Lag in Sociological Evolution Has Become an Existential Problem

Photo by Crawford Jolly on Unsplash 

Technology has evolved from the invention of the tool to the machine to the automated machine. From stone spearheads to autonomous cars in 5,000 years. The evolution of our society has not been able to keep pace.

Sociological studies of primates show that their societal structures are very stable. For instance, the gorilla formed the societal artifice of a single male with a harem about 16 million years ago and it has evolved little, if any, since. Humans are primates but are not as socially rigid as the gorilla. At some point we went from individual mating couples to banding together in mixed sex groups in a short period of time, apparently to take advantage of strength in numbers. Out of tribes came the ancient civilizations. 

The ancient world was a very fluid and free time for humanity. One could travel unfettered all over the world if you had the means and sufficient bodyguards. There was very little restriction. Restrictions on travel did not occur until the third and fourth centuries of the Roman Empire when serfdom came into being. Serfs were not allowed to travel and had to accept their lord’s conditions of existence. The Romans even invented the “passport” to control travel. Shortly afterward, during the Renaissance, the idea of nation states took hold, allowing rulers to control valuable labor and get rid of unwanted ethnic and religious minorities simply be importing or exporting them across borders. 

This is pretty much where we are stuck now. The nation state system has been in effect since the Renaissance 700 years ago, although superficially changed by colonialism and two world wars. Our society has gone from mating pairs to tribalism to nation states over the past 800,000 years. Our technological advances make our sociological advances look quaint. Technologically, we have gone from fire to nuclear fusion. Sociologically, we have gone from mating pairs to large, combative groups of mating pairs—not that great of an advancement. One could argue it is a regression. 

Societies were originally invented to protect all the members of that society. The accumulation of wealth, power, and technology by a few in these societies has allowed the original intent of protection for all members to be perverted into protection of those members with wealth and power. The extent of this varies a lot from country to country. For a dichotomy look at Scandinavian countries with their social democracy versus the U.S. with its blatant plutocracy. Quality of life in America is plunging. Lifespans are shortening. Infant and maternal death rates are rising. Four in ten people in the U.S. would not be able to come up with a $400 emergency expense. People die without healthcare. Two-thirds of bankruptcies are for medical reasons. Scandinavians, on the other hand, regularly survey as being some of the happiest people on Earth. They have little inequality of income and universal single payer healthcare. 

This article is not about the vagaries of American society. America is just an example of what can go wrong in the current sociological setting. There are other countries just as bad or worse than the United States, and that is the point. 

No country on Earth takes the stand that the world’s resources are for everybody, not just those that figure out how to wheedle them out of everybody else. And that is the end game of capitalism. One person ends up with everything. The only game worse is communism where everybody ends up with nothing. Capitalism being the economic mechanism du jour for the world does not mean that, as a species, we are well and totally fucked. It seems to be working in countries where money is not allowed to buy votes or legislation. It is not working in America. American needs to come up with a way to control capitalism so that it reflects a benefit for all parties involved instead of only a few. We still all collectively need clean air and water, food, health care, shelter, and education. We need a climate that is not going to morph into a man killer or destroyer of homes. 

The Scandinavian countries have managed a balancing act of free market capitalism and a comprehensive welfare state using a parliamentary democracy. We would do well to look at and, perhaps borrow, some of their methods. 

Climate change has added an urgency to the mix. What we need now is a world organization that has the power to control nations similar to what nations now have in controlling their individual states or prefectures—a United Nations on steroids or everything Lance Armstrong took to win Tour de France seven times. 

We cannot keep letting our sociological evolution slip backwards while our technical evolution soars. Technology is giving tools to individuals that allow them to take advantage of others to an extent that was never possible in pre-technology. And the rate at which that is happening is increasing geometrically. We have become thinly veneered reptilian brains with nukes and lasers and military grade psychological warfare techniques. 

Is it hopeless? Are we doomed? Will we succumb, as a species, to the baser instincts DNA has provided to survive a landscape of dire wolves, cave lions, and giant bears? I think it depends on those other facilities nature gave us. Our capacity for empathy and love and understanding must be developed on an individual basis to be able, as a group, to decide how to go forward into a better future. It is dependent on us … no, it is dependent on you to love your neighbor as yourself. It is dependent on you to understand we are all human beings with the same wants and desires for well-being and happiness no matter which side of whatever border we come from. Once that happens on an individual basis then no, we are not doomed. It is not hopeless. We can then decide through the mechanism of our democratic society the correct path forward. And when that happens we will know that our social evolution is back on track to catch up with our technological evolution after seven hundred years of stagnation. 

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Carbon Capture and Sequestration (CCS): The Existential Technology We Are Ignoring

Photo by Cata on Unsplash

Our modern lives insulate us from and make us forget a knowledge that came simply and unforgettably to our hunter-gatherer forebears. That is the discrimination between needs and desires. We don’t need smartphones, automobiles, TV, indoor plumbing, granite countertops, Nikes, non-fat lattes with caramel drizzles, YouTube, scented candles, or video games. We do need food, air, water, a modicum of shelter, and a proper temperature range in which our species can exist. The last was a given until recently. That’s why there’s no life on Mars or Venus—too cold, too hot. The fact that temperatures go up in lockstep with CO2 levels now makes CO2 capture and sequestration mandatory to provide us with one of our necessities, a livable temperature range. 

If you want to make a lot of money, figure out a cheap way to remove CO2 from the atmosphere and stash it somewhere for several hundred years or forever. Everyone will thank you and shower you with cash. Ahahaha! That’s not true, but it should be true. Unfortunately, Trump is gutting U.S. funding for research in this area. That leaves the Chinese as the world leader for this technology. At the rate CO2 levels are increasing, we may end up renting the technology from them. Ironic, since they probably stole the idea from us to begin with. 

Since energy companies revealed they are spending 5 trillion dollars over the next decade for fossil fuel exploration, it is a foregone conclusion that CO2 capture and sequestration (CCS) will be a technology of existential necessity.  The fossil fuel industry has an enormous cache of wealth acquired at the expense of the Earth’s climate. They are going to use that wealth to continue doing what they do by gaming the legalized bribery system at the heart of many of America’s problems—lobbying. The energy companies plan to sell combustibles until fossil fuels are gone, they are too expensive to extract at a profit, or their client base has plummeted due to “natural causes.” 

We are currently at 413 ppm CO2. We are on track to hit 550 ppm by end of century. This will raise average temps 10.8 degrees Fahrenheit.  At some point in the next century, if we keep going at our current rate, we could see 700 to 900 ppm CO2, something not seen since the Eocene some 50 million years ago. Temperatures were up to 25 degrees Fahrenheit higher on average. There was no ice at the poles, but probably alligators and palm trees in Antartica. 

Looking at past geological records, it appears there is a lag time of one to four centuries for sea levels to catch up to rapid changes in CO2 levels. None have been as rapid as the last 200 years. We know that sea levels were a hundred feet higher during the Miocene, 15 million years ago, when CO2 levels were similar to what we have now. The reason we don’t see that large increase in sea levels or the 11 degrees F. higher temperature yet is because of the buffer provided by our still-cool, deep ocean waters. Ninety percent of the ocean is between 32 and 37.5 degrees Fahrenheit. But over the next couple of centuries we will see increasingly rapid elevations in sea levels and temperature. 

If we burn the rest of our fossil fuels scientists estimate atmospheric CO2 levels could rise to 1000–5000 ppm. If it is toward the upper limits of this estimate, it is debatable whether life will continue as we know it on Earth. Before we get there fossil fuel companies will, hopefully, realize they could lose their customers and, therefore, make some changes. These same scientists say just 450 ppm will be disastrous. It is a certainty we will reach that. With uncontrolled fossil fuel use and no capture and sequestration, CO2 levels will easily blow past 500 ppm; and our civilization could collapse under the strain of drought, food chain disruption, defrosted pathogens, resource wars, heat prostration, and tropical diseases. 

That is where CCS comes in. Various means of scrubbing CO2 from the air have been developed. It is then used for making lubricating oil and putting the fizz in soda water. Those are pretty small markets for the amount of CO2 we need to eliminate. Plus, who is going to pay for it on the industrial scale that is required. It would be ideal for those responsible for the CO2 in the first place to pay for capture and sequestration by implementing a carbon tax or a cap-and-trade scheme. Otherwise, we are simply paying to clean up the energy companies’ mess which, in the end, may not be out of the realm of possibilities.

In the past it was thought that CO2 capture would have to take place at those industries where it is produced—chemical, power, concrete, steel, and fertilizer plants. Then it would be pumped somewhere to be injected into the ground. This is very expensive and unlikely to be adopted. 

A recently developed CCS technology allows carbon to be extracted directly from the air. Not oddly at all, it is called Direct Air Capture (DAC). With current technology it may be possible to get this down to about $100 dollars per ton. It needs to be ten times less expensive ($10 to $20 per ton) not to be a drag on the economy. This is the only technology that can realize a carbon negative offset. In other words, it could remove more carbon than is produced by mankind and nature to reduce overall levels in the atmosphere. The only alternative coming close is massive reforestation and afforestation. These have their own sets of problems and need funding to iron out the bugs. 

The problem is money. No one except a few universities and Bill Gates are spending money in the U.S. to develop this technology. It is not enough that we strip carbon out of the atmosphere. It must be put in a stable environment or condition and left there for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. Turn it back into limestone? Make CO2-foamed concrete? Make plastic to feed our 3D printers? Plant all available land with trees? I don’t know. That is why we need some smart people working on this right away.

Environmentalists are in a moral tug of war about CO2 capture and sequestration. Some believe it will give the fossil fuel companies an incentive to keep on doing what they are doing. That ship has sailed. We cannot be picky now about how carbon is removed from the atmosphere. It is all good, but CCS offers at least the possibility to reverse the levels of carbon in the atmosphere, staving off the worst of global warning until the climate stabilizes at a reasonable temperature—one of the basic needs that will allow us to keep on drinking non-fat lattes with caramel drizzles. 

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The Weapon of Mass Destruction Nobody Is Talking About

Peacekeeper missile testing — courtesy Wikipedia

On April 26, 2018, around 10:30 am two men in a semi truck were stopped for erratic driving near Kearney, NE on I-80. They were acting suspicious, so the truck was searched, revealing secret compartments containing 118 pounds of fentanyl.

Authorities estimated there was enough fentanyl to kill approximately twenty-seven million people, nearly 10 percent of the U.S. population.

This isn’t the first time such a large amount of fentanyl has been seized. One hundred pounds was seized in New Jersey in January of 2018. The two men involved are now in jail.

Let us look at what could have happened that day in late April in Kearney, Nebraska. What if the men in the truck decided to run for it, thinking they could lure the police car along side and run it off the road. A high speed chase evolves with the perpetrators getting on state highway 44 going south off of I-80 towards the Platte River. They lose control of the truck going over the Platte River bridge, vault the guard rail, and slam into the shallow river. The trailer bursts into pieces allowing 43 packages of fentanyl to go into the Platte River.

Paper bags take 5 X the water to make and 7 X the fuel to transport than plastic bags 

The packages release their deadly contents as they float along the Platte River to the Missouri River. Omaha, Kansas City, St. Louis, Memphis, Vicksburg, Natchez, Baton Rouge, New Orleans, and the Gulf of Mexico are all downstream from Kearney. Nearly three million people in those cities are at risk. Thousands more living along the rivers could die. Farmers could use it on crops, endangering millions of people eating those crops. Millions of birds, including half a million sand hill cranes could die. Billions of fish, including those in the Gulf of Mexico, could be wiped out.

Imagine the Mexican cartels have decided to bring in fentanyl over the southern border of the U.S. I can’t imagine they haven’t thought about it or done it already. They are using a small plane flying low over the Arizona border. It crashes in a wind storm, part of a dry cool front moving west, near I-10. The hundred pound bag of fentanyl breaks open and powdered fentanyl is carried across Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas, killing thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands, before it disperses enough to not be deadly.

Now imagine if that plane were carrying carfentanil, elephant tranquilizer, a drug 100 times more potent than fentanyl. The winds could be deadly all the way to the East Coast, causing approximately 100 million people to overdose on opioids. That 118 pound seizure in Kearney, Nebraska would be able to kill 2.7 billion people, one third of the population of the world, if it were carfentanil.

In fact, the routine check of a carbon monoxide alarm guided Canadian authorities to 92 pounds of carfentanil in the basement of a Pickering, Canada home. More sleuthing uncovered a shipment of printer cartridges from China shipped to Vancouver that contained 2.2 of pounds of carfentanil so pure it would have yielded 50 million fatal doses. That’s enough to kill every one in Canada and 14 million Americans to boot.

Great way to carry your groceries; + trash, dirty clothes, food prep waste, garden clippings, used cat litter, etc. 

Real, actual weapons of mass destruction, more deadly than dozens of nuclear weapons, are reaching the shores of the United States; and nobody talks about it. While 4 ounces of gunpowder in a sealed pipe is considered a weapon of mass destruction, it seems silly that nobody is talking about the megadeath this drug represents. Why aren’t alarm bells going off? Does our government even realize the danger these drugs represent? If it does, nothing is being said about it. I’m sure the local law enforcement is proud to have made these interceptions, but no higher government authority has mentioned the implications of such huge quantities of a drug. It has been compared to nerve gas agents in its lethality per volume. We bombed Syria for using such a substance on its own people.

It’s bad enough if the drug is distributed. It will kill hundreds, maybe thousands, from overdose. The accidental dispersal of such large amounts needs to be given some thought because it could kill millions of innocent people. Victims will just sit or lie down and go to sleep forever. The dosages could be such that no amount of naloxone will bring them back.

Eastern Seaboard — courtesy Wikimedia

You can’t stop there. what if this drug is deliberately used as a terror weapon? Carfentanil costs about $2,700 per kilo from China. A small plane can be rigged to fly like a drone with off-the-shelf technology. A simple device to stir up the powder and release it gradually is attached to the underside of the wings on each side. Total cargo weight is about 100 pounds of drug and distribution equipment and 100 pounds of drone automation. When the wind is blowing gently onto shore, it starts flying north and east of Boston, down the coast and includes Manhattan Island, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington D.C. It crashes after about 600 miles by running out of fuel or getting shot down, but not before millions are dead. The drugs and plane would cost less than $250,000.

This is an existential threat, not only to the U.S., but to the world. Someone needs to start talking about how to deal with it.

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Keep On Smiling

“With age comes wisdom.” When I first heard this I thought “How much frigging wiser can I get?” At ...ahem...34, I’m over twice as wise now and I know this: I was dumber than dirt then and I’m still dumber than dirt. The difference is that now I know I’m dumber than dirt. I’m exaggerating. Dirt’s pretty dumb. In realty, I’m infinitely smarter than dirt but there could be beings out there infinitely smarter than me. Don’t ask me to draw the chart.

I do know this. Compared to the vast immensity of the universe we are but a few sprinkling of atoms coalesced and brought to life by a miracle as yet beyond our understanding to be able to have a self-awareness of that condition. It doesn’t even matter that there are seven billion of us; as an individual, the odds of us just being here are like winning the Powerball Lottery five hundred times in a row. Whatever you’re experiencing, remember that out of the entire universe, a comparatively minuscule dot of matter was animated so that you could ask the question, “Why me?” Not many other collections of molecules in the universe can do that. Feel better? Yes? Then smile. No? Sorry. Go have a Dos Equis and smile anyway. Beer is another miracle of the universe.

Thanks,
Glen Hendrix, author of Transmat World