Modeling

Dying organism

When everything falls apart, doesn’t it remind you of death ? So let’s compare life on Earth as a whole to a living being. One characteristic of life is dynamic balance with many interdependencies. This is true for both a body and life on the planet. Another characteristic is decision-making; given its power, humanity shapes its planet, and even if the decisions are not very wise, we cannot deny that human will plays a significant role in the evolution of life on Earth.

So by comparing life on Earth to a body, humanity appears as its will.

With this model, we immediately see a problem: if humanity is intelligent individually, it is completely foolish when it comes to planetary decisions, yet it is becoming, whether it likes it or not, the mind of the planet.

Adding a level

Let’s start again from the beginning of our dear universe:

• Particles assemble into atoms
• atoms into molecules
• molecules into organelles
• organelles into cells
• cells into simple animals (like sponges) of the colony type
• cells into animals with organs
• animals into simple societies (without forms, etc.)
• animals (us) into societies with organs (tax administration, media, etc.)

We see a progression and repetition: the progression of complexity and the repetition in the assembly of previous elements to build the next. The transition from cells to multicellular beings took more than a billion years, and although the time scales are different, the comparison between our organization and that of an animal with organs suggests that we are far from the same level of sophistication and efficiency:

• Glucose is the body’s energy, whereas for us, it’s money that plays the role of symbolic energy. We can observe good energy management in living bodies (distribution according to needs, reserves), whereas in our society, the atmosphere is more of a scramble to grab as much as possible.
• The cells in living bodies do not try to take each other’s place and eliminate them. Yet our society still regularly experiences wars.
• Living bodies have a brain that makes decisions for the benefit of the entire body, whereas the decisions made by our governments are much less in the interest of the collective good.
• When there is an illness, the body reduces its physical activity until it heals. However, when our society experiences a pandemic, the reduction in economic activity (the equivalent of physical activity) causes enormous problems.

This representation shows us that we are at the very beginning of an important phase in the evolution of life: organization into organs.

A change in the evolutionary system

In the previous model, we saw the progression of complexity. But we can focus on a more abstract aspect: the evolutionary framework, that is, the entire system in which natural selection occurs. It’s a rich subject, but we can note some important elements:

• Life seeks efficiency, and so does our mind (obtaining beneficial things economically). In both cases, there is a symbolic representation system (DNA for one and ideas for the other), the generation of new elements (mutations for one and imagination for the other), and the transmission of good elements.
• To achieve good evolution of a living system, scale parameters are important, for example:
  • The system must be large enough that an advantageous evolution does not quickly disrupt the whole, allowing time for adaptation.
  • The speed at which new elements appear.
  • The amplitude and frequency of disturbances: too many disturbances cause too many deaths, but too few do not provide enough challenges to discriminate efficiency.

While the Earth is suited to evolution in the form of DNA (good scale parameters), the appropriate scale parameters for ideas are more likely those of the universe (since ideas are produced and transmitted at much higher speeds). This mismatch implies that we are no longer subjects of the DNA-based evolutionary system, and thus we must take charge of this evolutionary framework. In practice, this implies that we move from a "survival of the fittest" mentality to that of a scientific manager/cultivator.