[p2p-research] Fwd: Understanding Our Human Crisis

[Michel Bauwens]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Timothy Wilken, MD <timothy.wilken at gmail.com>
Date: Tue, May 11, 2010 at 10:25 PM
Subject: Re: Understanding Our Human Crisis
To: Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com>
Cc: "Paul B. Hartzog" <paulbhartzog at gmail.com>, Samuel Rose <
samuel.rose at gmail.com>, chris at cataspanglish.com


Dear P2P experts,

The paper is up online in html at:
http://futurepositive.synearth.net/preamble-to-a-hypothesis/

The PDF is also there. Khan gave me permission to publish this without
restriction. Please distribute it as you like. You are welcome to mirror
what I have at Future Positive, or modify as seems appropriate to you.

Timothy



On Mon, May 10, 2010 at 11:30 PM, Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com>wrote:

> Dear Paul,
>
> As I'm on the road, I hope you can do a presentation of this fictional work
> (you can use tim's commentary and perhaps use one of the systems that
> presents pdf files in a blog, forgot the name for now)
>
> the subject seems to be part of your own areas of interest,
>
> your assistance would be most appreciated and tell me if it's not possible,
>
> there is no hurry, I'd prefer post-dating may 20 or after,
>
> 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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>
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>
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>
> Think thank: http://www.asianforesightinstitute.org/index.php/eng/The-AFI
>
>
>
>
>



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