The Alien Colony

A Happy Colony of Aliens in space The objective of sustainability is, put shortly, for mankind to continue to survive on this planet. Preferably, flourishing and happy, but that requires survival in the first place, and lack of critical hardship in the second. What does it take for us to survive like this? In order to figure this out, and get a feeling for its base principles, it helps to use the following thought experiment. Imagine an alien colony floating around in space. What does it take for it to survive? Imagining this clarifies some of the base theoretical principles of SiD, which is helpful to have in mind before diving deeper into the theory chapter. So let’s have a look. Preventing collapse In order to understand how our alien colony floating around in space can continue to survive, it helps to think about its reverse, preventing it from collapse. This, since societal collapse has been well defined and studied. Collapse doesn’t have to be complete annihilation, it is more often the degradation of a civilization to a more primitive state. In either case, collapse goes hand in hand with death and destruction of all kinds of values we hold dearly, such as cultural sophistication, economic value, and human rights. We don’t want that, and therefore we want to prevent it. Here we have our alien colony. Floating in space. They are lovely aliens, they merely hope to survive and flourish. Let’s look at what they’ll need to achieve this, and not collapse. The colony needs Autonomy To begin with, the colony will need their basics in order. All life needs some input of resources. They may need to consume sustenance to stay alive, which they need to make. They may also need heat to keep warm in space. Basically, they’ll need some material resources, perhaps including things like medicine to stay, in the most basic form, alive. In order to stay that way, they need to have an indefinite supply of these resources that will keep the colony alive, and an infrastructure of extraction, production, and distribution. This may include recycling everything to reduce reliance on outside sources, and so on. In SiD, these requirements are covered under the word ‘autonomy’. Autonomy is about the colony’s self-sufficiency, and making the decisions to remain that way. Okay, Autonomy covers the basic needs. What else do they need to survive? The colony needs Harmony In order to survive further, the colony should maintain some level of peace. It’s all fine and well to have enough food and medicine and shelter, but if there’s so much tension that they keep killing each other, well, that will threaten their existence. Things that may cause them to be upset with another can include how resources are shared, power structures, participation, and so on. All things related to this are called ‘Harmony’ in SiD, which point to the need for the management of internal tensions of the colony. The colony needs Resilience With autonomy and harmony in place, they’re doing pretty well floating around. But then there’s outside influences. They’re floating in space, so at any time, a meteor or whatever unidentified thing can cross their path. They can be floating by a moon, and its shadow takes away the light of a star needed to survive. Or whatever you can think of can happen floating in space. In order to deal with this and survive, they need some properties. For example, they need to be able to detect things coming their way, like our eyes help do. Also, they need to be aware about what the meaning is of what they are seeing (awareness). And, if they understand that some giant space rock is hurdling their way, they need the capacity to get out of its way (flexibility). In the event of being struck anyway, it would help if there isn’t just one alien, but many, so that at least some will survive (redundancy). There’s a bunch of these aspects that help the colony to survive unexpected and sudden changes in their environment. These we call ‘Resilience’ in SiD. All the aspects such as awareness and flexibility come back in SiD’s sets of network parameters that drive Resilience, and help to figure that out. So, in order for a colony to not collapse, they need to be autonomous, in harmony, and resilient. If they have these properties, they can survive. If they manage to get them up to a certain level of comfort, they also set the preconditions for them to flourish and be happy, if they want. The colony needs healthy system dynamics These three aspects, autonomy, harmony and resilience, form the foundation of a sustainable society. If all three of them are in the ‘green’ then the colony has a good chance to survive. But, it’s never that simple. These three aspects influence one another. For example, increasing the colony’s resource intake, and thus their autonomy, may make them heavier. This then reduces their agility of movement, which reduces their resilience. There’s hardly ever an ideal move, there’s always a trade-of, within certain contextual circumstances. Some of these interactions can get rather complex, much more than a simple trade-off. Some may develop slowly over time, or are so subtle on an individual’s basis that we can’t see their massive effects on a grand scale, like climate change. We call the patterns in these interactions ‘system dynamics’, or ‘system behaviors’. These are critical to keep in mind when trying to make the alien colony survive. For example, the relation between autonomy and resilience changes when the colony grows: it cannot grow indefinitely using the same structure. As it gets bigger, resilience is reduced if autonomy isn’t changed in structure by decentralizing infrastructures, and so on. It would be great if the alien colony has a detection system to find these shifts in resilience. Unfortunately, we humans don’t really have an example they could follow. As a human civilization, we’re pretty good at understanding that we need to secure water, food, power, and some other resources to survive; the autonomy part. We mostly understand the importance of the harmony part but we’re not particularly good at arranging that (yet, I hope). The resilience part is where we still struggle the most, which eludes us often. And that also causes us to miss important system dynamics between all of them. We do not really have the ‘eyes’ to see them, or even the awareness of their existence. We make many decisions that make us less resilient in the long run for short term autonomy or harmony gain. As our society grows, we see increasingly self-reinforcing system behaviors that threaten our survival through it. This will make us sitting ducks in space, like an alien colony in space unable to move, eating up finite resources until it perishes. For example, we are only recently aware of one of the most important system dynamics that we face, one that all of our societies are governed by, both the alien colony and us. The one system dynamic to rule them all: the law of diminishing marginal returns. We have no detection system, metrics, or governance in place to deal with this on a societal level yet. Large companies that are heavily subject to this are often not even aware it exists. For anyone wishing to survive in the long run, the alien colony as well as us, we best start looking at these things. Below I explain a little about the importance of the law of diminishing marginal returns, as an example of how critical the understanding is of these systemic behaviors. Further in the Theory chapter we discuss others as well. Diminishing Marginal Returns Joseph Tainter (1949-) is an anthropological scholar and historian, and one of the world’s most interesting experts on societal dynamics. Tainter was fascinated by one central question: why did old civilizations cease to exist, even sophisticated ones? He wasn’t happy with the usual answers, for example that the Mayans collapsed because of a famine, and the Roman Empire because they were overrun by Barbarian tribes. He figured the Mayans had dealt with famine before, and the Romans dealt with Barbarians before, so he wondered what was it that made them collapse this time around? What made their societies so fragile that they couldn’t overcome that adversity? So, he studied a lot of old civilizations, including Mayans, Chacoan, and the Romans, using network and complexity theory, and he found a pattern. He wrote a magnificent book about it called the Collapse of Complex Societies (1988). In this book, he shows that societies become ‘brittle’ over time due to the law of decreasing marginal returns, an over-arching system dynamic. We get further into system dynamics further in the theory chapter, but to summarize here’s a short simplified overview. As a society grows and develops, it increasingly needs more of everything. A developed society has a larger footprint per capita than a more simple society, and this is an irreversible process (until collapse). More of everything means not just more energy and food, but also less tangible things such as capacity to handle trade transactions, cultural diversity, and management overhead. This means resources, including time, need to come in increasingly large supply to satisfy the needs of a society. And there are always limits to resources. Once the resources become scarce, it puts pressure on everything, making the system ‘brittle’. If not a new, more concentrated form of the scarce resource is found, the system becomes critical. At that point, pretty much anything can set off the process of collapse. Collapse can then be slow and gradual, like with the Roman Empire, or with a sudden shock. As mentioned, collapse doesn’t mean a total eradication per se, but certainly a decrease in complexity, and with it, a reduced capacity for support for many people, meaning death and suffering. So, applied to our colony of aliens, it means that when it grows, it will need to fundamentally change its operations, infrastructures, and even base resource usage patterns to prevent becoming brittle and collapse. Even out in space, where there is infinite room to grow, there are limits to growth, and a necessity to tune systems to their changing dynamics over time. So, besides being autonomous in having food, energy and materials, and besides not killing each other, the colony needs to be aware of and adapt to changing system dynamics to remain resilient, and survive whatever the future throws at them. Learning from aliens and collapse Looking at our world, we can see the cracks in the system of our increasingly brittle society appearing. One can even deduct large societal movements such as the Arab Spring or the rise of nationalism in the western world as early systemic warning signs. We also have some hopeful unique properties that may help us in the long run. Our society is unique in comparison to older civilizations in that we are globally connected. For the first time in history, we have a world economy and resource system that can help to balance resource needs. This can keep a certain part of society from collapsing on its own. The downside of this is that this puts harmony under pressure. There’s already a fair share of issue with migration, and countries stealing each other’s resources such as oil, land, food, and water. We also have unprecedented technological advances, that may allow us to tap into more concentrated or abundantly available resources, such as renewable energy and nuclear fusion. This may help us beat the curve until we finally figured out that we need to globally curb our own growth, or figure out ways to deal with the growth cracks until we do. But, besides battling the symptoms, even better still is for us to learn, understand, and apply the solutions that systemic insight brings us. We can develop some eyes and awareness of them, and develop ways to ride the wave of change out of the danger zone. Like the alien colony setting up control rooms to check for system dynamics in their colony. It’s not hard to imagine some beautiful screens showing the development of their colony, some essential parameters to track, and a panel of wise aliens determining how to act on its dynamics. There is no reason to think that our society does not comply to the law of diminishing marginal returns, and there is plenty of proof to indicate that we have become increasingly ‘brittle’. But there are still many ways we can go forward. In that, it helps to allow ourselves to start looking at our society as an alien colony floating in space. What systems would we put in place to detect these system dynamics? Where in the system that has become brittle can we intervene to increase resilience? What measures can increase autonomy and resilience at once? How can we better embed harmony in the world? What part can we play in this? Questions I hope using SiD will help you answer.