Decoupling for a Postbiological Future
Friday 29 December 2023
A correspondent has drawn my attention to the relationship between the distinction I have made between biocentric and technocentric civilizations (and the replacement process that yields the latter from the former, discussed in newsletters 267 and 268) and the idea of decoupling, whereby economic growth is decoupled from its impacts on the environment. The hope is that we can keep our cake and eat it too: that we can continue to enjoy indefinite economic growth, but that this growth, unlike past economic growth, can be engineered to avoid further damage to the biosphere. This process of uncoupling resembles the process of replacement, since replacement involves using artificial alternatives to biological resources and processes, so that the progress of replacement implies a decreasing reliance upon and therefore lessened impacts upon the biosphere. However, there are also subtle differences between replacement as I conceive it and decoupling as it has been presented by the Breakthrough Institute, which has on its website An Ecomodernist Manifesto, which returns time and again to the idea of decoupling.
I define replacement within my within my model of the institutional structure of civilization, so that replacement has three dimensions: 1) the replacement of a biocentric practices and artifacts with technocentric practices and artifacts, by means of the replacement of naturally occurring materials with artificially produced materials, 2) the replacement of biocentric ideas and institutions with technocentric ideas and institutions, by means of the replacement of qualitative concepts with quantitative concepts and the replacement of biological and organic institutions with artificial institutions, and 3) the replacement of a biocentrically conceived central project with technologically conceived surrogates for the central project. These formulations can be recast in terms of decoupling as follows: 1) the decoupling of economic growth from biocentric processes in favor of technocentric processes, 2) the decoupling of quantitative concepts from qualitative concepts, and 3) the decoupling of a central project conceived in technological terms from a central project conceived in biocentric terms. These formulations aren’t perfect parallels, and it would take some investment of thought to adequately express decoupling within my model of civilization (or to express the replacement thesis within the assumptions employed by the ecomodernists).
Here is a representative passage from An Ecomodernist Manifesto that gives a sense of how the ecomodernists conceive decoupling:
“Even as human environmental impacts continue to grow in the aggregate, a range of long-term trends are today driving significant decoupling of human well-being from environmental impacts. Decoupling occurs in both relative and absolute terms. Relative decoupling means that human environmental impacts rise at a slower rate than overall economic growth. Thus, for each unit of economic output, less environmental impact (e.g., deforestation, defaunation, pollution) results. Overall impacts may still increase, just at a slower rate than would otherwise be the case. Absolute decoupling occurs when total environmental impacts — impacts in the aggregate — peak and begin to decline, even as the economy continues to grow.”
This manifesto overlaps at many points with The Techno-Optimist Manifesto by Marc Andreessen, which includes the following:
“We believe there is no inherent conflict between the techno-capital machine and the natural environment… We believe technology is the solution to environmental degradation and crisis. A technologically advanced society improves the natural environment, a technologically stagnant society ruins it.”
Both the ecomodernists and the techno-optimists see the possibility of an expansive future, the ecomodernists through continued economic growth and the techno-optimists through continued technological innovation. Since it is technological innovation (driven by science) that has largely driven economic growth since the industrial revolution, there is an obvious relationship between the ecomodernist vision of continued economic growth and the techno-optimist vision of technological progress. There are subtle differences also: the ecomodernists tout the idea of a “good Anthropocene” revealing a vision largely bounded by terrestrial concerns (not antithetical to wider horizons, but also not predicated on any expansion beyond Earth), while the techno-optimists explicitly look forward to a future lived on a cosmological scale, not bounded by the Anthropocene, which latter is implicitly a terrestrial conception, if not a geocentric conception.
What drives (or what could drive) the decoupling that the Breakthrough Institute sees? Technology, for one (and this it has in common with the techno-optimists), regulation, though that can have mixed results, and greater efficiency, which is often a function of improved technology but with an economic motive driving it. There still remains a great deal of low hanging fruit in the form of unrealized efficiencies, and we could chase efficiency for another century or two, which would give the appearance of decoupling over the longue durée. There is, indeed, no reason not to pursue these inefficiencies. However, even here we run into problems. The manifesto notes that cities occupy three percent or less of total land area, but house four billion people. We know from many studies that cities are a much more efficient way of housing human beings than the former majority rural condition of human residential patterns. Is the solution, then, to have everyone live in cities? In part, yes, but we haven’t needed a policy for urbanization. Urbanization has been growing for ten thousand years, and in the 90s we passed the threshold of more than half of the human population living in cities. This has occurred across societies, cultures, civilizations, and periods of history, so it cannot be credited to any one tradition or form of government. But urbanization conceived and implemented as a policy would take on a very different character from the natural evolution of society that has resulted in ever-increasing urbanization.
The low-hanging fruits of efficiency are very real, but once we harvest the low-hanging fruit, the remainder of the fruit demands ever-greater effort to harvest, and we quickly run into the problem of diminishing returns, so that the energy input into efficiency exceeds the energy saved from the efficiency secured. Once humanity reaches a certain (currently unknown) threshold of urbanization, further urbanization will become increasingly expensive. A rational pursuit of any such policy would recognize such limitations, and would modify its approach as the returns on investment began to yield diminishing returns. The problem from my point of view is that I do not expect human beings to behave rationally, especially when they are possessed by an ideology, as the ideologies expressed in An Ecomodernist Manifesto and The Techno-Optimist Manifesto. I expect human beings to act like human beings who have adopted a manifesto and want to see it implemented, and this is rarely a pretty sight.
A rational pursuit of higher efficiencies that resulted in continuing economic growth and decreasing impacts on the biosphere (the twin pillars of ecomodernism that define decoupling) would shift from one sector of the economy to another as efficiencies are realized and then begin to tail off as the required energy investment begins to rise sharply. When we begin to look closely at decoupling we find that most decoupling requires a considerably higher energy expenditure than the existing coupled growth dependent on the biosphere. Utopia is nearly within our grasp, but its cost is a never-ending supply of energy, and every form of energy involves a tradeoff with the biosphere, so that biosphere impacts lessened by decoupling are paid for by increased biosphere impacts from energy production itself. We could approach this quite simply by distinguishing between decoupling at higher energy cost and decoupling with no additional energy cost, and then attempt to disproportionately implement no energy cost decoupling. (There are really two decouplings here: decoupling from environmental impacts and decoupling from energy use.) As I stated above, I think we could pursue this strategy for a couple of hundred years before it reaches the limits of our technology (even a technology advanced two hundred years beyond the present), and this energy efficient world would definitely be an improvement over our world.
When we turn to the decoupling that requires greater expenditure of energy, we enter the realm of wishful thinking, in which energy technologies just beyond our grasp are imagined to be practical, and we proceed as though they are, and then we run into the kind of problems we are running into now with renewable energy projects pursued at scale or battery-powered vehicles produced in the quantities now produced. These technologies have great promise, but they are not yet ready to run the world the way we run the world today. But suppose that the requisite energy technologies are ready; suppose that we make not only the necessary breakthroughs, but also the practical engineering of these technologies into industries that can support eight billion persons. Suppose that we have all the energy we need to pursue decoupling at any energy cost — energy too cheap to meter, in any amount, and decoupled from biosphere impacts. Does that solve our problems?
Unfortunately, it does not. We cannot have a “good Anthopocene” even if we have limitless decarbonized energy. There is a short paper by Eric Chaisson, “Long-Term Global Heating From Energy Usage” (Eos, Vol. 89, no. 28, 08 July 2008) in which he notes:
“Even if civilization on Earth stops polluting the biosphere with greenhouse gases, humanity could eventually be awash in too much heat, namely, the dissipated heat by-product generated by any nonrenewable energy source. Apart from the Sun’s natural aging — which causes an approximately 1% luminosity rise for each 108 years and thus about 1ºC increase in Earth’s surface temperature — well within 1000 years our technological society could find itself up against a fundamental limit to growth: an unavoidable global heating of roughly 3ºC dictated solely by the second law of thermodynamics, a biogeophysical effect often ignored when estimating future planetary warming scenarios.” (After this paper appeared in Eos, James R. Fleming wrote a letter — Eos, Vol. 89, №51, 16 December 2008 — to note that Chaisson’s work had been anticipated by Mikhail I. Budyko; I previously mentioned these materials in Planetary Constraints 9.)
While we cannot have a “good Anthropocene” with endless energy, we can nevertheless imagine fantasy scenarios in which both the economy and human ambition can grow without limit, even within the bounds of a planetary future. I noted in last week’s newsleter that I tend to focus on spacefaring technology, whereas the development of a technocentric civilization might be clustered around the development of other forms of technology. The most obvious example here would be a civilization that measures its technological progress toward a condition of (self-defined) technological maturity in terms of computer, networking, and communications technology, which I once called “virtualization” (or “singularization”), and which I discussed in A Virtually Optimized World and Existential Risks to a Virtually Optimized World. In the virtualization scenario, the economy and the scope human activity grow without limits in the virtual world supplied to us by computers, which must be supplied with growing sources of energy, but here we are assuming that these energy resources are available.
Given energy and computational power, no human fantasy is beyond realization (in the virtual world), and we can continue to elaborate this scenario to truly cosmic proportions. Clément Vidal’s paper “Stellivore Extraterrestrials? Binary Stars as Living Systems” (2016) includes a scenario in which, in our relentless pursuit of more energy, we not only absorb and make use of all the energy that the sun can give us, but we find ways to intensify solar insolation, the better to feed our energy needs:
“…here is one speculative scenario which could lead life on Earth into such a high-energy configuration. We continue to climb the Kardashev scale and use more and more energy. In parallel, our technologies function on smaller and smaller scales, and we climb the Barrow scale. Those small and dense technologies demand more and more energy. Once we cover the Earth with solar panels — having understood that all other energy sources are not sustainable in the long term — we still want more energy. An obvious way to get more energy is to get closer to the Sun. This might be done by changing the orbit of the Earth (Korycansky, Laughlin, and Adams 2001). The higher temperatures progressively require to change the physical substrate of life from organic chemistry, to a heat-resistant postbiological substrate. After a certain time, the energy passively received is still not enough to meet our ever growing energy needs. Stellar engineers set up the first active accretion from the Sun. We have become stellivores.”
Another form of this scenario would be to construct a vast and growing network of space-based solar power (SBSP) stations and to focus all the energy collected on Earth. Needless to say, at some point we pass the threshold at which the biosphere can continue to function with the level of energy influx, and we have to make the transition to a postbiological substrate. The Ecomodernist Manifesto, with its focus on reducing human impacts on the biosphere, would presumably not be on board for this kind of energy intensification, though we have seen the energy intensification is effectively built into the project of decoupling. Taken to its extreme implementation, decoupling for the sake of the biosphere leads to the elimination of the biosphere, which would not be the first time an ideological agenda led to outcomes antithetical to its stated purposes. Pareto’s conception of non-logical conduct is key here. There are any number of actions not motivated by an explicitly known purpose, any number of purposes not realizable in practice, and any number of actions that cannot be realistically expected to achieve some purpose, even if that purpose is both known and realizable. In any statement of principle as elaborate as we find in An Ecomodernist Manifesto or The Techno-Optimist Manifesto, there are too many opportunities for self-deception leading to non-logical conduct that it is nearly inevitable that the energies unleashed by a new movement that announces itself with a manifesto will take a wrong turn.
But since we’re doing imaginative and (outlandishly) speculative scenarios for the far future, let’s continue with the thought experiment. There are several ways in which we could address the above scenario of pursuing an energy-intensive civilization that ultimately involves the sacrifice of the biosphere to escalating energy influxes:
- Instead of focusing all energy on Earth, we could focus energy on some other body, or on an artificial platform constructed for the purpose, where human intelligence (in a postbiological form) could migrate and best take advantage of this energy influx.
- We could engineer some way of transferring waste heat on Earth out into extraterrestrial space, so that all energy influxes are balanced by waste heat exports. I have several times noted the possibility of the use of sun shields — called “Dyson Dots” in the Robert G. Kennedy III, et al. paper “Dyson Dots: Changing the solar constant to a variable with photovoltaic lightsails.” This could be a response to rising temperatures due to either greenhouse gases or the waste heat from nonrenewable energy sources, and as the drivers of rising temperatures increase, mitigation measures could increase, fully offsetting the drivers of rising temperatures. This works with most energy sources, but it doesn’t work with Vidal’s scenario of focusing greater quantities of solar energy on Earth; it is, indeed, the opposite strategy.
- We could move the biosphere to some other location, such as to another planet or onto an artificial platform, allowing the Earth to continue developing technologically while biological development is displaced to another location.
- We could store the total information content of the biosphere — a planetary-scale seed bank — and allow the biosphere to go extinct, with the plan of reconstituting it at another time or in another place, the idea being that nothing is lost as long as all biological information is retained. I consider this a dubious prospect, but mention it nonetheless.
- We could produce postbiological technological surrogates for all species, so that as human beings make the transition to a postbiological substrate, all other species make the transition to a postbiological substrate at the same time.
This last possibility strikes me as strange, and I assume that the reader finds it as strange as I do, if not stranger, yet if we are willing to acknowledge that we are biological beings with the terrestrial biosphere as our environment of evolutionary adaptedness, and we (or some of us) are willing to consider technological surrogates as a viable alternative to biological lives, why should we not also consider technological surrogate for other species a viable alternative to their lives? Should we construct technological surrogates for crocodiles? For mosquitoes? Is this techno-optimism? Is this a virtually optimized world?
The philosophically interesting question is why this is such a strange idea, and I think it is such a strange idea because we have (implicitly) come to think of human development as having become decoupled from our bodies and the material world in which our bodies exist. We are already, in an intellectual sense, decoupled; human cultural, social, and intellectual development is decoupled from biological evolution, but the lives of other species still seem to be dependent upon their embodiment. Since they lack the cultural, social, and intellectual lives of human beings, they must continue to live through their bodies. One response to this could be “uplift,” in which we not only provide other species with postbiological substrates, but also raise them to a cognitive level at their development, too, can be culture, social, and intellectual.
This bizarre vision seems likely to be the antithesis what would happen in fact. The decoupling foretold by the Breakthrough Institute, which is to happen in the name of reducing human impacts on the biosphere, would likely end up with the biosphere either superfluous or an obstacle to further development, even though decoupling in the manner implied by the Breakthrough Institute would leave humanity and nature sharing the planet in some disjoint fashion, i.e., in a way that makes the biosphere irrelevant to humanity. In most accounts of our future technological condition, nature is glaringly absent, as though it never existed.
The ecomodernists have intuited this danger, and they push back against the implied teleology by asserting the intrinsic value of nature, adding:
“Even if a fully synthetic world were possible, many of us might still choose to continue to live more coupled with nature than human sustenance and technologies require. What decoupling offers is the possibility that humanity’s material dependence upon nature might be less destructive.”
Less destructive we can manage, but can we manage our human, all-too-human incentives that would balk at maintaining a pristine, re-wilded world when it is decoupled from our wants and desires? But perhaps benign neglect is the best hope that nature has at this point.
