V-ati belit la carici, vine sfarsitu lumii puslamalelor

[† Prof. Dr. Ing. IPS Raspopitul]

Why the demise of civilisation may be inevitable

* 02 April 2008
* From New Scientist
* Debora MacKenzie

DOOMSDAY. The end of civilisation. Literature and film abound with
tales of plague, famine and wars which ravage the planet, leaving a
few survivors scratching out a primitive existence amid the ruins.
Every civilisation in history has collapsed, after all. Why should
ours be any different?

Doomsday scenarios typically feature a knockout blow: a massive
asteroid, all-out nuclear war or a catastrophic pandemic (see "The end
of civilisation"). Yet there is another chilling possibility: what if
the very nature of civilisation means that ours, like all the others,
is destined to collapse sooner or later?

A few researchers have been making such claims for years.
Disturbingly, recent insights from fields such as complexity theory
suggest that they are right. It appears that once a society develops
beyond a certain level of complexity it becomes increasingly fragile.
Eventually, it reaches a point at which even a relatively minor
disturbance can bring everything crashing down.

Some say we have already reached this point, and that it is time to
start thinking about how we might manage collapse. Others insist it is
not yet too late, and that we can - we must - act now to keep disaster
at bay.
Environmental mismanagement

History is not on our side. Think of Sumeria, of ancient Egypt and of
the Maya. In his 2005 best-seller Collapse, Jared Diamond of the
University of California, Los Angeles, blamed environmental
mismanagement for the fall of the Mayan civilisation and others, and
warned that we might be heading the same way unless we choose to stop
destroying our environmental support systems.

Lester Brown of the Earth Policy Institute in Washington DC agrees. He
has long argued that governments must pay more attention to vital
environmental resources. "It's not about saving the planet. It's about
saving civilisation," he says.

Others think our problems run deeper. From the moment our ancestors
started to settle down and build cities, we have had to find solutions
to the problems that success brings. "For the past 10,000 years,
problem solving has produced increasing complexity in human
societies," says Joseph Tainter, an archaeologist at the University of
Utah, Salt Lake City, and author of the 1988 book The Collapse of
Complex Societies.

If crops fail because rain is patchy, build irrigation canals. When
they silt up, organise dredging crews. When the bigger crop yields
lead to a bigger population, build more canals. When there are too
many for ad hoc repairs, install a management bureaucracy, and tax
people to pay for it. When they complain, invent tax inspectors and a
system to record the sums paid. That much the Sumerians knew.
Diminishing returns

There is, however, a price to be paid. Every extra layer of
organisation imposes a cost in terms of energy, the common currency of
all human efforts, from building canals to educating scribes. And
increasing complexity, Tainter realised, produces diminishing returns.
The extra food produced by each extra hour of labour - or joule of
energy invested per farmed hectare - diminishes as that investment
mounts. We see the same thing today in a declining number of patents
per dollar invested in research as that research investment mounts.
This law of diminishing returns appears everywhere, Tainter says.

To keep growing, societies must keep solving problems as they arise.
Yet each problem solved means more complexity. Success generates a
larger population, more kinds of specialists, more resources to
manage, more information to juggle - and, ultimately, less bang for
your buck.

Eventually, says Tainter, the point is reached when all the energy and
resources available to a society are required just to maintain its
existing level of complexity. Then when the climate changes or
barbarians invade, overstretched institutions break down and civil
order collapses. What emerges is a less complex society, which is
organised on a smaller scale or has been taken over by another group.

Tainter sees diminishing returns as the underlying reason for the
collapse of all ancient civilisations, from the early Chinese
dynasties to the Greek city state of Mycenae. These civilisations
relied on the solar energy that could be harvested from food, fodder
and wood, and from wind. When this had been stretched to its limit,
things fell apart.
An ineluctable process

Western industrial civilisation has become bigger and more complex
than any before it by exploiting new sources of energy, notably coal
and oil, but these are limited. There are increasing signs of
diminishing returns: the energy required to get each new joule of oil
is mounting and although global food production is still increasing,
constant innovation is needed to cope with environmental degradation
and evolving pests and diseases - the yield boosts per unit of
investment in innovation are shrinking. "Since problems are
inevitable," Tainter warns, "this process is in part ineluctable."

Is Tainter right? An analysis of complex systems has led Yaneer Bar-
Yam, head of the New England Complex Systems Institute in Cambridge,
Massachusetts, to the same conclusion that Tainter reached from
studying history. Social organisations become steadily more complex as
they are required to deal both with environmental problems and with
challenges from neighbouring societies that are also becoming more
complex, Bar-Yam says. This eventually leads to a fundamental shift in
the way the society is organised.

"To run a hierarchy, managers cannot be less complex than the system
they are managing," Bar-Yam says. As complexity increases, societies
add ever more layers of management but, ultimately in a hierarchy, one
individual has to try and get their head around the whole thing, and
this starts to become impossible. At that point, hierarchies give way
to networks in which decision-making is distributed. We are at this
point.

This shift to decentralised networks has led to a widespread belief
that modern society is more resilient than the old hierarchical
systems. "I don't foresee a collapse in society because of increased
complexity," says futurologist and industry consultant Ray Hammond.
"Our strength is in our highly distributed decision making." This, he
says, makes modern western societies more resilient than those like
the old Soviet Union, in which decision making was centralised.
Increasing connectedness

Things are not that simple, says Thomas Homer-Dixon, a political
scientist at the University of Toronto, Canada, and author of the 2006
book The Upside of Down. "Initially, increasing connectedness and
diversity helps: if one village has a crop failure, it can get food
from another village that didn't."

As connections increase, though, networked systems become increasingly
tightly coupled. This means the impacts of failures can propagate: the
more closely those two villages come to depend on each other, the more
both will suffer if either has a problem. "Complexity leads to higher
vulnerability in some ways," says Bar-Yam. "This is not widely
understood."

The reason is that as networks become ever tighter, they start to
transmit shocks rather than absorb them. "The intricate networks that
tightly connect us together - and move people, materials, information,
money and energy - amplify and transmit any shock," says Homer-Dixon.
"A financial crisis, a terrorist attack or a disease outbreak has
almost instant destabilising effects, from one side of the world to
the other."

For instance, in 2003 large areas of North America and Europe suffered
blackouts when apparently insignificant nodes of their respective
electricity grids failed. And this year China suffered a similar
blackout after heavy snow hit power lines. Tightly coupled networks
like these create the potential for propagating failure across many
critical industries, says Charles Perrow of Yale University, a leading
authority on industrial accidents and disasters.
Credit crunch

Perrow says interconnectedness in the global production system has now
reached the point where "a breakdown anywhere increasingly means a
breakdown everywhere". This is especially true of the world's
financial systems, where the coupling is very tight. "Now we have a
debt crisis with the biggest player, the US. The consequences could be
enormous."
"The networks that connect us can amplify any shocks. A breakdown
anywhere increasingly means a breakdown everywhere"

"A networked society behaves like a multicellular organism," says Bar-
Yam, "random damage is like lopping a chunk off a sheep." Whether or
not the sheep survives depends on which chunk is lost. And while we
are pretty sure which chunks a sheep needs, it isn't clear - it may
not even be predictable - which chunks of our densely networked
civilisation are critical, until it's too late.

"When we do the analysis, almost any part is critical if you lose
enough of it," says Bar-Yam. "Now that we can ask questions of such
systems in more sophisticated ways, we are discovering that they can
be very vulnerable. That means civilisation is very vulnerable."
"We are discovering that networked systems can be very vulnerable.
That means civilisation is very vulnerable"

So what can we do? "The key issue is really whether we respond
successfully in the face of the new vulnerabilities we have," Bar-Yam
says. That means making sure our "global sheep" does not get injured
in the first place - something that may be hard to guarantee as the
climate shifts and the world's fuel and mineral resources dwindle.
Tightly coupled system

Scientists in other fields are also warning that complex systems are
prone to collapse. Similar ideas have emerged from the study of
natural cycles in ecosystems, based on the work of ecologist Buzz
Holling, now at the University of Florida, Gainesville. Some
ecosystems become steadily more complex over time: as a patch of new
forest grows and matures, specialist species may replace more
generalist species, biomass builds up and the trees, beetles and
bacteria form an increasingly rigid and ever more tightly coupled
system.

"It becomes an extremely efficient system for remaining constant in
the face of the normal range of conditions," says Homer-Dixon. But
unusual conditions - an insect outbreak, fire or drought - can trigger
dramatic changes as the impact cascades through the system. The end
result may be the collapse of the old ecosystem and its replacement by
a newer, simpler one.

Globalisation is resulting in the same tight coupling and fine-tuning
of our systems to a narrow range of conditions, he says. Redundancy is
being systematically eliminated as companies maximise profits. Some
products are produced by only one factory worldwide. Financially, it
makes sense, as mass production maximises efficiency. Unfortunately,
it also minimises resilience. "We need to be more selective about
increasing the connectivity and speed of our critical systems," says
Homer-Dixon. "Sometimes the costs outweigh the benefits."

Is there an alternative? Could we heed these warnings and start
carefully climbing back down the complexity ladder? Tainter knows of
only one civilisation that managed to decline but not fall. "After the
Byzantine empire lost most of its territory to the Arabs, they
simplified their entire society. Cities mostly disappeared, literacy
and numeracy declined, their economy became less monetised, and they
switched from professional army to peasant militia."
Staving off collapse

Pulling off the same trick will be harder for our more advanced
society. Nevertheless, Homer-Dixon thinks we should be taking action
now. "First, we need to encourage distributed and decentralised
production of vital goods like energy and food," he says. "Second, we
need to remember that slack isn't always waste. A manufacturing
company with a large inventory may lose some money on warehousing, but
it can keep running even if its suppliers are temporarily out of
action."

The electricity industry in the US has already started identifying
hubs in the grid with no redundancy available and is putting some back
in, Homer-Dixon points out. Governments could encourage other sectors
to follow suit. The trouble is that in a world of fierce competition,
private companies will always increase efficiency unless governments
subsidise inefficiency in the public interest.

Homer-Dixon doubts we can stave off collapse completely. He points to
what he calls "tectonic" stresses that will shove our rigid, tightly
coupled system outside the range of conditions it is becoming ever
more finely tuned to. These include population growth, the growing
divide between the world's rich and poor, financial instability,
weapons proliferation, disappearing forests and fisheries, and climate
change. In imposing new complex solutions we will run into the problem
of diminishing returns - just as we are running out of cheap and
plentiful energy.

"This is the fundamental challenge humankind faces. We need to allow
for the healthy breakdown in natural function in our societies in a
way that doesn't produce catastrophic collapse, but instead leads to
healthy renewal," Homer-Dixon says. This is what happens in forests,
which are a patchy mix of old growth and newer areas created by
disease or fire. If the ecosystem in one patch collapses, it is
recolonised and renewed by younger forest elsewhere. We must allow
partial breakdown here and there, followed by renewal, he says, rather
than trying so hard to avert breakdown by increasing complexity that
any resulting crisis is actually worse.
Tipping points

Lester Brown thinks we are fast running out of time. "The world can no
longer afford to waste a day. We need a Great Mobilisation, as we had
in wartime," he says. "There has been tremendous progress in just the
past few years. For the first time, I am starting to see how an
alternative economy might emerge. But it's now a race between tipping
points - which will come first, a switch to sustainable technology, or
collapse?"
"It's now a race between tipping points - which will come first, a
switch to sustainable technology or collapse?"

Tainter is not convinced that even new technology will save
civilisation in the long run. "I sometimes think of this as a 'faith-
based' approach to the future," he says. Even a society reinvigorated
by cheap new energy sources will eventually face the problem of
diminishing returns once more. Innovation itself might be subject to
diminishing returns, or perhaps absolute limits.

Studies of the way cities grow by Luis Bettencourt of the Los Alamos
National Laboratory, New Mexico, support this idea. His team's work
suggests that an ever-faster rate of innovation is required to keep
cities growing and prevent stagnation or collapse, and in the long run
this cannot be sustainable.

The stakes are high. Historically, collapse always led to a fall in
population. "Today's population levels depend on fossil fuels and
industrial agriculture," says Tainter. "Take those away and there
would be a reduction in the Earth's population that is too gruesome to
think about."

If industrialised civilisation does fall, the urban masses - half the
world's population - will be most vulnerable. Much of our hard-won
knowledge could be lost, too. "The people with the least to lose are
subsistence farmers," Bar-Yam observes, and for some who survive,
conditions might actually improve. Perhaps the meek really will
inherit the Earth.