cause (I cant even put “volunteered”) they believed in, and many paid very dearly for it – some died, many were injured but all were mentally tortured to some degree. Not a single one of them ever came home saying “well that was all jolly good fun”. The last man to have first hand knowledge of the trenches – the last fighting Tommy – died just a few years ago, in 2008. His name was Harry Patch, and given that he died at the age of 111 years, 1 month, 1 week and 1 day, I would say he had the best timed death of anyone – apart from a damn good innings.
After the war, he tried his best to forget about it all, but in the 1990′s when he realised he was one of the last remaining few of a dwindling group of men, he began to speak about his experiences, and made clear that what had happened should not be forgotten, even after all the men involved have ceased to be. Toward the end of his life, the Queen offered him a State Funeral, which he turned down, saying he didn’t want to be singled out from all the others, just because he lived the longest. There were thousands of other men, braver, stronger, smarter, who never made it back.
The classic example of a wasted life is that of Henry Moseley. He was an English physicist, who made amazing advances on the theories about the structure of the atom, initally put forward by other physics heavy-weights Niels Bhor, Ernest Rutherford and Antonius van den Broek. He left his post at Oxford University, joined the Royal Engineers, and was killed in action at Gallipoli in 1915. Because of his death, the British government instituted a policy preventing prominent and promising scientists from enlisting for combat duty. Had he lived, its very likely he would have been awarded the 1916 Nobel Prize for physics.
It really hurts me to think of all that terrible wasted potential – not just in the First World War, but in all periods where Older Men Have Declared War. All those lives that were snuffed out just as they reached a point where they could contribute. As I write this, Im twenty four years old. Back then, compared to them, I would be eaither a bit on the old side, or dead along with them. All the boys who never got to be men, all the brilliant racing drivers who never got to sit in a car, all the fantastic minds who never got to contribute, all the amazing writers who never got to realise their dreams. Thousands and thousands who gave up their lives – all the wasted potential.
What if Buddhists are right?
I recently had the dubious honour of a long and extended drive through South Africa’s heartland – a big patch of not-very-much called the Karoo. The roads are as long and straight as Edward Fox.
On such a drive, especially when you’re alone, there’s a lot of thinking to do – it doesn’t have to happen very quickly, which is half the charm. You’ll get to the end of the idea eventually, so why hurry? One such thought went a bit like this:
According to the greatest minds of wikipedia, we can start looking forward to manned Mars missions by some time around the mid 2030′s. So what happens if a person on such a mission dies there, and Buddhists turn out to be right, and reincarnation really happens?
(I would like to state clearly at this juncture that at no point during the abovementioned drive was I under the influence of any nyer nyer nyer gurble gurble whatsit).
If reincarnation really happens, and you die on Mars (or any other planet for that matter) are you reincarnated there? This assumes that there are life forms there, currently reproducing, so that you will spend your next life as one of them. If so, is there much point to coming back as a bacteria, or a sponge? I can’t see much in the way of Saturday night excitement, but Im not one to criticise. It does, however, open the door for questions about the process of reincarnation, seeing as bacteria are by far the most abundant form of life on Earth.
But what if you die on Mars and are reincarnated here on Earth? Yes, that seems like a more likely possibility. But then that suggests that – if there’s life on other planets in the universe (and there certainly is) – then you can spend a succession of lives on a succession of planets. To put it another way, when you die, you hop to another world, and have your next life there.
This opens a multitude of doors for simple space travel and exploration. All we need to do is re-direct the funding from those studies that look at things like “are women who have had children more likely to bite the heads off jelly-babies”, and find the factor that determines where you go, and how we can control it – and get you to remember stuff from past lives in this one.
Admittedly, for someone to read the funding application, they might need to have previous had a significant quantity of nyer nyer nyer gurble gurble whatsit.
Tomorrows World
A little while ago, I found out that Im going to be an uncle. My brother and his wife will be having their first child (gender as yet is undetermined) in April next year. I first became a cousin at the age of three, but for me, this is something new and pleasantly unusual.
This new addition to my family – what sort of world will they grow up in? I have been fortunate enough to have lived my life until now in a country that hasn’t been in a war during my life time. I have never had to face conscription, or anything like that. One of the biggest things South Africa is perhaps known for is Apartheid – but that all came apart when I was five years old, and I don’t remember a thing about it.
But will this continue? What changes will tomorrows children be forced to undertake? As the Billy Talent song Red Flag states, “the kids of tomorrow don’t need today when they live with the sins of yesterday”. Basically we need to deal with our mistakes on our own (even if they are the mistakes of our parents) and not pass them on to our children.
If you think about it, children who start school this year, are going to retire in or around 2070. And despite all the expertise of scientists, economists and future thinkers, despite all the talks, summits, colloquiums, conferences and publications, no-one has a clue what the world will be like in ten or fifteen years from now, let alone in fifty or sixty.
Will it be a future of destruction? Will we destroy ourselves in a World War Three? Will our continued use of fossil fuels cause a major climate change? Will our rapidly growing population eventually become too much for our planet to bear, resulting in a major environment and ecosystem collapse? Will it be some combination of those factors?
Im pretty sure that if the worst does happen – a major environmental collapse, widespread death and destruction, and societies the world over violently folding in on themselves – Im pretty sure humans will survive. We will endure it, and we will go on – for two reasons:
1. We live everywhere. There is hardly a place or environment on Earth where you cant find people. If something aweful happens, chanes are that isolated pockets will survive. Chances are they’ll be in out-of-the-way, hard-to-reach areas.
2. What we know. The level of human knowledge is, comparitively speaking, truly unprecedented. Not only when comparing with people now, and people – say – two hundred years ago, but also when comparing humans with every other species that lives or has lived on this planet.
But maybe it wont all be all doom and gloom. Maybe hydrogen fuel cells will work out, and the population will level off at some sustainable level. Maybe one day there really will be a PlayStation 20. I don’t know. I think the best we can do is prepare the kids we have now for whatever world they may have to live in then. Because, ultimately, we wont see that world – but they will.
Its rude to have a point
A few nights ago, I went out with some friends. I found myself sitting next to a girl who didn’t run away – Id almost forgotten what that felt like. She started telling me about why she was a vegetarian. I cant remember how that topic of conversation had come up, because Id been drinking. It dosn’t take much.
My drink of choice.
What impressed me about her argument was that she was expressing why she didn’t eat meat – cruelty to animals, its more economical etc etc – but she wasn’t trying to convert me. She was simply expressing an opinion. I should state here that I am not a vegetarian. I love eating meat, I enjoy it, and you’d have to be absolutely gorgeous in order to make me stop. I didn’t tell her why though. And the reason is quite simple – if you are a vegetarian because you don’t want to have animals killed for your benefit or pleasure (which is fine), how many animals will you save over the course of your life? Hundreds? Thousands? If you think about it, the vast majority of animals eaten these days (with the exception of fish) have been domesticated and bred for it – hundreds if not thousands of years ago. My point here is not “oh, we can eat animals because they’re bred to be eaten” but rather that they do not contribute ecologically. They are not part of some natural ecosystem, and if they are, its in a fairly minor capacity and they wouldn’t be missed if they suddenly disappeared. This then leads to my main point – if you don’t eat meat, and save or the little cuddlies from their deaths (when they still die eventually… another point that), in a hundred years will it have mattered? Maybe in some fairly small and insignificant way. In a thousand years, will it have mattered? I doubt it. What about in a million? In a hundred million years, every species you see around you – everything - will have either become extinct and evolved into something else. That’s not me pointing fingers, its just statistics. In about six billion years, the sun will have expired, and the solar system will collapse. Will you making the choice to not eat meat have made a difference then?
Over the past fifty years, we’ve seen a massive increase in hippies with beards (and people called Al Gore) saying that the Earth is a fragile thing, we all need to take care of it, otherwise our children will be the ones to pay. Fossil fuels are running out, we have to convert our economy to hydrogen fuel cells, if we don’t the world will end.
I re-state my point: in a few hundred or thousand years, will it matter? Watch Fight Club - on a long enough time line, the life expectancy of anything drops to zero. Even planets. Given enough time, humans wont be around any more. If we hurry the process along by burning oil and plundering the worlds resources, the only thing that will judge our demise are ourselves.
Now having said all of that, I’ll go the other way. If you’re one of those people who eats salad, shouts at the Japanese and goes to protest marches, good for you. I have utterly no problem with that. Whatever gets you out of bed in the morning is your choice. Because we as people have the fantastic knowledge that we’re only here for a little while, and then one day we go to sleep and wake up dead. Due to the brilliant advances in the sciences and medical technology over the past two hundred years or so, I now get to live twice as long – twice as long - as my ancestors. I get to experience this world and all the brilliant stuff in it for so much longer. I have aeroplanes that can fly me to places I’ve only heard about to have conversations with girls in pubs about why they’re vegetarians. The same is true for you – whoever you are. Don’t let anyone tell you how to live your life, because its yours. If you think your life will be better if you order salad rather than steak, that’s fine. Make of it what you can, because before you know it, you’ll be gone.
Modern Martyrs
I recently had the great pleasure of watching the new film, Senna – a sort of movie/documentary about the life of Ayrton Senna, arguably the greatest racing driver who ever lived.
He was a complex man, a devoted Catholic who gave away millions to childrens charities in his home country of Brazil. But at the same time, his racing tactics were frequently placed under scrutiny. He had a particular habit of entering a corner alongside another driver, but in a position where – if the other driver didn’t back down – there would be an accident. If the driver did back down, he was effectively, according to Senna, psychologically buried – every time he went on the attack, you would back down, and let him pass. This incredible will to win reached a peak in 1990, when Senna’s arch-rival Alain Prost was going to be World Champion, provided he simply finished the race. At the first corner, Senna maintained his line, Prost didn’t back down, and they both crashed off the track. This all ended tragically in 1994, when Senna was killed in Italy, the last man to die during a Formula One race.
A while ago, I again had the fortune of – this time – reading about another man, in a book called Heavier than Heaven. It told the story of the young rockstar Kurt Cobain.
As front man of the Seattle based band Nirvana, he started out simply playing the music that he had to. He was a complex man, who battled against drug addiction and health issues. Nirvana started off very much as an underground band, supported by the sort of people who went round saying that corporations were bad, and bands that sold out were weak and pathetic. Without really planning it, the group put out there most famous album, Nevermind. This shot immediately to the top of international charts, and everyone was chanting the lyrics of Smells Like Teen Spirit. Suddenly, fans who used to be able to feel like Nirvana was theirs, that they could carry their band around in their back pocket, had to go and see them along with thirty thousand other rock fans at major festivals. Like Senna, Kurt’s life also ended prematurely. He committed suicide at the age of only twenty seven.
To be honest, I was too young to remember a time when either of these men were alive. I remember seeing an interview with Dave Grohl, the drummer for Nirvana who later went on to front the Foo Fighters. He said “I’d give anything to have Kurt still alive. Anything.” Im sure there are many who feel very much the same about Senna. But would they really then be as great as they are? Can you imagine a man like Senna, dying of cancer or something, at the age of eighty? If Kurt didn’t commit suicide, there are many that argue that he would have had to stop playing music altogether, and concentrate every fibre of his being into healing himself, and getting better. I think part of the reason men and women like these are as great as they are is because they died. They were fantastic and reached a lot of people, and then their lives ended. They didn’t retire, slip into the unknown and get forgotten. They epitomised the saying “Live fast and die young”. Their death caused them to become immortal.
Defining new art?
A while ago I found a video on youtube of a flash mob in Antwerp Central Station, in Belgium.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQLCZOG202k
For those that dont know, a flash mob is a relatively new phenomenon – someone sends out a text message or email, organising a time and a place – usually somewhere quite public – to all their friends, who send it on to their friends and so on. Everyone gathers at the site, performs some act, like a dance, or a pillow fight, and then suddenly leaves again. The idea is to provide a basic break from the mundanity of everyday life. Its completely pointless, but requires very little input effort, and brightens up everyones day just a little bit.
A little while ago, I came across an interesting definition for a piece of art: for something to be art, it has to have no other purpose other than itself. So something like a car – I’ll use the Farrari 250 GTO as an example – may be goppingly stunning to look at, and if you were 15 years old and had a picture of it, you might need to go to the lavatory to have some time alone with it, but it cant be art – because its a car and therefore has a purpose.
But could you then – using that definition – call a flash mob art? Some people do think of them as a form of performance art. Maybe they’re taking flash mobs a bit too seriously, maybe they only eat salad and have names like Jerome or Bridgette – I dont know. But a flash mob clearly has no other purpose other than itself. So has it – inadvertently – become art?
To be honest, I dont really blog for any other purpose other than itself. I think the same is possibly true for a lot of other people. An interesting thought then…
