This was a great conversation, thank you! It was one of those times when there is a part of you that knows you are hearing a truth you know already, somewhere inside of you, but you're actually hearing it for the first time. I love when that happens!
As usual, a fascinating podcast. One point. Nate pointed out that many advocate for decentralization into smaller communities , aka decentralization. Dr. West answered Nate's question directly - the metabolic implications of decentralization, and he (I assume correctly) answered that from a scaling perspective, it would be much more inefficient. That seems to be the perspective from which Nate asked the question. My own belief is that the potential positives of small communities is based on the possibility that small communities tend to be less hierarchical, more cooperative, and that the social cohesion, social connections, in communities where each individual has a relationship, a human bond with everyone else in the community fosters a different kind of well-being than individualistic economic competition. This would in turn foster the communal connections that could be more rewarding vis a vis happiness, and quality of life, separate from material comfort, and economic growth. There is no reason that such communities could not exist within cities. Of note is that in the Philippines, the barangays tend to serve as small communities that provide the social cohesion and communal advantages described. Originally developed in rural areas, when the Philippines urbanized, with many moving to cities from barangays in rural areas for work, people have created urban barangays, with sizes and social structures similar to their rural counterparts. I suspect that Philippine cities scale according to the same laws that cities do worldwide, metabolically. Interesting, the the nation/state model of governance, imposed by both the Spanish and the US, coexists with the barangays, and there is a complex power sharing, and division of governance tasks (healthcare, policing, etc) between the government and the barangays. Insofar as there is evidence that humans seem to be hardwired for both hierarchical and partner/cooperative societal organizations (see Riane Elsier The Great Simplification #116: Partnership and Domination in Society), I think this is the critical component of the decentralization question.
Great point! I think this is also what Elinor Ostrom referred to as "polycentrism". Even so this structure must have negative feedbacks embedded in it to constrain runaway growth.
There are many, many deep-thinking individuals like Geoffrey West EVERYWHERE around the world. The Great Simplification features many of them. I have the fantasy of an organization similar to the United Nations devoid of international political, economic and military considerations and focused, instead, on the myriad issues that are presented on this podcast. I believe it represents the hearts and brains, and the hopes and wishes and the very best aspects of most of us. Mad men now run the world. It shouldn't be this way!
What a delighful human being! from such a person, everything that he says, no matter how harsh to listen to, comes as a nourishing and welcome piece of wisdom. Thank you for this interview!
Nate, all your podcasts are valuable - this one is really a standout. Thank you!! I've heard a bunch of these ideas before, but Geoffrey is a great communicator... and the two of you, as is almost always the case, make a great combo.
"Man has survived hitherto because he was too ignorant to know how to realize his wishes. Now that he can realize them, he must either change them or perish." --William Carlos Williams
Wonderful! There are many great minds at SFI that could benefit the show. I am also pleased to see that whenever we get "aloft," polarization subsides. That is also one of the many learnings I got from this show: when we get look at the bigger picture, we are not encumbered by details that keep us from making progress, together.
Thank you for the conversation! The remarks about Trump made me think about a little book I read by Bruno Latour, 'Down to Earth, politics in the new climatic regime'. He describes Trumps ideas as an 'attractor', the 'boundless', not restricted to any physical or social norms and boundaries, and therefore destructive in its nature. Opposite to that is the Earth, and Latour argues that is where we should be heading. A comment like this is not really suited to do Latour's ideas justice, but it certainly fits into the narrative of the two gentlemen. Well worth the read.
The convergent evolution across the world was because of the commodification of the commons. We became to believe that land could be owned, and as land = power, so then power became imbalanced and empires could evolve.
1:32:00 You mean to say ... If we don't care for nature and we are chaotic with our attention to eachother, nature will do the same. This was fantastic. Thank you!
The "third rail" in the discussion of our global dilemma is over-population. I am not a proponent of eugenics in any form but it is disturbing to me that this most-obvious problem seems to be studiously avoided. Other than William Rees and William Catton and Paul Ehrlich, our deepest thinkers tend to avoid this life-threatening "elephant in the room". I realize that it runs counter to the incentive for the perpetual growth of GNP and GWP; and that it offends much of our religious community, but homo sapiens are devouring the Earth right from under their own feet. It seems to be the most pertinent issue of our times. As it has been said before, "perpetual growth on a finite planet" is is not only unrealistic, it is cultural lunacy.
Agree with your premise. Ironically there's a growing sense of panic as national birth rates decline. Internet amplifying the noise and fear mongering. Blissfully self ignorant of reality that every year another 80 million, 2x population of Canada, net new precious humans join us. Each requires 30,000 days, typical lifespan, of 2,000 calories of food. Clothing housing transportation education healthcare environmental infrastructure the size of new York City must come into existence every single month just to accommodate the new folks.
I would say that there is probably some concerted and yet covert work going on to try and keep the population down. But even that is "third rail";as it goes all too easily into David Icke and Alex Jones territory.
So many are answering that by saying that the population is beginning to decline as a result of reduced birth rates. I agree with you and find the facile argument that things will take care of themselves over time to miss the point. As we go over the falls, throwing out items to make ourselves lighter will be beside the point. By the way, I always appreciate your comments and look for them as adding to the general discussion.
Population is not as important as consumption (and the waste products of consumption). The 9% of us at the top of the global income distribution use the majority of the energy and produce 50% of the carbon, while the bottom 50% of the global income distribution produces just 7% of the carbon. So the true "elephant in the room" is that a small percentage of us is sucking up all the energy and producing all the CO2, in short, we Americans are optimized for planet wrecking.
Hi Nate, I recommend you interview Kev Polk, who did a lot of work sustainable cities, wrote a book, and run the youtube channel "edenicity". I also want to mention James C. Scott's book "Seeing Like a State", that goes deeper into the roots of what you discussed here about Brazilia and other planned cities.
Nate, thank you very much for this wonderful interview. It speaks to the heart of our current situation: have we evolved to the point where we have the tools and can develop the social networks to produce Annette energy positive giving us the ability to recapitalize the planet? Natural systems work to sequester, solar energy as life and complexity. It’s clear that climate stability is the result of increasing complexity in the super organism of life. The only exception being human kind. We’re probably not gonna be able to do anything monumental, but at least to address, climate, change or goals should be to develop systems negative entropy, weary we use our social networks in the technology available to usto introduce a new financial system in itself, complexity is the goal that we seek to achieve in order to address, climate change, or environmental degradation as I’d like to. Keep up the good work.
Wow ! I have not heard of Geoffrey before this chat but so much of it is around subjects i have thought and talked about over the decades. Jane Jacobs works interested me decades ago, and the the book Cities in Civilization made me look at things in a different lens. Anyways, I will be listening to this a number of times over next 10 days and forward it on to others. Many thanks Nate for an fascinating discussion. cheers
This was terrific. I've always had a affinity for Ecological Systems thinking, I gravitated to H.T.Odum through searching for confirmation of my own speculations. This was right up my alley! 🙂
This was such an interesting conversation to listen to. I reminded me of many other things... a transportation textbook that pointed out that Los Angeles' development followed a "20 minutes of commute time between workers' homes and their places of work" rule of thumb, which you could see manifested over time in waves of development, as modes of transport increased how far you could travel in 20 minutes... and also science fiction author Paolo Bacigalupi's short stories collected in *Pump Six*, many of which take place in a future that still has advanced technology, but must limit its use of fossil fuels, so transoceanic trade is handled via neo-Clipper ships made of carbon fiber, which are loaded by the most calorically efficient means available: genetically re-created mammoths. Anyway, fascinating to learn about Kleiber's law, and to hear speculation about how it applies to exosomatic energy use (a.k.a. infrastructure?) Thanks for this great interview, Nate. Really fascinating!
Wow just when I think you couldn't have a more interesting guest than the amazing panoply that has preceded Geoffrey West, you knock it out of the park. I knew of West's work but seeing him interact with you was riveting. I knew of the scaling of mammalian sizes but expanding it to damn near everything has left me stunned.
What a delightful guest. Mind blowing that I use as much energy as a dozen elephants and almost as much energy as a blue whale to stay alive. Profound implications.
One thing I've been wondering about since watching this fascinating talk. Our organisation of interactions has forced into cities to facilitate them and as Geoffrey points out, these are comprised of 2 networks. The infrastructure and social. What I've realised is that the infrastructure follows the nature/evolutionary path and solves for less than 1, whereas our social path solves for greater (apologies for the math analogy). It seems that our social network had not had the time to solve for efficiency in terms of interactions, you could argue with the luxury of time they would also but over the timescales necessary it won't make it.
Great episode, it was an intellectual delight. On a similar note, it would be interesting to have professor Doyne farmer on your podcast, his to be released book on complexity economics will have some insights.
It is inevitable, so accept it. Humans are no exception to the rule. As for those few individuals who are exceptions to the rule - they are out bred into extinction by the collective.
Nate it seemed that you really enjoyed this talk. Do you know if any studies have been done on the Americans Indians or Australian Aborigines. It seems that these cultures lived within the constraints of the biosphere. They did not create 1:15 cities, is that because they had a greater wisdom on consequences.
American Indian groups did create a number of urban cultures that eventually dispersed or collapsed, probably due to outstripping natural resources and increasing inequality.
That is interesting, I always wondered what made other cultures expand. After listening to Mr West it seems that our social networks helped the expansion.
In "Chaos: Making a New Science" by James Gleick there was a section about biological networks and how their fractal structure made them efficient. The simple repetitive rules for construction allowed for an almost data compression effect.
Wow. The 'Grand Universal Theory of Sustainability. [ 1 hr. 25 ish ] I pray we do have the GUTS to realize that we need to slow down and cherish the idea of the great Simplification. Thank you, gentlemen. Mind blown once again.
I asked Google's Gemini AI the following question: "If the current exponential growth in the creation of new data continues into the future, how much energy would be needed to store and keep cool all of the data in the world's data centers by 2124?" Gemini's answer: ● Current Consumption: Let's assume a conservative estimate of 4% of global electricity consumption by data centers (as of 2020). ● Growth Rate: For illustration purposes, let's assume a high annual growth rate of 21%. ● Timeframe: We're looking at 100 years until 2124 (2124-2024). Calculated Future Consumption: With these assumptions, data centers could consume an astronomical 75,962,110% of global electricity by 2124.
That's exactly how far and how fast we are going off the rails. Google Gemini will clearly elaborate on the self-delusion of AI's creators and profit hungry promoters. The power drunk tech bros and elites won't listen to what AI already knows about human nature. in my professional opinion (Psychiatry), humanity may have already crossed the tipping point hurling us irreversibly towards mass psychosis.
Another amazing interview . I just love when two inelegant people do a pod cast on the most important issues facing man kind I always learn so much What I find Extraordinary about humans is How every living thing on or in this planet and its atmosphere Man has altered everything including what's living or went extinct or going extinct the climate /atmosphere everyspace on the planet in some way has Human finger prints on the ice cores millons of years from now will have micro plastics and all the toxic chemicals found in them We managed to do this in the last 100 or so years at least the damaging things that effect our survival If we didn't have fossil fules to dig up we definitely wouldn't of been able to accomplish this. We simply got to smart to fast letting money lead to are disposal. It's not impossible to imagine a day when drones are used to hunt humans for human population reduction. Like now we have extinction rebellion other groups like them but don't use disruption to the system so to say . Well when the rich keep leading us down this path as they have so much influence on the goverments. There's going to be other groups like or worse in acts of disruption that anyone protesting anything will be stopped and said to be terrorist attacks See next drones will start eradicating In ways it's already started
This is great, Nate. I'll say it again, you're still circling around the energy/economic connection. Time to apply the Maximum Power Principle to the calculation of monetary value. It's revelatory.
Nate! Your discussion about searching for an alternative story to bring humanity down to sub-linear metabolism - I am reminded of Noah Yuval Harari’s work on how Story has the power to shape us. However, my concern is the following: is it the stories that are shaping our collective behaviour? Or, is it our biology, via natural selection and gene expression, that “selects” which stories that tend to rise to the top (in terms of their ability to make copies of them selves amongst a population, in service of their own selection)? My fear is the latter, which means there truly is no guru-figure that can lead us to a better story for humanity, and we are well and truly stuck, waiting for the simplification and hoping things change for Homo Colossus 2.0.
If you’re really interested in the building of new cities in the context of “The Great Simplification” Pre and Post civilisation renaissance, can I suggest you check out Dr Simon Michaux, (Dr Simon Michaux if you’re not aware has been a guest of Nate’s on ‘The great Simplification” podcast on a number of occasions). Simon is Principle Advisor to the “Venus Project” (of late Jacque Fresco fame). There’s a great conversation on this project between Manda Scott (of ‘Accidental Gods’) and Simon Michael, to be found at “Accidental Gods - #215 The Promethian Project: Building a Radical Tomorrow with Dr Simon Michaux🤔
44:30 MLK inspired a very small number of people at the time. Of course after the fact, everyone remembers they were on the right side of history. But the focus on the natural world is key. It is a form of spirituality. My suggestion would be Ornithology as a mandatory primary school class :)
Nate, I hope you hold a roundable with Geoffrey West and Mario Giampietro, who also was looking at metabolism at varying scale. Other past guests to consider adding to the roundtable include Josh Farley, Paul Erlich, Joseph Tainter, and Jared Diamond.
Chaisson, Roddier, et Georgescu traitent de ces sujets ou abordent des sujets similaires. Si les sociétés humaines ont des exposants supérieurs à 1, pourquoi les mégalopoles existent ? et comment expliquer la mondialisation ? Plus la société est grande plus chaque individus consomme (d'énergie ...) mais plus il produit aussi (de brevet ...). réponse slide 27:40, il revient sur cela à 1:00:00 plus la ville est grande plus elle est optimale 25:20 4ième principe de la thermodynamique 53:00 société post fossile 58:20 ville de 15 minutes, retrofitter les villes 1:19:00 bureaucratie très efficace pour optimiser (quel indicateur ?) le collectif (au détriment des individus) 1:30:11
Very interesting conversation, lots to chew on. However, one area where I think West is wrong is his assertion that larger cities are more likely to be incubators of new ideas, innovation, based on the assumption that more minds equals more creativity. But history tells another story. Florence at the height of the Renaissance had a population of 60-70,000, Venice was about the same. Classical Athens had perhaps 40,000 people. Renaissance Rome was equally small, and might have had more sheep and goats grazing between the ruins than people, whereas Imperial Rome had a million people, and yet nobody considers it to have been a generator of truly high cultural achievement. Whatever the factors are that create renaissances or great culture in general with its fostering of creativity at the highest levels, they remain a mystery, way beyond anything, like population size, that can be ascertained numerically. So, even West's hometown, Santa Fe should, theoretically, be capable of being a node of great cultural activity, and, of course, compared to most American towns of similar size, it already is. Otherwise, the Santa Fe Institute, where some of the most forward trending thinking of our time takes place, wouldn't be there. Maybe we need to get over being dazzled by mere bigness.....
It's good to bear in mind that all these units, whether mice or elephants, and including cities, have evolved. That is they have developed over time whilst fighting off adversity and taking opportunities as they arise. That means they are inherently efficient because an inefficient unit (e.g. organism or city) would not have survived. What is happening now is an unprecedented centralisation of control, and that makes the system less resilient. One of a thousand things might knock it off course. While that is happening, the cities (invisibly?) rely on their surroundings for fuel and food etc. By some reckonings, this contributory area is around 100 times the area of the city it supports, so another consideration is the sheer 'footprint' of the city, because the Earth is finite. I think it's pretty clear that we have already exceeded this limit.
Theory of Constraints (Goldratt) is coming to mind. It's like a highway. Take a work order and imagine it's a car on the highway through a factory. If you increase the length of time the WO stays on the shop floor, you make a traffic jam, because you don't have enough exits and it is there longer. Shorter lead times, more flow. One would think that if you have more local resources, shorter lead times, this would increase delivery of goods?
I would never reduce food intake to calories and nutrients. We have evolved to live of the fresh food the biosphere we are part of provides, not highly processed industry products. Great episode!!
Calorie restriction and aging is more complex than Dr West suggests. It triggers a host of mechanisms that slow down some forms of aging, but it comes at the expense of immune and reproductive function. Monkeys in a calorie restriction study showed less signs of aging that age matched cohorts on unrestricted diets, but the calorie restricted monkeys experienced higher rates of death from infectious disease, so the average mortality wasnt that different between the groups. There are also suggestions that the beneficial effects might come from restricting methionine intake (the amino acid needed to initiate protein synthesis). Methionine deficiency likely stimulates more efficient recycling of old proteins, and accumulation of misfolded proteins over time is one of the major mechanisms for aging.
@@leonsappl It requires videos to explain. I did one in french for a round table on water problems in urban areas. ua-cam.com/video/gzEjtCSa2T0/v-deo.htmlsi=LYH6MHECcynBOuQ_ But there are many applications for governance as well.
Thanks for another great one, Nate! I have a hypothesis that humans carry subconcious demographics limiting and expanding traits somewhat similar to coyotes. I doubt this is any kind of new idea, but I've never seen or heard of it and haven't looked for it so I throw it out there. We very quickly self limit reproduction under the improved abundance conditions of industrial life in 1st and developing world countries when there is plenty, while the most struggling famine starved areas breed excessively. Of course the obvious factors like labor for agriculture, contraception, technical advance etc play many compkex roles. Im asking if we collectively feel the pinch on resources and ecological degradation. Does the multicrisis penetrate and trigger something on a deeper level despite extreme opposition by some factions. Do the harried masses who are seemingly unaware, too busy and too strapped to care subconciously know and react? Is the 20% part of the 80/20 rule acting on some deeper drives than our assumed greed, selfishness and competition overdrive motives and models? Again, there are very many obvious, well researched interplaying factors, but just as biology, physics and other sciences are finding multiple next levels to explore, I wonder what the next deeper levels are concerning demographics? Anybody???
Great podcast as always. Geoffrey is an institution into himself, a wise person in the fullest sense of the word! Btw did the ancient cities also have this relation with metabolism where increase in size increases metabolism by a power greater than one? Sorry I missed that one
I’m afraid Nate this conversation was too academic for me, I’ve also heard majority of what was discussed before, so skipped in a series of steps through it, stopped around 35:00:00 minutes when discussion was around city scaling, and super linear scaling, listened until 1:04:00, then slowly skipped to the end. Like I’ve said it was generally too academic for me. If you’re really interested in the building of new cities in the context of “The Great Simplification” Pre and Post civilisation renaissance, can I suggest you have on your podcast, who you’ve had many times before, Simon Michaux, Simon is now involved, if you’re not aware, as Principle Advisor on the “Venus Project” (of the late Jacque Fresco). “There’s a great conversation on this project between Manda Scott (of Accidental Gods) and Simon Michael, to be found at “Accidental Gods - #215 The Promethian Project: Building a Radical Tomorrow with Dr Simon Michaux; check it out🤔
@@dbadagna Sometimes yes! unfortunately this wasn’t one of those occasions for me, academics alone won’t solve our polycrisis, and I like people who walk the talk. Dr Simon Michaux is one of those people. If you didn’t read all my comment check out “Accidental Gods - #215 The Promethian Project: Building a Radical Tomorrow with Dr Simon Michaux”🤔
A healthy society is one in which there is a proper balance between the individual and the group. I’m not sure that that’s just for human society, groups of nonhuman social animals also must have this balance, however I think this is the basis for how morals and ethics evolved in humanity - both from ‘nature and nurture’. It does seem to be the one observation for me that keeps coming up with this podcast.
❤ interesting. Just to be a true Australian, the largest living organism on the planet is not the blue whale. It is a bed of seagrass off the coast of western Australia the size of Washington DC for my American friends 😂😂 it is incredibly old and all originates from the one plant. Learn something every day people! 👍👍
28:30 'Cities minimize time from A to B' - except that energy was assigned a very artificially low cost; cars are very heavily subsidised; and zoning restrictions have forced very simplified/homogeneous land use. Choose Delft not Detroit.
1:00 '15 minute/more distributed city uses much more energy than the current scheme' - is a falacy because the current scheme is far from optimised (eg current massive cummuter waste) - see previous comment.
Nate on dopamine as positive feedback outside metabolism - you need to study Stuart Hameroff's Quantum Pleasure Principle. Hameroff is a professor emeritus anesthesiologist who has collaborated with Nobel Physicist Roger Penrose on quantum biology consciousness science. thanks
Without critically problematizing social and economic structures, this conversation leans uncomfortably close to sociobiology, biological determinism, and social darwinism. For example, cells don’t own property and they cooperate with each other. The extra metabolic cost of private property and competition that lead to surplus profit is akin to a regressive taxation that scales the flow of energy and resources to the top of the social hierarchy, making the ‘capitalist’ system metabolically unsustainable. Put differently, the unnatural anabolic cost of capital inevitably leads to a catabolic collapse of economies and societies.
In the body, there is no central governing force that rules the cells. Each cell has it's own handbook (DNA) and then goes on to be a good cell, to fulfill its functions, then it dies and is processed and ejected for recycling. The problem with the super organism is that we don't have a conscious version of the common code. Despite our uncanny ability to all get to 1.15 "by accident" our cities have bad DNA and so look like tumours and not like leaves, veins or rivers. We really need a new narrative on urbanisation and the SHAPE of urbanised zones. Veins of urban with triangles of green instead of a blob. Christopher Alexander wrote a book called "A pattern language." I recommend it to anyone looking for an upgrade on urban DNA. I did a quick videi summary for a project about water, but it is in french, ua-cam.com/video/gzEjtCSa2T0/v-deo.htmlsi=LYH6MHECcynBOuQ_
i think it is waaaay higher friend, but i may not entirely understand the calculation, ..in fact , im sure that i do NOT. while watching the video i attempted to count the energy iwas responsible for dispensing, from the lights to the coffeemaker and then consider how the milk i drank from the fridge, ...etc etc... this is a VERY hard to quantify # Also,...WHY is it NOT /hour/minute/sec/day ????? what does 11 000 watts mean?? is it equivalent to me being an 11K bulb just burning as i survive?regardless of context/ i am so confused and alarmed at my new perception
Nate, there are a couple of inherent problems with the logic of this conversation. What it does not take into account or the tools of technology which enable the virtual city and the virtual sharing of ideas in ways that we do not have to physically congregate. This provides us with a number of advantages in dealing with addressing the polly crisis. We can aggregate ourselves and create a local Community, based on the creation of biological complexity, and storing energy within natural systems, while simultaneously having the benefits of the aggregation of intellectual property in an open source paradigm. Also, it assumes that the byproducts of our activities are limited to those things which result in degradation of the biosphere. By taking a global perspective And making restoration of the planet, or at least thinking of the entire planet as an interconnected powerhouse using biology to convert solar energy into complexity of life and carbon. We have the capacity to address, environmental degradation, and more importantly, to introduce a global purpose for humanity, being climate, mitigation.
Decentralization is important from a social and a political standpoint even if we are forced to sacrifice optimization, we cannot introduce one centralized system because inherently it will lead to social unrest because the sociopaths will have a path to the aggregation of social control. By focusing on creating abundance, acknowledging that nature creates an over abundance, such that it feeds all the decomposers along with food chain, and that we need to acknowledge, disruption and recovery along the way as does nature, we can take a different attitude and think in terms of complex adaptive systems moving away from linear thought
Have you explored how trophic levels -- biomass transfer efficiency are linked to Kleiber's LAw? Because as apex predators humans should be consuming somewhere between 0.1 to 0.01% of the initial energy from primary producers, which I have a gut feeling might be at least as important as Kleiber's Law. I think it's safe to say our addiction to consumerism and fossil fuels totally screws the pooch on that one.
Have you read his PNAS paper? Although it has since been edited, it was published in 2007, before the internet took off, and way before AI crossed a capability threshold. By what factor has the internet expanded social interaction, for urbanites and rural people? If it turns out to be possible to continue to power the internet, the cloud, AI, and personal devices, could humanity relocalize, deconstruct megacities, and resume a new cycle of "growth" based on the distributed social organization? In that scenario, human connection to the agricultural land that sustains us, if not to "nature", could be restored, thus increasing the carrying capacity of the smaller towns (food and waste transport by horse or oxcart), while satisfying the dopamine need for growing social interconnections. Growth of social connections is limited by the length of a human lifespan, so the connectivity of the overall system would level out at some K carrying capacity. Of course, this scenario would require good governance of the internet: elimination of streaming video advertisements and commercial extraction of personal data, and brakes on potential virality of falsehoods and AI hallucinations.
Humans have exceeded their activity metabolism since they began cooking with fire 1.8 million years ago, not just 10,000 years ago with the agricultural revolution. We are truly fire apes, and 1.8 x10^-6 years sounds like an evolutionary time scale. There are so few foods that humans can digest raw, our metabolism must be genetically adapted to cooking, no doubt to feed our oversized brains. Cooking is a form of predigestion. We are the only animals that require predigested food past infancy.
Which would suggest that combustion and its emissions are not necessarily the problem, scaling is. We can operate sustainably at a much smaller scale relative to the metabolism of the biosphere.
" We (the human species) are the agencies of care and understanding" this good man averred. All things considered, I find small comfort in that assertion. Considering our untenable ecological degradation, our geo-political lunacies, out domestic inequities, our political dysfunction, our religious lunacies, our racial segregations, and our own human arrogance relative to 99% of the biosphere, I find little comfort in our ancient Greek for-father's assertion that "Man is the center of all things". Humility and honesty are the traits that are most lacking in our contemporary human fantasy.
So for 15 cities and smaller cities you've assumed we will be behaving as we are now however a decentralised model lends itself to much more circular economy models ie sharing and lending stuff, repairing stuff and this not using as much.
I am willing to accept Kleiber's Law, although Kleiber's Principle would be a better term. As Geoffrey West says early on, it is not like Newton's Laws. But here is the fly in the ointment. The scaling principle may well apply with a high degree of confidence in biological organisms, but applying it to social systems doesn't pass my sniff test. The problem is that West talks about paradigms early on and is obviously well-versed in using them to generate theories and testable hypotheses. However, he fails to see his own paradigmatic model of what Tainter (1988) called integration theory. Tainter posited conflict theory (elites form social systems for their own benefit) versus integration theory (administrators and bureaucrats aggregate power because they benefit society). The classic example is forming a bureaucracy in state-level Sumer to monitor large-scale irrigation and make it more beneficial to the state. Tainter gives some credibility to conflict theory (mentioning Marx as an example) but comes down on the side of integration theory. I am just the opposite, as I see bureaucracy as a power struggle that just provides a few benefits to the peasants to keep them in the game. We certainly see that now and I am confident it was prevalent in ancient societies. West assumes that societies gain power because they provide benefits, not because they "conquer, colonize and Christianize." He has a good life and thinks civilization is a good thing. This is true for only a small segment of upper middle class (UMC) white people. As Bob Seeger once sang, "I want to be a lawyer, a doctor or professor. A member of the UMC. I want to drive a Lincoln and spend my evenings drinking the very best Burgundy." (On the 1976 Live Bullet album.) This is a case of paradigms informing and even changing the structure of research. I suspect that if Geoffrey West had different paradigms, he would generate different theories and produce different results.
Absolutely. What you see depends on where you stand. Since he is making social generalizations with economic consequences, so his moral assumptions should not be so narrow and normative. In the absence of equality, society is conflict for the majority.
In ecology we a taught about the 'carrying capacity' of a defined area. What is the current carrying capacity i.e. how many humans can be supported under the current model or how many could be supported under a different model. Of course this too complex certainly for me but could AI in the future be able to calculate this?
Positive feedback in cities! Super linear scaling! Thank you, thank you so much!... but then it started getting more confused... the larger cities become, the more energy they use per capita as a scaling law of 1.15... ok, this makes sense, sustaining current cities generates 70% of the CO2 whilst only housing 55% of the worlds population... but then you start saying a city is more like an elephant than a equivalent weight in number mice... meaning it's hugely more efficient as an entity than all the individual mice, which doesn't seem to make sense as its the same number of entities, only squooshed together, not as one entity like an elephant... so I'm going to push back on this a little. Cities, by their nature, almost prescribe a certain type of material use, we need to use concrete, we need to use lots of glass, we need to use steel, and all those things are high energy/CO2 use... we can't build earth skyscrapers (or at least, nothing like current skyscrapers and ziggurats have gone out of fashion, especially in wet countries), we can build timber ones, but the fire protection issues are extremely complex, and not well enough understood to be widely adopted, and even then, firestorms in cities are something we're all scared of (there's a reason Japan casts everything out of concrete now)... by contrast, reduce the density and all of that goes away, buildings no longer need to be built with high resource/energy materials, they can be simpler. A block of ten flats which might generate 2000 tonnes+ of CO2 to build in a city, can be ten houses built from insulated timber frame for about max 20 tonnes each, which when insulated and with heat pumps generating around a tonne of CO2 per year to heat, means you've got 80 years of serviceable life before the timber one catches up with just the construction impact of the city version (which by that point will likely have been pulled down). Combine that with a low energy transport system, electric trains/trams, electric bikes to get you to the station, and you've got all you need... i.e. satellite towns with local produce being grown around them (where transportation of food long distance becomes less of an issue). For me, the function of cities has fundamentally changed over the last 20 years... communication technology is making the whole world a sort of city to bounce ideas around in (we're all across the world now talking to one another), and AI is going to have some pretty profound impacts in how everything is organised, we likely won't need large quantities of labour within walking distance of factories). City living certainly doesn't lend itself to the slower, quieter, more introspected pace of living that we are going to need to adopt for there to be a future (in the short term as population is reduced), and it certainly acts as a barrier to exposing people to the natural world so they can physically see the consequences of their actions (something the subjectivities of cities currently prevent). The scale of resource dependence of cities also bothers me, for example, with London in the UK, the whole of the UK cannot produce enough food to support the population of that city alone, nor generate the energy needed for HGV and marine transport across the country to carry the food to support it. It is completely dependant upon imports, which are completely dependant upon oil. What happens to a city when it can no longer feed itself? What happens to the people when they have no space to grow food? Cities, by their nature, grow out of a surplus of energy and resources, and that (unless we get fusion up and running) is not the future we are looking at... very worried about this, when people promote cities as being 'the future of humanity'.
Very interesting “metabolic ratio” Never heard of it before, particularly its scale invariance. Funny how a man troubled by mortality finds yet another “fine tuning” argument and takes the time to repeatedly state he’s an unbeliever. The presumption leads to the conclusion, despite remaining puzzled by mechanism by which randomness produced the invariance. It remains of great import to remain in the tribe. Sidebar: as he points out, it’s not greed per se, it’s envy, and that is rooted in pride. At least there was an acknowledgment of a possible spiritual change/solution, although I suspect neither will embrace it (just throw out the comment for “completeness”).
I personally witness the seeding of envy and when I try to bring it to the forefront I quickly realize that it's intentional. A mother completely deifying her baby and having another one and likewise transferring her attention to the new one. Same people always insist on having a big black dog that guards food, and gets jealous of anything anyone else has, animal or human. There's more to it than I can perceive, but I've become aware of certain behaviors that I identify as ritualistic as well as cyclical with seeding and harvesting of trauma and energy unfortunately. It's a very serious situation.
Great interview, but you (Nate) seem to have some inaccurate stereotypes about cities. Residents of NYC consume less energy and have a smaller carbon footprint per capita than the US average, even when you include the energy needed to grow and ship food and other products into the city. The per capita energy use and carbon footprint of suburban and many rural residents of the US are some of the worst in the world, and their lifestyles also involve shipping lots of stuff from around the world. Getting more of into dense cities is actually better than our high carbon sprawl.
Urban density is "better"? Predictable misuse of single-issue utilitarianism. At some point you have to choose: are you promoting it the greatest good, or the greatest number of people? You cannot achieve both; one must give way to the other at some point. For example, this 'urbanization' stance completely ignores the negative effects of such on human health: physical, mental, and spiritual. Not everyone wants to live in urban hellscapes, and we should not be forced--nor coerced--into such. Better to focus on innovating our way into more efficient use of the (as he stated, near infinitely abundant) energy present in the world.
@@CK-vh5gi I'm simply stating a fact: Dense cities, like NYC, use substantially less energy and create smaller carbon footprints per capita than any other modern populated living arrangement. I never said density is a panacea, but as discussed in the video, once density reaches a certain point, their are synergies that result in economies of scale, greater cultural options and more innovation. Currently, the tax base of city dwellers subsidize the people living in suburbs and rural areas, which isn't fair to city folks or the environment. If you want to live in a big house in the suburbs or some rural hideaway where there's nobody on the streets and you have drive everywhere , fine, but since you'll be using more energy and creating more carbon, you should pay extra for this high carbon lifestyle. Are cities perfect? No way, but most are also not the "hellscapes" you claim. Many cities have quality of life advantages over suburbs and isolated rural areas, including walkable neighborhoods, public transit, etc. Also, if you want innovative new uses of the sun's energy, cities are where the patents come from -- as Nate and Geoffrey discussed.
@@unclesamshrugged2621 Certainly, there are no perfect solutions, only compromises. I am more of an advocate of small cities, rather than this current push for mass-urbanized ones; I do not consider the downsides of cities like NYC to be acceptable compromises, particularly having experienced my natal home town become the fastest growing city in the U.S. Multiple other factors (culture, relative economic resources, etc.) also play a huge part in the relative innovation of a place; you do not necessarily see the same levels of innovation coming out of large cities across the globe. My home town was the 'silicon hills', and we had more than enough patents per capita far prior to the influx of transplants. Our sudden mass influx of people in the last decade has made what was a very enjoyable and vibrant place to live now quite a bit more unpleasant, and not relatively more innovative. I further wonder how 'sustainable' NYC would be if it had to actually pay the true cost of food, rather than the products of a heavily subsidized and unsustainable farming industry, particularly when its own industry is based on selling non-essential services it convinces the world it needs.
Michael Levin deifines cancer in terms of the closing of gap-junctions between cells -- the loss of higher identity (with the organ or tissues) and the degradation back down to individual identity. Wondering how this helps when considering people as "cancers on the earth."
would that depend on what the cell or human decides to do after it's been stripped? Fall in line and assimilate with the demands of the forces that stripped it? Go rogue for the benefit of self, or benefit of a salvageable outcome for a prioritized group or cause. I'm a firm believer that cancer doesn't get a chance to leave survival mode and it's full spectrum if observed would be kept under wraps.
rough guess: a paper and pen is faster and more reliable than a computer because the paper is smaller/less dense/lower entropy. the computer is larger/ more dense/ higher entropy....(although more entropy quanta are contained away from dissipation - the entropy is always higher in the larger item) the overall entropy of the computer is higher like a city. the city will rot and fade to equilibriate into a village. the small village is stable because it matches the environmental entropy more closely. the city produces ideas that attempt to reinvent a wheel or cycle, therefore cities are pointless and self defeating by entropy. the elephant is lower entropy because of the fact that herbivores are lower entropy than lions, the lions are there to remove waste products from nature- not to grow. the elephant is designed to grow, but loses the ability to manouevre in high entropy conditions. only a small animal can do that. every boxing match on earth proves this. the larger thing moves slower and corrects errors slower, therefore causes the most destruction per space and time. entropy law 0.1: everything glitches example: BP oil spill. more surface area equals more danger.
The tragedy is that all we label as 'production' is in fact consumption. Let's be honest, GDP is derived from monitoring consumption. Consumption is the process for increasing entropy because all energy 'consumed' is transformed into heat. None of this is restored to its original form and we never give this one thought in our discussions about energy. We have failed to develop true production processes that absorb or reverse entropy, a 'negative' entropy to reduce the entropy increasing process called consumption. Growth is a product of this 'negative' entropy production process that has the byproduct of maintaining a temperature gradient to enable all life to exist on Earth. Since this is the case, GDP needs to be renamed GDC, gross domestic consumption, which makes total sense particularly when fossil carbon energy consumption correlates strongly with it. The technologies that need to change to re-direct our path to a more harmonious existence are accountancy and economics, in particular replacing the crazy mathematics and systems they implement and apply to advise and decide 'investment' decisions in all institutions and organizations. These are THE human behavioural control technologies that need to change to achieve alignment with natural ecological restoring regenerative processes on Earth. Consumption, hence entropy, has been boosted by increasing throughput of energy flows that in turn has facilitated financial debt that is claimed as assets/wealth by those who made such 'investments'. This in reality should be realised as anti-wealth which it actually is in reality. We need true production, entropy reducing processes, to realise true wealth and recovery of humanity and life on Earth. Accountancy and economics need to be strongly reformed to cohere with this requirement. Thanks for a great talk.
Yes, the economy and ‘productivity’ are aggressively entropic - which is in direct conflict with natural systems which are miraculously extropic. And we don’t need to invent a new ‘circular economy’, we need only live in balance with to natural cycles. The economy causes consumption to become disposal and waste, but natural systems create life through a virtuous cycle of birth, growth and decay. Thermodynamically, capital cannot be sustainable because it doesn’t really “grow”, only living organisms can do that.
I’m sure it’s clear that cities, as much as they are providing the necessary infrastructure for more complexity, are IMPOSSIBLE in their current state- size and organization, without cheap fossil fuels!!! Even if full electrification/ hydrogenofication of all the transportation and services( water/ refuse etc.) is possible, industrial food production won’t be possible without industrial fertilizers/pesticides etc. and reliable rainfall. So if all that is known, the only logical conclusion is that this conversation is for the US, a country- continent with a lot of natural resources and land. Any other part of the world will be so much affected of the climate warming ( primary US directly or indirectly induced) that other countries won’t be able to sustain big cities, thus limiting their intelectual/technological output. 👏, yet another reason for warm feelings towards US and their way of life. Isn’t it much more logical that new cities should be something like oversized towers for not more than a half a million or so people, with different floors/sections for the different activities (places, dedicated to laboratories, universities and technical and governmental institutions), so the rest of the land to be reclaimed/rehabilitated for wildlife, nature and smaller scale sustainable agriculture?
Where I'm at farming is in trouble. Wet winters getting even wetter. 2 to 4 times the usual rainfall in some areas.Machines cant operate effectively in the morass. Potato shortages predicted for this year and a general increase in food prices on the way probably. Cities are f
@@liamhickey359 I completely understand the situation- where I live hasn’t stopped raining for 6 months( as was predicted from the climate scientists decades ago) and where I want to create fruit garden didn’t rain at all the last couple of years ( again something scientists’ report warned us more then 30 years ago- I still have the reports), so plants have hard times starting. Whatever benefits cities provide should be correlated and balanced with the terrible environmental situation. Also even though cities are potentially better for one type of interactions - technological- I believe they are detrimental for other types of relations like closed, intimate, honest and respectful relationships. Big population numbers and anonymity can be good for business, but not for morals and culture, because the roots of human ethics and culture are based on human interactions with other LIVING things- something todays big cities are largely devoid of. Although in industrial capitalistic economies “culture” is a product, that can be bought, I don’t believe that’s what real cultural values are, this mechanistic view of human society has done a lot of damage and ultimately will destroy humanity.
@@renimon100 Said to a conservative friend of mine recently : " We'll see where western civ and judeo christian values are at when the agricultural diesel runs out.
Once again, an urbane conversation between two class-blind and hierarchy-blind men of reading and intelligence. Time for you to get David Wengrow on @Nate!
Large cities are more efficient because they have to be in order to function at all. If they weren't living on top of each other maybe they wouldn't need all the extra patents they create. Creating circumstances that require more efficiencies doesn't inherently make the circumstances or the resulting efficiencies desirable.
This was a great conversation, thank you! It was one of those times when there is a part of you that knows you are hearing a truth you know already, somewhere inside of you, but you're actually hearing it for the first time. I love when that happens!
As usual, a fascinating podcast. One point. Nate pointed out that many advocate for decentralization into smaller communities , aka decentralization. Dr. West answered Nate's question directly - the metabolic implications of decentralization, and he (I assume correctly) answered that from a scaling perspective, it would be much more inefficient. That seems to be the perspective from which Nate asked the question. My own belief is that the potential positives of small communities is based on the possibility that small communities tend to be less hierarchical, more cooperative, and that the social cohesion, social connections, in communities where each individual has a relationship, a human bond with everyone else in the community fosters a different kind of well-being than individualistic economic competition. This would in turn foster the communal connections that could be more rewarding vis a vis happiness, and quality of life, separate from material comfort, and economic growth. There is no reason that such communities could not exist within cities. Of note is that in the Philippines, the barangays tend to serve as small communities that provide the social cohesion and communal advantages described. Originally developed in rural areas, when the Philippines urbanized, with many moving to cities from barangays in rural areas for work, people have created urban barangays, with sizes and social structures similar to their rural counterparts. I suspect that Philippine cities scale according to the same laws that cities do worldwide, metabolically. Interesting, the the nation/state model of governance, imposed by both the Spanish and the US, coexists with the barangays, and there is a complex power sharing, and division of governance tasks (healthcare, policing, etc) between the government and the barangays. Insofar as there is evidence that humans seem to be hardwired for both hierarchical and partner/cooperative societal organizations (see Riane Elsier The Great Simplification #116: Partnership and Domination in Society), I think this is the critical component of the decentralization question.
Great point! I think this is also what Elinor Ostrom referred to as "polycentrism". Even so this structure must have negative feedbacks embedded in it to constrain runaway growth.
Great clarification. Thank you!
There are many, many deep-thinking individuals like Geoffrey West EVERYWHERE around the world. The Great Simplification features many of them. I have the fantasy of an organization similar to the United Nations devoid of international political, economic and military considerations and focused, instead, on the myriad issues that are presented on this podcast. I believe it represents the hearts and brains, and the hopes and wishes and the very best aspects of most of us. Mad men now run the world. It shouldn't be this way!
Unfortunately, you seem to have a complete misunderstanding of homo sapiens. Man's intelligence will never overcome his biology.
Asimov's "Foundation"
Love it.
Sounds a bit like the Santa Fe Institute of which Geoffrey was formerly president.
Say it again for the people at the back ✊✊🏻✊🏼✊🏽✊🏾✊🏿!
What a delighful human being! from such a person, everything that he says, no matter how harsh to listen to, comes as a nourishing and welcome piece of wisdom. Thank you for this interview!
Nate, all your podcasts are valuable - this one is really a standout. Thank you!! I've heard a bunch of these ideas before, but Geoffrey is a great communicator... and the two of you, as is almost always the case, make a great combo.
"Man has survived hitherto because he was too ignorant to know how to realize his wishes. Now that he can realize them, he must either change them or perish."
--William Carlos Williams
This one knocks it out of the park! Thanks Geoffrey and Nate - I hope you do a follow up. Keep up the great work Nate!
Thanks for an aamazing lecture! Geoffrey West is a man of knowledge
Wonderful! There are many great minds at SFI that could benefit the show. I am also pleased to see that whenever we get "aloft," polarization subsides. That is also one of the many learnings I got from this show: when we get look at the bigger picture, we are not encumbered by details that keep us from making progress, together.
Thank you for the conversation! The remarks about Trump made me think about a little book I read by Bruno Latour, 'Down to Earth, politics in the new climatic regime'. He describes Trumps ideas as an 'attractor', the 'boundless', not restricted to any physical or social norms and boundaries, and therefore destructive in its nature. Opposite to that is the Earth, and Latour argues that is where we should be heading.
A comment like this is not really suited to do Latour's ideas justice, but it certainly fits into the narrative of the two gentlemen. Well worth the read.
Excellent podcast. Learned a lot. Thx so much!
Great man you have invited Nate ! Thank you very much.
We should be putting much, much more focus on transforming the school systems to get this next generation of kids immersed in nature
The convergent evolution across the world was because of the commodification of the commons. We became to believe that land could be owned, and as land = power, so then power became imbalanced and empires could evolve.
Thank you Nate, you always have wonderful guests on your show. I am going to start reading Geoffrey West today!
1:32:00 You mean to say ... If we don't care for nature and we are chaotic with our attention to eachother, nature will do the same. This was fantastic. Thank you!
Amazing! I love Geoffrey's work. Thanks Nate :)
The "third rail" in the discussion of our global dilemma is over-population. I am not a proponent of eugenics in any form but it is disturbing to me that this most-obvious problem seems to be studiously avoided. Other than William Rees and William Catton and Paul Ehrlich, our deepest thinkers tend to avoid this life-threatening "elephant in the room". I realize that it runs counter to the incentive for the perpetual growth of GNP and GWP; and that it offends much of our religious community, but homo sapiens are devouring the Earth right from under their own feet. It seems to be the most pertinent issue of our times. As it has been said before, "perpetual growth on a finite planet" is is not only unrealistic, it is cultural lunacy.
Agree with your premise. Ironically there's a growing sense of panic as national birth rates decline. Internet amplifying the noise and fear mongering. Blissfully self ignorant of reality that every year another 80 million, 2x population of Canada, net new precious humans join us. Each requires 30,000 days, typical lifespan, of 2,000 calories of food. Clothing housing transportation education healthcare environmental infrastructure the size of new York City must come into existence every single month just to accommodate the new folks.
I would say that there is probably some concerted and yet covert work going on to try and keep the population down. But even that is "third rail";as it goes all too easily into David Icke and Alex Jones territory.
So many are answering that by saying that the population is beginning to decline as a result of reduced birth rates. I agree with you and find the facile argument that things will take care of themselves over time to miss the point. As we go over the falls, throwing out items to make ourselves lighter will be beside the point.
By the way, I always appreciate your comments and look for them as adding to the general discussion.
I think the third rail is governments unwilling to do anything that may cause a drop in GDP.
Population is not as important as consumption (and the waste products of consumption). The 9% of us at the top of the global income distribution use the majority of the energy and produce 50% of the carbon, while the bottom 50% of the global income distribution produces just 7% of the carbon. So the true "elephant in the room" is that a small percentage of us is sucking up all the energy and producing all the CO2, in short, we Americans are optimized for planet wrecking.
Hi Nate, I recommend you interview Kev Polk, who did a lot of work sustainable cities, wrote a book, and run the youtube channel "edenicity".
I also want to mention James C. Scott's book "Seeing Like a State", that goes deeper into the roots of what you discussed here about Brazilia and other planned cities.
Again an incredible guest! Thank you so much Nate 😊
Nate, thank you very much for this wonderful interview. It speaks to the heart of our current situation: have we evolved to the point where we have the tools and can develop the social networks to produce Annette energy positive giving us the ability to recapitalize the planet? Natural systems work to sequester, solar energy as life and complexity. It’s clear that climate stability is the result of increasing complexity in the super organism of life. The only exception being human kind. We’re probably not gonna be able to do anything monumental, but at least to address, climate, change or goals should be to develop systems negative entropy, weary we use our social networks in the technology available to usto introduce a new financial system in itself, complexity is the goal that we seek to achieve in order to address, climate change, or environmental degradation as I’d like to. Keep up the good work.
Wow ! I have not heard of Geoffrey before this chat but so much of it is around subjects i have thought and talked about over the decades. Jane Jacobs works interested me decades ago, and the the book Cities in Civilization made me look at things in a different lens. Anyways, I will be listening to this a number of times over next 10 days and forward it on to others. Many thanks Nate for an fascinating discussion. cheers
This was terrific. I've always had a affinity for Ecological Systems thinking, I gravitated to H.T.Odum through searching for confirmation of my own speculations. This was right up my alley! 🙂
This was such an interesting conversation to listen to. I reminded me of many other things... a transportation textbook that pointed out that Los Angeles' development followed a "20 minutes of commute time between workers' homes and their places of work" rule of thumb, which you could see manifested over time in waves of development, as modes of transport increased how far you could travel in 20 minutes... and also science fiction author Paolo Bacigalupi's short stories collected in *Pump Six*, many of which take place in a future that still has advanced technology, but must limit its use of fossil fuels, so transoceanic trade is handled via neo-Clipper ships made of carbon fiber, which are loaded by the most calorically efficient means available: genetically re-created mammoths. Anyway, fascinating to learn about Kleiber's law, and to hear speculation about how it applies to exosomatic energy use (a.k.a. infrastructure?) Thanks for this great interview, Nate. Really fascinating!
Kleiber's law was first introduced to me by Nate's teaching, so I am excited to dig into this one. Thanks y'all!
really? I can't remember when I first learned of it... hmmm...
strange how they talk about citizens and individuals but no mention of corporations and the military.
Wow just when I think you couldn't have a more interesting guest than the amazing panoply that has preceded Geoffrey West, you knock it out of the park. I knew of West's work but seeing him interact with you was riveting. I knew of the scaling of mammalian sizes but expanding it to damn near everything has left me stunned.
On behalf of my dozen elephants, I'd like to say that what we need is joyous freeways! That was ironic. Thanks for another good discussion.
Good morning Nate and Geophrey
Sanity brain gym indeed.
Nature is key.
Truly grateful.
💜
83? Amazing how fit some people are at such an age! Thank you for this interesting interview. ❤
What a delightful guest. Mind blowing that I use as much energy as a dozen elephants and almost as much energy as a blue whale to stay alive. Profound implications.
I thought he said we use as much as a lightbulb to stay alive, and the rest is for all the extra things we prioritize.
I might have misunderstood, but the extension for our productivity, I don't remember the exact way he said it so I paraphrase.
I suddenly felt absolutely starving the second I said something to you.
Another great episode, Nate and Geoffrey.
One thing I've been wondering about since watching this fascinating talk. Our organisation of interactions has forced into cities to facilitate them and as Geoffrey points out, these are comprised of 2 networks. The infrastructure and social. What I've realised is that the infrastructure follows the nature/evolutionary path and solves for less than 1, whereas our social path solves for greater (apologies for the math analogy). It seems that our social network had not had the time to solve for efficiency in terms of interactions, you could argue with the luxury of time they would also but over the timescales necessary it won't make it.
Great episode, it was an intellectual delight. On a similar note, it would be interesting to have professor Doyne farmer on your podcast, his to be released book on complexity economics will have some insights.
It is inevitable, so accept it. Humans are no exception to the rule.
As for those few individuals who are exceptions to the rule - they are out bred into extinction by the collective.
We truly need to explore not only well-being enlightened awakening but also of of Gaia worlds indigenous peoples 💖
On deck. Many.
Nate it seemed that you really enjoyed this talk. Do you know if any studies have been done on the Americans Indians or Australian Aborigines. It seems that these cultures lived within the constraints of the biosphere. They did not create 1:15 cities, is that because they had a greater wisdom on consequences.
American Indian groups did create a number of urban cultures that eventually dispersed or collapsed, probably due to outstripping natural resources and increasing inequality.
That is interesting, I always wondered what made other cultures expand. After listening to Mr West it seems that our social networks helped the expansion.
In "Chaos: Making a New Science" by James Gleick there was a section about biological networks and how their fractal structure made them efficient. The simple repetitive rules for construction allowed for an almost data compression effect.
Wow. The 'Grand Universal Theory of Sustainability. [ 1 hr. 25 ish ] I pray we do have the GUTS to realize that we need to slow down and cherish the idea of the great Simplification. Thank you, gentlemen. Mind blown once again.
I asked Google's Gemini AI the following question:
"If the current exponential growth in the creation of new data continues into the future, how much energy would be needed to store and keep cool all of the data in the world's data centers by 2124?"
Gemini's answer:
● Current Consumption: Let's assume a conservative estimate of 4% of global electricity consumption by data centers (as of 2020).
● Growth Rate: For illustration purposes, let's assume a high annual growth rate of 21%.
● Timeframe: We're looking at 100 years until 2124 (2124-2024).
Calculated Future Consumption: With these assumptions, data centers could consume an astronomical 75,962,110% of global electricity by 2124.
Glad I wont be around for that.
That's exactly how far and how fast we are going off the rails. Google Gemini will clearly elaborate on the self-delusion of AI's creators and profit hungry promoters. The power drunk tech bros and elites won't listen to what AI already knows about human nature. in my professional opinion (Psychiatry), humanity may have already crossed the tipping point hurling us irreversibly towards mass psychosis.
Another amazing interview . I just love when two inelegant people do a pod cast on the most important issues facing man kind I always learn so much
What I find Extraordinary about humans is
How every living thing on or in this planet and its atmosphere
Man has altered everything including what's living or went extinct or going extinct the climate /atmosphere everyspace on the planet in some way has Human finger prints on the ice cores millons of years from now will have micro plastics and all the toxic chemicals found in them
We managed to do this in the last 100 or so years at least the damaging things that effect our survival
If we didn't have fossil fules to dig up we definitely wouldn't of been able to accomplish this.
We simply got to smart to fast letting money lead to are disposal.
It's not impossible to imagine a day when drones are used to hunt humans for human population reduction.
Like now we have extinction rebellion other groups like them but don't use disruption to the system so to say . Well when the rich keep leading us down this path as they have so much influence on the goverments.
There's going to be other groups like or worse in acts of disruption that anyone protesting anything will be stopped and said to be terrorist attacks
See next drones will start eradicating
In ways it's already started
This is great, Nate. I'll say it again, you're still circling around the energy/economic connection. Time to apply the Maximum Power Principle to the calculation of monetary value. It's revelatory.
Nate! Your discussion about searching for an alternative story to bring humanity down to sub-linear metabolism - I am reminded of Noah Yuval Harari’s work on how Story has the power to shape us. However, my concern is the following: is it the stories that are shaping our collective behaviour? Or, is it our biology, via natural selection and gene expression, that “selects” which stories that tend to rise to the top (in terms of their ability to make copies of them selves amongst a population, in service of their own selection)? My fear is the latter, which means there truly is no guru-figure that can lead us to a better story for humanity, and we are well and truly stuck, waiting for the simplification and hoping things change for Homo Colossus 2.0.
If you’re really interested in the building of new cities in the context of “The Great Simplification” Pre and Post civilisation renaissance, can I suggest you check out Dr Simon Michaux, (Dr Simon Michaux if you’re not aware has been a guest of Nate’s on ‘The great Simplification” podcast on a number of occasions). Simon is Principle Advisor to the “Venus Project” (of late Jacque Fresco fame). There’s a great conversation on this project between Manda Scott (of ‘Accidental Gods’) and Simon Michael, to be found at “Accidental Gods - #215 The Promethian Project: Building a Radical Tomorrow with Dr Simon Michaux🤔
44:30 MLK inspired a very small number of people at the time. Of course after the fact, everyone remembers they were on the right side of history. But the focus on the natural world is key. It is a form of spirituality. My suggestion would be Ornithology as a mandatory primary school class :)
Nate, I hope you hold a roundable with Geoffrey West and Mario Giampietro, who also was looking at metabolism at varying scale. Other past guests to consider adding to the roundtable include Josh Farley, Paul Erlich, Joseph Tainter, and Jared Diamond.
Chaisson, Roddier, et Georgescu traitent de ces sujets ou abordent des sujets similaires.
Si les sociétés humaines ont des exposants supérieurs à 1, pourquoi les mégalopoles existent ? et comment expliquer la mondialisation ? Plus la société est grande plus chaque individus consomme (d'énergie ...) mais plus il produit aussi (de brevet ...). réponse slide 27:40, il revient sur cela à 1:00:00 plus la ville est grande plus elle est optimale
25:20 4ième principe de la thermodynamique
53:00 société post fossile
58:20 ville de 15 minutes, retrofitter les villes
1:19:00 bureaucratie très efficace pour optimiser (quel indicateur ?) le collectif (au détriment des individus)
1:30:11
Very interesting conversation, lots to chew on. However, one area where I think West is wrong is his assertion that larger cities are more likely to be incubators of new ideas, innovation, based on the assumption that more minds equals more creativity. But history tells another story. Florence at the height of the Renaissance had a population of 60-70,000, Venice was about the same. Classical Athens had perhaps 40,000 people. Renaissance Rome was equally small, and might have had more sheep and goats grazing between the ruins than people, whereas Imperial Rome had a million people, and yet nobody considers it to have been a generator of truly high cultural achievement. Whatever the factors are that create renaissances or great culture in general with its fostering of creativity at the highest levels, they remain a mystery, way beyond anything, like population size, that can be ascertained numerically. So, even West's hometown, Santa Fe should, theoretically, be capable of being a node of great cultural activity, and, of course, compared to most American towns of similar size, it already is. Otherwise, the Santa Fe Institute, where some of the most forward trending thinking of our time takes place, wouldn't be there. Maybe we need to get over being dazzled by mere bigness.....
Can we please get a list of the books on West’s bookshelf??
Rwaly, Thank you from Cairo, Egypt
It's good to bear in mind that all these units, whether mice or elephants, and including cities, have evolved. That is they have developed over time whilst fighting off adversity and taking opportunities as they arise. That means they are inherently efficient because an inefficient unit (e.g. organism or city) would not have survived. What is happening now is an unprecedented centralisation of control, and that makes the system less resilient. One of a thousand things might knock it off course. While that is happening, the cities (invisibly?) rely on their surroundings for fuel and food etc. By some reckonings, this contributory area is around 100 times the area of the city it supports, so another consideration is the sheer 'footprint' of the city, because the Earth is finite. I think it's pretty clear that we have already exceeded this limit.
Theory of Constraints (Goldratt) is coming to mind.
It's like a highway.
Take a work order and imagine it's a car on the highway through a factory. If you increase the length of time the WO stays on the shop floor, you make a traffic jam, because you don't have enough exits and it is there longer.
Shorter lead times, more flow.
One would think that if you have more local resources, shorter lead times, this would increase delivery of goods?
I would never reduce food intake to calories and nutrients. We have evolved to live of the fresh food the biosphere we are part of provides, not highly processed industry products. Great episode!!
Calorie restriction and aging is more complex than Dr West suggests. It triggers a host of mechanisms that slow down some forms of aging, but it comes at the expense of immune and reproductive function. Monkeys in a calorie restriction study showed less signs of aging that age matched cohorts on unrestricted diets, but the calorie restricted monkeys experienced higher rates of death from infectious disease, so the average mortality wasnt that different between the groups. There are also suggestions that the beneficial effects might come from restricting methionine intake (the amino acid needed to initiate protein synthesis). Methionine deficiency likely stimulates more efficient recycling of old proteins, and accumulation of misfolded proteins over time is one of the major mechanisms for aging.
I'm definitely going to have to find time to do my videos on fractally proportional social design.
@@leonsappl
It requires videos to explain. I did one in french for a round table on water problems in urban areas.
ua-cam.com/video/gzEjtCSa2T0/v-deo.htmlsi=LYH6MHECcynBOuQ_
But there are many applications for governance as well.
Thanks for another great one, Nate!
I have a hypothesis that humans carry subconcious demographics limiting and expanding traits somewhat similar to coyotes. I doubt this is any kind of new idea, but I've never seen or heard of it and haven't looked for it so I throw it out there.
We very quickly self limit reproduction under the improved abundance conditions of industrial life in 1st and developing world countries when there is plenty, while the most struggling famine starved areas breed excessively.
Of course the obvious factors like labor for agriculture, contraception, technical advance etc play many compkex roles.
Im asking if we collectively feel the pinch on resources and ecological degradation. Does the multicrisis penetrate and trigger something on a deeper level despite extreme opposition by some factions. Do the harried masses who are seemingly unaware, too busy and too strapped to care subconciously know and react? Is the 20% part of the 80/20 rule acting on some deeper drives than our assumed greed, selfishness and competition overdrive motives and models?
Again, there are very many obvious, well researched interplaying factors, but just as biology, physics and other sciences are finding multiple next levels to explore, I wonder what the next deeper levels are concerning demographics?
Anybody???
Check out the film "Idiocracy"
Great podcast as always. Geoffrey is an institution into himself, a wise person in the fullest sense of the word! Btw did the ancient cities also have this relation with metabolism where increase in size increases metabolism by a power greater than one? Sorry I missed that one
Great program Nate! Regarding fasting Nate, please take a look at Dr. Michael Greger's book "How not to Age"
I’m afraid Nate this conversation was too academic for me, I’ve also heard majority of what was discussed before, so skipped in a series of steps through it, stopped around 35:00:00 minutes when discussion was around city scaling, and super linear scaling, listened until 1:04:00, then slowly skipped to the end. Like I’ve said it was generally too academic for me. If you’re really interested in the building of new cities in the context of “The Great Simplification” Pre and Post civilisation renaissance, can I suggest you have on your podcast, who you’ve had many times before, Simon Michaux, Simon is now involved, if you’re not aware, as Principle Advisor on the “Venus Project” (of the late Jacque Fresco). “There’s a great conversation on this project between Manda Scott (of Accidental Gods) and Simon Michael, to be found at “Accidental Gods - #215 The Promethian Project: Building a Radical Tomorrow with Dr Simon Michaux; check it out🤔
Sometimes it's good to stretch one's mind.
@@dbadagna Sometimes yes! unfortunately this wasn’t one of those occasions for me, academics alone won’t solve our polycrisis, and I like people who walk the talk. Dr Simon Michaux is one of those people. If you didn’t read all my comment check out “Accidental Gods - #215 The Promethian Project: Building a Radical Tomorrow with Dr Simon Michaux”🤔
A healthy society is one in which there is a proper balance between the individual and the group. I’m not sure that that’s just for human society, groups of nonhuman social animals also must have this balance, however I think this is the basis for how morals and ethics evolved in humanity - both from ‘nature and nurture’.
It does seem to be the one observation for me that keeps coming up with this podcast.
I am astonished that Nate had never heard of 15-minute cities!
❤ interesting. Just to be a true Australian, the largest living organism on the planet is not the blue whale. It is a bed of seagrass off the coast of western Australia the size of Washington DC for my American friends 😂😂 it is incredibly old and all originates from the one plant. Learn something every day people! 👍👍
The wide Sargasso Sea.
Depends on how we define “large.” By mass, the largest is the Pando Tree.
@@wmpx34 cool 😀
28:30 'Cities minimize time from A to B' - except that energy was assigned a very artificially low cost; cars are very heavily subsidised; and zoning restrictions have forced very simplified/homogeneous land use. Choose Delft not Detroit.
1:00 '15 minute/more distributed city uses much more energy than the current scheme' - is a falacy because the current scheme is far from optimised (eg current massive cummuter waste) - see previous comment.
Nate on dopamine as positive feedback outside metabolism - you need to study Stuart Hameroff's Quantum Pleasure Principle. Hameroff is a professor emeritus anesthesiologist who has collaborated with Nobel Physicist Roger Penrose on quantum biology consciousness science. thanks
Without critically problematizing social and economic structures, this conversation leans uncomfortably close to sociobiology, biological determinism, and social darwinism.
For example, cells don’t own property and they cooperate with each other. The extra metabolic cost of private property and competition that lead to surplus profit is akin to a regressive taxation that scales the flow of energy and resources to the top of the social hierarchy, making the ‘capitalist’ system metabolically unsustainable. Put differently, the unnatural anabolic cost of capital inevitably leads to a catabolic collapse of economies and societies.
In the body, there is no central governing force that rules the cells. Each cell has it's own handbook (DNA) and then goes on to be a good cell, to fulfill its functions, then it dies and is processed and ejected for recycling. The problem with the super organism is that we don't have a conscious version of the common code. Despite our uncanny ability to all get to 1.15 "by accident" our cities have bad DNA and so look like tumours and not like leaves, veins or rivers. We really need a new narrative on urbanisation and the SHAPE of urbanised zones. Veins of urban with triangles of green instead of a blob. Christopher Alexander wrote a book called "A pattern language." I recommend it to anyone looking for an upgrade on urban DNA.
I did a quick videi summary for a project about water, but it is in french, ua-cam.com/video/gzEjtCSa2T0/v-deo.htmlsi=LYH6MHECcynBOuQ_
i think it is waaaay higher friend, but i may not entirely understand the calculation, ..in fact , im sure that i do NOT.
while watching the video i attempted to count the energy iwas responsible for dispensing, from the lights to the coffeemaker and then consider how the milk i drank from the fridge, ...etc etc...
this is a VERY hard to quantify #
Also,...WHY is it NOT /hour/minute/sec/day ????? what does 11 000 watts mean??
is it equivalent to me being an 11K bulb just burning as i survive?regardless of context/ i am so confused and alarmed at my new perception
Nate, there are a couple of inherent problems with the logic of this conversation. What it does not take into account or the tools of technology which enable the virtual city and the virtual sharing of ideas in ways that we do not have to physically congregate. This provides us with a number of advantages in dealing with addressing the polly crisis. We can aggregate ourselves and create a local Community, based on the creation of biological complexity, and storing energy within natural systems, while simultaneously having the benefits of the aggregation of intellectual property in an open source paradigm. Also, it assumes that the byproducts of our activities are limited to those things which result in degradation of the biosphere. By taking a global perspective And making restoration of the planet, or at least thinking of the entire planet as an interconnected powerhouse using biology to convert solar energy into complexity of life and carbon. We have the capacity to address, environmental degradation, and more importantly, to introduce a global purpose for humanity, being climate, mitigation.
Streaming video and data storage are also very energy-intensive. Have you ever seen how enormous (and power-hungry) a data center can be?
.75 is constant within different systems?
Ah, but no discussion on waste, the acceleration that is wasteful going five times the speed of replacement.
Would be interesting to analyze scaling in cities before the use of fossil fuels. Probably sublinear again.
Decentralization is important from a social and a political standpoint even if we are forced to sacrifice optimization, we cannot introduce one centralized system because inherently it will lead to social unrest because the sociopaths will have a path to the aggregation of social control. By focusing on creating abundance, acknowledging that nature creates an over abundance, such that it feeds all the decomposers along with food chain, and that we need to acknowledge, disruption and recovery along the way as does nature, we can take a different attitude and think in terms of complex adaptive systems moving away from linear thought
1:19:00 'Bureaucracy is optomised for the collective' - probably optimised for its own short term power.
Have you explored how trophic levels -- biomass transfer efficiency are linked to Kleiber's LAw? Because as apex predators humans should be consuming somewhere between 0.1 to 0.01% of the initial energy from primary producers, which I have a gut feeling might be at least as important as Kleiber's Law. I think it's safe to say our addiction to consumerism and fossil fuels totally screws the pooch on that one.
ETH has been developing the concept of the 2000 watt society for many years now.
Links? Who can I have on show to discuss this? Thank you
2000watt.swiss is their website. I believe that I first read about it the Swiss Revue journal several years ago.
Have you read his PNAS paper? Although it has since been edited, it was published in 2007, before the internet took off, and way before AI crossed a capability threshold. By what factor has the internet expanded social interaction, for urbanites and rural people? If it turns out to be possible to continue to power the internet, the cloud, AI, and personal devices, could humanity relocalize, deconstruct megacities, and resume a new cycle of "growth" based on the distributed social organization? In that scenario, human connection to the agricultural land that sustains us, if not to "nature", could be restored, thus increasing the carrying capacity of the smaller towns (food and waste transport by horse or oxcart), while satisfying the dopamine need for growing social interconnections. Growth of social connections is limited by the length of a human lifespan, so the connectivity of the overall system would level out at some K carrying capacity. Of course, this scenario would require good governance of the internet: elimination of streaming video advertisements and commercial extraction of personal data, and brakes on potential virality of falsehoods and AI hallucinations.
Humans have exceeded their activity metabolism since they began cooking with fire 1.8 million years ago, not just 10,000 years ago with the agricultural revolution. We are truly fire apes, and 1.8 x10^-6 years sounds like an evolutionary time scale. There are so few foods that humans can digest raw, our metabolism must be genetically adapted to cooking, no doubt to feed our oversized brains. Cooking is a form of predigestion. We are the only animals that require predigested food past infancy.
Which would suggest that combustion and its emissions are not necessarily the problem, scaling is. We can operate sustainably at a much smaller scale relative to the metabolism of the biosphere.
Thank you. :)
Cities are feedlots which benefit by using resources from far and near to the detriment of the people and the ecosystems which are outside the cities.
We learned this from William E. Rees (The Great Simplification #53)
So a consistent 3/4 metabolism would be the ideal? Or the perpetual motion machine?
" We (the human species) are the agencies of care and understanding" this good man averred. All things considered, I find small comfort in that assertion. Considering our untenable ecological degradation, our geo-political lunacies, out domestic inequities, our political dysfunction, our religious lunacies, our racial segregations, and our own human arrogance relative to 99% of the biosphere, I find little comfort in our ancient Greek for-father's assertion that "Man is the center of all things". Humility and honesty are the traits that are most lacking in our contemporary human fantasy.
How does Gaia Vince’s thesis of large settler cities ringing the arctic circle fit into Geoffrey’s models.
So for 15 cities and smaller cities you've assumed we will be behaving as we are now however a decentralised model lends itself to much more circular economy models ie sharing and lending stuff, repairing stuff and this not using as much.
I am willing to accept Kleiber's Law, although Kleiber's Principle would be a better term. As Geoffrey West says early on, it is not like Newton's Laws. But here is the fly in the ointment. The scaling principle may well apply with a high degree of confidence in biological organisms, but applying it to social systems doesn't pass my sniff test. The problem is that West talks about paradigms early on and is obviously well-versed in using them to generate theories and testable hypotheses. However, he fails to see his own paradigmatic model of what Tainter (1988) called integration theory. Tainter posited conflict theory (elites form social systems for their own benefit) versus integration theory (administrators and bureaucrats aggregate power because they benefit society). The classic example is forming a bureaucracy in state-level Sumer to monitor large-scale irrigation and make it more beneficial to the state. Tainter gives some credibility to conflict theory (mentioning Marx as an example) but comes down on the side of integration theory. I am just the opposite, as I see bureaucracy as a power struggle that just provides a few benefits to the peasants to keep them in the game. We certainly see that now and I am confident it was prevalent in ancient societies. West assumes that societies gain power because they provide benefits, not because they "conquer, colonize and Christianize." He has a good life and thinks civilization is a good thing. This is true for only a small segment of upper middle class (UMC) white people. As Bob Seeger once sang, "I want to be a lawyer, a doctor or professor. A member of the UMC. I want to drive a Lincoln and spend my evenings drinking the very best Burgundy." (On the 1976 Live Bullet album.)
This is a case of paradigms informing and even changing the structure of research. I suspect that if Geoffrey West had different paradigms, he would generate different theories and produce different results.
Absolutely. What you see depends on where you stand. Since he is making social generalizations with economic consequences, so his moral assumptions should not be so narrow and normative. In the absence of equality, society is conflict for the majority.
In ecology we a taught about the 'carrying capacity' of a defined area. What is the current carrying capacity i.e. how many humans can be supported under the current model or how many could be supported under a different model. Of course this too complex certainly for me but could AI in the future be able to calculate this?
Positive feedback in cities! Super linear scaling! Thank you, thank you so much!... but then it started getting more confused... the larger cities become, the more energy they use per capita as a scaling law of 1.15... ok, this makes sense, sustaining current cities generates 70% of the CO2 whilst only housing 55% of the worlds population... but then you start saying a city is more like an elephant than a equivalent weight in number mice... meaning it's hugely more efficient as an entity than all the individual mice, which doesn't seem to make sense as its the same number of entities, only squooshed together, not as one entity like an elephant... so I'm going to push back on this a little. Cities, by their nature, almost prescribe a certain type of material use, we need to use concrete, we need to use lots of glass, we need to use steel, and all those things are high energy/CO2 use... we can't build earth skyscrapers (or at least, nothing like current skyscrapers and ziggurats have gone out of fashion, especially in wet countries), we can build timber ones, but the fire protection issues are extremely complex, and not well enough understood to be widely adopted, and even then, firestorms in cities are something we're all scared of (there's a reason Japan casts everything out of concrete now)... by contrast, reduce the density and all of that goes away, buildings no longer need to be built with high resource/energy materials, they can be simpler. A block of ten flats which might generate 2000 tonnes+ of CO2 to build in a city, can be ten houses built from insulated timber frame for about max 20 tonnes each, which when insulated and with heat pumps generating around a tonne of CO2 per year to heat, means you've got 80 years of serviceable life before the timber one catches up with just the construction impact of the city version (which by that point will likely have been pulled down). Combine that with a low energy transport system, electric trains/trams, electric bikes to get you to the station, and you've got all you need... i.e. satellite towns with local produce being grown around them (where transportation of food long distance becomes less of an issue).
For me, the function of cities has fundamentally changed over the last 20 years... communication technology is making the whole world a sort of city to bounce ideas around in (we're all across the world now talking to one another), and AI is going to have some pretty profound impacts in how everything is organised, we likely won't need large quantities of labour within walking distance of factories). City living certainly doesn't lend itself to the slower, quieter, more introspected pace of living that we are going to need to adopt for there to be a future (in the short term as population is reduced), and it certainly acts as a barrier to exposing people to the natural world so they can physically see the consequences of their actions (something the subjectivities of cities currently prevent). The scale of resource dependence of cities also bothers me, for example, with London in the UK, the whole of the UK cannot produce enough food to support the population of that city alone, nor generate the energy needed for HGV and marine transport across the country to carry the food to support it. It is completely dependant upon imports, which are completely dependant upon oil. What happens to a city when it can no longer feed itself? What happens to the people when they have no space to grow food? Cities, by their nature, grow out of a surplus of energy and resources, and that (unless we get fusion up and running) is not the future we are looking at... very worried about this, when people promote cities as being 'the future of humanity'.
Very interesting “metabolic ratio” Never heard of it before, particularly its scale invariance. Funny how a man troubled by mortality finds yet another “fine tuning” argument and takes the time to repeatedly state he’s an unbeliever. The presumption leads to the conclusion, despite remaining puzzled by mechanism by which randomness produced the invariance. It remains of great import to remain in the tribe. Sidebar: as he points out, it’s not greed per se, it’s envy, and that is rooted in pride. At least there was an acknowledgment of a possible spiritual change/solution, although I suspect neither will embrace it (just throw out the comment for “completeness”).
I personally witness the seeding of envy and when I try to bring it to the forefront I quickly realize that it's intentional. A mother completely deifying her baby and having another one and likewise transferring her attention to the new one. Same people always insist on having a big black dog that guards food, and gets jealous of anything anyone else has, animal or human. There's more to it than I can perceive, but I've become aware of certain behaviors that I identify as ritualistic as well as cyclical with seeding and harvesting of trauma and energy unfortunately. It's a very serious situation.
Great interview, but you (Nate) seem to have some inaccurate stereotypes about cities. Residents of NYC consume less energy and have a smaller carbon footprint per capita than the US average, even when you include the energy needed to grow and ship food and other products into the city. The per capita energy use and carbon footprint of suburban and many rural residents of the US are some of the worst in the world, and their lifestyles also involve shipping lots of stuff from around the world. Getting more of into dense cities is actually better than our high carbon sprawl.
Am researching this- thank you
Urban density is "better"? Predictable misuse of single-issue utilitarianism. At some point you have to choose: are you promoting it the greatest good, or the greatest number of people? You cannot achieve both; one must give way to the other at some point. For example, this 'urbanization' stance completely ignores the negative effects of such on human health: physical, mental, and spiritual. Not everyone wants to live in urban hellscapes, and we should not be forced--nor coerced--into such. Better to focus on innovating our way into more efficient use of the (as he stated, near infinitely abundant) energy present in the world.
@@CK-vh5gi I'm simply stating a fact: Dense cities, like NYC, use substantially less energy and create smaller carbon footprints per capita than any other modern populated living arrangement. I never said density is a panacea, but as discussed in the video, once density reaches a certain point, their are synergies that result in economies of scale, greater cultural options and more innovation. Currently, the tax base of city dwellers subsidize the people living in suburbs and rural areas, which isn't fair to city folks or the environment. If you want to live in a big house in the suburbs or some rural hideaway where there's nobody on the streets and you have drive everywhere , fine, but since you'll be using more energy and creating more carbon, you should pay extra for this high carbon lifestyle. Are cities perfect? No way, but most are also not the "hellscapes" you claim. Many cities have quality of life advantages over suburbs and isolated rural areas, including walkable neighborhoods, public transit, etc. Also, if you want innovative new uses of the sun's energy, cities are where the patents come from -- as Nate and Geoffrey discussed.
@@unclesamshrugged2621 Certainly, there are no perfect solutions, only compromises. I am more of an advocate of small cities, rather than this current push for mass-urbanized ones; I do not consider the downsides of cities like NYC to be acceptable compromises, particularly having experienced my natal home town become the fastest growing city in the U.S. Multiple other factors (culture, relative economic resources, etc.) also play a huge part in the relative innovation of a place; you do not necessarily see the same levels of innovation coming out of large cities across the globe. My home town was the 'silicon hills', and we had more than enough patents per capita far prior to the influx of transplants. Our sudden mass influx of people in the last decade has made what was a very enjoyable and vibrant place to live now quite a bit more unpleasant, and not relatively more innovative. I further wonder how 'sustainable' NYC would be if it had to actually pay the true cost of food, rather than the products of a heavily subsidized and unsustainable farming industry, particularly when its own industry is based on selling non-essential services it convinces the world it needs.
Michael Levin deifines cancer in terms of the closing of gap-junctions between cells -- the loss of higher identity (with the organ or tissues) and the degradation back down to individual identity. Wondering how this helps when considering people as "cancers on the earth."
would that depend on what the cell or human decides to do after it's been stripped? Fall in line and assimilate with the demands of the forces that stripped it? Go rogue for the benefit of self, or benefit of a salvageable outcome for a prioritized group or cause. I'm a firm believer that cancer doesn't get a chance to leave survival mode and it's full spectrum if observed would be kept under wraps.
rough guess: a paper and pen is faster and more reliable than a computer because the paper is smaller/less dense/lower entropy.
the computer is larger/ more dense/ higher entropy....(although more entropy quanta are contained away from dissipation - the entropy is always higher in the larger item)
the overall entropy of the computer is higher like a city.
the city will rot and fade to equilibriate into a village.
the small village is stable because it matches the environmental entropy more closely.
the city produces ideas that attempt to reinvent a wheel or cycle, therefore cities are pointless and self defeating by entropy.
the elephant is lower entropy because of the fact that herbivores are lower entropy than lions, the lions are there to remove waste products from nature- not to grow.
the elephant is designed to grow, but loses the ability to manouevre in high entropy conditions. only a small animal can do that.
every boxing match on earth proves this.
the larger thing moves slower and corrects errors slower, therefore causes the most destruction per space and time.
entropy law 0.1: everything glitches
example: BP oil spill.
more surface area equals more danger.
I'm using too many paper towels aren't I?
How about cities that haven't decayed? I'm thinking of Sienna, Italy.
how might we shift form to harmonize an integrative whole ♾️🌱💜🌟
The tragedy is that all we label as 'production' is in fact consumption. Let's be honest, GDP is derived from monitoring consumption.
Consumption is the process for increasing entropy because all energy 'consumed' is transformed into heat. None of this is restored to its original form and we never give this one thought in our discussions about energy.
We have failed to develop true production processes that absorb or reverse entropy, a 'negative' entropy to reduce the entropy increasing process called consumption. Growth is a product of this 'negative' entropy production process that has the byproduct of maintaining a temperature gradient to enable all life to exist on Earth. Since this is the case, GDP needs to be renamed GDC, gross domestic consumption, which makes total sense particularly when fossil carbon energy consumption correlates strongly with it.
The technologies that need to change to re-direct our path to a more harmonious existence are accountancy and economics, in particular replacing the crazy mathematics and systems they implement and apply to advise and decide 'investment' decisions in all institutions and organizations. These are THE human behavioural control technologies that need to change to achieve alignment with natural ecological restoring regenerative processes on Earth.
Consumption, hence entropy, has been boosted by increasing throughput of energy flows that in turn has facilitated financial debt that is claimed as assets/wealth by those who made such 'investments'. This in reality should be realised as anti-wealth which it actually is in reality. We need true production, entropy reducing processes, to realise true wealth and recovery of humanity and life on Earth. Accountancy and economics need to be strongly reformed to cohere with this requirement.
Thanks for a great talk.
Yes, the economy and ‘productivity’ are aggressively entropic - which is in direct conflict with natural systems which are miraculously extropic. And we don’t need to invent a new ‘circular economy’, we need only live in balance with to natural cycles. The economy causes consumption to become disposal and waste, but natural systems create life through a virtuous cycle of birth, growth and decay. Thermodynamically, capital cannot be sustainable because it doesn’t really “grow”, only living organisms can do that.
Don't forget what the first English to reach austrailia found in terms of social organization.
I’m sure it’s clear that cities, as much as they are providing the necessary infrastructure for more complexity, are IMPOSSIBLE in their current state- size and organization, without cheap fossil fuels!!! Even if full electrification/ hydrogenofication of all the transportation and services( water/ refuse etc.) is possible, industrial food production won’t be possible without industrial fertilizers/pesticides etc. and reliable rainfall. So if all that is known, the only logical conclusion is that this conversation is for the US, a country- continent with a lot of natural resources and land. Any other part of the world will be so much affected of the climate warming ( primary US directly or indirectly induced) that other countries won’t be able to sustain big cities, thus limiting their intelectual/technological output. 👏, yet another reason for warm feelings towards US and their way of life. Isn’t it much more logical that new cities should be something like oversized towers for not more than a half a million or so people, with different floors/sections for the different activities (places, dedicated to laboratories, universities and technical and governmental institutions), so the rest of the land to be reclaimed/rehabilitated for wildlife, nature and smaller scale sustainable agriculture?
Where I'm at farming is in trouble. Wet winters getting even wetter. 2 to 4 times the usual rainfall in some areas.Machines cant operate effectively in the morass. Potato shortages predicted for this year and a general increase in food prices on the way probably. Cities are f
@@liamhickey359 I completely understand the situation- where I live hasn’t stopped raining for 6 months( as was predicted from the climate scientists decades ago) and where I want to create fruit garden didn’t rain at all the last couple of years ( again something scientists’ report warned us more then 30 years ago- I still have the reports), so plants have hard times starting. Whatever benefits cities provide should be correlated and balanced with the terrible environmental situation. Also even though cities are potentially better for one type of interactions - technological- I believe they are detrimental for other types of relations like closed, intimate, honest and respectful relationships. Big population numbers and anonymity can be good for business, but not for morals and culture, because the roots of human ethics and culture are based on human interactions with other LIVING things- something todays big cities are largely devoid of. Although in industrial capitalistic economies “culture” is a product, that can be bought, I don’t believe that’s what real cultural values are, this mechanistic view of human society has done a lot of damage and ultimately will destroy humanity.
@@renimon100 Said to a conservative friend of mine recently : " We'll see where western civ and judeo christian values are at when the agricultural diesel runs out.
41:33 something fundamental
1:01:36 do you have Wendell Berry's response to his Consilience?
Did the transcript run out?
1:38:03 can knowledge of our metabolism impact our metabolism? Would that be a question of free will, at scale?
Once again, an urbane conversation between two class-blind and hierarchy-blind men of reading and intelligence. Time for you to get David Wengrow on @Nate!
My question is how do we explain the history of every major religion having an ascetic branch? Doesn’t this go against our biologic grain?
📍1:20:12
Large cities are more efficient because they have to be in order to function at all. If they weren't living on top of each other maybe they wouldn't need all the extra patents they create. Creating circumstances that require more efficiencies doesn't inherently make the circumstances or the resulting efficiencies desirable.