Heroes Not Zombies

Did you see this?

It’s a photograph of the oldest star in the Universe….or at least, the oldest one, the furthest away one, we’ve managed to see so far. It’s about 13 billion light years away and as the Universe is thought to be just over 13 billion years old, then the light from this star set off towards us just a few hundred thousand years after the Big Bang (of course, not everyone agrees there ever was a Big Bang, and we haven’t managed to see just that far back yet BUT let’s just take the theory for real for now)

In the beginning, we think the first element to appear in the universe was Hydrogen, and the strange thing is not only did the energy and subatomic particles which predated Hydrogen not just scatter everywhere, and fill the universe evenly, but Hydrogen particles were brought together in the first stars (like the one in this photo). These stars are giant furnaces, and in their cores they fused Hydrogen particles into Helium ones.

And then there were two. Two kinds of elements.

What happened next?

The bigger the stars, the greater the fusion capacity and the bigger the elements they could manufacture by connecting them up together.

Here’s a diagram illustrating the next steps

Hydrogen fusion produces Helium; Helium fusion produces Carbon, Nitrogen and Oxygen; Carbon fusion produces Oxygen, Neon, Sodium and Magnesium; and so on with each level producing ever heavier elements…..Sulphur, Silicon, Phosphorus and all the other elements in the Periodic Table up to Iron.

Connecting elements together by fusion didn’t go any further than iron, and all the other natural elements in universe were produced by giant cosmological phenomena known as supernovae!

All of these elements scattered around the universe and the universe continued to connect them up, producing this –

….our Earth.

And the connecting didn’t end there. The universe continued connecting the different elements together to create beautiful structures, like sand particles…..

…which when you look more closely look like this…

…and still the universe kept connecting everything to everything else to produce beautiful spirals of shells…

and…plants and creatures…..

and, eventually…..

My littlest grandchildren!

Just think! Over 6 billion human beings on this planet, the most complex, most connected phenomena the universe has ever created and every single one of us is unique – no two of us share the same DNA, the same fingerprints, the same irises, and certainly not the same two stories.

There IS a clear direction of travel in this story of the Universe – ever greater complexity, ever greater uniqueness, ever greater connectedness…….

I find that pretty thrilling actually!

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We are coming to end of a 500 year or so period where we’ve engaged with Life as if it is a machine. The machine model is of distinct, definable components which when assembled in a regular, repeatable pattern produce a mechanism which produces stable, predictable outcomes.

That model was the foundation of the industrial and technological age. We used it to create ever more efficient tools to work with.

One problem with that model is that we went on to apply it to the world, and, indeed, to Life. From this perspective, the Earth is a storehouse of resources to be consumed, and Nature is something which human beings have to subdue and control. From this perspective disease is a malfunctioning part, and the application of an “evidence based” tool will fix it. From this perspective, organisations of humans, from communities, to factories, shops and offices, to whole societies can be controlled by applying a strong hierarchy. A ruling elite can control the cogs in the machine – the rest of the human beings in that organisation. With the “right” rules and processes, all organisations can be made to do whatever the planners, controllers and managers want it to do.

We’ve even squeezed our understanding of science into this model. The mechanistic view of science states this – science is a matter of “observation, description, explanation, prediction and control”. This might work with machines, but we are beginning to discover, it doesn’t work when dealing with Life, human beings, Nature, or what the rest of us might call reality.

So, what’s the new model which is going to help us to see things differently for the next 500 years? It’s the network model. Take a look at this

Quite simply, networks are nodes and links. Some nodes have many links, others have only one or two. The nature of the links in organisms is “non-linear” , and a connected network of non-linear links produces a “complex adaptive system”.

Here are a couple of characteristics of complex adaptive systems which change everything –

They develop “emergent” behaviours. That means that the parts combined create something new, a new form, a new behaviour which could not have been predicted from an analysis of either the parts or the links. Emergent behaviours are one of the keys to growth and evolution. They are the basis of adaptability. They are unpredictable. You’ve heard of the “butterfly effect”? Where a small change in the starting state of a system produces huge changes in the end state?

The economy is like this. It is not predictable. 2008 financial crash. Predictable? Controllable?

Nature is like this. Tsunamis and earthquakes. Predictable? Controllable?

Human beings are like this. Choices, illnesses, responses to treatments. Predictable? Controllable?

Life is like this. Every single living organism is a complex adaptive system embedded in higher and higher orders of complex systems, from families, to communities, to species, to ecosystems, to planets……Predictable? Controllable?

But here’s another characteristic of these systems –

Self-organisation. Organic, complex, adaptive systems have the capacity to self-organise, self-regulate, self-repair, and in the case of living organisms, to self-replicate and make themselves (autopoiesis)

So the organisations of the future will be networks, not hierarchies. We can see now that human beings are not separate from Nature, and that all of Life on planet Earth is co-dependant, connected, and co-evolves. There isn’t Nature out there to predict and control. There isn’t an Earth out there to be plundered and consumed with no consequences to Life.

We can see a different way to live coming down the track towards us. We’re only at the beginning of this one, but here it is – we live, not in giant machine, but as complex organisms inextricably connected in a finite, complex Earth.

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There is a lot change going on. Let’s consider some of the big changes over the next few days.

Part 1 – ecological change

Two disturbing elements – population growth and resource depletion

First up, population growth – the increase in the number of people living on this little Earth is phenomenal in the last couple of hundred years. We’ve gone from 1 billion to 8 billion between 1800 and now. It’s not just the sheer numbers which are important, it’s the rate of change – the increase is increasing!

Secondly, non-renewable resources. So far, human beings have treated the world as if it is an infinite source of anything we want. But the problem is that we have consumed 80% of ALL known NON-RENEWABLE resources since 1800. Most of it has gone. How much is left?

Put these two developments together and what do you have? A rapidly increasing number of human beings rapidly consuming the finite resources of the Earth.

What does this mean?

The Age of Abundance is past.

And yet, in every country of the world, economists and politicians push for “growth” – greater and greater consumption by more and more people. This isn’t sustainable. We are going to hit the point where the “growth curves” start to dive, dive, dive.

So, the questions include, when and how are we going to change course?

The times they are a’changin’……….

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