What will happen to our world in 30 years? The past year I have been in acknowledgement of a recurring uneasiness. Earth’s climate is changing rapidly and accelerating. Different areas are warming up, cooling down, drying out, raining down, storming out faster than humans and non-human nature can keep up. It seems only inevitable that there will arise a certain sequence of years later this century that destroy all crops, flood all warehouses, kill all cattle, and bring people to famines.

A part of me wants to accept the transient nature of life and all things and “do nothing at all”. A different part feels saddened, worried, hopeless, powerless at the state of 95% of the 8 billion humans and the trillion non-human animals. In large part, the situation is worsening, acceleratingly worsening, and a tiny fraction of humans are to blame. One can ask if life is possible without suffering and the answer seems no. Why does it even matter if we do anything or not?

Is life possible without suffering?

History has known at least one human, the Buddha, trying to grapple with the nature of suffering – rather dukkha. (But there are others.) Dukkha, in Buddhist Philosophy, means something slightly different from the meaning of the english term suffering. Dukkha means unsatisfactoriness, which captures what I have in mind. Unfortunately, Dukkha is one of the three marks of existence.

The Buddhist way is the Middle Way between the two extremes of ascetism and hedonism. It concerns the Noble Eightfold Path that is expected to lead to the cessation of suffering. The eight folds or pillars include: right view (understanding), right resolve (thought), right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, right samadhi (concentration). While useful as a general guideline for living, it seems to leave unanswered cases such as: self-defense and climate-change.

• Self-defense
• Climate-change

Here is a long reddit post on climate-change and buddhism from 2019. The solution to climate anxiety might just be to accept the inevitable worsening and death whenever it happens, while trying to make positive contributions wherever possible.

However, there is a third part of me, who identifies as a puzzle solver. The question it asks is this: Is life possible without suffering? More particularly, is there a way a civilization like that of humans can progress and perhaps reach the space age, without triggering a collapse of the ecosystem and food and water resources? Even if we acknowledge that most humans might fall prey to famines within the next 50-100 years, might there be a way for a new civilization to not repeat the mistakes of our civilization?

If you’ve known me in real-life, you’d have heard me talking about Doughnut Economics this past year. It suggests that humans should use multidimensional metrics instead of GDP to measure well-being. And that human activity should be such that it does not exceed planetary boundaries. While the Doughnut Graphic is helpful to communicate to the general public, it remains deficient in rigor, that’d be necessary for modeling and concrete quantitative recommendations.

It was difficult to imagine that Doughnut Economics was the only alternative economics model ever proposed over the past century and half. Indeed, a bit of searching (you can ask ChatGPT) will list you several. Are any of them useable for the new civilization?

Perhaps, one of the fatal flaws in standard neoclassical economics – both Capitalism and Marxism – when it comes to interfacing with nature, is that it assumes raw materials are limited only by the means of production. This means, if you had enough means of production, you can get an unlimited supply of raw materials from nature. It does not consider that the number of trees might be finite. That clearing land for mining might have downstream effects. And so on and so forth. A second fatal flaw would be that it makes no claims about what happens or should happen to by-products, emissions, and wastes. These assumptions are fine when the human activity were no more than a fraction of what goes on in non-human world. Unfortunately, that is not the case. The scale of collective human activity is large enough to rival or even exceed that of non-human nature.

Has anyone pondered how these different aspects can be integrated into economics?

Enter Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, a mathematician, statistician and an eventual economist. Through his The Entropy Law and the Economic Process, Georgescu-Roegen considers entropy from thermodynamics and suggests what it means for our (economic) system. For my purposes, the important point is that, entropy (disorder) of a closed system always increases. This is a fundamental law of the universe; no closed system is immune to this. This means a closed system should naturally evolve towards disorder.

Yet, life seems to disobey thermodynamics. It seems to evolve towards order. What explains this?

Two points may be helpful. Firstly, that life is not a closed system. It exchanges matter as well as energy with its surroundings. Secondly, given a physical (chemical, nuclear, etc) process that emits energy, a part of that energy can be used to perform useful work that can increase the order of a system. This is roughly known as Gibb’s Free Energy. Taken together, life can use free energy to create order and emit waste energy into its environment. Thus, the order can increase locally.

Note, however, that the order-construction processes emit (waste) energy into its surroundings. Earth’s biosphere is remarkable at recycling its material resources – carbon, oxygen, nitrogen and other elements. However, it is limited by physical laws in recycling energy. For Earth to remain habitable at a certain temperature, waste energy must leave the Earth. In the absence of large-scale human activity, one expects that there was a balance between the incoming and outgoing energy on Earth. Any energy received by the sun was either reflected or put to use by geological and biological systems to extract useful work. Eventually, the waste energy was released back into the atmosphere and eventually into space.

The human activities underlying climate change have disturbed these energy exchanges. In particular, the larger amounts of greenhouse gases emitted by human activities have increased the amount of solar energy that remain in the atmosphere. I’d even suspect that harnessing fossil fuels, geothermal energy, as well solar energy from panels more efficient than plant leaves also increases the received energy. Call this latter as man-made energy. This is in contrast to other transformed energy such as hydroelectric or wind-energy. Man-made energy emits more energy, while the other forms of energies are mere conversions. Two possibilities arise:

1. Man-made energy is miniscule compared to the energy received from the sun. In this case, the civilization’s main concern would only be to keep the greenhouse gases at their pre-civilization levels. The Earth’s systems should take care of the rest. There arises the possibility that transformed energy reduces the amount of energy available to biological and geological systems. Thus, one can even disturb Earth’s systems without climate change. As of the current twenty-first century, that windmills could affect Earth’s biosphere or geosphere seems unrealistic.

2. Man-made energy is significant compared to the energy received from the sun. To keep temperatures constant, this possibility will require devising ways to transmit the excess (waste heat) energy outside Earth.

In either case, a “natural” equilibrium will be attained as the Earth’s temperature rises. It will rise enough so that the irradiated energy by the Earth equals the unreflected incoming energy and an equilibria is attained. Fortunately, this depends on the fourth power of absolute temperature, and, thus, only involves a small change in (average) temperatures. Unfortunately, the local effects of that small change in average temperature are rather large for the ecological, ocean, wind, rain, and human systems under consideration. This precisely is climate change.

Zooming out, climate change is not going to melt Earth. It is rather a disequilibria in Earth’s energy budget. The Earth will adapt. Life will adapt. That in no way implies that life or civilization as we know it would continue the same. There will be changes. Significant and expensive ones at that.

What about the new economic system? At least ChatGPT says this is an open problem. Following is a brief summary for anyone wanting to delve deeper:

Earlier this year or the last, I also had a read at Peter Singer’s How are We to Live?. The claim was that an ethical life is fulfiling in itself. I do not remember if it preached a particular ethics framework; what it did preach is that one should live an ethical life simply because it is more fulfiling. Like with Buddhist philosophy, this works “by and large” as a general framework, without providing us a way to decide our actions from moment-to-moment. That requires a rigorous model of the world, the kind Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen might have aspired for.

Unfortunately, then, there is no solution to How are We to Live?, no answer to Can life exist without suffering?, rigorous enough that one can structure one’s day to day life and local and national policies around them.

It’s sometimes not even clear whether anxiety is adaptive or malfunctioning. Perhaps, we would not even be in this mess if the richest and most-polluting people were more anxious (and foresightful?) in their actions.