The Path to an Ideal World It seems that our species is driven to try to attain total happiness, which corresponds to maximum life expectancy. Unfortunately, given limited resources, doing so most severely limits the amount of time that resources will last.

Target for Survival

One way to avert a population collapse due to exhaustion of resources is to hold consumption (the mass consumed per year) constant and convert from using non-renewable resources to using renewable resources so that we are consuming more than 99% renewable resources by the end of this century. Starting at the end of 2010, the annual rate (applied to the fraction that is non-renewable) would need to be at least 5.1%:

Milestones

The following world milestones assume business-as-usual behavior:

In the News

Arctic Ocean methane is being released faster than expected. Is it already too late to stop catastrophic global warming?

The Supreme Court grants corporations the right to spend as much money as they want to support political candidates, threatening to totally corrupt the U.S. government.

Economy in turmoil: See current business news (NYT)

More news...

Commentary

Projections of U.S. income and cost of living based on the population-consumption model suggest that last year's recession was a consequence of the world's depletion of resources, and that income will grow just barely faster than expense until the world population crashes.

On health care reform and global warming, our leaders have confirmed that they are capable of only halfway measures to deal with the most critical issues of our time. While it is tempting to blame individuals and alliances, the real problem is that as a culture we value individual power above the survival of all, and some lives more than others based on how successful they are at catering to our basest wants rather than our basic needs.

Perhaps the best world we could hope for is one where people cooperate much like the species in a healthy ecosystem. This will perhaps require siphoning energy from our current efforts into building new relationships, with an uncertain result.

The book "Plan C" by Pat Murphy lays out in great detail how we came to reach peak oil and what we can do to alleviate its effects, especially from the perspective of the United States. Statistics quoted in the book suggest that there is 80% of consumption not accounted for in this site's population-consumption projections which is attributable to global warming carbon dioxide emissions. See the blog entry "Plan C-B."

Key Relationships

The longevity of a population -- how long it takes to deplete a fixed amount of resources at a fixed rate -- is proportional to the amount of resources and inversely proportional to the square of per-capita consumption.

Population is proportional to per-capita consumption.

Life expectancy and happiness vary as the logarithm of per-capita consumption.

These relationships are embodied in the current version of the Population-Consumption model.

Longevity Map

By changing three variables, humanity can potentially determine how long it will survive: minimum life expectancy, maximum life expectancy, and total resources. This is illustrated by the longevity map (below), which shows how long the world's current population would take to consume all of its resources. See Comfort.

See the Products page for items that can be used to spark conversation about some of the issues raised here.

Now available: "Lights Out" is a novel that explores the consequences of the resource depletion over the very short term, as a fictional electromagnetic pulse disables technology on the Hawaiian islands.

© Copyright 2008-2010 Bradley Jarvis. All rights reserved.