,
18 tweets,
7 min read
Read on Twitter
Fascinating essay on the collapse of civilizations — both the good and bad outcomes — and why a collapse from the modern level of interconnectedness could be profoundly bad. aeon.co/ideas/civilisa…
2/ This has implications for settling in space. The article says complexity makes civilization fragile. I would bet that it isn’t actually the level of complexity, but the failure to retain simpler layers in-place beneath the more complex layers, that makes it fragile. 
3/ AFAIK, life has been resilient on Earth for billions of years because the simplest organisms always dominate. Complex organisms need simpler ones, but simpler organisms don’t need complex ones. The bias is always toward simplicity. (Illustration, S.A. Gould.) So in space...
4/ We’re in a 10,000+ year process evolving “symbiotic” machines at the apex of this pyramid, enabling larger human populations. Today, machines can’t exist w/o us, but we can exist w/o them. In space that flips. We will always depend on machines in space. (Image: Wikimedia)
5/ Evidence suggests these complex relationships we are evolving at the top are only metastable, so civilizations grow then collapse. Efforts like the “50 Machines to Restart Civilization” aim for better stability by keeping the simpler layers intact. opensourceecology.org/gvcs/
6/ Of course I asked if this could explain Fermi’s Paradox: since more complex societies have more profound collapses, then are interstellar space-faring civilizations at a level of such complexity that their collapse must always be complete? deviantart.com/juhho/art/the-…
7/ I don’t think that’s necessarily so. Why can’t a super-advanced species be smart enough to build resilience into the fabric of civilization? I would guess this means building vastly more simplicity into everything we do. As the pyramid gets taller its base gets wider.
8/ So here’s the practical application. Right now we’re building the simplest level of machines to support humanity off the planet. These are the “bacteria” of the future machine pyramid that makes complex civilization possible in space, ecologically the “primary producers”.
9/ (Unlike the first bacteria, we don’t plan for it to be a closed ecology: it will still depend on shipments of stuff from Earth for a long time, until we achieve a 100% closed supply chain in space. But it needs to make about 80% of all stuff in space within a few decades.)
10/ We talk about rapidly replacing that first generation with higher-tech machines, and evolving through generations of industry until we get to that fully closed supply chain where everything can be made in space. Maybe that is a mistake.
11/ Maybe we need to mimic nature, with ever larger populations of the basic machines, always operating in their simple 80% closure supply chain, even as we evolve the more complex ones. Maybe we should be creating a pyramid of complexity in space, not just the apex.
12/ These questions are unanswered because the academic field that studies this — industrial ecology — is a new field of thought. We have a lot to learn here on Earth, and in space everything becomes even less familiar. (Image de Souza et al. researchgate.net/publication/31…)
13/ I’m optimistic because computing is growing so rapidly that our ability to study and solve these problems will increase while we are building civilization beyond Earth. In fact, computing can be seen as both the driving need for, and the solution to, getting beyond Earth.
14/ By the middle of THIS century, computing is expected to require the entire global energy supply. We can hope to delay this only a decade or two through better efficiency. We must face this in mere decades. (Source: Semiconductor Industry Assn. semiconductors.org/resources/rebo…)
15/ This is part of a long-term exponential trend in growth of information processing that can be seen in Moore’s Law and many other metrics. It even goes back to before humanity existed in the growth of genetic complexity. Now at last, information is reaching planetary scales.
16/ The famous chart by Ray Kurzweil showing how paradigm shifts seem to occur at ever shorter intervals of time in exponential decay. Inverting both sides of this equation you get a prediction of exponential growth in information that began at the Big Bang, same as Moore’s Law.
17/ That’s getting rather heady, but the point is that complexity has been increasing seemingly like a natural law. And it has been an interesting ride. It could continue, if we can get these darned information systems off our planet so they won’t hurt the ecosphere any further.
18/18 So I’m optimistic that informational complexity is not just the problem (at the planet-scale) but also the solution to creating systems that can get beyond the planet and learn to do it with resilience and long-term sustainability. We can’t do it yet, but we learn as we go.
