Initial Overestimates, Resilience, and the one-percent rule.

Since I walked away from Blogger, I forgot all that I had written there over the years.  Probably healthy, but since I started cross-posting over there as an emergency backup to my main squeeze Dreamwidth, I have been peeking at the past and trying to get insight into that man who wore this body years ago. 

Gloomy fucker.

I am trying to figure out the way that people and society and the world all fit together and the path that they are taking.  I still tend to be pessimistic, lets face it, slope (M) is still negative.  But it is obvious that the value that I have been attaching to the slope value has been too high.  I suppose that if I were hanging out with my ex-boeing buddies, I would have to admit that I appear to have underestimated the thrust of the engines in this glide path.  Now, while this causes me a certain amount of chagrin, I am quite happy that things are holding together better than my initial estimates.  But it is best to plan for the worst case and to be pleased when it doesn't occur, so my chagrin is worn lightly and is dismissed with a laugh.

SO I am now toying around with what I will refer to as the 1% rule.  Pretty simple rule.  Late stage industrial capitalism is a cancer.  Cancers don't kill you quick.  Cancers eat away at you slow and take their sweet time. 

The culture that we live in and the industrial/scientific worldview is going to kill off a bunch of folks in the next 100 years.  I am going to say this will be around an average population loss of 1% per year.  That means when our descendants look up from their labors in 2120 they will find around three billion folks cohabiting the planet with them.  That might well be manageable.

The other half of the rule is the possibility of a catastrophic event occurring in any given year.  By a catastrophic even I mean something that wipes out >5% of the world population at a stroke (COVID need not apply right now it had a 0.013%)  I have to come up with a baseline percentage of where we are now, but if I use a value of 6% (which is quite high) that means in 2120, the aforementioned descendant will be looking at Russian roulette odds. 

Nope, I am certain that this kind of talk will offend the obligatory positivism so required among today's boojie culture.  But their view of the world and their desire for a Star Trek future doesn't appear to be in the cards.