George Mobus on the impending bottleneck [View all]

[GliderGuider]

Dr. Mobus is a professor of Computer Science at the University of Washington in Tacoma. He has a very broad academic background, and interests that include biology, and evolutionary, cognitive, and neuro-psychology. He is co-author of a textbook on Complex Systems.

His blog, Question Everything, has been up since 2007, and features erudite articles on biophysical economics, evolution, sapience, systems science, and the global human predicament. He is the one writer in the blogosphere whose work consistently comes closest to expressing my own views.

In the blog post excerpted below he puts a stake in the ground regarding what he now firmly believes is an upcoming evolutionary bottleneck. It's an event that follows naturally from the expanding global predicament, driven by social, environmental and ecological factors that our world culture appears powerless to address with enough speed or resolve to turn back the rising the tide of calamity.

Do You Want to Avoid the Bottleneck?

After more than a decade of searching for answers, and attending to the major trends in our world, I have come to certain conclusions about the future of humanity. I haven't made a secret of my now fairly firm belief that in the not-too-distant future humanity will suffer an evolutionary bottleneck event concurrent with a sixth major extinction. Ironically this extinction event is being brought on by humanity itself. Freed from the ordinary biological constraints that keep other species in check in normal ecological feedback loops, and bolstered by the discovery of incredible power stored in fossil fuels and nuclear fission, humans have used their cleverness to grow far beyond the natural carrying capacity afforded by real-time solar influx. And the problems caused by this fact have grown obvious to most. We are altering our climate. We are polluting our environment. We are diminishing the quality of soils and water. And we are behaving badly toward one another, as well as the rest of the biosphere.

If you want to know why I am so convinced of this outcome, I have put together a list of things that, from a systems perspective, seem to me to be necessary actions needed to minimize the negative impacts rapidly approaching. All of the items on this list interact in complex, nonlinear ways so that you can't just pick and choose the one or ones you think will do the job. All will have to be done, together, for there to be any positive effect. Once you see the list, and ponder the likelihood that our population will do any of them, let alone all, you will understand my conviction.

• Stop all reproduction. No new babies for twenty years at least and then only ten percent of the adult population should be allowed to reproduce afterward.
  
• Stop capitalistic profit taking. Forever. No more capitalism and profiting ever again. Freeze prices and wages (except for the overpaid executives: reduce theirs).
  
• Take back the wealth of the top 10% - it will be needed to support survival activities.
  
• Destroy the financial system. Revert banking to hold savings and eliminate securities and futures markets.
  
• Reallocate housing to handle the poor. Move those living in squalor and homeless into the mansions in the Hamptons (for example).
  
• Put all able-bodied men and women to work restoring soils and growing food for local consumption.
  
• Turn all arable and climate-viable land over to permaculture.
  
• Begin immediate mass migrations of peoples living in climate danger zones. For example all of the people of the MENA and central Africa regions are in danger from severe climate change. They will need to be relocated north as far as Russia and Europe.
  
• Eliminate all luxury product/service productions. Re-purpose the capital to producing absolute necessities such as plows!
  
• Redirect all fossil fuel production to supply energy for recycling materials, food production, and migration.
  
• Minimize energy consumption by the public to just that essential to support the above.

But you may have another conclusion. What is yours, and on what basis do you make it? What evidence do you have? Simply saying you just can't believe my conclusion is valid is not sufficient. You need to show where my evidence is wrong or that counter evidence exists to warrant another (possible) conclusion. I'm open to arguments with merit. In fact I hope someone can shoot me down on this, for obvious reasons.