Ongoing Process

Just wondering if anyone else Googled the mailing list. 

I find a melon that’s good to eat.  I notice that it likes to grow in a particular sort of area.  I save all the seeds from the melons I eat, and I find a place near my home similar to where they like to grow.  I plant my seeds simply by poking a small hole with a stick for each one, putting the seed in, and then pushing the hole closed.  I notice that birds like to eat the seeds.  Now I have birds to eat!  When the plants start growing, I notice that bugs like to eat them.  Now I have bugs to eat!  When the melons start to grow, I notice that rabbits like to eat them.  Now I have rabbits to eat!  When the remaining melons finally ripen, I have melons to eat!  I save my seeds, and plant them back down again.

I’ve been pondering what it might be like for humanity once civilization finishes its run.  Nobody can really know until it gets here, of course, but I’ve always enjoyed a good round of speculation.

Things that will go away:

Money - Money is the abstraction of value.  It removes value from the things which actually have it (goods, labor, etc) and places it into an idea which has no intrinsic value of its own.  This is catastrophic on numerous levels.  Perhaps a rough parallel could be established with some kind of standardized item of barter that actually had value in itself (the old Roman method of paying their soldiers in salt comes to mind), but money as we know it will be no more.

Large Settlements - The age of towns and cities will be over.  I anticipate we’ll wind up settling in villages of around 100-150 people, as observed by Dunbar’s Number.

Centralized Governments - Government will be at the village level, and relatively informal because everyone knows everyone else.  Styles will vary widely based on regional conditions and cultures, but will tend towards more egalitarian structures featuring more “coordinators” than “officials”.

Agriculture - Farming and livestock as we know it utterly destroys the land.  I imagine some manner of parallel will emerge that involves encouraging the growth of particular plants and animals in their natural environment, but the idea of taking over a plot of land and attempting to utterly control it will be history.

Unchecked Procreation - The “right” to pop out as many kids as you want will be recognized as insanity.  Some manner of taboo will develop around male-female intercourse that dramatically reigns in population growth (not that people will stop having sex, but perhaps something involving the withdrawal and/or rhythm methods of birth reduction).

Non-renewable Materials - Anything that we can’t in some way put back the way we found it will be out.  Metals, oils, gases, minerals, and even stone will become taboo to use in most ways (probably excepting what can be scavenged from the old constructions).  I imagine that cleverly processed plant fibers will become the dominant material for everything from tools to buildings.

Electricity - I suspect that in the end we’re going to find that there’s just no way to convert, store, transport, and use electrical energy that doesn’t wind up costing more than it’s worth in the big picture.  Not to mention that the loss of metal and other non-renewables will render it pretty much unusable anyway.

Mental Illness - What we have come to call “mental illness” is nothing more or less than the psycho/spiritual backlash from convincing ourselves that civilization is “the world”.

Most Humans - Barring some manner of miracle (which I do hold as not entirely impossible), once the infrastructure goes, it seems very probable that most of us are going to die.  The world just can’t support seven billion humans.  To give you a sense of scale, they estimate that we out-populated the hunter-gatherer strategy at around one million humans.  In a dark way, I kind of hope that enough of us go fast enough so that those left have plenty of resources to work with.

War - Believe it or not, war is entirely a product of civilization and overpopulation.  Humans went their first two million years without even the concept of a warrior.  Once the population is sufficiently reduced that we have adequate survival resources and we aren’t subjected to the myriad insanities of civilization, we’ll suddenly find ourselves in the recently novel position of not having anything to fight about.

Things that will hang around:

Specialization - It will probably be dramatically reduced in scale (I doubt we’ll see any more psychoneuroimmunologists), but specialization is one of the single most powerful tactics we’ve ever developed.  Look for it to remain a big player.

Writing - Writing is just way too handy for far too many things to go anywhere.  I suspect there will be a great deal of renewal in oral tradition, so writing may not be quite as dominant, but it’ll keep on going strong.

Art - Pre-civilization cultures had some basic forms of art, but civilization took it to much greater heights.  I think we’ll see a lot less absurd “modern” art that doesn’t make sense to anyone but other “modern artists”, but on the flip side I imagine a deeper appreciation for more down-to-earth art in the general population will emerge.

Complex Technology - It’s going to see a major reduction in scale (by several orders of magnitude!), and develop some very serious taboos about responsible usage, but we can’t put the worms back in the can.  Complex technology in its basic concept is here to stay.

Distributed Enterprise - We can do so much with a lot of people working in concert that I suspect we’ll find a way to keep doing it.  I can imagine regional networks among villages coordinating the exchange of goods and labor to produce products of much greater sophistication than any single village could manage.

There’s much buzz around Avatar becoming the highest grossing film of all time in only a few weeks.  This buzz is well earned in many ways because it’s a landmark movie, but the more astute among you may say “Ah, but adjusted for inflation, it’s nowhere near the top!”.  This is true, it comes in 26th when looked at that way (still a remarkable feat given how briefly it’s been out).  But when you really think about it, money doesn’t directly measure the popularity of a movie: the number of tickets sold does.  But just as the dollars need to be adjusted for inflation for a more accurate measurement, the ticket sales must be adjusted to reflect changes in population (selling 100 million tickets in a population of 150 million is a very different thing than in a population of 300 million!).  So, based on estimated domestic ticket sales from Box Office Mojo and estimated population from the US Census Bureau, I present to you the actual most popular movies of all time.

Gone with the Wind still holds a record that is hard to imagine being broken.  At almost twice the popularity of its nearest competitor, every single citizen in the entire nation saw this movie an astonishing one and a half times!

Even with this more realistic picture of popularity, Avatar is still doing incredibly well at 68th place.  And it’s still steadily cranking out the sales, so I don’t doubt that its rank will climb much higher than that before it finishes its run.

It’s interesting to note that there hasn’t been a new top-10 movie in 28 years.  That means that most people currently alive in the country have never personally experienced a genuine cinematic phenomenon (especially not also being old enough to really appreciate it).  And in the last decade, Avatar aside, the best we’ve managed to do is 72nd.  Let’s hope that Avatar is a sign of better things to come!

Note that ticket sales were taken from a list ultimately based on money made, so an unusual ratio of tickets to money could have resulted in some movies being excluded from this list, especially near the bottom. Also, any movie re-released in a year with a substantially different population will have a skewed result (I’m looking at you, Star Wars).