Otherwise, the population would die out. Scientists have proposed that as few as or as many as 40, people could be needed to sustain a genetically viable population. The more favourable the conditions, the fewer people are needed, and the more likely a population is to succeed.
A post-catastrophe world would also have some major disadvantages. For example, a lot of the most accessible fossil fuels and other resources have already been extracted and used up. Some industrial pollutants also would persist for many years.
On the upside, cities may endure as dense collections of usable materials like steel. And some energy sources like wind and hydropower would remain available and fairly easy to tap. Fossil fuels like coal may be difficult to mine for a post-catastrophe civilisation without industrial technology Credit: Getty Images.
Planning for possible future catastrophes may seem rather abstract and removed from the pressing issues that we face today.
But it is important to recognise that the actions we take now can affect the course of human civilisation into a distant long-term future. At stake is who will have the chance to live, and what their lives will be like. To help wrap my mind around this, I find it helpful to imagine the world today if the Holocaust and WWII had been avoided. In that world, there would presumably be many people living good, happy lives — people who do not exist in ours.
Of course, we cannot go back in time and change events. But we can change what we do right now to avoid new catastrophes, especially those that could affect the long-term future of human civilisation.
For the sake of everyone yet to live, it is vital that we succeed. Seth Baum is the executive director of the Global Catastrophic Risk Institute , a think tank focused on existential risk. Did you enjoy this story? Then we have a favour to ask. Join your fellow readers and vote for us in the Webby Awards!
It only takes a minute and helps support original, in-depth journalism. Thank you! Deep Civilisation Risk. Combining literary flair with scientific rigour, this enthralling book documents the coming revolution by telling the story of the researchers' exploration of the law, their ingenious work and unexpected insights.
Buchanan reveals that we are witnessing the emergence of an extraordinarily powerful new field of science that will help us comprehend the bewildering and unruly rhythms that dominate our lives and may even lead to a true science of the dynamics of human culture and history. Earthquakes, market crashes, hurricanes, wars: are these random forces of nature, or foreseeable blips on the radar screen of history? In this lively book, science journalist Mark Buchanan introduces readers to a developing branch of science that looks for order in what seems to be utmost chaos.
In the late s, three physicists set out to investigate the apparently inherent instability of complex systems. In a process that Buchanan illustrates by analogy with a sand pile, they discovered that these systems tend to arrive at a "critical state," after which point any random grain falling in just the right place can touch off an avalanche.
So it is, Buchanan shows us, with the onset of world wars, economic shocks, traffic gridlock, and other dislocating events--all of which this new science may one day help predict.
In clear and vigorous prose, Buchanan brings readers insights from nonequilibrium physics, offering a new way of seeing the "fingers of instability" that poke through the world's fabric--and that in turn make it such an interesting place.
Why do catastrophes happen? What sets off earthquakes, for example? What about mass extinctions of species? The outbreak of major wars? Massive traffic jams that seem to appear out of nowhere?
Why does the stock market periodically suffer dramatic crashes? Why do some forest fires become superheated infernos that rage totally out of control? Experts have never been able to explain the causes of any of these disasters. Now scientists have discovered that these seemingly unrelated cataclysms, both natural and human, almost certainly all happen for one fundamental reason.
This is an idea from complexity theory, and an exciting one. What it means is that such systems are in principle impossible to predict. In the sandpile game, for example, we don't know when we drop the latest grain whether it will trigger a big avalanche or a small one or none at all. This is similar to the "butterfly effect" in complexity theory in which it is thought possible that the flap of a butterfly's wings in the Sahara Desert, for example, may affect the amount of rain that falls on Cuba.
Where I think Buchanan goes astray here is in making unwarranted connections between systems by using superficial and forced similarities. For example, one of the ideas from the study of earthquakes is that there is no typical size for an earthquake.
In his desire to generalize Buchanan tries to find the same sort of phenomena in the interesting study Sidney Redner did on the fate of scientific research papers. Buchanan writes on page that there was "no typical number of citations for a paper, and, by extension, no typical magnitude for the reshaping in the network of ideas that any paper ultimately entails.
Of the , papers published, , had no citations at all. Buchanan also asserts on page " Chicago, for example, is a big city not by happenstance but because of its location on a great lake and because of its proximity to the middle of a great, growing country. Similar arguments can be made about other great cities in the US and around the world.
The historical and geographical circumstances are special and they really are crucial. Buchanan further extends the thesis to include social and political revolutions.
This makes for lively reading and there is no doubt that there are similarities between the critical state of a nation before a revolution and that of a sandpile before an avalanche or a forest before a fire, but the stresses are of an entirely different sort.
He sees the readjustments of governments as a way to prevent the maladjustments that lead to revolutions as similar to the small forest fires that forest managers start to prevent a large forest fire as similar. Buchanan himself notes, still on page , "None of this is meant to be fully convincing. The message is simply that this is a real possibility.
In conclusion, I disagree with the notion that the world is simpler than we think. I believe the opposite is manifestly true, and I found nothing in Buchanan's very interesting arguments to prove otherwise. An interesting book along the lines of Blink, Tipping Point.
Using several global examples, Buchanan tries to show there is no way to predict future events, earthquakes, market crashes, etc. When we imply we know how major events like these happened, it is always in hindsight. In particular I liked his example using economists predictions.
There was NO case where any economist predicted any of the events we have been through. Economics is a particularly good example of his methodology since ther An interesting book along the lines of Blink, Tipping Point.
Economics is a particularly good example of his methodology since there is generations of accumulated data to pour over. Finally he discusses system equilibrium and the idea systems always tend towards a stable state.
In fact he says most events are because many of these systems are in fact always on the edge of criticality and we have no way of knowing how, why, or what will cause the turning point that will push complicated systems over the edge and cause upheavals.
I will probably read this again. It's a short book and some of the mathematical models didn't make it into my brain clearly. I would recommend this book. Oct 28, Anil rated it really liked it.
If the author had included a chapter with one example, with exact step by step procedures about how these power laws were calculated, the book would've been perfect.
Nevertheless, amazing book. Methods are interesting and can be googled. While I have always used the Petri dish as an analogy for human societies, I was pleased to find out that the spread and scaling of human settlements followed the same patterns as forms of bacterial growth. The message that we should not try to learn lessons fro If the author had included a chapter with one example, with exact step by step procedures about how these power laws were calculated, the book would've been perfect.
The message that we should not try to learn lessons from conventional narrative history is useful advice. Dec 18, James Morrison rated it really liked it. I liked it very much. It made me skeptical about some of the science I learned when I was young.
Mostly, not everything is normally distributed like you might think. Science class, at least in the past, studied things we understand and when the relationship is not linear, or we don't understand the pattern it tends to be ignored. So this is a nice science lesson from a different perspective than you may have considered. One of those books that makes you look at the world in an entirely new way.
Everything from earthquakes to the stock market to the current protests about the killing of George Floyd. Why do you sometimes get a "big" event -- a catastrophic earthquake, fire, worldwide protest movement, and sometimes such things are no big deal?
Amazingly, it all can be explained and understood with very simple physical models. And the difference? There is no difference; all of these systems, from the earth's crust One of those books that makes you look at the world in an entirely new way. There is no difference; all of these systems, from the earth's crust to forests to society, naturally settle into a "critical state" in which a tiny disruption will trigger an event, and that may or may not trigger further events.
It's essentially impossible to figure out what will happen because of a given trigger, and conversely, looking back at some event, the particular character of whatever trigger started it generally isn't so important. Oct 29, Vinny rated it really liked it. This is a phenomenal book for students of history to understand how the concept of universality in physics relates to the field.
Universality simply states that under very broad conditions, interacting objects display universal features of their behavior.
Furthermore, it appears that systems generally tend to move into a self-organized critical state on their own, which could result in a catastrophic event. Through a series of examples, Buchanan guides the reader through the history of the concep This is a phenomenal book for students of history to understand how the concept of universality in physics relates to the field. Through a series of examples, Buchanan guides the reader through the history of the concept of the critical state and connects it to the study of history.
The final thought that I left with was that human history is fundamentally unpredictable because we operate in a semi-independent state. Generally speaking, our civilizations, societies and cultures appear to follow basic power laws and remain stable, yet individually we display dramatic differences in variability which in turn change many other variables. So we are able to evolve and create new tools and types of societies to attempt to bring about new levels of stability to our systems, yet we still reflect the basic characteristics at the atomic level, as defined by universality and self-organized criticality.
Jan 11, Holly Williams rated it liked it Shelves: history , philosophy , non-fiction , science. Started off strong explaining the fundamentals of power states, some solid examples with evidenced data and introduction to critical states in broad science.
The earthquake power state comparison was interesting and both well reasoned and demonstrated. In this simplified setting of the sandpile, the power law also points to something else: the surprising conclusion that even the greatest of events have no special or exceptional causes.
After all, every avalanche large or small starts out the same way, when a single grain falls and makes the pile just slightly too steep at one point. What makes one avalanche much larger than another has nothing to do with its original cause, and nothing to do with some special situation in the pile just before it starts. Rather, it has to do with the perpetually unstable organization of the critical state, which makes it always possible for the next grain to trigger an avalanche of any size.
To this, John Mauldin adds :. First, Hyman Minsky who should have been a Nobel laureate points out that stability leads to instability.
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