Sustainability MMORPG
August 17th, 2008 Filed Under games, sustainability
I recently read this blog post entitled Sowing the Seeds of a Future Society (emphasis mine):
Given that I believe a major environmental crisis is unavoidable, how might we ensure that genuinely sustainable communities could become a reality? Firstly I believe we should use the most powerful tool of the current age to design exactly how future communities should look, what technologies and system of government would be most appropriate, and how to ensure that such communities remain sustainable over time. Computer games already exist which allow users to design cities and societies. It would be a relatively simple undertaking to design an on-line computer game which would allow interested parties worldwide to refine the details of exactly what such a future society should look like. Remember that if communities develop in a haphazard manner, it is likely that they will fall into many of the traps that our current society has.
This, along with my current interest in educational science games, inspires me to reimagine Spaceship Earth Beta, my ongoing imaginary platform for exploring issues and strategies of sustainability, as a massively-multiplayer computer game.
First, there must be two competing goals which different players are working towards:
- To develop a society proven to be sustainable over a large time-scale;
- To be selfish or violent or “evil”, taking advantage of loopholes for personal wealth or power or ego, which ultimately leads to making the whole society unsustainable.
The first goal must be concretely measurable. Concrete definitions of a small number of metrics must be defined such that, if they can be maintained or improved over several generations of players, they would indicate that the society as a whole is sustainable. These metrics would at least include:
- energy consumption and reserve
- cultural preservation and distribution
- tolerance for error (human, software, external catastrophe)
Playing the game through multiple generations of players, with different personalities and each generation being more detached from the start of the project, is important; cultural values are not transmitted by default to the next generation.
The second goal, while perhaps irritating to the larger community which devotes itself to the first goal, is nonetheless vital and the players which achieve it must be revered, even as the players who attempt it must be reviled. All systems which are composed of humans with individual volition will have members who desire to destroy the system, even if they must sacrifice themselves. The system must be resilient against any single point of failure, or any small-scale collusion against it. The exile or incarceration of citizens for what amounts to this “treason” must be enforced; their murder must carry the same emotional weight as it would in reality.
I do not believe that we can plan from the outset a completely sustainable system; the “metarules” that are in existence from the outset of the project, and the texts which define its culture and values, are all we can really control, and their ramifications can only be understood from playing them out to a reasonable conclusion. Now, the results of a computer game are obviously not the same as the results of the same experiment conducted in reality. However, we can work to create and refine the starting set of metarules to have the greatest probability of success.
This simulation will have to be run many times with many different people. This makes it different from existing MMORPGs which run continuously, with game designers (”GDs”) modifying the game rules to maximize fun and membership. Many variants will be obviously flawed, others more subtly so, but they should be aborted if and when they are irretrievably broken, and the system analyzed post-mortem to find the flaws that led to its demise, and a new system started with the modified meta-rules.
Stumble it!World Population
May 9th, 2008 Filed Under news, sustainability
Slashdot had a post noting that today the world population will surpass 6.666666666 billion people, right on track to hit 7 billion by 2012. Many people, including myself, think the world is radically overpopulated with humans, but I’m no longer worrying about it. It’s just how life goes: a new replicator (species) struggles to survive, and if it doesn’t go extinct, it becomes dominant and tries to convert all matter into copies of itself. Eventually, it suffers a massive population reduction, whether from a cataclysmic event, a new dominant predator, or by choking on its own waste. Then it has another chance to go extinct, but if all “goes well”, it settles into a comfortable equilibrium with the rest of the replicators, and the cycle repeats.
| Year | World Population |
|---|---|
| 1600s | 500 million |
| 1800s | 1 billion |
| 1930 | 2 billion |
| 1960 | 3 billion |
| 1975 | 4 billion |
| 1987 | 5 billion |
| 2000 | 6 billion |
| 2012 (predicted) | 7 billion |
A friend of mine, Joe Ardent, believes that the Singularity is nigh upon us, and with it comes the end of resource scarcity. I happen to believe that energy will be a limiting factor for some time to come–I don’t think we will manage to create a viable fusion or antimatter or other essentially “limitless” energy source in my lifetime. That’s not to say it won’t happen ever. The concept of the Singularity emerges naturally from exponential growth, and in time, I suppose all things are possible. But this is a battle of the exponents: just as our technological and production capabilities grow exponentially, so does our population and its consumption (and I’m not even taking into account the emergent problems that come with scaling all new technology).
So I bet this friend a year’s supply of energy (about 300 GJ, or 10kW-years) that before we achieve the Singularity–for the purposes of the bet, defined as a billion people having programmable nano-factories that can make unlimited copies of those same nano-factories–the world will see a huge population reduction, defined by the bet as a 15% population drop (the loss of 1 billion people from today’s world population).
That is a nearly unfathomable number of people–the entire world population in A.D. 1800–and the events that could cause such a massive loss of population are certainly not going to be pleasant. For comparison, the Black Plague killed 100 million people, reducing the world population by 25%.
But let’s put this in perspective: If something does happen in 2012 to knock a billion people off the earth’s roster, that would merely set the world’s population back to 6 billion, which we had just 12 years prior in 2000. Honestly, as a planet and a species, we would scarcely notice such a minor disturbance in the Force.
I of course hold out hope that our awakening superbeing becomes aware of its plight, and takes active steps to limit its population and reverse the last century’s hypergrowth. But this looks like it will take a very long time–the annual growth rate did peak (at 2.2%) in the ’60s, which is good news, but 40 years and 3.5 billion people later, we’re still headed the wrong direction (over 1% annual growth). More developed countries which already have a negative population growth (like Italy), are worried that their particular breed of human will be overrun by a swarm of another particular breed of human, and so they’re encouraging their breed to, well, breed. Which is not a real solution to any real problem.
Effective solutions, like encouraging widespread contraceptive use or offering impoverished parents a few bucks to get their children sterilized, are not widely pursued for so-called “moral” reasons. So it looks like, we humans are going to keep procreating ourselves into an ever-deeper hole, and regardless of technological progress will eventually suffer the same plight as every dominant lifeform before us. Ah well. We all know that it will be the poorest and ugliest who will die first, so assuming we don’t go completely extinct, our descendents will be richer and more beautiful than we are. Maybe they’ll be smarter too, but I’m not going to bet on it.
Spaceship Earth Beta
November 13th, 2007 Filed Under projects, sustainability
I decided to launch Spaceship Earth Beta as a blog, allowing the setting to be used by other artists under a non-commercial Creative Commons license.
The design right now is pretty weak, so I put up a rentacoder bid request to see if I could get a reasonable design for some holiday cash. If anyone knows anyone who can draw and likes spaceships or sustainability, please send them my way!
Human-powered wishlist
November 5th, 2007 Filed Under sustainability
For Christmas last year, I got instructions on how to make a home-made Pedal Generator, but I don’t think I’m mechanically inclined enough to make it happen (and I don’t really have the time anyway). This year, I want a mass-produced Human Powered Generator ($550), which charges a 12-volt battery or the Portable Power Pack ($475) , which provides a 120-volt AC plug.
Alternatively, I could get the foot pump generator ($290) which I think might work with the Portable Power Pack above? Or this Xantrex XPower Powerpack 400 Plus ($140) which appears to do the same thing.
And here’s the PowerMonkey ($60), a universal power adapter so you can charge whatever device with its proprietary battery on the go.
Also intriguing is a 10 Watt solar panel ($130). Not all that useful at this latitude and with Seattle’s climate. I’d prefer to turn sushi into electricity with leg power.
For transportation, this “Human Car” ($5k-$17k) looks pretty neat, but it won’t be available until at least next year.
Nothing to do with anything but this is pretty neat.
I was thinking about getting this LED reading light ($30), but it requires 4 AAA batteries (for 100 hours). I guess LEDs require some serious voltage.
Finally, in preparation for the coming apocalypse, I’ll definitely need a hand-cranked portable light and cell phone charger ($50).
New Scientist: Recent CO2 rises exceed worst-case scenarios
May 21st, 2007 Filed Under news, science, sustainability
Seems that we’re not getting better at dealing with carbon emissions; in fact, every part of the world is getting worse:
During the 1990s, emissions grew by 1.1% per year on average, but the number shot up to 3.3% between 2000 and 2004, when the study ended.
…
They concluded that the rise in CO2 emissions is not due to a growth in global population, but a reduction in global efficiency. “We are not getting more efficient at using CO2 in the way we projected,” explains co-author Corinne Le Quéré from the University of East Anglia in the UK.
From the 1970s to the 1990s, the world as a whole was becoming better at producing more energy for the same CO2 emissions, and more GDP with less energy. But the trend reversed in 2000.
The researchers found that no part of the world reduced the amount of carbon used to produce energy between 2000 and 2004, despite widespread publicity in support of greener sources of energy.
So we’ll have to revise our worst-case predictions to match new worst-case trends.
