Exhaustion? Prosperity? — 08. Materials Useful for Understanding the Prospects of Humanity
To understand what awaits us, we must determine where we are and what influences our future. Here are materials prepared for other purposes that may be useful for this course.
As lectures for this course, I propose materials created earlier.
Lecture on levels of selection, the Invisible Hand, Invisible Foot, and Invisible Head: Invisible Head and Everything Else.
I would like to convince you that depending on system organization, different organizational levels may either inhibit each other’s development or, conversely, stimulate it. Adam Smith was the first to reflect on mutual stimulation across levels and called this scenario the “invisible hand.” Herman Daly called the case where lower levels inhibit higher-level development the “invisible foot.” It seems reasonable to also consider a third case, where a higher level “subjugates” the functioning of a lower one.
The current state of human civilization is discussed in these two lectures:
Uniqueness of humanity: our energy sources
Uniqueness of humanity: victory over space and time
Important problems of human demography (and features of simulation modeling in spreadsheets) are discussed in this lecture: Simulation modeling of human population demography.
Some basics concerning the depletion model are explained by Dennis Meadows, one of the authors of The Limits to Growth (1972): Dennis Meadows lecture on limits to growth (2012).
For understanding future pandemic risks, this article (Computerra, 2009) may be useful: Swine flu, or the acceleration of time.
Several Computerra columns on humanity’s prospects:
No. 41. Diet without phosphorus?
No. 84. Mountain road
No. 89. Dies irae
On changes in humanity’s ecological niche:
No. 116. Culturally adapting opportunists...
No. 117. Six traditional ecological niches...
No. 118. The regular fate of the Forest-Steppe...
No. 125. Does ethnicity possess independent being?...