It's The End Of The World As We Know It (Update)
A Minimal Model for Human and Nature Interaction, 2012, (PDF) as submitted.
Keith’s 20 March update: (The University of Maryland has pulled this 2012 paper offline – summary/excerpts below). This is apparently the newer 2014 paper – submitted on 18 March – on the same topic – with a nearly identical summary: “Human and Nature Dynamics (HANDY): Modeling Inequality and Use of Resources in the Collapse or Sustainability of Societies”.
Excerpts from both versions of the paper are included below – after the link.
NASA Statement on Sustainability Study
“A soon-to-be published research paper ‘Human and Nature Dynamics (HANDY): Modeling Inequality and Use of Resources in the Collapse or Sustainability of Societies’ by University of Maryland researchers Safa Motesharrei and Eugenia Kalnay, and University of Minnesota’s Jorge Rivas was not solicited, directed or reviewed by NASA. It is an independent study by the university researchers utilizing research tools developed for a separate NASA activity. “As is the case with all independent research, the views and conclusions in the paper are those of the authors alone. NASA does not endorse the paper or its conclusions.”
Keith’s 20 March update: The paper claims that it was partially funded by NASA – and mentions a specific NASA grant i.e. “NASA/GSFC grant NNX12AD03A”. NASA seems to be saying that it was not funded by NASA.
Keith’s 21 March update: NASA responded to my questions on this topic:
NASAWATCH: Did NASA money support this work and if so how much and who (program, project, directorate) paid for it?
NASA: In 2010, NASA funded a small pilot project at the University of Maryland to adapt a physical climate simulation model for use at the University. A small secondary task, valued at less than $30,000, was used to couple the climate model with a population model. The resulting model, the “Human And Nature DYnamical’ (HANDY) model is a simplified model of human-climate interactions.
NASAWATCH: If NASA funds were used why has it been pulled offline? Is not such work a matter of public record?
NASA: NASA has not pulled the paper offline or directed it to be done. Questions regarding the paper itself should be directed to the University of Maryland.
NASAWATCH: Did NASA solicit this research – and if so what specific program solicited and funded it?
NASA: NASA did not solicit the research in this paper. The HANDY model was part of a pilot study funded as part of Goddard’s Modeling, Analysis and Prediction program.
NASAWATCH: Is there a statement of work/proposal to accompany this paper?
NASA: Yes. There was a Statement of Work that covered the development of the model.
NASAWATCH: Does NASA endorse the findings?
NASA: No.
NASAWATCH: Will NASA be publishing/promoting this paper and its findings?
NASA: No.
“Human and Nature Dynamics (HANDY): Modeling Inequality and Use of Resources in the Collapse or Sustainability of Societies”, 2014 (newer paper)
Safa Motesharrei
School of Public Policy and Department of Mathematics
University of Maryland and National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center (SESYNC)
Jorge Rivas
Department of Political Science University of Minnesota and Institute of Global Environment and Society (IGES)
Eugenia Kalnay
Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences University of Maryland
March 18, 2014
Abstract There are widespread concerns that current trends in resource-use are unsustainable, but possibilities of overshoot/collapse remain controversial. Collapses have occurred frequently in history, often followed by centuries of economic, intellectual, and population decline. Many different natural and social phenomena have been invoked to explain specific collapses, but a general explanation remains elusive. In this paper, we build a human population dynamics model by adding accumulated wealth and economic inequality to a predator-prey model of humans and nature. The model structure, and simulated scenarios that offer significant implications, are explained. Four equations describe the evolution of Elites, Commoners, Nature, and Wealth. The model shows Economic Stratification or Ecological Strain can independently lead to collapse, in agreement with the historical record. The measure “Carrying Capacity” is developed and its estimation is shown to be a practi- cal means for early detection of a collapse. Mechanisms leading to two types of collapses are discussed. The new dynamics of this model can also reproduce the irreversible collapses found in history. Collapse can be avoided, and population can reach a steady state at maximum carrying capacity if the rate of depletion of nature is reduced to a sustainable level and if resources are distributed equitably.
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In sum, the results of our experiments, discussed in section 6, indicate that either one of the two features apparent in historical societal collapses — over-exploitation of natural resources and strong economic stratification — can independently result in a complete collapse. Given economic stratification, collapse is very difficult to avoid and requires major policy changes, including major reductions in inequality and population growth rates. Even in the absence of economic stratifica- tion, collapse can still occur if depletion per capita is too high. However, collapse can be avoided and population can reach equilibrium if the per capita rate of depletion of nature is reduced to a sustainable level, and if resources are distributed in a reasonably equitable fashion.
In the upcoming generations of HANDY, we plan to develop several extensions including: (1) disaggregation of Nature into nonrenewable stocks, regenerating stocks, and renewable flows, as well as the introduction of an investment mechanism in accessibility of natural resources, in order to study the effects of investment in technology on resource choice and production efficiency; (2) making inequality (?) endogenous to the model structure; (3) introduction of “policies” that can modify parameters such as depletion, the coefficient of inequality, and the birth rate; and, (4) introduction of multiple coupled regions to represent countries with different policies, trade of carrying capacity, and resource wars.
Those interested in obtaining the model code can contact the authors.
Acknowledgements
We are grateful to Profs. Matthias Ruth, Victor Yakovenko, Herman Daly, Takemasa Miyoshi, Jim Carton, Fernando Miralles-Wilhelm, Ning Zeng, and Drs. Robert Cahalan and Steve Penny for many useful discussions. Study of the “Equitable Society” scenarios (i.e., with Workers and Non- Workers), the scenario presented in section 5.2.5, in particular, was suggested by V. Yakovenko. We would also like to thank anonymous reviewer No. 1 for having highlighted to us the importance of the capability of HANDY to naturally produce irreversible collapses, which is not found in earlier models. We would especially like to thank the editors of this journal for alerting us to the model and work done by Brander and Taylor, of which we were unaware, and allowing us to revise our article to account for this new information.
This work was partially funded through NASA/GSFC grant NNX12AD03A.
A Minimal Model for Human and Nature Interaction, 2012, (PDF) as submitted (Now deleted)
A Minimal Model for Human and Nature Interaction
Safa Motesharrei
School of Public Policy
University of Maryland
Jorge Rivas
Department of Political Science
University of Minnesota
Eugenia Kalnay
Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences
University of Maryland
November 13, 2012
Abstract
There are widespread concerns that current trends in population and resource-use are unsustainable, but the possibilities of an overshoot and collapse remain unclear and contro- versial. Collapses have occurred frequently in the past ve thousand years, and are often followed by centuries of economic, intellectual, and population decline. Many di erent nat- ural and social phenomena have been invoked to explain speci c collapses, but a general explanation remains elusive. Two important features seem to appear across societies that have collapsed: (1) Ecological Strain and (2) Economic Strati cation. In this paper, the structure of a new model and several simulated scenarios that o er signi cant implications are explained. The model has just four equations that describe the evolution of the populations of Elites and Commoners, Nature, and accumulated Wealth. Mechanisms leading to collapse are discussed and the measure \Carrying Capacity” is devel- oped and de ned. The model suggests that the estimation of Carrying Capacity is a practical means for early detection of a collapse. Collapse can be avoided, and population can reach a steady state at the maximum carrying capacity, if the rate of depletion of nature is reduced to a sustainable level, and if resources are distributed equitab
—-
In sum, results of our experiments, discussed in section 6, indicate that either one of the two features apparent in historical societal collapses — over-exploitation of natural resources and strong economic strati cation — can independently result in a complete collapse. Given economic strati cation, collapse is very dicult to avoid and requires major policy changes, including major reductions in inequality and population growth rates. Even in the absence of economic strati cation, collapse can still occur if depletion per capita is too high. However, collapse can be avoided and population can reach equilibrium if the per capita rate of depletion of nature is reduced to a sustainable level, and if resources are distributed in a reasonably equitable fashion. This version of HANDY so far contains only one region, and only renewable natural resources. In the next version, we plan to include several extensions including:
– Disaggregation of Nature into nonrenewable stocks, renewable stocks, and ows.
- The introduction of “government policies” that can modify parameters such as depletion, the coecient of inequality and birth rate, to see whether it is possible to avoid a collapse when the carrying capacity is exceeded.
- The introduction of multiple coupled regions to represent countries with di erent policies, trade carrying capacity and resource wars.
We have posted HANDY on http://www.atmos.umd.edu/~ekalnay/handy-ver1.mdl We welcome our readers to download the code, perform other experiments, and post their results at the same webpage.
Acknowledgements
We are grateful to Profs. Matthias Ruth, Victor Yakovenko, Herman Daly, Takemasa Miyoshi, Jim Carton, Fernando Miralles-Wilhelm, Ning Zeng, Drs. Robert Cahalan and Steve Penny, and Ms. Erin Lynch for many useful discussions. Study of the “Equitable Society” scenarios (i.e., with Workers and Non-Workers), in particular, the scenario presented in section 5.2.5, was suggested by V. Yakovenko. This work was partially funded through NASA/GSFC grant NNX12AD03A, known as “Collaborative Earth System Science Research Between NASA/GSFC and UMCP”.
NASA-Backed Study Says Humanity Is Pretty Much Screwed, Gizmodo
“Hope you’ve enjoyed civilized life, folks. Because a new study sponsored by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center says the world’s industrial societies are poised to collapse under the weight of their own unsustainable appetites for resources. There goes the weekend . . . and everything after it for the rest of our lives.”
Keith’s 17 March note: I have asked NASA PAO for a copy of this report.
Keith’s 18 March update: It is rather baffling in the 21st Century for NASA to be funding research on the future of civilization that does not include extraterrestrial resources as part of the equation – at the same time that the agency wants to go grab an asteroid. The authors have their heads in the sand as they totally ignore the fact that Earth sits amidst vast resources outside of its biosphere. This is rehashed 1960s Club of Rome defeatist thinking all over again. I wonder how much money NASA wasted on this. I’ll ask.
Folks:
So be it!
Except we don’t have to become a multi-planetary space-fairing civilization just to hedge our bets in more than one basket… we’ll need the resources, skills and help from space to fix things here on Earth too!
tinker
it takes vast amounts of energy to reach these destinations…and much more affordable technology development is required.
In the meantime….”dramatically reduce resource consumption by relying on less intensive renewable resources and reducing population growth. Which is just as difficult and improbable as it sounds.”
Profit in the next few months, not years, rules. The U.S. is on pace of consuming all of its oil, natural gas, and coal within the next few decades, with incentives from oil subsidies, saving little for the future generations…greatly affecting the climate at the same time–its quite the strategic plan!
……Which is just as difficult and improbable as it sounds.”…..
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When Limits to Growth was written the best estimate for planetary population in 2050 was 13.5 billion. Today the planetary population is now estimated to level out at about 9.1 billion by 2050. In many countries the demographic shift toward population reduction has already happened. Google the term. Also, note that in every single country where the demographic shift has happened, these countries are rich. Thus an argument can be made that increasing the wealth of everyone on the planet is key to population control (voluntary) rather than enforced shared poverty (involuntary) which leads to war.
if we can;t managed to “fix things here on Earth” without going into space, that clearly shows that we don;t have the knowledge and wisdom to use space to do it.
Here we are on the biggest, most robust, fault-tolerant, redundantly backedup, most suitable spacecraft for human life ever possible.
If we can’t figure out how to not screw it up, let alone manage it… how can we possibly make something BETTER?
And how can we possibly manage this one better by expending huge resources to go ELSEWHERE looking for things to help us?
Spaceflight is necessary for scientific research and technological progress… but the “it will save humanity!” bit is about as silly as a comic book…
…….And how can we possibly manage this one better by expending huge resources to go ELSEWHERE looking for things to help us?……..
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That argument could have been made 10,000 years ago, and is just as invalid today.
Well, Mad Max 2 is my favorite movie..so there’s that.
I’m going to go out on a limb and say this isn’t the End of Civilization. Civilizations don’t fall because of a deterministic process – they fall for a variety of reasons, the most common of which are conquest (not going to happen short of a full on nuclear war) or massive environmental collapse.
The latter would have to be something akin to an asteroid impact or super-plague, since anything localized could be worked around. Just look at the massive corn and soybean crop failure in the US back in 2012 – it didn’t even really budge food product prices.
EDIT: The examples are unintentionally hilarious. Rome, Han, Mauryan, Gupta – they all ended because of civil wars, invasion, or frequently both (as in the case of the western Roman Empire). I don’t world civilization is about to collapse because of military conflict, barring a massive nuclear war.
Isaac Asimov made a good case in his book on the Roman Republic that the fall of Rome began during the Republic when the populists failed to free the slaves. Thus the stratification of wealth and power continued and becoming an empire was a symptom of the decline. Rome expanded steadily under the Republic, but very little after it became an empire. Circumstances (no remaining peer powers nearby) caused the fall to be slow, but that doesn’t change the dynamics. The US is over 30 years into our decline from the same stratification. Some of the symptoms are the declining investment in infrastructure, education, and now R&D, with most of the short-term savings going to the wealthy and the corporations. We are big and wealthy, so it will take us a long time to decline, too. Things move faster now, so that means decades, not centuries.
Asimov was a writer, not a historian. It’s an interesting theory, but Rome didn’t really decline during the Imperial Period, at least not until into the 4th Century CE – it grew in about every sense of the word (population, technology, wealth, commerce). The 1st and 2nd Centuries CE in particular were probably the peak of the Roman Period. Maybe you could argue that that was still part of a “slow burn” death, but I’m skeptical of any long-time explanations when you have shorter-term ones that work better with what we know.
There’s no solid consensus among historians, but the biggest reasons that fit with what we know are what I mentioned above. This essay by Tim O’Neill on Quora has a good explanation of it, but I can summarize it. Basically, after the Roman Empire divided in two, the western Empire was stuck with a less defensible border and a far weaker economic and population base to support it. That would have been bad enough, but it also (for reasons related to its governance structure) was constantly plagued by civil wars that made the western Empire completely incapable of defending itself from Germanic war band invasions in the 5th Century. In some cases, one of the generals involved in a civil war even invited them in.
Your ad hominem comment on Asimov is ill founded. Good insights can come from anywhere. Asimov was a scientist and a polymath. He wrote 14 history books.
Your descriptions concern the end game, not the root cause. Geographic growth stopped after the Republic and the franchise became meaningless, so citizenship declined. The “governance structure” you mention was key. They lingered and grew fatter until they had serious outside pressure, then folded. The seeds of the collapse were sown long before the event.
It’s hardly an ad hominem to point out that while Asimov was a bright man, he was not a professional historian on the Classical Era, and he was writing on it decades earlier. What I described to you was the view you get from most historians, and the “long slide into decadence and decay” theory has long since been discarded.
Geographic growth continued under the Empire. It expanded into Mesopotomia, Dacia, and had client kingdoms south of Egypt and in the Black Sea.It wasn’t as rapid as it was under the Republic, because the Roman Empire was butting up against natural barriers, unprofitable terrain, and both enemy empires and loyal client kingdoms for whom it would have been pointless to invade.
As I pointed out, we don’t need to speculate about possible long-term theories that greatly over-simplify the political and historical situation when there are perfectly good shorter-term answers that explain much more and fit much better with the research. There’s a good primer book on this with the Cambridge Illustrated History of the Roman World, plus the essay I linked above.
Or The History of the Roman Republic and The History of the Roman Empire by Isaac Asim… oops, never mind.
See above.
The phrase ‘pissing in the wind’ comes to mind here, Brett. Some see history through very thick glasses.
I still wanted to post an answer, though, if only for other people. But you’re right about that, and the Fall of the Roman Empire in general tends to be treated as a prop by amateur and unorthodox historians for pet ideological causes.
Actually, he wrote two books on the Roman Empire and Republic, so that would seem to make him a “classical historian”, at least compared to any one promoting their own historical spin here.
Which ones? There was nothing in his nonfiction bibliography about Rome.
http://www.asimovonline.com…
The Kite That Won the Revolution (1963)
The Greeks: A Great Adventure (1965)
The Roman Republic (1966)
The Roman Empire (1967)
The Egyptians (1967)
The Near East: 10,000 Years of History (1968)
The Dark Ages (1968)
Words from History (1968)
The Shaping of England (1969)
Constantinople: The Forgotten Empire (1970)
The Land of Canaan (1971)
The Shaping of France (1972)
The Shaping of North America: From Earliest Times to 1763 (1973)
The Birth of the United States (1974)
Earth: Our Crowded Spaceship (1974)
Our Federal Union (1975)
The Golden Door: The United States from 1865 to 1918 (1977)
The March of the Millennia: A Key To Looking At History (1991)
Asimov’s Chronology of the World (1991)
Christopher Columbus: Navigator to the New World (1991)
Ferdinand Magellan: Opening the Door to World Exploration (1991)
21 history books out of 500+ listed works. (Of which around 300 were original. Dude was prolific.)
Not really. As I mentioned in my other posts, the Fall of the Roman Empire tends to draw a lot of outside writers without any background in classical/ancient history, because they use it as a prop for either some ideological purpose or for a Grand Theory of History that they’re trying to promote. Or in Asimov’s case, a combination of that and writing a popular history book in the 1970s.
Just look at the post that started this discussion:
That type of stuff is what all too often happens.
And many writers talk about the decline in civic virtue, as it was a much easier life on the dole than through gaining wealth as part of a military conquering force.
…….with most of the short-term savings going to the wealthy and the corporations…………
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You gotta be kidding….
You know what they say in those stock and gold selling scheme ads: “past performance is not indicative of future” whatever….
There are a few differences between out consumption of resources now and what our consumption of resources were during the Roman empire, etc.
See if you can think of them.
Yea. There’s difference, all right. We are consuming everything from the entire planet. All of it with no notion that it might run out. And it will.
Kim Stanley Robinson has a pretty good take on this over the next few centuries in his latest.
…Yea. There’s difference, all right. We are consuming everything from the entire planet. All of it with no notion that it might run out. And it will………
______________________________
This notion of consuming, what does the consumed products turn into? Air? dissolve into the either?
If a megawatt of power was as inexpensive as a kilowatt is today, we could use a plasma torch and turn rocks into metals. Now many metals are diffuse enough in the crust (PGM’s, REE’s) that you need to go off planet for them but when you say that we are consuming “everything from the entire planet”, what you are actually saying is that our resource extraction techniques are not efficient enough or our energy supplies are insufficient to cost effective enough to continue to process the raw ores to get product.
Time to quit using the worn out ideology of the 1970’s.
Well this is just Great!
Well I paid my Public Space taxes!
Good thing NASA has be working on this for us.
I want a ride on SLS/Orion so I can live an extra 25 days after the end of the world.
How soon can we launch?
Did I overlook the story that cannabis was legalized in the state of Maryland? GSFC, the center of Nobel Laureate Dr. John Mather, COBE, also the control center for Hubble and they are adding analysis of modeling of social systems. Well, OK, cross-disciplinary technology transfer can create innovative approaches to solving or understanding old problems.
I would not argue that disproportionate stratification of society and ecological carrying capacity or resource depletion represent critical paths for a society. Here’s my 5 cent worth. The rapid automation of manufacturing, the rise of the machines, represents a rapidly changing ecological factor (in effect) that humans in both industrialized and less/non-industrialized nations are not showing the capability to adapt to rapidly. This factor is already evolving independently of human population or economic conditions and without the need for a singularity.
Secondly, I do not know if this model takes into account the collision or merging of two previously closed systems. Its happened with past civilizations as, for example, civilizations have expanded and made contact with other systems. Disease, military conflict, new knowledge and technology, new natural resources, or new labor resources flow in one or another direction, totally upsetting and in some respect resetting a social system. Its a discontinuity in the modeling equations. Do they account for such events? The last truly closed systems vanished in 1492 but the level of closed or open still is a variable today, e.g. the direction China is moving, North Korea or Russia is moving.
Third, population growth also involves a dependency on education. I do not think this has been a factor until the industrial era, particularly the 20th century. Human contraception and the rise of equality between the sexes also in the 20th century are factors linked to education of the masses. All these factors contribute to lower birth rates.
Carrying capacity is directly related to the ability of a population to generate wealth and feed themselves. I would turn again to the factor of automation/mechanization as a type of environmental factor that is functioning like a resource depletion, redefining what is the carrying capacity or also creating new forms of wealth and how it is distributed. Pretty hideous it seems.
Fourth, these models of social systems must define what is or are the systems equilibrium points. Such points would define when a system such as one functioning under capitalism are functioning normally. Deviation from equilibrium would at some point represent dysfunctional state. The great depression might certainly have represented such a state or possibly the one we are experiencing now. Any social system involving competition inevitably is broken or corrupted by winners that eventually revise the rules of operation in favor of themselves. So there is possibly a factor representing the coherency of the rules of engagement. A certain level of incoherency represents a tipping point. Lastly, another facor in these models should be democratization. This factor does not cause a step function but rather involves a continuum of states and varying degrees of impact on the system. There was a time when villages were self-sustaining systems. In the 1980s in West Germany there were village elders that had never ventured once or maybe once in their lifetime to the local big city. All they needed resided within a small space. In contrast, for better or worse, communism integrated a vast matrix of villages and villagers into a large social system. You see today a system in Russia that continues to have a low value democratic factor which impacts birth rates, productivity and the coherency (maybe call it ‘fairness’) factor of their society.
I think it is possible that such models as the one developed with GSFC input, could evolve and then be revised to operate a world economy down to the individual. The complexity of the world economic and social system is too complex already for humans to manage without considerable input from computer programs of many sorts. Eventually all of these can be merged into a computer system that can manage the whole system given some preconditions, predefined nominal operating ranges. Furthermore, I think it is possible that the conflict of opposing systems could disappear by permitting every individual to operate within an economic and social system of their choice with all systems functioning everywhere, all the time, down to the individual. One’s personal accounts and factors governing how one interacts would be defined by the choice of system they accept. So struggle between those wanting socialism, libertarianism, planned or market, etc. etc. would all walk the streets together (in computerized harmony – which shouldn’t be taken as Orwellian). Personal proximity, communities of like-minded people would exist but the acuity of the operating system would be down to the individual. The primary requirement would be that there be equity and equality for everyone, no free lunches no matter what system you choose to function as a part.
Raising the question of why not include asteroid or lunar resources in the modeling certainly came to mind. So I agree with Keith to a degree. Is there anything that NASA does that should not include thinking outside the box and doing cutting edge experiments and development? No, except where it is prudent to use simple, safe and cost effective technology as a means to an ends that is cutting edge. As is, this model seems too simple to draw insightful conclusions if one input ‘boundless resources from Space’. Also, too simple, as is, to add the factors such as I suggested.
However, I would suggest someone apply the model to NASA as a system. NASA has economic stratification – haves and have-nots – SLS and ISS and JWST versus everyone else. And it faces conditions of Ecological Strain in terms of resource depletion – exhaustion of funds, reaching its carrying capacity. Retirement and early buyouts are equivalent to death rates, while rate of hiring new employees represents birth rate. Why not model NASA with this groups work (HANDY)?
These are all good observations, and I’m sure the final report will make good reading. Yet as someone on the outside, an engineer, and by no means an expert on history, social change, macro-trends, etc., I have noticed something very odd, and unexpected, about these kind of expert analysis. There is a very clear lack of symmetry between optimistic and pessimistic takes on the subject of humanities future.
The symmetry I’m referring to is about the kind of evidence either those with optimistic conclusions or pessimistic conclusions present in these studies or books. So to say there is uncertainty about bad or good outcomes would seem to imply that evidence leans or can be interpreted both ways. But that’s not what these reports do. The optimistic leaning books (most recently “Abundance” by Diamond, or anything Kurzweil) all have a flavor of the anecdotal, with a near phobia of looking at the past and how certain conditions lead societies to certain outcomes. Experts who have arrived at pessimistic conclusions about our future (a definitive older work like “Overshoot”, or anything of a flavor “Guns, Germs and Steel”, “Why the West rules, For Now”, etc.) always provide well studied, abundant evidence, looking back, to the present, and then forward.
At the end of the day, very few people are experts on anything other than perhaps a narrow field, so the most we can do is educate ourselves on the other topics that we think are important, or we may ignore it all as too much. Then we act on beliefs, and really don’t want to hear anymore; evidence, facts, and numbers even less. I’m just saying, set aside a stack of such books for your reading over the next few years. The one’s reaching rather pessimistic conclusions about our fate if we don’t fundamentally change our direction read like damning evidence, making their point logically, with abundant evidence. Read the optimistic books and the reading gets lighter, more shallow, less well researched, very quickly.
This paper does not appear either optimistic or pessimistic to me; rather it says that there are specific parameters of individual societies which determine how they will evolve with time. Most importantly, it provides clear strategies (for those with the power to implement them) that can reduce the risk of collapse.
And those specific parameters are wholly insufficient to describe the parameter space that actually exists.
Buy my book.
Rocky, you make some good points but the HANDY model permits changes in the parameters to accommodate the social merging, changes in productivity, and other effects you mention. Moreover I think the major point of the paper is that many societies, based on their characteristics, particularly extreme social stratification, simply do not have points of stable equilibrium. This results in cyclic oscillation or runaway growth followed by collapse.
Yea, God help us that the poor in not only our society, but now around the world, live better than 99.9% of all humans that ever existed.
Hmmm. A little Google sleuthing suggests that the model development was partly supported several years ago under a blanket research agreement between UMD and GSFC. That’s a long way from a “NASA-sponsored” study, and certainly not a study that’s performed by or endorsed by NASA. Seems like sloppy reporting.
As far as i can tell the article has not even been published yet. How did the Guardian get hold of it? it sounds suspiciously like a case of a press release with inflated claims about NASA involvement to increase credibility.
I have a link to the actual article posted … not too hard to find.
Link check please!
Check the update. University of Maryland pulled the 2012 paper – there is a more recent one submitted 2 days ago that they would rather you not know about – but I found it … virtually identical.
Sounds like a recycling of the Club of Rome’s “Limits of Growth.” As G. Harry Stine pointed out in his “The Third Industrial Revolution,” extraterrestrial resources can totally change the equation.
I’m having trouble understanding how extraterrestrial resources are going to change things. Care to expand on this statement?
Cheers
That’s the thing. These ET resources would be great- if you are living ET. Getting an amount of, say, Titanium (or whatever) down the gravity hole will be an interesting proposition with no technology to achieve it in sight.
Getting the titanium down the gravity well is easy, you just drop it and gravity causes it imitate a meteor. The hard part is getting the Moon rocks and asteroids to the drop point.
I’m having trouble finding where it says exactly what NASA contributed to this research. Was it a grant, software, etc?
Read the bottom of the paper.
David Appell @ quark soup has some tidbits on where this is coming from
http://davidappell.blogspot…
I don’t know who did the study, but it’s the same bull-shit I’ve been hear’n for more than 30 years!
I can still recall an old Mad Magazine poster I had as a kid (in ye ancient tyme of the ’60’s):
” T H E . E N D . O F . T H E . W O R L D . I S . C O M I N G. !!!
(It’s just late . . . like everything else.) “
Thanks Keith for the link.
Although the connection to NASA is tenuous to the point of nonexistence, the paper is interesting and presents innovative ideas. It is not particularly dependent on the HANDY model as the mathematical simulation is in modern terms quite straightforward. The approximation of world history in an equation inevitably runs the risk of oversimplification. However the mathematical modeling of human society as two animal species, commoners and elites, engaged in a predator-prey relationship, browsing on natural resources and storing up wealth, ingeniously synthesizes economics, sociology, history and ecology in a theory that stirs memories of everything from Hari Seldon to dialectical materialism, yet has the unique potential, for socioeconomics, to provide quantitative data and thus prove itself through the only real test of scientific rigor, the ability to predict.
The paper is fascinating and contains points of contention but much food for thought. It certainly doesn’t predict the end of the world as we know it and I doubt any of the reviewers have actually read the paper.
I recommend that everyone stop talking about it and read it carefully from beginning to end. Then we can talk.
No one at NASA or affiliated with NASA, even at a great, highly-competent, scientific and engineering Center like Goddard, is even slightly qualified to make any broad-sweeping economic, social, or financial pronouncements. Period. End of Story.
Endorsing, sponsoring, financing, or supporting a cliche-ish, tired, boring, worn-out socialist agenda of economic equality and income leveling does absolutely nothing to add to NASA’s credibility as a scientifically objective contributor to important international dialog in such areas as environmental devastation, deforestation, climate change, pollution, sea surface salinity and other areas where it is actually qualified.
If one dollar of NASA money is spent on this sort of thing it is a waste.
It is sad if NASA, an esteemed engineering and scientific organization, is getting so politicized that it is weighing in on faddish socio-economic issues in which it is completely unqualified.
Just as it is none of NASA’s business whether Moslems feel good about their once enlightening effects on world mathematics (that they left behind forever centuries ago), it is none of NASA’s business to endorse a Marxist socio-political agenda that was completely discredited at the very latest with the fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of state capitalism in the People’s Republic of China.
Explore Space – Not A Socialist Agency (NASA)
Looks like they have pulled the paper. The link is 404ing and the directory has no similar paper titles.
I worked with the World Dynamics model that was used in “The Limits to Growth” back in the 70s. The key assumptions in their model have proven to be false due to technological changes. First, energy use per unit of GDP has declined.(The US had $3 GDP per unit of energy in 1980 and $6.7 in 2012; constant dollars) Second, pollution per unit of GDP has fallen in most of the developed world. Third, we continue to find and develop more resources or find substitutes as prices increase. (This is one area where the use of space resources could help – copper does appear to be getting in short supply – a real problem for electric and hybrid cars, btw.) Fourth, agriculture has gotten much more productive. The starvation in the world is mostly due to political factors (wars, farm confiscation, etc.) and not lack of supply.
So, their predictions of collapse in a stew of food and resource shortages while we choke on pollution in the next couple of years hasn’t come to pass.
I hoped to see if their models were available, but my guess is they won’t be. Meadows made the MIT model available if you sent a tape and return postage – we used the version written in APL.
Just did an update. University of Maryland pulled the 2012 paper – there is a more recent one submitted 2 days ago that they would rather you not know about – but I found it … virtually identical.
I would place the fault on the person who wrote the press release, which improperly implied NASA endorsement of the research. Likely someone at Goddard called the university to complain. The university did not want to risk its grant and understandably withdrew the paper for modification.
Dear Kieth, I think the reason NASA seems to have ignored all the resources around the planet Earth is that the fiscal and political realities mean we are not making a serious effort at getting those resources fast enough to replace what we are destroying the Earth to get.