MATTHEW WATKINSON • WEB: http://www.fishsnorkel.com • TWITTER: http://twitter.com/fishsnorkel
WHAT ARE THE PHYSICS OF CIVILISATION? Matthew Watkinson FLS
“There is no law of nature that the most powerful will inevitably remain at the top. Anyone can fall, and most eventually do." Jim Collins
SUMMARY •
The laws of physics also apply to the massive energy gradients that define civilisation.
BUILDING WITH TREACLE Try to imagine, if you can, trying to build a small pyramid on your kitchen table using nothing but treacle. It wouldn’t be easy that’s for sure, but if you had enough help and enough motivation you could heap the treacle into a kind of pyramid thing and achieve the desired objective. Would it last indefinitely though? Of course it wouldn’t, and it wouldn’t because of the second law of thermodynamics: “The second law of thermodynamics is an expression of the universal principle of entropy, stating that the entropy of an isolated system which is not in equilibrium will tend to increase over time, approaching a maximum value at equilibrium…In simple terms, the second law is an expression of the fact that over time, differences in temperature, pressure, and chemical potential tend to even out in a physical system that is isolated from the outside world.” Wikipedia
This basically means that all energy gradients will eventually be eliminated in a closed system. In this particular case, gravity will combine with the physical properties of treacle (it’s a liquid) to create an energy gradient across the height of the pyramid that will eventually equalise. Or, to put it another way, an untended treacle pyramid will collapse. Thus, the only way to maintain the energy gradient necessary for the existence of a treacle pyramid is to use energy from outside the system. Or, to put it yet another way, if you want your treacle pyramid to survive you’re going to have to sit there, with as many treacle pyramid enthusiasts as necessary, continually rebuilding something that’s continually trying to collapse.
ENERGY At this point you’re probably wondering what on Earth this has got to do with modern civilisation, and I have some sympathy with that. The truth is that modern civilisation (and indeed all life in general) is based on exactly the same principles however. To maintain ordered systems - like individual cells, or individual humans, or individual businesses, or individual societies, or individual global economies etc. – you need external energy sources and, quite logically, the larger the ordered system, the larger the requirement for external energy. “Organisms are dissipative systems: because of the second law of thermodynamics, they must export entropy or heat in order to maintain a dynamic steady state. This means that matter and/or energy must enter the system in low entropy form and leave the system in high entropy form, after undergoing a number of conversions. The entropy that is dissipated or ‘wasted’ by the system is needed to keep up the cycle of production processes that maintains its organisation.” Francis Heylighen, The Global Superorganism: An Evolutionary-cybernetic Model of the Emerging Network Society (http://ht.ly/34cLC)
Maintaining a taller treacle pyramid is going to require more energy than maintaining a smaller treacle pyramid for example, and maintaining a multicellular organism is going to require more energy than maintaining a unicellular organism, and maintaining a consumer society is going to 1
MATTHEW WATKINSON • WEB: http://www.fishsnorkel.com • TWITTER: http://twitter.com/fishsnorkel
require more energy than maintaining a subsistence society etc. etc. The larger the system, the larger the gradient and the larger the gradient, the more energy is required to maintain that gradient. “Throughout the history of life, as increasingly dense reservoirs of energy became available, species that made use of increasing amounts of energy evolved. This is the natural context of Homo sapiens, the most energy-using species the world has ever known.” David Price (http://ht.ly/33B48)
It’s simple physics and, for those that haven’t realised, the energy source currently maintaining the gradient that defines modern civilisation (high energy power bases supported by lower energy resource harvest areas) is fossil fuels... “Since 1750 human society has increasingly augmented the solar energy that it relied on exclusively for most of its history with a progression of temporary supplies of non-renewable geological energy sources (coal, petroleum, natural gas and fissionable uranium).” Peter Salonius (http://su.pr/1FRChV)
...which is a highly concentrated finite resource that will never ever be matched by the much more dilute original (solar energy – which also drives wind and water energy by the way). “...it remains a commonly held assumption that alternative energy sources capable of substituting for conventional fossil fuels are readily available—whether fossil (tar sands or oil shale), nuclear, or a long list of renewables—and ready to come on-line in a bigger way. All that is necessary, according to this view, is to invest sufficiently in them, and life will go on essentially as it is. But is this really the case? Each energy source has highly specific characteristics. In fact, it has been the characteristics of our present energy sources (principally oil, coal, and natural gas) that have enabled the building of a modern society with high mobility, large population, and high economic growth rates. Can alternative energy sources perpetuate this kind of society? Alas, we think not.” Richard Heinberg, Searching for a Miracle: “NetEnergy” Limits and the Fate of Industrial Society (http://ht.ly/1Xfmc)
EFFICIENCY What will happen when fossil fuel supplies start to shrink though? “We have passed or are close to passing the peak of global oil production.” Feasta and The Risk/Resilience Network, Tipping Point: Near-Term Implications of a Peak in Global Oil Production (http://bit.ly/aCXc3F)
Well, if we return to the metaphorical pyramid of treacle, if the number of treacle pyramid enthusiasts available to maintain it suddenly drops, there’s a very real danger the pyramid will start to collapse. “Our civilisation is structurally unstable to an energy withdrawal. There is a high probability that our integrated and globalised civilisation is on the cusp of a fast and near-term collapse.” Feasta and The Risk/Resilience Network, Tipping Point: Near-Term Implications of a Peak in Global Oil Production (http://bit.ly/aCXc3F)
It’s not guaranteed of course (well, it is eventually), but whether it does or not all depends on the efficiency of the system. If everybody was working at fifty per cent capacity before some were lost (i.e. the system was very inefficient), then those that remained would be able to increase their own personal maintenance efforts to counteract the lost labour and the pyramid wouldn’t collapse. If, however, everybody was working at one hundred per cent capacity before some were lost, there is no functional reserve and the energy available to maintain the pyramid will no longer 2
MATTHEW WATKINSON • WEB: http://www.fishsnorkel.com • TWITTER: http://twitter.com/fishsnorkel
be enough to maintain the pyramid. Hence, the pyramid won’t be maintained: it will collapse. “Any society that displays broad increases in most measures of capital production coupled with signs of serious depletion of key resources, in particular, may be considered a potential candidate for catabolic collapse.” John Michael Greer How Civilizations Fall: A Theory of Catabolic Collapse (http://ht.ly/1VwYF)
RESILIENCE The slightly paradoxical conclusion therefore must be that super-efficiency is a bad thing if you want to be resilient in a changing world... “Resilience arises from a redundancy that has the appearance of inefficiency...” Nicole Foss, Fractal Adaptive Cycles in Natural and Human Systems (http://bit.ly/alBOyi)
...and that highly efficient economic systems with lots of highly inter-dependent and highly specialised cogs... “As the system continues to evolve, on-going adaptation and division of labor lead to an increasingly diverse, complex, and efficient organisation, consisting of ever more specialized components.” Francis Heylighen, The Global Superorganism: An Evolutionary-cybernetic Model of the Emerging Network Society (http://ht.ly/34cLC)
...like those that define the current global economy... “…society increasingly resembles a complex organism, with its specialized cells, organs and tissues that are functionally autonomous, but tightly integrated in a global, self-organizing network of mutually feeding processes.” Francis Heylighen, The Global Superorganism: An Evolutionary-cybernetic Model of the Emerging Network Society (http://ht.ly/34cLC)
...are actually a disaster waiting to happen. “Living systems are never in equilibrium. They are inherently unstable. They may seem stable, but they’re not. Everything is moving and changing. In a sense, everything is on the edge of collapse.” Dr Ian Malcolm (in Jurassic Park)
Or, to put it another way, modern civilisation, with its hyper-specialised just-in-time delivery chains, is more fragile now that it has ever been before, despite the rhetoric. “The facts of environmental crisis we hear so much about often conceal as much as they expose. We hear daily about the impacts of our activities on ‘the environment’ (like ‘nature’, this is an expression which distances us from the reality of our situation). Daily we hear, too, of the many ’solutions’ to these problems: solutions which usually involve the necessity of urgent political agreement and a judicious application of human technological genius. Things may be changing, runs the narrative, but there is nothing we cannot deal with here, folks. We perhaps need to move faster, more urgently. Certainly we need to accelerate the pace of research and development. We accept that we must become more sustainable. But everything will be fine. There will still be growth, there will still be progress: these things will continue, because they have to continue, so they cannot do anything but continue. There is nothing to see here. Everything will be fine.” The Dark Mountain Project, The Dark Mountain Project Manifesto (http://ht.ly/34dTu)
It’s stretched so tight that minor changes in conditions could overwhelm the reserve capacity and initiate collapse, just like an increase in treacle viscosity would do if the treacle pyramid enthusiasts were all working at full capacity. “...all complex adaptive systems (of which human civilization is one) go through looping cycles as they grow and decline. On the way up the front of the cycle as the system grows, it gains in integration, efficiency and brittleness. The brittleness combined with resource depletion or
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MATTHEW WATKINSON • WEB: http://www.fishsnorkel.com • TWITTER: http://twitter.com/fishsnorkel
negative outside influences pushes the system over the top of the loop and into decline. During decline the system loses integration/efficiency/brittleness and gains modularity/inefficiency/ resilience. The degree of resilience a system retains as it grows determines how steep the inevitable decline will be.” Paul Chefurka (http://ht.ly/34deQ)
CONCLUSION So, what will happen when the fossil fuel supplies start to shrink (peak oil is imminent, if it hasn’t occurred already)? “In 1850, before commercial production began, there were about 2 trillion barrels of oil in the ground. By about the year 2010, half of that oil had been consumed, so about 1 trillion barrels remain ? which may sound like a lot, but isn't. At the moment about 30 billion barrels of oil are consumed annually, and that is probably close to the maximum that will ever be possible. When newspapers announce the discovery of a deposit of a billion barrels, readers are no doubt amazed, but they are not told that such a find is only two weeks' supply.” Peter Goodchild, The Imminent Collapse Of Industrial Society (http://ht.ly/34cWS)
Will we be able to fight the second law of thermodynamics forever... “The notion of balance in nature is an integral part of traditional western cosmology. But science has found no such balance. According to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, energy flows from areas of greater concentration to areas of lesser concentration, and local processes run down. Living organisms may accumulate energy temporarily but in the fullness of time entropy prevails. While the tissue of life that coats the planet Earth has been storing up energy for over three billion years, it cannot do so indefinitely. Sooner or later, energy that accumulates must be released. This is the bioenergetic context in which Homo sapiens evolved, and it accounts for both the wild growth of human population and its imminent collapse.”David Price (http://ht.ly/33B48)
....or will our destiny mirror that of every single civilisation that has ever previously existed? “Temporary overshoot of carrying capacity has caused human numbers to fall back precipitously with some regularity throughout history, while less regular complete collapses of societies have been the norm since the advent of agriculture.” Peter Salonius (http://su.pr/1FRChV)
Will we be able to rewrite the laws of physics.... “As individuals, and as a social species we put up huge psychological defences to protect the status quo. We've heard this doom prophesied for decades, all is still well! What about technology? Rising energy prices will bring more oil! We need a Green New Deal! We still have time! We’re busy with a financial crisis! This is depressing! If this were important, everybody would be talking about it!” Feasta and The Risk/Resilience Network, Tipping Point: Near-Term Implications of a Peak in Global Oil Production (http://bit.ly/aCXc3F)
...or will modern civilisation crumble like the Roman Empire when it ran out of wood? “What is most striking about this history is the speed of the Roman Empire's collapse. In just five decades, the population of Rome itself fell by three-quarters. Archaeological evidence from the late fifth century - inferior housing, more primitive pottery, fewer coins, smaller cattle - shows that the benign influence of Rome diminished rapidly in the rest of western Europe. What WardPerkins calls "the end of civilization" came within the span of a single generation.” Niall Ferguson (http://ht.ly/33BNr)
I will leave it up to you to decide.
“There is no feast which does not come to an end.” Chinese Proverb 4