The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens - The Simple Story of Civilization with Tom Murphy | Frankly #22

Episode Date: January 6, 2023

This week, Nate invites colleague Tom Murphy, professor of physics at the University of California, San Diego and writer of 'Do the Math', to unpack his recent essay The Simple Story of Civilization. Tom condenses the vast timescale of human life on Earth to an average human lifespan to give us a sense of the anomalous period we're living through. What is civilization and how quickly did it come about?  Can technology redirect civilization from its current perilous course? Is optimism näive or is it necessary in order to make the hard decisions within us? A 30 minute overview with Nate and Professor Tom Murphy. For Show Notes and More: https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/frankly-original/22-the-simple-story-of-civilization To Watch on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6yFrh1X6DI

Professor Murphy, good to see you. Hi, Nate. So we are old friends and colleagues. And earlier this week, you posted an excellent essay, the simple story of civilization. I was so struck by its simplicity and brevity and hard-hitting points that I gave you a call and thought we could have a conversation for you to unpack it. Yep, glad to do that.

Okay. So in your do-the-math essay earlier this week, you compared the span of human life on Earth to a single human lifetime to bring perspective on how much of an anomaly our current culture and economy are. Can you walk us through that analogy in brief? Sure. So what we're going to do is take 75 years as a typical lifespan plus or minus and map that onto the 2.5 to 3 million years that humans have been on. on this planet. So for a little bit of context, that itself is only one five thousandth of the age of the universe.

So this is still a narrow time slice in the big scheme of things. But all the same, in this 75 year span of human habitation on the planet, the first 70 years are various species of humans evolving and coexisting on the planet, mostly in a sustainable way. The last five years of this 75 years is the age of Homo sapiens.

you know somewhat recent but we're getting used to it it's 200,000 years and mostly in a sustainable way it's the last 15 weeks that we would call the age of civilization that's 10,000 years where we've had agriculture settlements leading the cities in the last four days just four days in the 75 year lifespan it's the age of science that's 400 years for us then the last 36 hours a day and a half, the age of fossil fuels. That's 150 years of significant use. But really, that's ramped up so that the last 50 years are the most important. And that comes to the last little time slice, which is the last 12 hours of this 75-year lifetime,

has been an age of rapid global ecological devastation. And it's not coincidental that that overlaps with the heaviest use of energy by our society. So I've seen this over the years presented many different ways on videos online. I thought this was a clever way of doing it. So now let's consider going a step further. What might this look like if our 75-year-old friend or relative went through a similar progression? Yeah, I think that really helps to bring it into focus. And, you know, the first 70 years in this case, not much happens in this lifetime.

It's kind of like a boring uncle, a very, very good. kind and enjoyable uncle. You know, we don't want to diminish that life. But, you know, not too exciting. Then another five years in the Homo sapiens mode, it's Homo sapiens turn to be boring. Not a whole lot happens the next five years. It's just in the last 15 weeks, you notice your relative doing something completely different, different behavior, different values, different relationships, different personality. It leaves you wondering, you know, who is this person even? And it's as if they've adopted a new hobby or even maybe a gateway drug and they've just,

you know, they've just transformed. And so I think about it is imagine you're briefing your cousin. You're talking to them on the phone after just a horrendous day dealing with your relative who's kind of gone off the rails. And you say, get this, four days ago. this new hobby of his, he took it to a whole new level and things just really kind of took off. And what I'm talking about here is adopting science, which we can think of maybe as stepping away from the gateway drug into something like cocaine. It really amps things up.

Okay, and then the conversation. And then early yesterday, he found the most dangerous substances of all. And now he thinks he has superpowers. He thinks he can fly out of windows. And I'm talking about fossil fuels, which in this drug analogy might be something like PCP, where you do imagine you can jump out of a window and fly. And then, you know, since this morning, he's destroyed most of his environment and this uncontrolled accelerating rampage. Well, the first question that comes to mind is, will we make 80 or even will we make 76? But let me keep unpacking your paper. So that's what we're doing right now.

We're on a, as a species, we're on a destructive rampage. I thought we were just living our lives. Well, to an individual life, it does seem like that. But if you really look at the data and look at what our ecosystem is doing, we've lost about 85% of our primary forest and it's just gone. That's a lot of an important habitat for a lot of animals. then, you know, about 70%, average decline in vertebrate populations since I was born in 1970. So that 50-year roughly time span, huge decline in animal populations.

At this point, wild mammals are now just 4% of the mammal mass on Earth, most of its humans in our livestock. And so they're really being squeezed. That's 2% on land and 2% in oceans. So they've really been kind of squeezed down. It's very alarming. It's happening in the blink of an eye on this time scale. That's the last 12 hours of this 75-year life. But this was happening the prior 12 hours as well.

It just wasn't as globally huge in its impact. And it was happening 24 hours ago, too. Yeah, we just, yeah, it's absolutely been ramping up, but it's all part of this new hobby. So it's all, you know, within the last 15 weeks that we've seen traumatic changes. So in your essay, you also challenge your readers to question whether the very foundations of our civilization are wrong. Can you justify such a bold statement? Why go that far, that extreme?

Yeah, good question. And I think this is an extreme moment. I mean, from this perspective, you see that things, have really kind of unraveled quickly. And it really all does trace back to the start of what we call civilization, our civilization, meaning agriculture and then settlements and cities. So prior to that, we lived in approximate equilibrium with ecosystems. And, you know, occasionally we might cause some extinctions.

But generally, we were playing by the same rules as all other animals played by. I mean, we were part of that evolutionary set. But once we took control of our food production, a lot of things happened. So suddenly we had surplus. We needed ways to store that surplus. We had settlements to stay close to our stores and the land that was producing our food. We started accumulating material possessions. That led to hierarchies and systems to kind of preserve that status, standing armies,

to protect those stores from yourselves and other nearby populations. It led to property rights, this crazy idea that we can own the land. And the property rights, together with accumulation of material possessions, led to want a desire to continue that ownership into further generations. And that led to a patriarchy scheme, which, by the way, got tied into our religious schemes and became monotheism. So you have this great paternal sort of overseer. And then, you know, we had subjugation of humans and animals to do work for us. Led to all kinds of ecological problems from soil degradation, habitat destruction, extinction rates far above normal, and all the

rest, all the things that we see today. Just sort of a connect the dots straight from this idea of agriculture. So now that we've kind of dialed up this rate of destruction, it's more obvious what the pattern is showing us, which is that this initial impulse to control nature was itself kind of a flawed premise and consequential, very consequential. So since then, we've actually been doubling down on that idea of control so that we keep trying to control more and more, but it's never going to be enough. We're never going to be full masters. And so it's going to fail.

It's guaranteed to fail. And unfortunately, this system that we've constructed is so huge that the failure is almost by definition going to be spectacular and awful and lamentable because we just built it up so large. So when you say the failure will be spectacular, are you saying that as a physicist or just as a human who's learned all these facts and are observing it. Yeah, and sorry, there's a deer walking through the snow, so very much, you know, have a nature moment here. You're entitled to a pause.

Yeah, so that's what it's all about after all. So, yeah, I mean, it's the spectacular failure is just, it saddens me that we can be as destructive to ourselves and to nature, especially to nature, all for the wrong reasons and all for something that never could have worked and could have been avoided sooner before we built it up to this colossus. So at its core then, Tom, what is fundamentally wrong with civilization? Yeah, so I think it's really kind of the philosophy behind our civilization. it's not even remotely predicated on principles of sustainability.

And just to be clear, something that's not designed to be sustainable is almost certainly unsustainable. You'd have to get crazy lucky for something that wasn't designed to be sustainable to accidentally be sustainable. Our civilization is very clearly not sustainable. And I like to think of flight analogies here. So a rock is not designed for sustainable flight. It can't continue a level indefinite flight. It can, however, be launched to soar upward for a while, but inevitably it's going to come back down toward Earth.

And I think our civilization is very similar because it's also like a rock, not founded on principles of sustainability. It can soar upward for a time, as we're doing now, as we spend Earth's inheritance. It's a big spinning spree. And it's great fun for the paying passengers and lots of satisfaction,

but it's temporary. And patiently waiting is Earth. And what I would call planetary limits. So that's going to find us before long. So is this our fault? Is this an immutable flaw in humans? I used to kind of think so. But I've come around and thinking, no, it's not really.

It's a flaw in the systems that we've adopted. And we've done so not fully conscious of their long-term ramifications. So I don't blame us for going down this road. But the fact is we have lived sustainably before for much longer stretches of time. And our recent binge that we call civilization is the anomaly. So we ought to be trying new ways of living. on this planet that are sustainable. It doesn't mean necessarily a reversion to other ways that we're sustainable.

It's a proof of concept that our current way is not the only way. And other ways can go for millions of years. There might be other constructs that can do the same. Well, it depends on how you define civilization. Because couldn't we hold on to civilization and maintain it as a much reduced level for a very long time, kind of like a steady state? Yeah, that's a very appealing notion that, you know, hold on. We don't have to ditch the whole thing.

Maybe we've got enough to work with here, and we can just eliminate the bad stuff. And I can't say for sure whether we could hold on the civilization for long term, but the fact is no one can't. And so it's important to recognize that. The concerns I have kind of come from a quantitative origin, and that, you know, we've blown through a large fraction of our inheritance in the time scale of something like a century. And to be clear, it wasn't our inheritance. We were just the ones that found it and dug it up.

But go on. That is true. That's something that I still fall into is this possessive instinct. But, yeah, we had this non-renewable inheritance that we did stumble onto and claimed for our own and spent a large fraction of that. in the course of a century or so. And if we greatly reduced our footprint, say a tenth of our current scale, which by the way, maybe a billion people or so,

but living at global standards, which is already much lower standard of energy and resources and materials than we're used to in the US, for instance. So even if we did that, maybe we get a thousand years or a few thousand years out of it. And if we did the most aggressive, recycling campaign and had more materials than I'm giving credit for, maybe 10,000, but that's still

short. I mean, on the 75-year span, that's still just weeks or months. And it also says that we're perhaps nearer the end than the beginning of what we call civilization. And this thing we have, at the end of the day, it's still fundamentally unsustainable. It wasn't built on sustainable principles. And so you could stretch it, but it's not built for the long term. It can't really do that. The most energy-efficient invention, to my knowledge, of mankind is the bicycle because it combines technology and materials with human effort to get a person from A to B using the least amount of energy versus a car or a plane or a tractor or whatever.

Can't we use the remaining fossil and mineral seed corn in combination with technology to find and fix the problem that we face? Well, you know, I don't want to be someone who rules out anything, but I do see that the problem that we're having today are the set of problems, the predicament, is due to technology at some level. It's the illusion that we can completely control nature. And I'll just point out, again, it's not working so well. It never really has. We've only really mounted problems at the global scale, and we just sort of blithely keep trucking on and ignore them, sweep them under the rug.

But we'll never really fully master. We'll never own nature. And the sooner we stop thinking that we can, the better and stop floundering in our attempt to, to accomplish that. So I don't see it really as a matter of solving problems or mastering nature, of exerting our will and our efforts, of defining what nature should be according to our notions or dictating what it should be. That's all kind of a hubristic way that's not working and can't work at some level. So I really think we ought to spend more time considering not technology as an avenue,

but humility and figuring out ways to tuck into this amazing biodiverse world that we live in in a way that doesn't use that world, but it builds a relationship and a kinship at some level with that world. Well, I agree with you on that, but let me continue to talk to the physicists within your human body. So renewable energy, renewable technology isn't an answer to to fossil depletion and climate change? Well, you know, I used to think that. That's kind of how it started out as a physicist approaching these problems.

And I did a lot of calculations about how much we could get from solar and wind and what are the practical ends and outs and limitations. And the problem I have now with it is it only really doubles down on this destructive scheme. And the question really is,

what is it that we do with abundant energy? what have we done? We tend to expand the human enterprise. We clear more land for agriculture and other human use. And the humorous way I tend to put it is, if every jackass on the planet had access to abundant, even clean energy, what would they do with it? Would they do good things like ecological restoration

where there's no money in that? So our financial economic system won't support such things. Or will they do what I would call bad things like, you know, plunder the earth more for their own personal or economic game. So I think it's very clear what unleashing a lot of energy would do. And the other framing is, what would the animals want? If you ask the squirrels and the newts and the parrots and the lizards, you know, what do they hope we'll do at this crossroads?

Are they hoping that we're going to pull off this renewable energy transition so we can keep civilization fully powered and trucking along? hell no that's the worst possible thing the most destructive decision we could make from their point of view i remember from our first podcast last year you are a newt and salamander aficionado so maybe we should make a reality tv show or movie and call it ecological jackass i'm kidding so so here's here's kind of the problem i have with this or not it's not the problem but uh it's it's a little bit of a pushback um you see say that we didn't plan to be sustainable or we chose to do this economic system.

I think everything that you just said would have been true 100 years ago or 50 years ago or 10 or 20 years from now, probably. We are part of nature, Tom. We didn't make the choice to create civilization. It was the byproduct of a social species finding this huge amount of ancient sunlight just under the surface, self-organizing around this energy surplus and expanding our nodes of trade and transport and dopamine. So when did we as a culture ever really have a choice and will we ever have a moment in the

future where we have a choice? Yeah, I think that's a really deep and interesting question. And I know that you've had some guests on your podcast, especially I remember Daniel Schmockenberger talking about technologies being. kind of an obligate thing, that it's a game theory. It's whatever out-competes other modes just ends up winning. And so at some level, no, it wasn't really a choice. We never sat around a table and plotted this course.

We're just kind of along for the ride, and it's been a fun one. I also think of it as, hey, look what we can do, approach to living in this world. So, you know, the issue is that, yeah, we didn't make this conscious choice, and part of it is that very few people could have understood the long-term consequences. It's hard to, nobody has crystal balls, hard to peer into the future. Some had some really interesting insights and premonitions, and Malthus comes to mind, and now the, you know, named Malthus is ridiculed because he didn't see the fossil fuels as part of the story. And, you know, that's a lesson. There are things that maybe we're not seeing as well. Like, you know,

Yes, sure. You could always say that. But, you know, the writing is on the wall in a lot of ways. We do have this, you know, tremendous decline in biodiversity. But when you ask, you know, when or will we ever have a moment to make a choice, we always have this moment. In fact, that's the only moment we ever have. We don't have the future yet and we can't do anything about the past.

So we have now, to make a serious change, I just don't know how. to precipitate that effectively or if it's even really possible but but sure we can do something now i feel you on that and that's why my friend i'm doing these podcasts i don't think you or i are going to change the world or make this choice but my hope is that passing the baton of ecological information systems education might inspire and inform other people around the planet and in aggregate some emergent process happens I mean that's a naive hope on my part but hope nonetheless so how would you even define success what would have to happen for us to achieve success and what is success yeah I think in order to

get to success every human concern would have to be built on a foundation that's biophysically sustainable. And so what I mean by that is, if you look at what I mean by concerns, economics, politics, belief systems, human rights, science, technology, everything that, you know, look at a university catalog,

you know, everything that we care about and teach, are currently not predicated on an insistence for long-term ecosystem sustainability. The first chapter in all of those books So the first lecture is not about that sustainability and the conditions for that. So all these concerns will fail in their current formulation. It's almost guaranteed that if they're not built on sustainable principles, then they're unsustainable.

They will fail. So you have to start every consideration with something like this question of, would this action be a net help to the whole world, which, by the way, is mostly non-human? or would it be a net harm? Now, most decisions we make today are clearly net harms because they're very narrow in their focus and their goals. And so that's a start. You have to sort of start on that foundation,

but it would require a reformulation from the ground up of all human interactions and organizational schemes and how we interface to the planet. And so I don't really see it as an evolution or a tweaking or knob turning of our current civilizational aspirations and mindset as a new start from scratch. It's kind of a, you know, hey, this civilization idea has so many flaws. We can't salvage it. We have to build something completely new.

So do you have any hope for that sort of a major transition? Well, I always have a little bit of hope that we could embark on something as radical. is that voluntarily in aggregate. I mean, that's what it would take. We'd have to all, or, you know, enlarge numbers want to go in this new direction. I'll seize whatever hope I can. I mean, it might sound counterintuitive and like a disjoint,

but I'm actually an optimistic person. I am fairly happy-go-lucky, and I see a lot of the troubles, but I fundamentally just have to believe that there's something, can do. It can't be false hope. It can't be based on a faith in technology. I think that's mostly peddled today, but I think that's, you know, if you step back, we can see that this period is an anomaly and most of what we've learned in our mindset is a very temporary stage. It's not likely to

last. And I guess the final thing I'll say about hope is that the human mind is incredibly plastic. And one thing that means is that a child born a thousand years from now, we'll see whatever world that looks like to them will just be normal and accepted. And so, and they'll get on with things. And so. Or 50 years from now too. Yeah. You can say that about any moment in history is that to a child, it all looks just normal. It's, it's by definition normal. So I think that we, we have a great potential in the sense that this system isn't part of our DNA and it's something that once gone is is not going to plague us and those children of tomorrow aren't going to cry over what we have that they don't it's just not part of their their their their worldview so i think in this uh very

articulate unpacking of a simple story of civilization, I think we, there's two paths ahead, two questions ahead. There's one which you're working on with this line of thinking, which is what does a more sustainable future look like where we do no harm and we help? And all the ecological, biophysical, social, cultural, you know, research and study. and inference from that. And then the second question is how to get there from here. And those are two things that need to be worked on concurrently because once we start to have less energy every year

or more costly and less energy every year, all of the current cultural assumptions of what technology can do for us start to change from what they've been. last 50 years. So thank you for this. I appreciate you, Tom, and I look forward to having you back again on this show. And thank you for doing the math with your head and doing the caring with your heart, my friend. Do you have any closing comments on this short little conversation? I appreciate the opportunity. And, you know, I'm,

I'm constantly striving to get a handle on what this is all about and how we might make those transformations. I think, you know, a large part of it, it's kind of like Dorothy and the Wizard of Oz. You know, we've had the special shoes on all this time, and we just need to decide that we need to click them and do something different. Because this culture and the civilization only exists because we create it in our heads. And so in a sense, it's the easiest thing for us to dismantle if we put our minds to it. So I do think that's a really important thing to start think about how that happens. Well, I mean, this is our work. And finally, after 20 years, people are now recognizing the truth of most of what you just said on this call.

And there's a lot more people that recognize that. Now, the what to do about it, that's another question. So to be continued, my friend, and thank you. Great.