Global Energy, GWP and Population Growth: what happened in 1972?

[GliderGuider]

16. I had similar questions about Garrett's 9.7mw number, so I wrote him.

Last edited Thu Jun 27, 2013, 12:54 PM - Edit history (2)

He clarified it as being the power required to support the total accumulated asset base of civilization since the beginning of time (or practically speaking since Year 1?). His proxy for this was the cumulative constant dollar GWP going back as far as made any difference.

The idea makes intuitive sense to me - you need energy to maintain what you built last year as well as stuff that was built 20 or 50 or 100 years ago, as well as to build new assets in order to grow- but I think the precision he claimed came from a very small sample of years, and so is open to legitimate criticism. Estimating GWP from e.g. the year 500 is imprecise business, though Angus Maddison made a good stab at it. Also, GWP is a poor proxy for asset construction, since the rate of Fixed Capital Formation within economies and over time varies a lot, and even poorer as the economy become decoupled from physical activity through the use of financial instruments like derivatives.

I think he had a good insight, but the validity of the proof is low.

The application of physical laws to human behavior is an area I'm very interested in at the moment, and is what led me to find Garrett. I'm looking at the possibility (now IMO a certainty) that basic human behavior - especially anything having to do with survival and growth - is shaped by the operation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics as manifested in non-equilibrium open systems. Essentially, our strong cultural resistance to de-growth or restraint (especially in the use of energy) is evidence that we are shaped by the thermodynamics inherent in the "survive and propagate" directives that drive all living organisms.

The thermodynamic shaping of human behavior is apparent at the individual level if one knows how to look at it, but becomes more obvious when we look at our whole global civilization. The collective behavior of 7 billion individuals becomes statistically deterministic, similar to the way temperature and pressure appear in a gas composed of many individual molecules. The molecules themselves each have a mass, a position and a velocity, while the gas aggregate exhibits the emergent properties of temperature and pressure.

The plateaus in the energy use graph represent stable technological periods - I'd just call them the agricultural, industrial and electronic eras after their defining technologies.

I'm just beginning to delve into cybernetics in my quest to understand what's going on. The first thing I discovered was a 1963 paper talking about "Deviation-Amplifying Mutual Causal Processes". It's about growth-amplifying positive feedback loops between two or more processes rather than the more typical cybernetic concept of homeostasis requiring negative feedbacks. The analogy to the feedback relationship between processes like population growth and energy production, technological growth and urbanization, or the system of (fossil fuel CO2 production, Arctic warming, shrinking polar ice cap, methane releases from melting permafrost) is obvious.

Essentially all of human growth activity is tangled up in positive feedback loops. Such loops can only be broken in two ways: by external limits on essential process outputs or inputs, or the inability of the system to maintain structural coherence at high levels of activity. Collective human behavior does not appear to be able to put artificial controls on the feedbacks, so breaking the loops will require either input limits or system breakdown.

To finish off by going a bridge too far (or jumping the shark, take your pick of metaphor) I'm beginning to suspect that we are approaching a point of endosymbiosis with our cybernetic control technology, especially the Internet. If endosymbiosis is achieved, humans become essential elements of a larger super-organism in much the same way that mitochondria migrated into early prokaryotic cells and became essential components of the new eukaryotic cells. Similarly, it's possible that we are evolving towards a situation in which human beings act as hyper-functional neurons within the super-organism, with endpoint devices like smart phones and PCs acting as synapses, and network connections being analogous to nerve fibers.

It's an old science-fiction idea, but I think it's about to appear in reality. However it seems to be happening through a process of coevolution driven by the mutual amplification effects of human ingenuity and electronic technology, rather than through a Borg-like assimilation of humans into a hive mind, or Kurzweil's eschatological Singularity.

It's probably going to happen much faster than we expect, and in ways that we don't interpret as being what they are - much like the way most people are unable to see our behavior as being shaped by thermodynamics rather than solely by human volition. The big question is whether climate change and the rest of the Global Clusterfuck is going to win the race and eliminate the possibility before it happens. I rather hope not. So in the interests of seeing this possibility have maximum opportunity for expression, I now hope solar and wind do end up powering a future 100 terawatt civilization. Srsly. I'd love to see how a cyborg civilization comes into being.