Phil Henshaw
This is a very quick
posting of a new graphic that needs to be followed with a more complete
discussion. The problem of the scale of change, when is it 'big' and
when is it 'small' is not solved by a difference between before and after
because one never knows what scale to use, and not solved by a ratio of before
and after, because one never knows whether that's part of a larger event that is
big or small. A better way is to look at the number of
doublings, since change comes about by growth and the number of doublings is a
measure of the leap in complexity for the growth system. The human body
starts from a single cell and gets through 45 doublings to have around 10^14
cells or a hundred trillion total. That combines both the
accelerating and decelerating growth, so one might guess it did half of those
during the accelerating and half in the decelerating phase, or around 22
doublings during the explosion of growth. The modern growth of
wealth that seems to have begun in the late 1300's and has continued more or
less steadily ever since would have completed 30 doublings since then if it had
grown at a steady 3 1/2% rate as it has for the past 150 years.
The reasons why some growth systems destabilize their growth process after
fewer and others after more doublings varies in the particulars.
The
range of doublings which various kinds of natural systems display, like
electrical sparks or super-nova, etc, has not been studied. A
wild guess is that 10 to 20 doublings is probably normal. There's
lots of interesting questions about where to record the beginning or ending of
growth, since they those changes are among the most hidden of all physical
processes. Of course, what gives relevance to any particular
growth phase is it's connection to the others that compose the thing or event's
whole life story.
This is excerpted with the fig from RSswitch.htm.
10/14/06 I inserted this graphic because it add perspective on the problem. The total number of doublings before a growth system climaxes corresponds to how hard it hits its limits, the abruptness of the transition. Wealth has been regularly doubling for around 600 years now, and all signs are that it began responding to the limits of the earth around 1960. In terms of the suddenness of change we're experiencing (just to form an conceptual image to then push and pull to better fit reality) it's almost as if all the change of the past 600 years was packed into the period from 1900 to 1960 and an equal amount in the opposite direction may need to take place in the next 20 to come to a sustainable level to avoid extreme overshoot and collapse. That conceptual model is not a formula that things follow, but a set of proportionalities that can be expected. One of the strong implications is that our transition to stability needs to be abrupt when we hit the limits for whatever reason, given the length of doubling we've had, and that delaying transition after we've hit the limits will require even greater increases in the abruptness of the transition required. --
What happens is that the highly productive and competitive community of professionals (the world's economic power hitters) will see the problem. Those who care about the future of the earth will confront a dilemma. If they do what's in their own and everyone else's best interest voluntarily, it would put them at a strong competitive disadvantage to those who would exploit it. The former won't put up with either wrecking the earth or conceding advantage to those who would, and the new practices required will quickly become universal.
fyi, the dotted segments of the Da Vinci man symbol represent the way nature draws circles, with continuities made by discontinuities. The Physics of Happening