The Gaian System
Current to future
Modern Techno-Industrial civilization is a product of burning through a planetary larder of fossil fuels, mineral ores, and metal ores. All extraction of fossil fuels and mining of metal and mineral ores is a one-off event.
So why do it?
Presumably to maximally turn forests into tree farms/rangelands, scrub/grasslands into rangelands, aquatic regions (e.g. the lakes/rivers/oceans) into food, and all potentially arable (with irrigation/terraforming) lands into crops no matter how marginal… for a time (e.g. irrigation adds salts to soil to eventually turns land like the former Fertile Crescent into vast “boundless and bare… lone and level sands” which stretch far away), e.g. the future San Juaquin Valley in California. It was a planet for the taking. We took it. And then what?
By in effect turning fossil fuels and other non-renewables into food, we can maximize the human, livestock, and pet populations (for a time). The Modern Techno-Industrial (MTI) form of civilization is not remotely sustainable (as all prior empire building was not either).
Humans will not persist on the planet in a viable form as evolvable animals without understanding the following graphic. Which humans? All normal, non-retarded 15 year olds should “know it and live it.”
The Gaian system is a planetary life-support system all organisms depend on. Humans are organisms dependent on far more organisms than livestock, crops, and pets. A species that works to destroy a planetary life-support system has extinction as its outcome — not sometimes, but always.
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An expansionistic, aggressive metastatic cancer, e.g. pancreatic cancer, never goes into remission. With early detection and aggressive treatment, up to 10 percent of patients may become pancreatic cancer free so treatment ends (90% die during treatment or 100% die without treatment). Few societies just before or post-collapse and partial recovery, if any, attempt via aggressive treatment to renormalize, and only one (the Tairona) may provide evidence that an expansionist form of human can become a non-expansionist form of human.
Our current form of civilization is a complex adaptive dissipative structure/system. So too is a whirlwind, hurricane, or supercell. One seen by dinosaurs would have been the same atmosphere event as may be view today (no two are ever ‘exactly’ the same in the sense that “you can never step into the same river twice” because the river is always changing).
Dissipative structures are non-evolvable. They degrade available energy, increasing entropy maximally. They always die without leaving heirs to repeat the pattern with heritable variation. Evolvable systems are complex, adaptive, and they dissipate energy, but variations exist based on information that are be passed on to heirs — descendants. Before some organisms started shuffling their deck with that of another (reproducing sexually), random changes in the information (usually best viewed as errors) decreased the odds of persisting. But if reproduction was not subject to possible change, asexual replication would never produce change, variations upon which selection could alter the information as passed on, which is what an evolvable system does and a dissipative one does not (cannot do).
Form chiefdom building to state-level empire building (to current global empire) the dynamic has always risen above the background steady-state dynamic of humans living in groups of typically 20 to 50 others (range 5–85). One group with no interaction with other groups is non-viable (exogamy is a need and therefore an evolved want, but for which an individual will self-select out of begetting descendants who beget posterity long term).
Larger than viable-sized groups select for too few repeat interactions than are needed to select for trust and against cheating (lying, taking, using). In overcomplex society, hierarchy is selected for, as is the short-term self interests of those who would be privileged to prosper for a time by taking, exploiting, and using resources, including other people (e.g. Caesar: veni, vidi, vici.).
On the leading edge of expansion, when resources became scarce, the expansionist form of human just moved on to the next valley to repeat the pattern. The pattern can be repeated (for a time). It started about 50k to 60k years ago with the Great Expansion, but just as a metastatic cancer cannot grow without limit, without end, when the planet has been taken, the pattern of expansion ends (in the case of regional overcomplex societies, the downslope can play out over centuries, for the Indus Valley Civilization, 600 years to regional extinction).
