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Preamble: Putting the “X” into X-Events
An enlightening potpourri of books addressing the extreme events and the concomitant social problems at various levels of academic sophistication and at various levels of details include the following:
Warsh, D., The Idea of Economic Complexity (New York: Viking, 1984).
Posner, R., Catastrophe: Risk and Response (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).
Clarke, L., Worst Cases: Terror and Catastrophe in the Popular Imagination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).
Rees, M., Our Final Hour (New York: Basic Books, 2003).
Leslie, J., The End of the World (London: Routledge, 1996).
Homer-Dixon, T., The Upside of Down (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2006).
This collection is a great introduction to the theme of this book. The book by Warsh is one of those rare volumes that in my view will be seen in the historical perspective as the forerunner of an entirely new way of looking at economic processes in particular, and social processes in general. Richard Posner is a federal judge in Chicago and presents his litany of catastrophes in a calm, reasoned, concise, almost antiseptic fashion. The book by Lee Clarke is as much about the psychology of the potential victims of terrorist attacks and natural calamities as it is about the events themselves, and thus makes a good counterpoint to Posner’s detached, analytical discussion. Martin Rees is one of Britain’s most distinguished scientists, former president of the Royal Society and England’s Astronomer Royal. His book is written for the curious layperson and, naturally enough, emphasizes nature’s ways of doing us in. Leslie is a philosopher by profession and brings a philosopher’s mind to the logical analysis of whether the human race is in imminent threat of extinction, concluding that we probably are. His treatment is both academically thorough and easy to read—a rare combination. While the foregoing volumes are a bit on the gloomy side, Homer-Dixon’s account of the predicament we’re in today offers hope for a way out of our current dire situation. His book is a tour de force on how to make our society resilient enough to survive into the next century.
If you’re interested in seeing Bryan Berg and his huge house of cards, check out the following website for details: http://newslite.tv/2010/03/11/man-builds-the-worlds-largest.html.
For the details of the baseball simulation showing that Joe DiMaggio’s hitting streak was not so special after all, see Arbesman, S., and S. Strogatz. “A Journey to Baseball’s Alternate Universe,” New York Times, March 30, 2008.
The analytical formula mentioned in the text for characterizing the “X-ness” of an X-event is X = IM(1 - UT/(UT + IT)), where IM is the impact magnitude measured in normalized units, such as dollars of damage versus total GDP or lives lost versus total annual deaths, in order to ensure that IM is a number between 0 and 1. If you don’t care about this normalization, then using absolute deaths or dollars is fine; the final result will still give a sense of the relative extremeness of the event, it just won’t be a number between 0 and 1. The quantity UT is the unfolding time of the event, while IT is the event’s impact time. The final value of X is then a number between 0 and 1; the larger this value, the greater the “extremeness” of the event. Just to be clear on the matter, I do not take this formula very seriously as a precise measure of the magnitude of an extreme event; it’s simply a guideline, or rule of thumb, for comparing such events.
An interesting blog item on the problem of complexity collapse and modern society is given in the following post by former US Army Intelligence officer James Wesley Rawles, who published the recent novel Survivors, outlining how society might look when all infrastructures we rely upon for daily life disappear overnight: http://www.survivalblog.com/2010/06/is_modern_society_doomed_to_co.html.
The original account of the law of requisite complexity was given by cyberneticist W. Ross Ashby in 1956, who called it the law of requisite variety. Perhaps this is a better name anyway, as it suggests the notion I’ve emphasized in this book of complexity being tied up with the idea of diversity of actions, the degrees of freedom, that a system has at its disposal to address whatever problem may come along. Ashby’s exploration of this idea is given in his pioneering book An Introduction to Cybernetics (London: Chapman and Hall, 1956).
A recent account of the basic idea in the context of the world of commerce is given by international business consultant Alexander Athanassoulas in: Athanassoulas, A., “The Law of Requisite Variety,” Business Partners, January–February 2011, 16.
Part I: Why Normal Isn’t So “Normal” Anymore
A good summary of Ambrose’s work on nailing down the evolutionary bottleneck that the Toba volcano created is available at the website: www.bradshawfoundation.com/stanley_ambrose.php.htm. The full details are given in: Ambrose, S., “Late Pleistocene Human Population Bottlenecks, Volcanic Winter, and Differentiation of Modern Humans,” Journal of Human Evolution, 34 (1998), 623–651.
The concept of what I’m calling “complexity overload” has been in the air for several years now. Here is an eclectic sample of some ideas that have been put into circulation on the Internet that identify and explore this concept to help understand financial crises, the Internet, the Arab spring, and plain everyday life:
Helgesen, V., “The Butterfly and the Arab Spring.” Editorial in International IDEA (www.idea.int/news/butterfly-arab-spring.html).
Barratt, P., “Systemic Complexity, the Internet, and Foreign Policy” (http://belshaw.blogspot.com/2010/12/).
Nickerson, N., “On Markets and Complexity,” Technology Review, April 2, 2011 (www.techologyreview.com).
Danielsson, J., “Complexity Kills” (www.voxeu.org).
Norman, D., “The Complexity of Everyday Life” (www.jnd.org/dn.mss/the-complexity_of_everyday_life.html).
The mousepox near disaster is described in “The Mousepox Experience,” EMBO Reports (2010) 11, 18–24. (Published online: December 11, 2009.)
The statement from General Carl Strock cited in the text was taken from the following interview with Margaret Warner on PBS: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/weather/july-dec05/strock_9-2.html.
Nassim Taleb’s best-selling volume bringing the reality of fat-tailed distributions to the attention of the general public is: Taleb, N., The Black Swan (New York: Random House, 2007).
The statement by Ray Ozzie about the suffocating effect of complexity was quoted in the following article: Lohr, S., and J. Markoff, “Windows Is So Slow, but Why?,” New York Times, March 27, 2006.
The popular account of societal collapse put forth by Jared Diamond in the book cited below is the version that’s attracted attention in recent years. But the earlier work by Joseph Tainter is the one that will warm the heart of every complexity scientist. In any case, they’re both fantastic reads:
Diamond, J., Collapse (New York: Penguin, 2005).
Tainter, J., The Collapse of Complex Societies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
A stimulating popular account of the arguments in both these books can be found in the article: MacKenzie, D., “Are We Doomed?,” New Scientist, April 5, 2008, 33–35.
In the two decades or so since the Santa Fe Institute popularized the notion of complexity and complex systems, many SFI alums and others have put out popular accounts of this developing paradigm (including yours truly). Here are a few entrées for the interested reader to get a feel for the subject:
Casti, J., Complexification (New York: HarperCollins, 1994).
Cowan, G., Pines, D., and Meltzer, D. (eds.), Complexity: Metaphors, Models, and Reality (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1994).
Miller, J., and Page, S., Complex Adaptive Systems (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007).
Mitchell, M., Complexity: A Guided Tour (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).
Part II: Getting Down to Cases
I drew material for this part from an unpublished article I wrote as part of an OECD study on global shocks, especially in the chapters on the Internet, pandemics, and deflation. The entire article can be found at:
Casti, J., “Four Faces of Tomorrow, “OECD International Futures Project on Future Global Shocks, OECD, Paris, January 2011 (www.oecd.org/dataoecd/57/60/46890038.pdf).
Hempsell’s ideas presenting the categories of events presented here are given in Hempsell, C. M., “The Potential for Space Intervention in Global Catastrophes,” Journal of the British Interplanetary Society, 57 (2004), 14–21.
A related article focusing mostly on the extinction-type of events is Bostrum, N., “Existential Risks,” Journal of Evolution and Technology, 9 (March 2002).
Digital Darkness: A Long-Term, Widespread Failure of the Internet
Unlike some of the other topics dealt with in Part II, the body of information available on Internet security truly boggles the mind. Moreover, at present the problem is undergoing a huge reexamination. So it would be pointless to present a long list of citations here, when most of them would have been superseded long before this book was even published. As a result, I have listed here only a couple of very general pointers, together with specific articles that formed the background to the major stories presented in the chapter itself. For a more updated account of the current state of play regarding changes in the Internet, I urge the reader to just search online under terms like “cybersecurity, cyberwarfare” and the like for more information than you could ever hope to digest.
Two very interesting and informative recent works about the Internet and its future are the volumes:
Zittrain, J., The Future of the Internet (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008).
Morozov, E., The Net Delusion (Cambridge, MA: Public Affairs, 2011).
The first book is a pretty balanced account of the pros and cons of the Internet as it stands today, outlining the fact that the “black hats” are gaining the upper hand, with spyware, viruses, and other malware beginning to choke off the huge communication and information-availability benefits of the Internet. The author then outlines a program for preserving the good, while closing down the bad. The book by Morozov argues the far more radical thesis that the entire notion of “Internet freedom” is an illusion. Technology has not made the world more democratic, but in fact has actually allowed authoritarian regimes to exert even more control of their citizens than ever before. Morozov asserts that we are all actually being pacified by the Internet rather than engaging with it. On balance, this volume argues a very provocative and thoughtful thesis, one that every Internet user should be aware of.
The story of Dan Kaminsky’s discovery of the flaw in the DNS system is told in: Davis, J., “Secret Geek A-Team Hacks Back, Defends Worldwide Web,” Wired, 16, no. 12 (November 24, 2008).
As an illustration of the vast amount of literature available on how the Internet might crash, the following article is representative (and note this was in 1997!): Garfinkel, S., “50 Ways to Crash the Internet,” Wired, August 19, 1997.
I could list a dozen more recent articles all telling pretty much the same story. But the one above is the most fun, and very few of the fifty methods discussed have been effectively addressed even now, more than fifteen years after its publication.
The problem of router scalability is addressed at the following sites:
http://www.potaroo.net/ispcol/2009-03/bgp2008.html
http://blog.caida.org/best_available_data/2008/05/10/top-ten-things-lawyers-should-know-about-internet-research-8/
The story of Schuchard’s procedures for taking down the Internet via botnets is chronicled in: Aron, J., “The Cyberweapon That Could Take Down the Internet” (http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn20113-the-cyberweapon-that-could-take-down-the-internet.html).
The Stuxnet computer worm was discovered by German cybersecurity expert Ralph Langner in 2010. His deep study of the peculiarities of this worm, together with the fact that the Stuxnet seemed to be targeted primarily at Iranian nuclear facilities, led Langner to make the bold claim that it is actually a nasty piece of software introduced by the US intelligence community that has gotten out of the control of its creators. For this story, see: Gjelten, T., “Security Expert: U.S. ‘Leading Force’ Behind Stuxnet,” PBS, September 26, 2011 (http://www.npr.org/2011/09/26/140789306/security-expert-u-s-leading-force-behind-stuxnet).
An excellent overview of the entire DOS problem is given in: Mirkovic, J., et al. “Understanding Denial of Service,” InformIT, August 12, 2005 (http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=386163).
I’m afraid I cannot give a citation to Noam Eppel’s unbridled attack on Internet security, since as I noted in the text, the site from which I obtained the paper has since been shut down and the paper itself seems to have turned into “vapor paper,” so to speak.
Finally, the reader might want to have a look Dave Pollard’s account of what life will be like after the Internet crashes. I didn’t feature it in the text, but it’s still an interesting view of how life will be when the Internet is no longer part of it. The citation is:
Pollard, D., “What Are You Going to Do When the Internet’s Gone?” (www.howtosavetheworld.ca/2010/05/04/what-are-you-going-to-do-when-the-Internets-gone).
When Do We Eat: Breakdown of the Global Food-Supply System
A popular account of the tree virus in the United Kingdom is given in the following article: Middleton, C., “Red Alert in Britain’s Forests as Black Death Sweeps In,” Daily Telegraph, February 3, 2011.
More information about it can be found at the UK Forestry Commission website, www.forestry.gov.uk/pramorum.
John Christopher’s eye-opening novel about the social effects from the Chung-Li virus destroying food crops worldwide was originally published in 1956. A recent reprint is: Christopher, J., The Death of Grass (London: Penguin, 2009).
The “doomsday” seed vault was well chronicled in the general press at the time of its opening in 2008. See, for example: Mellgren, D., “‘Doomsday’ Seed Vault Opens in Arctic.” Associated Press release, 2008 (www.seed-vault.no).
The death of bees is a story well told in the book: Jacobsen, R., Fruitless Fall (New York: Bloomsbury, 2008).
Two of the many semipopular accounts of the two sides of the honeybee collapse story are portrayed in the following:
Aizen, M., and Harder, L., “The Truth About the Disappearing Honeybees,” New Scientist, October 26, 2009.
Armstrong, D., “Bee-Killing Disease May Be Combination Attack,” Bloomberg News, October 7, 2010.
The story of Ms. Galviso’s odyssey to find Thai jasmine rice for her family is told in: http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/content/ apr2008/db20080424_496359.htm.
The huge run-up in food prices worldwide has been featured in many articles and books. Among the more accessible for general readers are:
Brown, L., “The Great Food Crisis of 2011,” Foreign Policy, January 10, 2011.
Sircus, M., “Food/Financial Crisis of 2011” (http://agriculture.imva.info/food-prices/foodfinancial-crisis-of-2011).
Wallop, H., “Global Food Prices Hit New Record High,” CommonDreams.org, February 3, 2011 (www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/02/03-1).
Sen, A., “The Rich Get Hungrier,” New York Times, May 28, 2008 (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/28/opinion/28sen.html).
The direct links between rising food prices and political and social unrest is another theme that’s been well chronicled over the past few years. Two of the many sources contributing to the discussion in the text are:
Karon, T., “How Hunger Could Topple Regimes,” Time, 2008 (www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1730107,00.html).
Chang, G., “Global Food Wars,” New Asia, February 21, 2011 (blogs.forbes.com/gordonchang/2011/02/21/global-food-wars.html).
A very enlightening overview of the effect global warming is having (and will continue to have) on food production is available in: Gillis, J., “A Warming Planet Struggles to Feed Itself,” New York Times, June 4, 2011 (www.nytimes.com/2011/06/05/science/earth/05harvest.html).
The Day the Electronics Died: A Continent-Wide Electromagnetic Pulse Destroys All Electronics
Probably the most definitive source for material on the EMP as a threat to society is: Report of the Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States from Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) Attack, Volume 1. Executive Report (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 2004) (available at amazon.com).
Another good source is the volume: Gaffney, F., War Footing: 10 Steps America Must Take to Prevail in the War for the Free World (Annapolis, MD: US Naval Institute Press, 2005).
While there do not seem to be too many actual books (nonfiction, that is) focused on an EMP, there are volumes of items on the subject in professional and academic journals, as well as Internet postings addressing this threat. Here is a sampling that I found useful in preparing this chapter:
Kopp, C., “The Electromagnetic Bomb: A Weapon of Electrical Mass Destruction.” In Information Warfare—Cyberterrorism: Protecting Your Personal Security in the Electronic Age, ed. W. Schwartau (New York: Thunder Mouth Press, 1996).
Spencer, J., “The Electromagnetic Pulse Commission Warns of an Old
Threat with a New Face.” Backgrounder #1784, The Heritage Foundation , Washington, DC, August 3, 2004.
“Electromagnetic Pulse Risks and Terrorism,” United States Action Group (http://www.unitedstatesaction.com/emp-terror.htm).
Dunn, J. R., “The EMP Threat: Electromagnetic Pulse Warfare,” April 21, 2006 (http://www.americanthinker.com/2006/04/ the_emp_threat_electromagnetic.html).
The story of how both the United States and the USSR were thinking about an EMP as an opening salvo in an all-out nuclear exchange during the Cold War is told in: Burnham, D., “U.S. Fears One Bomb Could Cripple the Nation.,” New York Times, June 28, 1983, p. 1.
As always, the science-fiction literature is way ahead of reality as there are several very entertaining and scary accounts available of how life might look in the aftermath of an EMP attack. One recent entry in this area is: Forstchen, W., One Second After (New York: TOR Books, 2009).
The quotes from both the Chinese military commander and Iranian defense analyst N. Nezami are given in the following volume by US defense analyst Frank J. Gaffney: Gaffney, F., War Footing (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2005).
A New World Disorder: The Collapse of Globalization
The phenomenon of globalization has been chronicled and rechronicled to a point where regardless of what view you hold on the matter, there is a book somewhere that will support your position. So let me just list a few of the publications I consulted in preparation of the discussion found in the text:
James, H., The Creation and Destruction of Wealth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009).
Dumas, C., Globalisation Fractures (London: Profile Books, 2010).
Walljasper, J., “Is This the End of Globalization?,” Ode, July 2004 (www.odemagazine.com).
Finally, here is the citation to Saul’s analysis of the collapse of the entire process: Saul, J. R., The Collapse of Globalism (Victoria, Australia: Penguin, 2005).
The story of Russia’s future under Vladimir Putin is characterized in much the same terms as outlined here in the following articles, which coincidentally appeared on the same day in the same venue:
Freeland, C., “Failure Seen in Putin’s Latest Move,” New York Times, September 29, 2011.
Charap, S., “In Russia, Turning Back the Clock,” New York Times, September 29, 2011.
The story of Ms. Volkova and the unhappy fate of the Russian liberals is recounted in: Barry, E., “For Russia’s Liberals, Flickers of Hope Vanish,” New York Times, September 25, 2011.
The story of the collapse of the European Union as being driven by the current downward movement of the collective social mood in Europe is given in: Casti, J., Mood Matters: From Rising Skirt Lengths to the Collapse of World Powers (New York: Copernicus, 2010.
The scenarios painted in the text for a collapse of the euro are outlined in the following article: Phillips, J., and P. Spina., “What Will Happen to Currencies If the Euro Collapses?,” Gold Forecaster Bulletin, April 30, 2010.
Project Proteus is described for a public audience in the book: Loescher, M. S., Schroeder, C., and Thomas, C. W., compiled by Krause, P., Proteus: Insights from 2020 (Washington, DC: Copernicus Institute Press, 2000).
The Global Business Network scenarios for the end of America are given in: Levin, J., “How Is America Going to End?,” Slate, August 3, 2009 (www.slate.com/id/2223962/).
Niall Ferguson’s rousing endorsement of complex systems theory in the cause of historical analysis is found in: Ferguson, N., “Empires on the Edge of Chaos,” Foreign Affairs, March/April 2010 (www.informationclearinghouse.info/article24874.htm).
The Bloomberg piece on bunkers for oligarchs is: Pronina, L., “Apocalypse Angst Adds to Terrorist Threat as Rich Russians Acquire Bunkers,” Bloomberg News, May 12, 2011.
Fortune magazine’s list of the “new normals” is available in full form as: Tseng, N.-H., “Five ‘New Normals’ That Really Will Stick,” Money Magazine, August 23, 2010 (http://money.cnn.com/2010/08/20/news/economy/New_normal_economy.fortune/index.htm).
Fear of Physicists: Destruction of the Earth Through the Creation of Exotic Particles
An absolute must-read account of the possibility of accelerator disasters wiping out the world is given by Nobel Prize–winning physicist Frank Wilczek in: Wilczek, F., “Big Troubles, Imagined and Real.” In Global Catastrophic Risks, ed. N. Bostrum and M. Cirkovic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 346–362.
Two more stimulating discussions of the same theme are given within the context of a broader array of X-events in the volumes:
Rees, M. Our Final Century (London: Arrow Books, 2003).
Posner, R. Catastrophe: Risk and Response (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
A somewhat more detailed and academic discussion of the history of physics experiments threatening the world and ways to assess the risk of such happenings is the article: Kent, A., “A Critical Look at Risk Assessments for Global Catastrophes,” Risk Analysis, 24, no. 1 (2004), 157–168.
A fascinating account of the origin of Higgs’s ideas and the enormous scientific and political obstacles that had to be overcome to get the Large Hadron Collider built to search for the “God particle” is found in the book: Sample, I., Massive: The Hunt for the God Particle (London: Virgin Books, 2011).
An interesting journalistic account of the supposed strangelets that ran through the earth in 1993 is found in the article: Matthews, R., “Earth Punctuated by Tiny Cosmic Missiles,” London Daily Telegraph, November 5, 2002.
A fascinating sociological study of the clash between science and the public interest in regard to the Brookhaven RHIC brouhaha is given in the article: Crease, R., “Case of the Deadly Strangelets,” Physics World, July 2000, 19–20.
A short, but complete, history of the development of the Large Hadron Collider is found in the BBC article: “Building the ‘Big Bang’ Machine,” BBC News, April 9, 2008 (http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/1/hi/sci/tech/7595855.stm).
It’s interesting to see what the world’s top physicists think will come bursting forth from the LHC. Just before the machine was officially turned on, Newsweek magazine did just such a survey, asking people like Stephen Hawking, Brian Greene, and Steven Weinberg, among others, just what they imagined would be discovered. Their replies can be found in: “Forecasting the Fate of Mysteries,” Newsweek, September 6, 2008.
Blown Away: Destabilization of the Nuclear Landscape
In the 1950s thru the late 1960s, the RAND Corporation was about as exciting an intellectual environment as existed anywhere. Not only were people like Herman Kahn thinking about the nuclear matters discussed here, mathematicians were developing new tools like game theory, linear and dynamic programming, and network flow analysis to solve the optimization problems posed by these very practical military matters. In addition, economists and other social scientists were working on what has become known as cost-benefit analysis, Delphi methods for glimpsing the future, and a whole host of other themes that were unheard of at the time but are now commonplace. An interesting account of these days is found in the volume: Smith, Bruce R., The RAND Corporation: Case Study of a Nonprofit Advisory Corporation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966).
Herman Kahn’s controversial book on nuclear Armageddon is: Kahn, H., On Thermonuclear War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1960).
An entertaining and informative biography of Kahn’s work, including an extended account of his later gurulike status as a futurologist, is: Ghamari-Tabrizi, S., The Worlds of Herman Kahn (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005).
As good a place as you’ll find for learning the basic ideas underlying the MAD strategy of nuclear deterrence is the following volume by Nobel Prize winner Thomas C. Schelling: Schelling, T., Strategy of Conflict (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960).
Along with the Ambio article by Birks and Crutzen cited in the text, the spark that set off the heated nuclear winter debate is the book: Ehrlich, P., et al., The Cold and the Dark: The World After Nuclear War (New York: Norton, 1984).
Another volume of the same period that’s worth a look is: Greene, O., Percival, I., and Ridge, I., Nuclear Winter (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1985).
The TTAPS article by Carl Sagan and his colleagues that established the basis for the science of nuclear winter is: Turco, R., et al., “Global Atmospheric Consequences of Nuclear War,” Science, 222 (1983), 1283ff.
Many more accounts of the overall phenomenon of nuclear winter, updated scenarios, and forecasts are readily available via a web search. They are not listed here as the overall conclusion is unchanged in broad outline, if not detail, from the original work done in the 1980s.
More details on the hypothetical New York City terrorist nuclear attack are found at the website www.atomicarchive.com, while the website www.carolmoore.net is a treasure trove of material on various nuclear scenarios, including the Israel-Iran scenario reported here.
For more details on paradoxes of nuclear safety, the following volume is difficult to beat: Leslie, J., The End of the World (London: Routledge, 1996).
Running on Empty: Drying Up of World Oil Supplies
There are almost as many books, articles, videos, and other sorts of materials available about the peak oil problem and the impending “end of oil” as there are people with an opinion on the matter. So the following list of sources is nothing but a small tip of a huge iceberg. But it’s a tip that I found useful in assembling the story presented here, and each item contains numerous follow-up references for the interested reader to consult. To begin, let me note that some of the material in this chapter is adapted from my earlier book, Mood Matters, cited earlier.
An excellent, if slightly hyper, exposition of what we can expect from the end of oil and when is the volume: Kunstler, J., The Long Emergency (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2005). This well-researched volume starts with peak oil and goes on to detail the numerous infrastructure collapses and lifestyle changes that will follow from it. I highly recommend this book to anyone looking for a one-stop-shopping account of the end of the petroleum age and how humanity can survive it.
Here are a few other volumes that mine the same territory:
Goodstein, D ., Out of Gas (New York: Norton, 2004).
Middleton, P., The End of Oil (London: Constable and Robinson, 2007).
Strahan, D., The Last Oil Shock (London: John Murray, 2007).
An overview of the end of not only oil but numerous other commodities is: Heinberg, R., Peak Everything (Forest Row, UK: Clairview Books, 2007).
A very good look at the entire peak oil scenario in question-and-answer format is: “Life After the Oil Crash,” www.salagram.net/oil-in-crisis.htm.
The following volume provides the background of Hubbert’s famed 1956 forecast of the US peak oil moment, as well as a look at the current global situation: Deffeyes, K., Hubbert’s Peak (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001).
I’m Sick of It: A Global Pandemic
The Plague was one of the Camus’s most influential novels and almost surely figured heavily in his being awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1957. It has been reprinted many times so I won’t bother listing the book here. But two somewhat more recent fictional accounts of what could happen if unknown pathogens get loose are worth a look. They are:
Preston, R., The Cobra Event (New York: Ballantine Books, 1997).
Ouellette, P., The Third Pandemic (New York: Pocket Books, 1997).
The Internet is full of accounts of pandemics and plagues. One that I found extremely useful is from a course at Hartford University: History of Epidemics and Plagues (http://uhavax.hartford.edu/bugl/histepi.htm).
An outstanding general reference giving the “big picture” on epidemics is available at the website of the Wellcome Trust in the United Kingdom: www.wellcome.ac.uk/bigpicture/epidemics. Material from this document served as the basis for several of the stories recounted in this chapter.
Nathan Wolfe and his colleagues have argued that major diseases of food-producing humans are of relatively recent origin, having originated only in the last eleven thousand years. Their argument is presented in: Wolfe, N., Dunavan, C., and Diamond, J., “Origins of Major Human Infectious Diseases,” Nature, 447 (May 17, 2007), 279–283.
The Ebola fever story is recounted in the best-seller: Preston, R., The Hot Zone (New York: Random House, 1994).
A complete account of Gladwell’s three laws of epidemics is found in his immensely thought-provoking and entertaining popular book: Gladwell, M., The Tipping Point (London: Little, Brown, 2000).
Typhoid Mary’s sad story is available at dozens of websites. The Wikipedia entry under “Mary Mallon” is a good place to start.
A detailed discussion of the threat posed by avian flu is provided by Mike Davis in his book: Davis, M., The Monster at Our Door (New York: The New Press, 2007).
The work described in the text using the World of Warcraft as a virtual world for studying the spread of epidemics is published as: Lofgren, E., and N. Fefferman, “The Untapped Potential of Virtual Game Worlds to Shed Light on Real World Epidemics,” The Lancet. Infectious Diseases, 7, no. 9 (September 2007), 625–629.
Another Internet world being used for the same type of work is the game “Where’s George?” in which players keep track of the movement of dollar bills as they travel about the world. An account of this work is provided in the science blog “Web Game Provides Breakthrough in Predicting Spread of Epidemics,” www.scienceblog.com/cms.
Dark and Dry: Failure of the Electric Power Grid and the Disappearance of Clean Water Supply
Of the many popular and semipopular volumes on the electrical power grid, two that I found especially enlightening and useful are:
Makansi, J., Lights Out (New York: Wiley, 2007).
Schewe, P., The Grid (Washington, DC: Joseph Henry Press, 2007).
Both of these books give a vivid account of the history of the development of the power grid, the largest industrial investment in history, and arguably the greatest engineering achievement, as well. They each portray not only the fascinating history of the grid, but also its many vulnerabilities and the consequences for daily life of ignoring them.
A good discussion of how the electric power grid must be changed to meet societal demands over the next decades is given in: Gellings, C., and K. Yeager, “Transforming the Electric Infrastructure,” Physics Today, 57 (December 2004), 45.
There are numerous extensive accounts on the Internet of the various power blackouts mentioned in the text, so I won’t recount them here. But due to its unfolding character and threat to the economy of an entire country, it’s worth citing a couple of references to the situation in South Africa: Mnyanda, L., and Theunissen, G., “Rand Sinks as South African Electricity Grid Fails,” Bloomberg.com, February 11, 2008.
The reader should also see articles in the International Herald Tribune published on January 30–31, 2008.
Two very useful references on the water shortage crisis are the volumes: Pearce, F., When the Rivers Run Dry (London: Eden Project Books, 2006); and Clarke, R., and J. King, The Atlas of Water (London: Earthscan Books, 2004).
An important question is how to see the upcoming water shortage in a rational manner, so as to provide adequate clean water for future needs. This question is addressed head-on in the article: Smil, V., “Water News: Bad, Good and Virtual,” American Scientist, September–October 2008, 399–407.
For a set of eye-opening graphics displaying the water shortage situation, see those in the posting “Drought” (www.solcomehouse.com/drought.htm).
The story of the UK water shortage caused, paradoxically, by the massive flooding in 2007, is recounted in: Elliott, V., “Looting, Panic Buying—and a Water Shortage,” Times Online, July 23, 2007 (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article2120922.ece).
Professor Tony Allan received the Stockholm Water Prize in 2008, a prestigious award from the Stockholm Water Foundation, for outstanding water activities and research. An account of the virtual water concept is given in the announcement of this award from the SIWI at www.siwi.org/sa/node.asp?node=25.
Technology Run Amok: Intelligent Robots Overthrow Humanity
For the Gordon Moore quote that opens the chapter, see the Wikipedia entry under “Moore’s Law”: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law.
The definitive work outlining all aspects of the Singularity problem is the volume: Kurzweil, R., The Singularity Is Near (New York: Penguin, 2005).
A slightly earlier book by the science-fiction writer Damien Broderick, who terms the Singularity the “Spike,” mining much the same territory but with a more social perspective, is: Broderick, D., The Spike (New York: TOR Books, 2001).
The starting point for the entire idea of a technological singularity is the following 1993 paper by mathematician and sci-fi writer, Vernor Vinge: Vinge, V., “The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era.” Paper presented at the VISION-21 Symposium, NASA Lewis Research Center, March 30–31, 1993. (See also a slightly revised version of the paper in the Winter 1993 issue of Whole Earth Review.)
The guru of the nanotech movement is physicist K. Eric Drexler, who has presented his vision of the future in the following works:
Drexler, K. E., Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology (New York: Doubleday, 1986).
Drexler, K. E., Nanosystems: Molecular Machinery, Manufacturing and Computation New York: Wiley, 1992).
A fascinating account of why the “gray goo” scenario for the end of the world is extremely unlikely is given in the paper: Freitas, R., “Some Limits to Global Ecophagy by Biovorous Nanoreplicators, with Public Policy Recommendations,” The Foresight Institute, 1991 (www.foresight.org/nano/Ecophagy.htm).
An interesting account of how AI impacts the global risk situation is presented in the chapter: Yudkovsky, E., “Artificial Intelligence as a Positive and Negative Factor in Global Risk.” In Global Catastrophic Risk, ed. N. Bostrom and M. Cirkovic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 308–346.
Asimov’s three laws of robotics are presented, along with the Fourth Law discussed in the text and a detailed discussion of the entire intelligent robot question in the article: Branwyn, G., “Robot’s Rules of Order” (http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=101738).
Another very detailed discussion of this theme is given by Roger Clarke at the site http://www.roger/-clarke.com/SOS/Asimov.html.
Bill Joy’s cri de coeur outlining the dangers of the GNR problem is found in: Joy, W., “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us,” Wired, April 2000.
The Great Unwinding: Global Deflation and the Collapse of World Financial Markets
Bookshelves sag under the weight of volumes of various sorts all purporting to describe the Great Recession of 2007-08, along with how the world’s economic fate is likely to unfold in the coming decades. Oddly enough, it’s difficult to find even one of these learned and/or popular tomes that even mentions deflation as a candidate for the economic profile of the near-term future. The arguments made here seem to be essentially ignored by the pundits and the economic cognoscenti, which, given their record in forecasting anything like what actually takes place, seems as strong a reason as any to look long and hard at a deflationary scenario. The one volume I have at hand that actually does address this very real possibility is by Nouriel Roubini and Stephen Mihm. Given that Roubini has achieved near-mythical status in some quarters for his anticipation of the Great Recession, his serious treatment of deflation as a viable candidate for the upcoming global economy should in my view be taken very seriously indeed. The full reference is: Roubini, N., and S. Mihm., Crisis Economics (New York: Penguin, 2010).
Damon Vickers’s scenario for the big crash is found in his very entertaining and scarifying book: Vickers, D., The Day After the Dollar Crashes (New York: Wiley, 2011).
Seabright’s article on the structures put in place to supposedly insulate the economy from another 1930s-style crash is available in: Seabright, P., “The Imaginot Line,” Foreign Policy, January–February 2011.
The quote attributed to Robert Lucas about economists having solved the problem of the Great Depression is given in the absolutely first-rate article by Paul Krugman addressing the issue of how academic economics has gone so far off the track: Krugman, P., “How Did Economists Get It So Wrong?,” New York Times Magazine, September 2, 2009 (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/06/magazine/06Economic-t.html?page-wanted=all).
Some of the material mentioned in the opening salvos in the text regarding the onset of the financial crisis include:
Samuelson, R., “Rethinking the Great Recession,” Wilson Quarterly, Winter 2011, 16–24.
Krugman, P., “A Crisis of Faith,” New York Times, February 15, 2008.
Thompson, D., and D. Indiviglio, “5 Doomsday Scenarios for the U.S.
Economy,” The Atlantic, September 2, 2010.
The quote from Steve Hochberg about deflation appeared in Elliott Wave Short-Term Financial Forecast, Elliott Wave International, Gainesville, GA, September 8, 2011.
Two excellent one-stop-shopping explanations of deflation for the uninitiated are:
Hendrickson, M., “Demystifying Deflation,” American Thinker, October 12, 2010 (www.american-thinker.com/archived-articles/2010/10/demystifying_deflation.html).
A Visual Guide to Deflation (www.mint.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/visual-Guidetodeflation).
The social mood of a society is a major factor in biasing the sorts of social events one can expect to see. This point is elaborated in great detail in the book: Casti, J., Mood Matters: From Rising Skirt Lengths to the Collapse of World Powers (New York: Copernicus, 2010).
The sad Japanese experience in living in a deflationary environment is chronicled in the following articles:
Fackler, M., “Japan Goes from Dynamic to Disheartened,” New York Times, October 16, 2010.
Suess, F., “2010 And Beyond—Deflation, Japanese Style,” Daily Bell, January 16, 2010 (www.thedailybell.com).
The quote from Richard Koo on Japanese deflation is taken from his fantastic book describing the entire process: Koo, R., The Holy Grail of Macroeconomics: Lessons from Japans Great Recession (New York: Wiley, 2009).
Part III: X-Events Redux
The work by Stephen Carpenter and his group from the University of Wisconsin on identifying early-warning signals of the collapse of the lake ecosystem is described in:
Keim, B., “Scientists Seek Warning Signals for Catastrophic Tipping Points,” New York Times, September 2, 2009.
Sterling, T., “Scientists Detect Early Warning of Ecosystem Collapse in Wisconsin,” The Cutting Edge, May 2, 2011 (http://www.thecuttingedgenews.com/index.php?article=51948&pageid=28&pagename=Sci-Tech).
The definitive citation for the full story is: Carpenter, S.R., et al., “Early Warnings of Regime Shifts: A Whole-Ecosystem Experiment,” Science, April 28, 2011.
Other recent works covering an even broader scope of issues surrounding early-warning signals, including the area of climate change are:
Dakos, V., Expecting the Unexpected, Doctoral thesis, University of Wageningen, Wageningen, The Netherlands, 2011.
Dakos, V., et al., “Slowing Down as an Early Warning Signal for Abrupt Climate Change,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 105 (September 23, 2008), 14308–14312.
A layman’s account of some of the dynamical-systems-based approaches for anticipation of X-events is presented in: Fisher, L., Crashes, Crises, and Calamities (New York: Basic Books, 2011).
Computer-based tools for analyzing “What if…?” types of questions looking for early-warning signals of big things to come are treated in:
Casti, J., Would-Be Worlds (New York: Wiley, 1997).
Epstein, J., Generative Social Science (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006).
Ehrentreich, N., Agent-Based Modeling (Heidelberg: Springer, 2008).
Gilbert, N. Agent-Based Models (Los Angeles: Sage Publications, 2008).
The China scenarios and results of the World Trade Network Simulation model’s answers to the questions the scenarios raise are discussed in the following volume, which is the final report for the Game Changers project carried out by the author and colleagues for a consortium of Finnish and Scottish governmental agencies and private concerns in 2010–11. The citation is: Casti, J., et al., Extreme Events (Helsinki: Taloustieto Oy, 2011).
The fate of Air France 447 given in the text follows the account presented in: Schlangenstein, M., and M. Credeur, “Air France Crew May Have Faced Baffling Data,” Bloomberg News, May 28, 2011.
The Bookstaber account of the complexity gap between the SEC and the financial markets is found in his very accessible and entertaining book: Bookstaber, R., A Demon of Our Own Design (New York: Wiley, 2007).
The idea of “willful blindness” as a focal topic for why humans have such a predilection for taking actions that are manifestly against their own best interests is very timely today. Margeret Heffernan’s book of the same title shows this phenomenon in every aspect of life, ranging from investment in Ponzi schemes to the war in Iraq: Heffernan, M., Willful Blindness (New York: Doubleday, 2011).
Stiglitz’s argument for the growing complexity gap between the rich and the poor in American life is found in: Stiglitz, J., “Of the 1%, By the 1%, For the 1%,” Vanity Fair, May 2011.
Disaster myths as an indication for how the public at large will react to extreme events is explored in the article: Schoch-Spana, M., “Public Responses to Extreme Events—Top 5 Disaster Myths,” Resources for the Future, October 5, 2005 (http://www.rff.org/rff/Events/upload/20180_1.pdf).
The idea that it takes an X-event to shock a system out of a complexity gap is explored implicitly in the following article about Japan and the March 2011 earthquake: Pesek, W., “Roubini Earthquake Gloom Meet ‘Shock Doctrine,’” Bloomberg News, March 13, 2011 (http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-03-13/roubini-earthquake-gloom-meets-shock-doctrine-william-pesek.html).