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Collapse by Jared Diamond

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Guns, Germs, and Steel was one of the best books I’ve read, so I was very interested in reading Jared Diamond’s latest book, Collapse.  Browsing the reviews at Amazon, they were very mixed, with some finding the book boring, a rush job, or saying nothing new.  I guess I can see the last point, if I’d read more about the condition of the world’s environment.  But I haven’t, so, for me, it was a real thought-provoking, eye-opening read.  And I thought it was far from boring.  I don’t know enough about the facts behind Diamond’s claims, so I can’t judge at all the veracity or the bias behind the statistics or claims Diamond makes.  Even so, if even half of what he writes represents the real situation, then still the book is of great importance.

The basic theme of the book is that there are many examples of societies, both in the past and in modern times, that have failed.  Diamond’s task is to try to understand why, and he has arrived at a five-point framework to consider a given society’s collapse:

  • environmental damage by the society
  • climate change
  • hostile neighbors
  • friendly trade partners
  • the society’s response to its environmental problems

Not all of these factors contribute to any given society’s collapse, but, according to Diamond, at least one of these is a major contributing factor and for nearly all societies, the first one is often the most important.  Diamond tries to demonstrate this by looking at various past and present societies that did fail, including Easter Island, the island of Henderson, the Anasazi, the Maya, Rawanda and Burundi, and the Greenland Norse, and some that overcame their problems and developed a sustainable society, such as New Guinea, Iceland, the Greenland Inuit, and Japan.  As Diamond points out, some of the problems that faced some of these societies was essentially random luck, such as the quality of the land they settled.  For example, the Greenland that the Norse encountered looked lush, like their native Norway, but the soil was not anywhere near as productive and that led to some of their struggles.

The point of all of this is to understand what led to the failure or eventual success of each society so that we can apply the underlying lessons to our modern world.  Diamond illustrates those dangers by describing the current state of China, Australia and Montana, showing how ecological damage has affected the environment and, more important, the people and society of each.  He concludes that failure is not a given, that societies at some point essentially choose to either fail or succeed.

One might wonder why they would ever “choose” to fail.  To say that they choose to fail is a bit misleading.  Rather, Diamond gives 4 reasons that they essentially do not end up fixing their problems:

  • they fail to anticipate a problem before it arrives
  • they fail to perceive a problem that has arisen
  • they fail to try to solve a problem they do perceive
  • they may try to solve the problem, but fail

The third point, that they don’t even try to solve a problem that they do know about, is the hardest to understand, but in truth it seems that societies do indeed just fail to act.  Whether the choices involved in acting are too difficult, maybe involving abondoning core values or beliefs, or there are conflicting values, such as a profit motive.  We are at a point where we will have to make these hard choices to confront problems facing us, choices that many of us will be reluctant to make.

Finally, Diamond describes 12 problems that are currently facing the world:

  • the destruction of natural habitats, such as forests and wetlands
    – Diamond claims that deforestation was one of or the primary reason for the collapse of each previous society he analyzes
    – half of the world’s original forests have been converted to other uses and a quarter of what remains will be converted within the next 50 years
  • wild foods, a large fraction of protein for many of the world’s people, are disappearing, with many fisheries already having collapsed
  • many species have gone extinct, decreasing the world’s biodiversity, upsetting the balance of many ecosystems
  • farmland soil is being eroded at a much greater rate than it is being reformed, leading to the eventual ruination of that land; much other farmland is being destroyed by salinization
  • the primary energy sources are fossil fuels, which are a limited, non-renewable resource
  • most of the world’s freshwater is already being used, for irrigation, domestic and industrial use, or recreation, leaving very little for future expansion
  • we are near the photosynthetic capacity of the planet; that is, the way that sunlight can be used for plant growth is finite and we are already using about half of that, even assuming plants are 100% efficient at capturing photons
  • chemicals, either synthetic ones made by humans or natural ones that are made in extreme quantities by humans, are entering the environment; they have reached the furthest corners of the planet — the level of PCBs in the milk of Inuit mothers is at hazardous levels
  • alien species, introduced either intentionally or unintentionally, are upsetting ecosystems around the world, destroying native species and making farming extremely difficult in some areas
  • greenhouse gases and global warming
  • the growth of the global human population
  • finally, even more importantly, the impact per person on the environment is increasing

Upon reading his arguments, one realizes that the most alarming aspect of all of this is that these are problems today, in a world where the First World uses 32 times more resources per capita than the rest of the world, and the rest of the world is trying to catch up.  The rest of the world sees how the First World lives and wants that standard of living.  Getting there will mean that they too have a much higher per capita impact on the world, exacerbating all of the problems listed above.  For example, if China alone, which is pushing hard to achieve First World standards of living, reaches the same level as the First World, the per capita environmental impact of the world will increase by a factor of 2.  This is just if China reaches that level, and many of the other very populus countries are currently poor and working to get to First World standards.

All of this made me feel very depressed and pessimistic about the future.  These are huge problems that will require huge efforts to fix, require huge changes in how we live.  It seems to me that, to reach a sustainable lifestyle, people all around the world will have to compromise.  The First World will have to realize that, even if the rest of the world stays poor, the lifestyle we have is unsustainable.  We will have to settle for a lifestyle that is less affluent.  At the same time, the rest of the world will have to realize that they cannot have the same standard of living the First World currently has, a harsh realization.  This means hard choices on both sides, choices that it is not clear to me we will all make.

Diamond does end on one cautiously optimistic note.  The problems we are facing are caused by us, meaning they can be fixed by us.  Some of them will be difficult to fix even if we decide to do everything possible today.  But, it can be done if we have the will.  Whether we choose to do so will be the big question.

There is a lot in this book that I have failed to mention.  I highly recommend this book and think it should be a topic of discussion in all classrooms in the country.  We all have to acknowledge the problems facing us for there to be any chance that we can address them.  That means we have to think beyond how we want to live and consider how we should live.

After reading this book, I am concerned about the world my daughter will live in.  Hopefully, my generation will begin to act such that her generation has a better chance for a world in which the majority of humanity can live in both a sustainable and reasonably affluent manner.

Life, Movies and TV, Science

Final thoughts on the finale of Battlestar Galactica

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Warning!  You might not want to read this if you haven’t seen the final episode of Battlestar Galactica, as this post might contain spoilers!

It has been a while now since Battlestar Galactica concluded, but it has taken me that long to get a chance to write what I thought about the show and the ending.

When the show premiered, I wasn’t initially interested.  I remembered watching the original when I was a kid, but it seemed, in retrospect, a bit hokie and I wasn’t sure I was all that interested in a revival.  My wife, Lisa, though, got into it and eventually got me to watch too.  And I’m glad I did.

I really enjoyed the show.  I’m not much a fan of science fiction, mostly because it never feels all that true to science.  Being in science, I always have a hard time suspending my disbelief with sci/fi; it is much easier for me to do so with fantasy.  However, the one genre of sci/fi I really like is cyberpunk, the near-future, post-apocalyptic vision of a dystopian future.  And Battlestar Galactica (BG) had that feel to me.  The sci/fi wasn’t the focus, but was rather the vehicle for the story.  It was the politics that drew me in, that and the characters.  Their interactions.  That was why I tuned in every week.

So, what about the finale?  I certainly enjoyed the first half.  The big space battle between the BG itself and the Cylon colony was extremely well done and entertaining.  And, upon reflecting on it, I didn’t mind the second half, the way they ended the story.  There were two aspects, though, that did get to me.

There was a strong message that technology was the source of a lot of the problems of both the humans and cylons, and by extension, us as well.  I can understand how people blame technology for the problems around us.  While I don’t think those problems are unique to our modern, technological era, I think that technology may exacerbate some of those problems, making issues like deforestation that much more pressing as we are able to clear out so many more trees at a time with modern tools.  However, there are also so many benefits (improved health, the chance for everyone to do what they want with their life as opposed to being a serf on a farm, the marvelous leaps and bounds we’ve made in understanding the universe around us) that I just can’t accept technology as a pure evil.  And that was one of the messages I got from the finale.  The way for the humans and cylons to continue their existence was to abandon their science and technology and start fresh.

The second was that religion was the answer.  Religion is what guided these characters to the new Earth, saved them in the end via Starbuck’s miraculous understanding of what the song was supposed to mean, and has been what has guided two of the main characters from the beginning, through angels.  That religion played such a strong role at the end, and was entirely positive, just struck me wrong.  In my opinion, religion has been responsible for just as much wrong in our world as has science and technology.  Maybe even more so, as the people who have committed those wrongs in the name of their religion did so with the moral certainty that can only be gained via blind faith.

Even so, I did enjoy how the characters ended up. I liked how their personal stories ended.  And it was a way to end the show such that there was no possibility of a sequel or a continuation (though, for all we know, there is another ship of humans adrift in the depths of space).  I just didn’t like how the universe of the show ended, with such a blatant moral message: science is the source of our problems, religion is the answer.  I think that is a disservice to the audience, a simplistic assertion that I personally believe is wrong.

Books, Science

Nexus by Mark Buchanan

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By now, everyone has heard about the six-degrees of separation thing, how we are all connected to Kevin Bacon by about 6 other people.  Turns out, there is nothing special about Kevin Bacon — each of us is connected to pretty much everyone in the world by about 6 or 10 other people.  In a world with 6 billion people, how can this be possible?  That is where the theories of complex networks and, in particular, small world networks come in.

In Nexus, Mark Buchanan gives an introduction to this new field (many of the seminal discoveries have occurred within the last decade).  He describes how these networks are ubiquitous in nature (e.g. the networks of streams comprising a river system), social networks (the 6-degrees thing, among others) and networks created by humans (the internet and the electricity grid, as two examples).  It turns out that there are two types of small world networks, called egalitarian and aristocratic.  Buchanan discusses how such networks arise naturally.  In particular, the aristocratic networks, characterized by special nodes that have an especially high number of links to other nodes, occur via a “rich get richer” process, in which nodes that already have a lot of links or friends or what have you are more likely to get even more.

There were a number of intriguing points in this book.  For example, when he discusses river systems, it turns out that all river systems follow the same distribution of land they drain versus the number of streams in the river system that drain that amount of land.  They follow a power law distribution.  That is, if 100 streams in a given river system each drain 50 square miles of land, then 50 streams will drain some constant times 50, and 25 streams will drain that constant times that constant times 50.  There is a power law association between the number of streams that drain a given area of land and the size of that area.  Even more interesting, just assuming the most simplest of assumptions, this distribution can be generated in a computer.  All they assume, given a random topology of land (not even a real landscape), is that water flows straight down hill.  They neglect so many seemingly important features (erosion, for example) that it seems impossible that it would represent anything about real river systems.  But, it does.

Another feature that has such a power law distribution is the amount of wealth held by a given percentage of the population.  Known as the Pareto principle, it basically is the observation that in most countries in the world, regardless of type of government or economy, about 80% of the wealth is owned by 20% of the people.  And, as you look at the number of people who own 90% of the wealth, it is a constant factor of 20%, and so on.  This, to me, is amazing.  Furthermore, again in simple computer experiments in which you allow people to exchange wealth in one of two ways — they can either (a) buy something from someone else, involving direct transfer of wealth, or (b) they can invest their money with some random rate of return — this Pareto distribution is reproduced.  This is true even if you assume that all players have the same skill in investing.  It all comes down to random luck and the rich get richer principle.  As someone gets lucky and wins on their investment, they in turn have more money to invest.  Think about the implications: the distribution of wealth in most countries might be mostly due to random luck.  Sure, government policy (e.g. taxes, etc) would change the slope of the distribution, or the power in the power law, and skill might as well, but that this distribution can be obtained without any of that suggests that the wealthy are wealthy not because they worked harder or were smarter or anything like that, it is just pure random luck.  If this is true, what does that mean about how we view the wealthy’s role in society?

This book had a number of intriguing points such as this that really make you look at the world in a different way.  These small world networks are so pervasive (they even occur in the sexual relationships of people — there are some people who have so many sexual partners that they essentially connect everyone within a few links of one another; this has implications on how you might treat, e.g., sexually transmitted diseases) that understanding how they come about and what they teach us about how the world works is absolutely essential.  Knowing that we are all connected so intimately and what that means for how we interact is fascinating.

I highly recommend this book to anyone who is interested in how people, atoms, computers, rivers — so many different things — interact with one another.

For more information about small world networks, see this Wikipedia article.

Science

Interview for the website Sustatu.com

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A friend of mine, Luis Fernadez, interviewed me for the website Sustatu, a Basque site on technology, economy, and culture.  The interview, in Basque, can be found on their site.  Here, I’m posting an English version of that interview.  The subject is primarily nuclear energy.  Thanks for this opportunity, Luistxo!  (Unfortunately, my Basque is no where near good enough to answer Luistxo directly.  I answered in English, as below, and he translated to Euskara for me.)

Blas, tell us about your work and position at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

First, let me say that the views expressed here are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of Los Alamos National Laboratory.

I am a scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL). I work in a group that is studying materials for nuclear energy applications. In particular, we are interested in materials that would make for better nuclear fuels and would allow for better treatment of the nuclear waste from a nuclear reactor. We study materials at a fundamental level, trying to understand what makes some materials better than other for various applications. In particular, I perform computer simulations of materials at the atomic scale in order to determine what atomic-scale properties govern materials’ performance in various nuclear environments.

Read the rest of the interview