Is our imminent global ecological collapse inevitable, or can we live within natural limitations?
“…all of the central features of life from gestation and growth to mortality are exponentially sensitive to temperature.”
“…a modest 2C change in ambient temperature leads to a 20 percent to 30 percent change in growth and mortality rates. This is huge and therein lies our problem. If global warming induces a temperature increase of around 2C, which it is on track to do, then the pace of almost all biological life across all scales will increase by a whopping 20 percent to 30 percent.“
Geoffrey West, Scale
I’ve recently reread Geoffrey West’s Scale: the Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies, in which West the physicist looks for patterns in biological systems, and finds the mathemagic of scaling
West looks at scaling by identifying certain elemental physical structures and comparing mass, energy use (metabolism) and so on of mice and towns to larger versions of those things, elephants and cities.
His observation on the Industrial Era [1752-2012], and the fundamental difference between it and every previous era:
“From a scientific perspective the truly revolutionary character of the Industrial Revolution was the dramatic change from an open system where energy is supplied externally by the sun to a closed system where energy is supplied internally by fossil fuel. This is a fundamental systemic change with huge thermodynamic consequences, because in a closed system the Second Law of Thermodynamics and its requirement that entropy always increases strictly applies. We “progressed” from an external, reliable, and constant source of energy to one that is internal, unreliable, and variable. Furthermore, because our dominant source of energy is now an integral component of the very system it is supporting, its supply is hostage to continually changing internal market forces.”
Geoffrey West, Scale.
The question of climate change for me, becomes one of curtailing our most harmful, entropy-producing habits: unnecessary air travel (so long tourism!), industrial agriculture, etc. all of which force acceleration upon natural systems (locomotion from walking to space travel, from hunting to hormonally-grown chickens, from working during the season to working year-round, from counting most of the days to accounting for every second).
Not only have we closed ourselves off in thermodynamic terms, we’re accelerating the production of entropy at a logarithmic rate.
Fractal Slowing
” …sublinear scaling and the associated economies of scale arising from optimizing network performance lead to bounded growth and the systematic slowing of the pace of life. This is the dynamic that dominates biology.”
Geoffrey West, Scale
What Dr West refers to in the quotation above are the limits to biological size. The blue whale is about as large as a mammal can grow, which has to do with the limits to how many cells can be serviced by blood capillaries. In a shrew, or a person, or a whale, the capillaries- that is, the terminal points of our circulatory system–are the same size, whereas the largest vessel, the aorta ranges from fractions of a millimeter to about a foot in diameter. When it comes to scaling, the smallest element (terminal point) determines the largest element (the aorta).
More importantly, what he’s discovered is that as a system, circulatory, biological, ecological, etc. evolves, that it slows as it grows, rather than our current economic system, which forces logarithmic growth on us. Where we should become more efficient as a society as we develop, we have become wasteful and directionless, in no small part because of how much of our behaviour we have turned over to the artificial influences of commerce.
Constants of Scaling
” …across the spectrum of life all biological rates and times such as those associated with growth, embryonic development, longevity, and evolutionary processes are determined by a joint universal scaling law in terms of just two parameters: the number 1/4, arising from the network constraints that control the dependence on mass, and 0.65 eV, originating in the chemical reaction dynamics of ATP production. This result can be restated in a slightly different way: when adjusted for size and temperature, as determined by just these two numbers, all organisms run to a good approximation by the same universal clock with similar metabolic, growth, and evolutionary rates.”
Geoffrey West, Scale
The elements West identifies as fundamental to the limits of growth and energy processing include:
- 1/4 scaling rule
- 0.65 electron-Volts (basic quantum of metabolism)
Super Natural Limits ~ Quantum Loop Theory
In Reality is Not What It Seems, Carlo Rovelli describes quantum loop theory, which is the most promising among current theories, as it eliminates the infinite dimensions of string theory, and provides us with limits of our physical universe.
” … I think that quantum mechanics has revealed three aspects of the nature of things: granularity, indeterminacy, and the relational structure of the world.
“The theory does not describe things as they “are”: it describes how things “occur”, and how they “interact with each other.” It doesn’t describe where there is a particle but how the particle shows itself to others. The world of existent things is reduced to a realm of possible interactions. Reality is reduced to interaction. Reality is reduced to relation.
“Quantum mechanics extends this relativity in a radical way: all variable aspects of an object exist only in relation to other objects. It is only in interactions that nature draws the world.
” In the world described by quantum mechanics, there is no reality except in the relations between physical systems. it isn’t things that enter into relations, but rather relations that ground to the notion of thing.”
Carlo Rovelli, Reality is Not What It Seems
Curious to note that a big part of my ongoing journey to decolonize my thinking was to shift from thinking in terms of objects to thinking in terms of relationships. It was a fundamentally revealing shift in perspective, and one that appears to be fundamental to our current scientific thinking of the physical universe.
I do so enjoy it when scientists come around to discovering all that wisdom that ancient peoples have held since forever. The more things change, I suppose…
The limits that Rovelli provides us with (and there are plenty of others), are the minimum length, maximum velocity, and information limit, defined as:
- the Planck length (ℓP) : 1.616 229 (38) × 10−35 m
- the speed of light (c) : 299 792 458 m/s
- the Planck constant (h) : 6.626 070 15 × 10−34 Js
2019 SI Standards
2019, the SI units have new definitions that tie them more explicitly to these physical limits.
Provided we work within the limits and limitations of our planetary system, our ecological, social, and biological systems, we might succeed in curtailing our forcing energy into processes that increase the production of entropy logarithmically.
We’re all in this together, so let’s act like it.
Sources:
Rovelli, Carlo. Reality is Not What It Seems: the Journey to Quantum Gravity. New York: Riverhead Books, 2017.
West, Geoffrey B. Scale: the Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies. New York: Penguin Press, 2017.
Rethinking Time 