Martin Brasier, the Oxford paleontology professor, once shared his pet theory in a lecture (one of the ones I’d actually managed to get up for) about the cause of the 26 million year cyclicity in mass extinctions apparent in the fossil record. He suggested that it’s not that extreme events happen only every 26 million years, but instead they are fairly common – it just takes 26 million years for the biosphere to evolve to a level of complexity that is fatally susceptible to them.
With this idea in mind, looking back at the fossil record, and at the history of modern civilisation, it seems like this increase of complexity and subsequent collapse is a fairly unavoidable aspect of evolving complex systems. In fact you could argue that it is just the life/reproduction/death cycle played out on much larger scales. After all, a human, consisting of more than 100 trillion independent living entities (cells), is also an evolving complex system. It could be argued that human societies, and even the entire global biosphere, are in fact just huge organisms* that naturally develop, age and perish, just like humans do – they just have much longer life spans.
Taking that viewpoint, prevention of a global (human) catastrophe is probably best achieved not by attempting to prevent catastrophic events (as these will happen regardless) but instead by trying to decrease complexity and “tight coupling” within society. To explain that term, as with many things in evolution, there is a direct link to computer programming. “Tight coupling” is a programming term referring to when a number of programs are heavily dependent on one another: If one breaks, they all break; change something in one, and you have to change them all. Programmers have learnt through many costly mistakes that this is something to avoid, and instead aim for a collection of “loosely coupled” programs that work together, but function as independently as possible.
Loosely coupled systems have lots of redundancy, and redundancy is exactly what you need to survive a potentially major extinction event.
So, in terms of surviving a global catastrophe, this “loosely coupled” structure is undoubtedly the best option. Unfortunately, thoguh, the last time human society had such a structure was well before the industrial revolution, when it consisted primarily of small, self sufficient villages. So, we’re in trouble. And at the rate society is developing, I’d say we’re in really, really big trouble. But is it worth worrying about?
Probably not.
Societies collapse. Organisms grow old and die. Your brand new pc eventually gets so clogged up with software artifacts that windows packs up it’s toys and stops playing. If you’re unfortunate enough to be using Vista, it probably has already happened. Anyway, it’s an unavoidable consequence of complex evolving systems, and it’s been going on since the dawn of life. In fact, Richard Dawkins, in (I think) the Blind Watchmaker argues that complex system collapse (death) is a vital part of the evolutionary process – kind of like nature’s way of reformatting the hard drive and starting again from a clean slate.
So much so that we certainly wouldn’t be here without it.
*James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis both came to this conclusion independently from studying macroscopic and microscopic biology respectively, and collaborated to create Gaia theory.
