[p2p-research] Fwd: Understanding Our Human Crisis

[Michel Bauwens]

In case of interest, Timothy Wilken can send the pdf excerpt announced here
below,

Michel

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Timothy Wilken, MD <timothy.wilken at gmail.com>
Date: Tue, May 11, 2010 at 5:00 AM
Subject: Understanding Our Human Crisis
To:


Fellow Thinkers,

It is my privilege and pleasure to publish an important new work that
provides us with a scientific understanding of our present human crisis. I
had the good fortune to come across a small book called *Katrina Nights*
<http://www.amazon.com/Katrina-Nights-Love-Time-Flooding/dp/1449995411/>written
by a young Environmental Engineer named Fouad M. Khan that was just
published in December 2009. This brief but complex work can be viewed as a
coming of age story, a stranger in a strange land tale, a terrorist
thriller, or simply a ribald sexual romp, and it is all of these. But woven
into the fabric of the larger story is an important scientific hypothesis.

Why is the brightest species on the planet in crisis? Why do our present
actions threaten our very future?

With the author's permission, I have selected excerpts from the volume that
I believe best present that hypothesis. Those excerpts have been edited
slightly to make them more understandable since they have been lifted out of
the context of the novel itself. The result is the attached 28 page paper
excerpted from the 176 page novel. Although the book is described as a work
of total fiction, many of the details reported in the story ring amazingly
true. I suspect the story is a mixture of both truth and fiction.

All of the following is true. Fouad Khan was born and bred in the Islamic
Republic of Pakistan. He was a graduate student at the University of Houston
in 2005-2007. Fouad was in America on a Fulbright scholarship to pursue a
PhD degree in Environmental Engineering. For his thesis and research, he did
study the population dynamics of hydrocarbon-eating bacteria.

The story presented in the novel, describes the activities, thoughts,
conversations, and research of a fictional graduate student who by
coincidence also attends the University of Houston and is named Fouad Khan.
In the process of this experience, Fouad discovers what he believes is an
important truth about living populations. If he is correct, and I believe
that he is, then he has discovered the scientific basis for our present
human crisis.

Khan tells us that exponential growth whether in bacteria or humans has a
major impact on the finite environment it finds it self in. This is just as
true for a culture of bacteria living in finite growth tank in a laboratory
at the University of Houston or the entire human species living on a finite
planet called Earth. From the attached paper, Khan writes:

“There’s a fundamental assumption here, and that assumption is growth;
unfettered, unstoppable, unchanging, perennially beneficial growth. We
always start off with the unarticulated premise that bacteria populations
will keep on increasing exponentially, somehow effortlessly switching from
one food source to another without taking a hit to their growth rate. And
that that’s somehow good too, that that’s the ideal situation. Well, maybe
it isn’t. …

“The change in population of a species depends on the ‘Adaptability’ of the
species. ‘Adaptability’ can be defined as the ability of the species’
population to cope with the ‘Rate of Change of Entropy’ of its host system.
Think of it this way, when I add one liter of hydrochloric acid to my tank
of bacteria, … the population immediately dies off, the change in entropy of
the system is too fast, the RATE OF CHANGE OF ENTROPY is too high, the
populations can’t cope with it. But if I keep adding the same hydrochloric
one drop at a time over a period of sixty days, the bacteria survive, they
adapt, their adaptive capacity is capable of handling this *rate of change
of entropy*.

“In other words, give the process of evolution, nothing is poisonous per se
for bacteria or any other living population, it is the speed at which that
pollutant is added to the host system that makes the pollutant poisonous.
Ditto for change in the other environmental conditions.”

Khan has discovered that exponential growth increases the *rate of change of
entropy***, and is a critical factor leading to crisis. Khan continues:

“Now, the curious case of the exponential growth curve. The exponential
growth curve is stuck upon because the bacteria have suddenly discovered a
higher system. In other words when I introduce benzene in my tank of
bacteria population, I am introducing an additional resource to the system.
When bacteria discover this concentration of benzene and discover how to
consume it, they’ve essentially jumped from their lower system of no benzene
to a higher system which contains benzene in it. The higher system is more
expansive and has a better capacity to absorb entropy. So the sudden change
in entropy caused by sudden microorganism population rise does not have an
effect on the RATE OF CHANGE OF ENTROPY, though it does add a bit to the
entropy of the system. We must understand that the inherent *rate of change
of entropy* is a primary characteristic of a system and once that is
changed, the system definition is fundamentally altered, leaving the system
either adaptable or inadaptable for a inhabiting living species population.
The ‘adaptability’ of the species must now be measured against the new *rate
of change of entropy*.

“But what happens when a species discovers a higher system and hits an
exponential growth curve. I believe that there are fundamental behavioral
alterations at the individual species level which reflect in the change of
rate of population growth. Something in the species’ very genetic makeup,
some evolutionary trigger is pushed which reduces the species to an all
consuming, all reproducing machine. Some switch which previously moderated
the species consumption of resources is turned off… for good. I found out
that for bacteria, the consumption footprint of hydrocarbons increased
between three to five folds as the population hit the exponential growth
curve. The bacteria started eating and reproducing like maniacs. They ate so
much and so fast, they ate themselves into oblivion.

“You see with the exponential growth curve, the entropic footprint of the
species also increases very rapidly. Initially the bacteria or the species
is just another part of the system, contributing its set share to the
overall rate of change of entropy of the system. Adding to entropy but not
enough to affect the *rate of change*; at this point the species population
exists in harmony with the system. When a higher system is discovered such
as through addition of benzene to the tank, there’s now room for bacteria to
consume more and grow without affecting the already altered rate of change
of entropy of the system positively, so the bacteria grow exponentially. But
if the exponential growth continues soon a point arrives where the entropic
footprint of the species is so high that it is higher than the entropic
footprint of all the other components of the system put together. At this
point the species starts to add to the *rate of change of entropy* of the
system itself.

“Now if we recall, we’d defined the adaptability of the system as nothing
more than its populations’ ability to cope with the *rate of change of
entropy* of the system. When a species starts to add to the very *rate of
change of entropy* of its host system and enters what I have decided to call
hyper-entropic growth phase, it has essentially started to make its host
system uninhabitable and inadaptable for itself. It has essentially started
to commit mass suicide.

“The system becoming uninhabitable for the species is from there, only a
matter of time. Once the *rate of change of entropy* of the system has risen
too high for the species’ population to adapt to, basically due to the
species own insatiable appetite, the population enters the death phase,
after a very pointed peak or stationary phase. The more obtuse the rise in
population, the faster the exponential growth, the smaller the length of
stationary phase. ...

“I think we humans discovered a higher system when we discovered fossil fuel
as an industrial resource, a source of cheap energy. Hydrocarbons were our
dope, curiously not unlike those of the bacteria I grow in lab. We hit
exponential growth curve when we found oil. I believe human beings entered
the hyper-entropic growth phase somewhere in the mid to early nineteen
hundreds. We started affecting the entropy of our host system, Earth in a
big way around that time making it essentially inhospitable for us. I
believe global warming is one of the physical manifestations of the growing
inadaptability of our host system for us.”

Fortunately, we humans are much more powerful than the bacteria in Khan's
tanks. Plants and animals can only survive by adapting to their environment.
If the rate of change of their entropy is slow enough they can adapt to
anything. Humans have the animal body so we can also adapt to anything in
our environment if the rate of change is slow enough.

However, we have an advantage not available to the plants and animals. We
have the human mind which can understand and invent technology to adapt the
environment to us. Human technology allows us to survive underwater without
gills, it allows us to travel through the vacuum of space, and romp on the
moon, a planet without air. We do this by adapting the environment to us.

So while the plants and animals have only one strategy, we humans have two.
But this makes our situation no less precarious, it just gives us more
options.

Khan has discovered that *exponential growth* always increases the *rate of
change of entropy***, and this  explains our present *Human Crisis*.

Now the only way for us to avoid extinction is to change our behavior. We
must reduce our population. Ideally, going forward each of us would
voluntarily have only one child. One child per couple. This would bring our
population down rapidly without injury to anyone. We must simultaneously
reduce our use of fossil fuels.

Just as the bacteria in a culture can adapt to hydrochloric acid if it is
added a little at a time. The bacteria in the same culture could also adapt
to the loss of Benzene if it was removed a little at a time.

Today humanity is consuming ~85 million barrels of petroleum every day.
Reduce that to zero tomorrow and most of us would die. Reduce that by 5
million barrels every year, and in ten years our use would be reduced to ~35
million barrels a day, we could adapt to this change without too much
difficulty. It would only require that we work together in a more
intelligent and efficient way.

Our exponential growth does not have to be the end of our human species, but
it certainly will be unless we change our ways. This could be our final
human crisis if politics and business continue as usual.

Crisis is always the harbinger of an overwhelming problem. Fortunately,
crisis has two components—Danger and Opportunity. When faced with crisis,
there is almost always a window of opportunity, when intelligent action can
avert most or at least some of the danger of the crisis. But, that
opportunity is fleeting. The only rational response is Carpe diem—Seize the
Day. We must recognize the opportunity in time and then act quickly and
intelligently.

Please circulate Fouad Khan's paper as if your children's future depended on
it. You are welcome to mirror it from your websites. You are invited to
publish it anywhere and everywhere.

Seriously,
[image:
http://futurepositive.synearth.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/timsbluesignature.gif]

Timothy Wilken, MD

link to the paper online:
http://futurepositive.synearth.net/preamble-to-a-hypothesis/

PDF document attached.







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