New York City, one of the United States's most recognizable
cities,
in September 2021, of the many artistic landmarks of the
city,
was repurposed. It was the metronome near Union Square.
If you've ever walked by it or seen it online,
you'll probably notice two things.
One a giant piece of artwork by Kristen Jones and
Andrew Ginzel that is supposed to convey instancy and Infinity,
transience and permanence all at once.
While the pulsing nature of the artwork is supposed to
embody the city's energy,
elements such as the massive piece of bedrock symbolizing millennia
of geological history
and the rippling centerpiece all come together to help the
viewer visualize one thing
time.
Another thing you might notice is the nearly 60 feet
long display of digits.
This digital facet of the artwork is what allows it
to be reprogrammed to fit such an occasion.
Previously, it was used to display the time of the
day and the number of hours,
minutes and seconds that remain in it.
It is all fittingly titled The Passage.
But this September, this artwork embarked on a new mission.
The numbers changed to not display only the regular time,
but the time that Earth has left in our carbon
budget.
Before, given the current rate of emissions,
we crossed the 1.5°C threshold outlined by the IPCC in
2018.
Now it all sounds like things people have heard before.
Scientists come up with numbers,
they urge how important it is.
And then people move on with their days.
This is different. A complete depletion would result in the
total destruction of our planet,
and it will have been at the fault of our
own hands.
If the Earth's temperature is increased by just
1.5°C, we will feel its consequences.
Extreme heat waves, fire across the world,
droughts and places there shouldn't be,
and less and less of the one resource on Earth
we all need
water. The concern for climate change is certainly nothing new.
In fact, it's been with us not for just the
past few decades,
but for centuries. British archaeologist Ian Morris spoke at the
World Economic Forum to talk about how civilizations in the
past had collapsed.
He incorporated modern day scientific methods,
excavation practices, and billions of artifacts to dissect the collapse
of previous civilizations.
He concludes by saying that all major collapses tend to
have 5 common factors time and time again.
Firstly, they tend to have massive uncontrolled population movements that
overwhelm societal infrastructures,
pretty much overpopulation. Secondly, they have major pandemics and diseases
which because of the population movements,
spread and merge faster. Then there's state failure and increased
warfare.
This in turn leads to an economic collapse.
And then there's one final piece of the puzzle,
climate change. Civilizations rarely collapse because of one thing,
and so these five factors can often Co occur
and it's their combined effect that leads to the collapse
of civilization.
It's easy to see how these factors connect with each
other because all of these things are taking place right
now around the world.
Climate change is displacing millions of people,
a pandemic is ravaging the world as we speak,
and bad governance about these issues is making it all
worse.
And while the population growth is certainly not out of
control,
it is in fact declining steadily.
All in all, we're well on our way to collapsing.
Ian Moore says there is some hope,
however. In fact, in his study of past civilizations,
he notes that quite a few actually survived the five
horsemen of the apocalypse and rebuilt themselves afterwards.
He credits their survival to economic growth.
Now, I'm really not about to debate capitalism versus other
economic models in the world
because, well, I don't want to start a war.
In his book about the future of human civilization,
Homo Deus historian Yuval Noah Harari notes that although we
experience occasional economic crises and international wars,
in the long run, capitalism has not only managed to
prevail,
but also to overcome famine,
plague, and war. In fact,
in modern times we've experienced so much economic growth that
today more people die of eating too much than eating
not enough.
It turns out we have a little too much stuff
sometimes,
and that too much stuff isn't produced out of nothing.
Beyond the dollar value we pay for things,
there's a far greater cost to abundance,
an ecological cost. The overuse of unsustainable natural resources,
water pollution, soil pollution, loss of biodiversity in recent times
has meant that we are closer to ecological collapse than
we have ever been.
Even though in the past there wasn't a global governing
body like the United Nations to oversee and recommend actions
to reduce our environmental footprint,
the footprint itself was always very localized.
People hardly travelled as far as we do today,
and business was not nearly as robust.
Sure, a few centuries ago there were no solar panels
or recycled plastic,
but there also weren't any fuel hungry airliners either.
We also weren't siphoning oil and fossil fuels out of
the ground either.
The scale of the industrial world,
it seems, is truly unique to our time and civilization.
There are of course other aspects to our civilization that
make it more unique
and by extension more complicated.
Total nuclear obliteration is still a non zero possibility,
and as low as that number might be,
the simple possibility of something like that happening is terrifying.
Both natural pandemics and bioweapons are also a threat.
In fact, both are quite common throughout the history of
collapsed civilizations.
Until very recently, more soldiers died from disease than from
actual combat itself.
It's just that modern advances,
while allowing us to cure far more diseases than before,
have also opened up a Pandora's box of future threats.
There's obviously the threat of runaway super intelligence as well.
Such a technological singularity can encompass the threat of nanotechnology
and their rising incorporation into everything from manufacturing to medicine.
All of these factors understandably complicate the modern infrastructure,
and Joseph Tanner, a historian,
suggests that this rising complexity is what could ultimately be
our
society's downfall. They suggest that societies emerge as problem solving
collectives.
That's what they're there for.
But eventually they reach a point where the complexity and
intricate structures required to solve problems actually reach a point
of diminishing returns,
and civilizations collapse under their own weight.
Tied to this idea is that of energy return on
investment,
or eroi for short. Simply put,
it's how much energy is needed to produce or extract
a set amount of energy.
Fossil fuels have historically had good erois,
but as we're burning through tons and tons of non
renewable fossil fuels,
this eroi is steadily declining.
The Eroi for petroleum, for example,
has fallen by around 10 times in the past century
because,
well, we're stealing all of it.
Besides, despite being more in line with our goals of
a greener future,
as it stands, renewable energy sources are quite hard to
develop,
manufacture, and implement, which doesn't help their erois either.
These are all factors that are truly unique to our
time,
and they sound pretty complex.
However, there is one factor that civilizations in the past
have certainly never had before
social media. It's unique in the sense that there's never
been a platform that allows us to connect with so
many people so easily.
It's a society within our society
when we certainly didn't evolve to live in.
It was just a byproduct of other advances.
Of course, social media has led to some wonderful things,
like every other element I just talked about.
It's allowed lost families to reconnect,
allowed fundraisers to reach significantly larger audiences,
and it's given a platform to the ordinary person.
But the problem with social media?
Well, it's much more nuanced.
Much like the cost of biological advancements,
there's the threat of virality in social media too.
Only it's much, much worse.
If falsehood spreads 6 times faster than truth on Twitter,
then there's only ever going to be 1 winner in
the battle of ideas.
The virality of ideas. Or bad ideas,
I should say, is a newfound threat to civilization.
It means the ripple effect of a bad idea is
now much more likely to escape the geographic confines in
which it took place and affect the rest of the
world. The sharing of misinformation on social media has led
to levels of polarization that have never been seen before.
Lack of tolerance seems to be at an all time
high.
You see, one of the psychological side effects of prolonged
social media is a broken concentration.
You could argue that that's less of a side effect
and more of an objective.
Regardless, people are constantly glancing at their phones no matter
what they're doing,
and it's turning them into short sighted individuals who are
preoccupied with the next burst of dopamine.
That is exactly the problem we're facing with climate change
and ecological collapse.
We now have a world that is unwilling to look
beyond the next presidency or the next election or the
next generation or two.
Social media in this case might just be a good
analogy,
but the fact of the matter is we are slowly
but surely walking towards the collapse of civilization as we
know it
now. While an asteroid strike or an alien invasion is
a more spectacular possibility,
they're not nearly as likely as,
say, a slow ecological collapse.
A popular saying goes, civilization may not end with a
bang,
but with a whimper. The moral imperative to do something
really presents itself when you think about the number of
lives that will eventually be affected by climate change,
ecological collapse, or another factor that might cause societal collapse.
The number of people presently alive pales in comparison to
the number of people that can be alive in the
future
on this very planet, at least as long as the
sun isn't too close.
That number skyrockets once you factor in the possibility that
given enough time,
civilization could become multi planetary.
But that's the thing. Enough time.
We barely have enough time to think about the policies
of today,
let alone tomorrow. Think about this.
A man named Danny Hillis invented the idea of a
10,000 year clock in
1984 with one singular purpose,
to encourage long term thinking.
As the name suggests, this clock will continue ticking without
human intervention for 10,000 years when construction is complete.
Much like the metronome near Union Square,
this clock reminds us of time,
albeit in a different way.
This clock is not necessarily counting down from something,
but by its sheer presence,
its sheer scale, it serves to remind us that the
world will go on long after we've passed,
and as such, we can still have an impact.
Who knows, maybe under thousands of layers of sediment and
fossilized remains,
there could lie buried another civilization,
another civilization exactly like ours.
At this exact stage of their journey,
their time had come.
Seven years, 36 days.
The passage takes away second by second
to remind us that ours will do.
Earth has a deadline, and it literally is up to
us,
everyone, to save it. We need to solve our energy
problems,
change our daily habits and work together to help undo
the damage we've done.
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