The Yellow Peril: Propaganda and the Pandemic

 

The idea of the "Yellow Peril" about China was once a common way of thinking. Here I am illustrating how bad could that be from a short story by Jack London. Given the current situation, I wouldn't bet that this kind of attitude couldn't return, together with proposals for wiping out the Chinese population by means of biological warfare. Image source

 

As I was surfing the Web looking for data about how the Chinese government managed the COVID epidemic, I found this short story written by Jack London about a future where China grows so much that the Western Powers band together to exterminate the Chinese. They do so by means of a campaign of biological warfare that kills most of the Chinese population. Then, the survivors are killed by conventional weapons by the Western armies that invade China. Finally, Westerners sanitize and colonize the empty Chinese territory, resulting in an era of "splendid output."

I have to say that I was a little shocked: I knew Jack London for his "The Call of the Wild" and "White Fang," both could be seen as enlightened stories about the power of nature and the value of animal life. That London, who could so well understand the mind of a wolf, would so badly misunderstand the Oriental mind was a little unsettling, to say the least. On this, I later found that several critical essays on this story maintain that it was to be understood as ironic. Maybe, but I am sure many people who read the story took it at face value. 

So, we have here a description of a racially driven extermination of an entire population, done using biological weapons, the whole is said in glowing terms and apparently completely approved by the author. Hard to think of something more evil than this. Remarkable how this story could be published without anyone, apparently, complaining. 

But the curious thing about this story is that, although the story of the "Yellow Peril" seems to have gone out of fashion (fortunately), people in the West still badly misunderstand China. For instance, recently it has become fashionable to accuse China to have waged, or attempted to wage, a biological war against the West using the COVID-19 as a weapon (unlikely, to say the least!). Also, the fact that China managed to contain the epidemic much better than Western countries didn't generate a friendly attitude. 

The Western propaganda machine has been set in motion in this issue and the result is a wave of anti-Chinese feelings. I have seen many comments in the social media of people who seem to see the Chinese in the same way as they are described in London's story: a nation of incomprehensible and brutish individuals who eat bats and dogs and cultivate other disgusting habits. We haven't arrived yet to the proposal of exterminating the Chinese using biological weapons, but, who knows? The future always surprises you and the idea of "ethnic bioweapons" is circulating and probably being studied in the world's bioweapon labs. On this, London could have been prophetic, unfortunately.

Anyway, if you have 5 minutes, you can use them to take a look at this horrible thing that I still hope was to be understood as irony.

"The Unparalleled Invasion," by Jack London, 1910.

 Some excerpts (you can find the whole text here)

What they had failed to take into account was this: THAT BETWEEN THEM AND CHINA WAS NO COMMON PSYCHOLOGICAL SPEECH. Their thought- processes were radically dissimilar. There was no intimate vocabulary. The Western mind penetrated the Chinese mind but a short distance when it found itself in a fathomless maze. The Chinese mind penetrated the Western mind an equally short distance when it fetched up against a blank, incomprehensible wall. It was all a matter of language. There was no way to communicate Western ideas to the Chinese mind. China remained asleep. The material achievement and progress of the West was a closed book to her; nor could the West open the book. Back and deep down on the tie-ribs of consciousness, in the mind, say, of the English-speaking race, was a capacity to thrill to short, Saxon words; back and deep down on the tie-ribs of consciousness of the Chinese mind was a capacity to thrill to its own hieroglyphics; but the Chinese mind could not thrill to short, Saxon words; nor could the English-speaking mind thrill to hieroglyphics. The fabrics of their minds were woven from totally different stuffs. They were mental aliens. And so it was that Western material achievement and progress made no dent on the rounded sleep of China.

For many centuries China's population had been constant. Her territory had been saturated with population; that is to say, her territory, with the primitive method of production, had supported the maximum limit of population. But when she awoke and inaugurated the machine-civilization, her productive power had been enormously increased. Thus, on the same territory, she was able to support a far larger population. At once the birth rate began to rise and the death rate to fall. Before, when population pressed against the means of subsistence, the excess population had been swept away by famine. But now, thanks to the machine-civilization, China's means of subsistence had been enormously extended, and there were no famines; her population followed on the heels of the increase in the means of subsistence.

There was no combating China's amazing birth rate. If her population was a billion, and was increasing twenty millions a year, in twenty-five years it would be a billion and a half - equal to the total population of the world in 1904. And nothing could be done. There was no way to dam up the over-spilling monstrous flood of life. War was futile. China laughed at a blockade of her coasts. She welcomed invasion. In her capacious maw was room for all the hosts of earth that could be hurled at her. And in the meantime her flood of yellow life poured out and on over Asia. China laughed and read in their magazines the learned lucubrations of the distracted Western scholars.

But on May 1, 1976, had the reader been in the imperial city of Peking, with its then population of eleven millions, he would have witnessed a curious sight. He would have seen the streets filled with the chattering yellow populace, every queued head tilted back, every slant eye turned skyward. And high up in the blue he would have beheld a tiny dot of black, which, because of its orderly evolutions, he would have identified as an airship. From this airship, as it curved its flight back and forth over the city, fell missiles - strange, harmless missiles, tubes of fragile glass that shattered into thousands of fragments on the streets and house- tops. But there was nothing deadly about these tubes of glass. Nothing happened. There were no explosions. It is true, three Chinese were killed by the tubes dropping on their heads from so enormous a height; but what were three Chinese against an excess birth rate of twenty millions? One tube struck perpendicularly in a fish-pond in a garden and was not broken. It was dragged ashore by the master of the house. He did not dare to open it, but, accompanied by his friends, and surrounded by an ever-increasing crowd, he carried the mysterious tube to the magistrate of the district. The latter was a brave man. With all eyes upon him, he shattered the tube with a blow from his brass-bowled pipe. Nothing happened. Of those who were very near, one or two thought they saw some mosquitoes fly out. That was all. The crowd set up a great laugh and dispersed.

The wretched creatures stormed across the Empire in many-millioned flight. The vast armies China had collected on her frontiers melted away. The farms were ravaged for food, and no more crops were planted, while the crops already in were left unattended and never came to harvest. The most remarkable thing, perhaps, was the flights. Many millions engaged in them, charging to the bounds of the Empire to be met and turned back by the gigantic armies of the West. The slaughter of the mad hosts on the boundaries was stupendous. Time and again the guarding line was drawn back twenty or thirty miles to escape the contagion of the multitudinous dead.

 During all the summer and fall of 1976 China was an inferno. There was no eluding the microscopic projectiles that sought out the remotest hiding-places. The hundreds of millions of dead remained unburied and the germs multiplied themselves, and, toward the last, millions died daily of starvation. Besides, starvation weakened the victims and destroyed their natural defences against the plagues. Cannibalism, murder, and madness reigned. And so perished China.

They found China devastated, a howling wilderness through which wandered bands of wild dogs and desperate bandits who had survived. All survivors were put to death wherever found. And then began the great task, the sanitation of China. Five years and hundreds of millions of treasure were consumed, and then the world moved in - not in zones, as was the idea of Baron Albrecht, but heterogeneously, according to the democratic American programme. It was a vast and happy intermingling of nationalities that settled down in China in 1982 and the years that followed - a tremendous and successful experiment in cross-fertilization. We know to-day the splendid mechanical, intellectual, and art output that followed.

 

 

Fighting Overpopulation: Ten methods to exterminate most of humankind

First of all, a disclaimer: I am not advocating the extermination of anyone! This post is just an attempt of mine to place myself in the boots of the bad guys who could think of doing such a thing and examine how they could do it. Could these scenarios occur for real? I don't know but, as I say at the beginning of this blog, "always plan for the worst case hypothesis"

You know that there are people whom we call the "powers that be" (PTB) who can do things that we commoners can't even dream of doing. Obviously, they can't miss the fact that for decades the world's best scientists have been speaking about a coming collapse of the global ecosystem, mainly because of climate change. So, would they act on this knowledge? And, if so, how?

Like everybody else, the PTBs think in terms of their personal survival and some of them reacted to the threat by buying desert bunkers and stockpiling food and weapons in there. But what if some of them decided to take a more proactive stance? When the PTB decide that something is to be done, they usually succeed by a combination of propaganda, money, and sheer force. And you don't have to think that they are especially smart. They may well reason in simplified terms: what is the cause of the coming collapse? Those pesky humans, of course. Then, an obvious solution is to get rid of most of them.

The bad guys who plan the extermination of humankind are a classic element of science fiction, but large scale exterminations are a constant of real history. So, what shape could a large scale extermination plan take, nowadays? In the following, I tried to provide an answer. I don't know if I am evil enough for the task and, fortunately, I am not in the position to implement any of these plans. Also, I am sure I am teaching nothing to people who are much more evil than me. But here is what I came up with. The list doesn't include ways to reduce natality, only straight extermination. No "Armageddon Machines" either, I am considering methods that would leave at least someone alive. The methods are classed from the least efficient to the most efficient.


1. Biological warfare. A much-touted weapon that never delivered the promises it made. It is very difficult to attack a healthy population with a pathogen sufficiently lethal to generate a true extermination. The recent Covid-19 epidemic shows the problem: it was highly contagious but not very deadly. Indeed, if it had been much more lethal, it couldn't have diffused so fast. In the end, it caused little damage. At the end of the current cycle, the number of victims will probably be around 2 million, maybe more, but that's hardly a way to exterminate humankind if you consider that every year in the world some 60 million people die and about 140 million are born. Then, there is a worse problem: even if a pathogen with the appropriate lethality and infectivity could be developed, how can the exterminators avoid being exterminated? They may have a secret vaccine, but vaccines are never perfectly efficient and pathogens rapidly mutate, making vaccines useless. Overall evaluation: It just doesn't work.

2. Warfare. Wars can kill a large number of people but they normally stop short of exterminating whole populations. A state or coalition of states may wipe out the military forces of a less powerful coalition, but then the war is over and there is little incentive to keep killing civilians who are more useful as slaves than as cadavers. That's why in history wars are associated at most with a short term drop in population for the losing side. Besides, war is hugely expensive. You may use bullets, bombs, poison gases, or even just machetes, but you still have to manage armies, people, supplies, weapons, etc. All that just exterminate defenseless civilians? It makes little sense. Overall evaluation: too expensive.

3. Mass Poisoning. Food or water poisoning is a time-tested killing method that can be applied at various scales. In the simplest case, you can drop some rat poison in your aunt's coffee to cash in on her inheritance. On a larger scale, you could try to poison the food supply or the water supply of an entire country. The problem is how to do that without the targets reacting to the threat. That may not be difficult with an old aunt, but not so easy with a whole country. One trick could be to use a slow poison that doesn't kill before at least a few years. Indeed, much of what people eat nowadays can be considered as poison: excess sugar, heavy metals, plastic microparticles, carcinogenic chemicals, and more. But most of these systemic poisons are too slow to be useful as mass-extermination weapons since they tend to kill people only after they had a chance to reproduce. Psychoactive drugs may do better, but they also tend to be too slow. For instance, in the case of heroin, perhaps the most powerful drug available today, the number of lost years of life expectancy for average users is around 18. So, if the life expectancy in the US is 79, it means that heroin addicts die at 60 on the average -- not fast enough for meaningful mass extermination. We would need something like the fictional "Vibr" psychoactive drug invented by Antonio Turiel that kills users in five years. Such a drug doesn't exist so far, but it may be possible to create it. If it were cheap enough, it would indeed be a weapon of mass extermination. Overall evaluation: promising but not yet practical.

4. Climate Weapons. Altering the climate can surely kill a lot of people and that's exactly what the current global warming caused by human emission is geared to do in the coming decades. But this change will be long-lasting: we may not return to the pre-warming conditions before several tens of thousands of years have passed, and perhaps it will never happen. That's not what the PTB want: their objective is to get rid of most of the current population while leaving the planet mostly intact. Can we think of some climate weapon that would leave a habitable planet to the survivors? An interesting possibility is of engineering a "volcanic winter" by spreading large amounts of dust in the atmosphere, blocking the sun and starving people because of the damage to agriculture. In principle, the dust would settle after a few years and the planetary climate would return to what it was before. This scenario could be created by lobbing nukes into active volcanoes. The dust generated in this way should remain in the atmosphere long enough to starve to death most of the human population, while the rich would survive in their well-stocked bunkers. The main problem is how to calibrate the dust injection. If you exaggerate, you may damage the ecosystem so badly that it will need millions of years to recover, and you probably can't survive for so long in a bunker. Conversely, if the eruptions kill "just" a few billion people, the survivors won't be kind to you when they see you emerging unscathed out of your bunker. Overall evaluation: tempting, but too risky. 

5. Weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). It is a very popular concept, but not easy to define. Apart from being used as a propaganda tool to demonize 2nd-rate dictators, what do we mean exactly with "weapons of mass destruction"? The answer seems to be weapons involving a large kills/cost ratio and that can be used on a large scale, the typical example is nuclear weapons. There is little else that could qualify as "WMD," maybe radioactive poisoning substances and powerful electromagnetic pulses could do the job, but both need to be triggered by nuclear explosions so one could as well use the real thing. There is no doubt that a large scale nuclear war would exterminate a lot of people. The problem is that, although these weapons in themselves are not very expensive, the damage they do to infrastructures is gigantic, among other things making large areas uninhabitable for decades or even centuries -- to say nothing about possible disastrous climatic effects. That's not what a rational exterminator would want. Overall evaluation: may work, but it is too destructive.

6. Ethnic/political/ideological cleansing. It seems to be easy to convince people that their neighbors are evil because they speak a different language, their skin color is slightly different, or they tend to eat disgusting stuff. Sometimes, it happens even without the need of a propaganda operation. The result is often the extermination of a minority singled out as "bad," with the majority happily collaborating with the government in the task, or doing the extermination themselves. There have been many historical cases, the most recent one being the extermination of the Tutsi in Rwanda. Remarkably, that extermination was carried out by willing executioners who did the work for free and used weapons that weren't more sophisticated than machetes. So, it is a very cheap method of getting rid of a large number of people. The problem is that, for obvious reasons, a minority cannot normally exterminate a majority. So, in history, the method didn't normally result in an overall reduction of the population of the area where it was applied. Even the Rwandan disaster caused just a small bump in a population curve that later on restarted growing. Overall evaluation: risky and not very effective.

7. Eugenics. Eugenic policies are not normally thought of as ways to exterminate large numbers of people, but that may well be their side effect. Typical methods used involve forced sterilization, but may arrive at the physical elimination of people judged to be a burden to society. In modern times, eugenics in the form of "involuntary euthanasia" was used in practice only in Germany, during the Nazi rule. The number of German citizens eliminated in this way can be estimated as of the order of 100,000, not enough to have an effect on the German population. But, given enough time, the idea of getting rid of the useless people who are just a burden for society could be expanded and used for true mass extermination. Imagine laws that sentence everyone to death after reaching a certain age. So far they have been only described in fiction, such as in the 1978 movie "Logan's run," but fiction has a certain way to trickle into reality. Overall evaluation: a promising method, but not proven. 

8. Slaughterbots. Drones are the most fashionable weapon of our times and the concept of "slaughterbots" has been recently proposed: the idea is to build small and cheap drones that locate human beings and explode near their heads -- or do something equally nasty that kills people. Such small bots could cost no more than a smartphone and we know that more than 10 billion such phones were built since 2007. So, it would be reasonably possible to build billions of slaughterbots in a decade or so and spread them around the world. The poor would be the easiest to target, while the rich would be able to escape by having passwords to stop the bots, or simply hiding in suitable bunkers. Is it farfetched? Not at all: killer drones are being built right now. So far, they are very expensive and the reported number of people killed is in the range of a few thousands, at least officially. But the cost per kill ratio could be greatly reduced, just as it happened for cell phones. And, then, all the options are on the rotors. Overall evaluation: very promising and already in progress. 

9. Famines. Famines are well-known mass killers. Perhaps the most interesting case is the Irish famine of the mid 19th century. The Irish population depended on a monoculture, the potato crop, and when it failed for a few years in a row, half of the population of Ireland was wiped out. Today, the world's crops are much more resilient and agriculture seems to be still able to produce large amounts of food. But the problem, as I described in a previous post, is not food production, it is food supply. The world's food supply is vulnerable to a single factor: the globalized marine transportation system that carries food from producers to consumers and fertilizers and pesticides from the manufacturers to the users. If this system can be disrupted, the likely result will be that several billions of people would die by starvation. Wrecking the transportation system could be obtained by a war or, even more simply, by a downturn in the globalized financial system. In several respects, famine is the perfect extermination weapon. It costs little in comparison to its effects, it kills the poor while sparing the rich, it has long-lasting effects. It may not even need a specific intervention by the PTB, since it may develop by itself. Overall evaluation: Among the most effective methods available. 

10. Propaganda. "Consensus Building" (also known as "propaganda" or "psyops") is a set of technologies that define the structure and the functioning of the Western society. Propaganda seems to be able to convince people of just about anything, so could it be used for depopulating a country? Of course, it is hard to convince people to kill themselves, but it was attempted at least once in history. During the last phases of WW2, the British diffused postcards in Germany, supposedly issued by the German government, with detailed instructions on how to hang oneself (coded H1321 and H.1380). Nobody can say if the several thousand German civilians who committed suicide before the arrival of the allied troops did that as an effect of the British pro-suicide propaganda, surely it was an interesting attempt. But propaganda can be used in different and more creative ways. Typically, people can be convinced to do something that's contrary to their own interest if they are sufficiently scared that not doing that would lead to worse consequences. So, propaganda could convince most people in the US that a universal health care system is bad for them because it would be "communism". Then, propaganda can be used to convince people to eat unhealthy food, use health-damaging medicaments, refuse life-saving cures, and more. All that is being done right now, but the scare tactics can be stepped up with more rapid results. For instance, some people were so scared of the coronavirus epidemic that they thought it was a good idea to drink bleach to fight it. This effect was probably not expected, but ways to obtain it on a much larger scale could surely be developed. Overall evaluation: Still to be studied, but shows great promise. 
____________________________________________________________

And here we stand. After this exercise, I thought I would feel shocked just because of having thought of these ideas. But, really, I wasn't. What you discover by thinking the unthinkable is that nothing is too evil that it wasn't thought at some time in history, and sometimes put into practice. Also, I am not really worried that I could inspire someone into being more evil than they already are. So, I leave this text here as an exercise. Hopefully, none of these methods will ever be used, but the future always surprises you.





A comment from Ugo Bardi's personal troll, Mr. Kunning-Druger

And I see, Mr. Bardi, that as usual, you are stupid enough to reveal the plans of your friends and acolytes. The people who are engaged in these extermination plans are not those you call the "PTB" but the greenies who have been engaged in that task since the idea was proposed for the first time by the evil group of which you are part, the Club of Rome. Fortunately, their predictions turned out to be all wrong and they were discovered and prevented from carrying out their plans. Now we know that there are no limits to growth and your evil ideas will keep being thwarted and it is good that it will be so. 

KD

Overpopulation: Are You Sure it is an Ignored Problem?

In the 1960s and 1970s, the problem of world overpopulation was often debated, and birth control was proposed as a solution. It soon became politically incorrect even to mention this subject in public, but it may be that it wasn't forgotten, but it is rather being acted upon in ways that don't involve a public debate. I recognize that this post is a little catastrophistic, but some posts just write themselves and this is what happened with this one

In July of every year, the WWF usually alerts of the arrival of the "Fish Dependence Day" that marks the date when the European consumption of fish equals the projected yearly production from European seas. There follows that, from that day onward, Europeans eat only imported fish or offshore fish up to the end of the year. It is just one of the many indicators of the overexploitation of the world's natural resources, fish is just an example as I and my coworker Perissi describe in our recent book "The Empty Sea".

You probably know that the politically correct way to mention overexploitation is to say that we should be more careful, consume a little less, diversify, avoid the most overexploited stocks of resources, and that then everything will be well. This is the way I reported the 2020 Fish Dependence Day in an article I wrote for an Italian newspaper. But the anonymous comments I received were most politically incorrect: the majority of them blamed overpopulation. Most of these comments were not sophisticated: the idea was simply that the fewer people there are, the less the pressure on the ecosystem is. So, reduce the population and -- magically -- all problems are solved, from fish depletion to climate change.

Of course, that brings a small problem: how do you reduce population? The politically correct way to mention the problem is to immediately add a disclaimer in which you explain that you are not planning to kill or sterilize anyone, but just to use rational arguments to convince people that it is in their best interest to have fewer children. But, as you may imagine, even the disclaimer above won't save you from attacks from both sides of the problem: some people will accuse you to deny the population problem, others to overemphasize it, and both will accuse you of planning the extermination of humankind.

But in this post, let me try the untriable and face the unfaceable. In other words, to discuss how could states and societies act on overpopulation once they decide it is an important problem? (and, maybe, they already have decided that)

Let's start by saying that the whole debate on population, as it is today, is pure smoke and mirrors, as most public debates are. It is the way things are: debates are not there to take decisions, they are encouraged by the powers that be (PTB) in order to create confusion, divide the public, and make any decision difficult or impossible -- especially those decisions that the PTB don't like. But that doesn't mean decisions are not taken. It is just that they derive from different mechanisms. 

In some cases, decisions are taken by the PTB and then forced on people by means of laws, police, jails, and the like. Perhaps more often, they are the result of a form of collective intelligence that exists in all societies. No man is an island, and that applies also to decisions regarding family size: humans do not breed like rabbits. They decide according to a wide range of social conventions, laws, customs, peer pressure, and more. And the result is a certain degree of "population policy" that takes hold even in the absence of specific laws. As I describe in my book "The Seneca Effect", the Japanese society attained a nearly perfect population stabilization during the Edo period without any specific government intervention.

But often things are not so idyllic. Let's see a few historical examples, approximately ordered in terms of increasingly proactive societal intervention.

1. Ireland after the great famine. You probably know the story of the great famine that struck Ireland starting in 1846. In about one decade, Ireland had lost about half of its population to a combination of starvation, disease, and emigration. The interesting point of this story is that the Irish did NOT try to compensate for the losses by having more children. They did exactly the opposite, they reduced birthrates. The Irish of those times didn't have good contraceptives, but they coped mainly by retarding the marriage age and by adopting a lifestyle that discouraged sexual activity among young people. And they did the right thing: after the famine, the Irish population grew at a much slower rate than before, and today it has not yet reached the level of before the great famine. This is a very interesting story because it shows how a whole society can take a decision on a collective behavior without the need for this decision being enforced by a government. But note also that the Irish arrived at this decision only after having being struck with the equivalent of a hammer blow to the head. The Irish society as a whole had no predictive capabilities, it could only act after the disaster had already taken place.

2. The demographic transition. The modern decline of birthrates called the "demographic transition" can take different forms. In China, an official government program was enforced in the 1970s to limit the families to one child each. It involved financial penalties and forced sterilization and it was kept in place until 2016. The results were not so drastic as it might have been expected and the Chinese population continued to increase, although at progressively slower rates. In the West, the transition was more gradual and it may have started with the beginning of the 20th century, but the results were similar: slow decline of birthrates and gradual stabilization of the population size. In both cases, we may say that society reacted to the perception that population couldn't continue to grow exponentially forever. It may not be impossible that in both China and the West society had metabolized some of the results of the "Limits to Growth" study of 1972 and were reacting to it, even though the study soon became another politically incorrect story. For the Chinese, the result was an explicit government program of birth control, something that was possible in a strong state as argued by Chandran Nair in his recent book "The Sustainable State." In the West, instead, the concept of "birth control" soon became unspeakable in political terms, but it was implemented in practice by Western women on their own initiative.This case shows that there is a certain degree of societal intelligence that can react to the assessment of future threats. It is a limited capability though. The decline in birthrates was very slow and didn't lead to a population decline.

3. Eugenic policies in the West. This is a sensitive subject, not often discussed and for which it is not easy to find extensive data. In any case, eugenics is not, normally, about reducing the population size, but that may well be a side effect. Typical methods used involve forced sterilization and may arrive at "involuntary euthanasia." (a nice euphemism, although not so impressive as others that came in fashion in later times, such as "humanitarian bombs"). Eugenics made a fleeting appearance during the first half of the 20th century (and a little beyond that) in the West, mostly in the US and in Germany. In the US, eugenic policies had a decidedly racial aspect. Sterilizations targeted mostly minority groups seen as inferior (Blacks, Mexicans, Native Americans, etc.), but it doesn't seem that forced euthanasia was used. In Germany, the idea arrived later, with the Nazis in the 1930s, but it was practiced with much more enthusiasm and it involved the elimination of entire minority groups. We all know the case of the Jews, but the German state also engaged in the killing of a significant number of German citizens, although not on a scale that could reduce the population size. This case is interesting because it shows how a society can literally go crazy and enact drastic measures of population control that are not only probably useless but surely evil.



These are just examples, but I think it is possible to take a few general conclusions from them. The main one is that a society under strain may react by enacting laws or developing customs to influence the population size. Up to relatively recent times, states tried to overcome crises by increasing the birthrate of their citizens -- some still do that. It was a way to obtain more cannon fodder (or, even earlier, more blade fodder). But with the 20th century, military might was not anymore proportional to the number of soldiers that a state could field. So, the societal response to a crisis could be to stabilize the population and optimize the economy by reducing birthrates, in some cases even by using drastic methods such as eugenics. 

Now, in our times, there is no doubt that we are in a crisis, a very serious crisis, a crisis that no other society ever faced in the past. No matter what Steven Pinker tells us about things getting better, it is clear that they are not getting better when tens of thousands of the best world's scientists keep telling us that climate change is going to destroy our civilization. You may fault capitalism, the rich, inequality, the psychopaths in power, all that. Sure, but it is legitimate to think (even though it may not be said) that 8 billion people are a problem.

Let me state again that I am not here to propose any population policy: I have no such capability, nor title, and not even interest in doing that. I am just wondering about how society (and the Western society in particular) could react to the perception that, 1) there exists a very serious existential problem, and 2) it may be caused by overpopulation.

Clearly, reducing birthrates would not be enough: alone, it can't be fast enough to counteract the dire scenarios that we face in terms of ecosystem disruption. An "Ireland-like" scenario may well be in the cards: a major famine could halve the world's population, as it happened in Ireland in the mid-19th century. In that case, the population may not restart growing after the disaster and the worst-case climate scenarios might be averted. Alternatively, there would be the possibility of a new round of eugenic programs. That would be the most drastic and desperate attempt to react to the threat. Could that happen for real? It is true that eugenics is considered a bad word, but that doesn't mean it can't be implemented under different names.

The recent COVID-19 epidemics gave us a good example of what Western governments can do in an emergency, or what they perceive as an emergency. As an example, let me report a recent statement by Alan Dershowitz

“Let me put it very clearly: you have no constitutional right to endanger the public and spread the disease, even if you disagree. You have no right not to be vaccinated. … And if you refuse to be vaccinated, the state has the power to literally take you to a doctor’s office and plunge a needle into your arm.”

Which is a pretty good description of what the new eugenic policies might look like. It would all be for your own good, of course, but you cannot oppose being inoculated with something you would rather avoid to be inoculated with. And if you protest, you'll be branded as an enemy of the people and punished accordingly.

So, we could see something like what Antonio Turiel's described in his fictional story titled "Good Vibrations." In it, he shows how a government decides to get rid of the people considered a burden for the economy by enforcing the consumption of an anti-depressant drug that has the unfortunate side-effect of killing those who take it in about 5 years. Even without forcing people to take a deadly drug, governments could simply let the commerce of opioid drugs expand, with the result of obtaining the elimination of a good fraction of the "useless" people. It could happen.... wait... It is already happening!


And so we conclude that the future is indeed an interesting place. After all, we are all going there. But there are no maps of the future and so we don't know what we'll find there. Maybe it won't be so bad as some say it could be, or maybe we'll find it is much worse. Who knows? Just enjoy the ride: it is free!

The Return of the Black Death? The Coronavirus as an Agent of Population Collapse

Always plan for the worst-case hypothesis!  

 

The four horsemen of the apocalypse by Albrecht Durer (1498): famine, plague, war, and death itself. For sure, the ancients understood that collapses come from a combination of several different factors. It is the essence of what I call the "Seneca Effect." Today, if the coronavirus remains isolated as a threat to human life, it won't cause a population decline. But if the other horsemen intervene, then things could change for the worse.

The data about the coronavirus epidemic are starting to look scary. Yes, the Chinese government has taken draconian measures. And it is also true that the spreading of the infection in China is slowing down. So, if nothing unexpected happens, it is likely that the epidemy will be contained. But, as we all know, the real world always has ways to surprise us. So, let's drop for a while the "likely" adjective and ask the uncomfortable question: what is the worst that can happen? Could we see a serious collapse of the world's population?  

As usual, if we want to understand the future, we need first to understand the past. So, let's look at some data for the greatest pandemics of the past, those that swept Europe during the Middle Ages and afterward:

European Population in history (from Langer, W. L. The Black Death. Sci. Am. 210, 114–121 (1964))

These data are somewhat uncertain, but there is a general agreement that the great plague of the 14th century (correctly termed "Black Death") wiped out about 40% of the European population, some say more than that. As worst cases go, this is surely one.

Could a new plague do the same to us? Why not? If it happened in the past, it could happen again. But, of course, it can happen only if similar conditions will occur. If we examine the case of the European plagues in detail, we see that they never struck at random times, they struck already troubled populations. Viruses and bacteria are opportunistic creatures that tend to expand when they find a weak target.

In the case of the 14th century Black Death, it hit Europe after the failure of the attempt to expand to the East with the crusades. Europe found itself overpopulated, in the midst of a social and cultural crisis, and with no way out. The result was a series of famines, internecine wars, and social and political turmoil that opened the door for the plague to strike. Something similar happened with the second main plague burst of the 17th century. It arrived after the 30-years war had destroyed the very fabric of European society, creating poverty, famines, and the displacement of entire populations.

The rule that pandemics come with famines holds also for the last (so far) great world pandemic: the Spanish flu of 1918-1920. It was associated with the extensive famines generated by the first world war. Unlike the case of the Black Death, though, the Spanish flu struck against a background of economic expansion and population growth. By all means, it was a disaster: it may have killed about 1-2% of the world population of the time (that is 20-50 million victims out of a population of about 2 billion). But it barely caused a dent in the population growth curves of the 20th century. Other modern epidemics, AIDS, Ebola, SARS, etc., either do not exist in the West or, as in the case of AIDS, are expanding only in poor countries suffering from lack of food and poor health care systems (again, so far).

Conversely, famines can cause extensive depopulation even when not associated with plagues. A good example is the Irish famine of 1848. It wiped out about half of the Irish population in a few years, but it was not associated with a specific human disease. Sometimes, you don't even need famines to cause depopulation: social and economic stress is enough. A good example in modern times is that of Ukraine, where the population started declining in the early 1990s and it is still declining after the loss of some 20% of the total. There were no epidemics nor famines involved: the Ukrainians died as the result of a combination of poor quality food, lack of health care facilities, bad government, depression, heavy drugs, alcohol, and more.

  Ukrainian population – data from the World Bank


There is a general rule, here: disasters never come alone (when sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions). It is because when a complex system is in overshoot, it is fragile: it is sensible to even minor perturbations from the outside. These perturbations tend to generate a cascade of failures that brings the whole system down. It is the essence of what I call the "Seneca Effect" stating that growth is slow, but decline is rapid.  

Coming back to the coronavirus of today, we can conclude that it won't cause great disasters as long as it remains alone in attacking humankind. The world is not seeing large wars and it is not suffering from major famines. So, even if the virus were to spread outside China, maybe it could kill 1% of the current population. That would be a terrible disaster, of course, but it wouldn't change the growth trajectory of the world population, just like the Spanish flu didn't.

Yes, but, as I said at the beginning, reality has plenty of ways to surprise you. Maybe you don't need major famines or wars for a population to be weakened enough to be a good target for a viral attack. 

Think of pollution: in large part, it is a modern phenomenon. At the time of the Spanish flu, people were hungry, but not carrying in their bodies the amounts of heavy metals, pesticides, chemicals, microplastics, and other weird stuff we all have nowadays. And they didn't live in a hot world with 410 ppm of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, as we do. To say nothing about the rapid decline of the health care services, the poor quality of the average diet, the spread of alcohol and heavy drugs, the health effects of depression, the damage done by bad governments, and don't forget the risk of being shot. 

As a result, the population of many Western countries seems to have started to move along the same trajectory that the Ukrainian population started to follow 30 years ago. Life expectancy has been declining in the West starting with 2014.

Life expectancy in selected Western countries. Data from World Bank

In addition to the already weakened population, there is another factor that may favor the plague horseman: the economic crisis that's being created by the fear of the virus. Don't forget that if nearly 8 billion people can survive in the world today, it is because they can purchase food and have it delivered to them by means of that stupendous commercial system that we call "globalization" and its container ships crisscrossing the oceans. But if people stop moving and goods stop being transported, then food will stop being shipped to the places where it is needed. As a result, one more of the four horsemen, famine, will start galloping. And the third horseman, war, may decide to start galloping too, taking with him the last one, death. Then, yes, we could see a new Black Death.

Don't forget that this is a scenario: a story that we are telling to each other. It is up to us to make sure that it remains a story and it doesn't become reality. The future is never predictable, we can only be prepared for it.




A comment by Ugo Bardi's personal troll, Mr. Kunning-Druger

"And here you are, Mr. Bardi. I knew you would have arrived to this: I figure that you and your friends of the Club of Rome must be very happy, now. Isn't the coronavirus exactly what you always wanted? From the very beginning, the Club of Rome has been working at planning the extermination of most of humankind. And now the flag of the enemies of humankind has been taken by the little monster called Greta Thunberg. But we know who you are and we know what you are doing. If your plan ever becomes reality, we'll know who are the criminals behind it."

The Greatest Extermination in History: How Humans won the war on Whales

Image from the NYT. This dead whale on a California beach and the man taking a selfie in front of it symbolizes the war of humans on whales. The whales lost in what was probably the largest extermination of a non-human species in history. You'll find more details on this epic story in the upcoming book by Ugo Bardi and Ilaria Perissi "The Empty Sea" to be published by Springer

With the start of the 19th century (according to the human calendar), the lines were drawn: the two major vertebrate groups on Earth were squaring off against each other. On one side, the homo sapiens, the last survivor of the hominin genus, a bipedal primate with remarkable technical abilities. On the other side, the 89 species of the Cetacea order, known to humans as "whales," large aquatic animals that dominated the marine trophic chain.

When the war began, there were some 4 million whales in the Earth's ocean, for a total mass of some 120 million tons. On land, humans numbered about one billion individuals, but their total mass was less than 100 million tons. It looked like a fair fight but, in reality, the whales never had a chance.

The whales probably never understood what befell them: their powerful sonar systems worked only underwater and couldn't tell them of the menace that was coming from above the surface. Their sophisticated brains were unable to devise strategies to fight a threat that they had never faced in the tens of millions of years of their existence. Their stupendous bodies weighing tens of tons were of no use against small creatures using super-charged metabolic mechanisms. Their magnificent insulation system, that humans called the "blubber," made whales able to survive in icy waters but it was blubber that sent whales in hyperthermia when they tried to swim away from their human nemesis.

Image from Christensen 2006-  The Y-scale reports the estimated total mass of whales in the Earth's oceans. The X-scale goes from 1800 to 2000. It is a "Seneca Cliff," typical of the overexploitation of economic resources.

It was a war of extermination. In quantitative terms, it was possibly the largest extermination of a non-human species carried out by humans over their existence. And also the fastest one: commercial whaling started in the early 19th century, by the late 20th century it was basically over and the true collapse of the whale populations had lasted no more than a few decades. Afterward, one whale in four was still alive, and the large ones had been wiped out. Maybe 20 Million tons of whales remained out of an initial total of some 120 million. Whales are still hunted and killed, nowadays, although pollution and the keel of boats may be more effective extermination weapons than harpoons used to be (but harpoons are still used, too).

It is done, now, and the ocean is bereft of whales: it is not the same ocean anymore.  Humans are clever monkeys and they are good hunters, but they don't understand the results of their actions. Everything on this planet is connected and it is well known in biology that you can't do just one thing. So, the elimination of the top of the marine trophic chain is going to have unpredictable and probably disastrous effects on the whole ecosphere -- it will also have bad effects on the stability of the Earth's climate.

Some humans understand the danger of what they did, but most of them don't and don't care. They seem to think that exterminating whales is a right given to them by their God (maybe an evil deity going under the sacred name of MSY - maximum sustainable yield). About what the whales may have thought of their disgrace, we'll never know. But, if whales have a God or a Goddess, there may come a time for revenge, and humans will fully deserve whatever befalls them.





h/t Daniel Pauly

What are the chances of a war that would exterminate most of humankind? It could be more likely than you think

Recently, together with my coworkers, I have been engaged in a statistical analysis of war over the past 600 years. The results were sobering: war, it seems, is a statistical phenomenon similar to earthquakes and forest fires. It strikes according to well defined statistical patterns and there is very little that can be done to avoid it. Aaron Clauset is another scientist who has been working on the same subject and, in a sobering analysis of his, he calculates the probablities of future wars. According to his calculations, a war as large as the Second World War has more than 40% chances to occur within 100 years from now. Then, a war causing more than billion battle deaths, that is exterminating most of humankind, has a probability of 5% to occur in less than 4 centuries from now. That doesn't mean we can relax for 4 centuries, not at all. It means we can expect it at any moment in the future.

From Aaron Clauset, 2018. (highlighting by UB)

.... a stationary model may be used to estimate the likelihood of a very large war occurring over 100 years, one like the Second World War, which produced x_* = 16,634,907 battle deaths. Using the ensemble of semiparametric models for the sizes of wars and assuming a new war onset every 1.91 years on average (43), the probability of observing at least one war with x_* or more deaths is p_* = 0.43 ± 0.01 (Monte Carlo), and the expected number of these events over the next 100 years is 0.62 ± 0.01. Hence, under stationarity, the likelihood of a very large war over the next 100 years is not particularly small.

Under an even stronger assumption of stationarity, the model can estimate the waiting time for a war of truly spectacular size, such as one with x = 1,000,000,000 (one billion) battle deaths. A conflict this large would be globally catastrophic and would likely mark the end of modern civilization. It is also not outside the realm of possibility, if current nuclear weapons were used widely.

Using the ensemble of semiparametric models of war sizes and a longer Monte Carlo simulation, the model estimates that the median forecasted waiting time for such an event is 1339 years. Reflecting the large fluctuations that are natural under the empirical war size distribution, the distribution of waiting times for such a catastrophic event is enormously variable, with the 5 to 95% quantiles ranging from 383 to 11,489 years. A median delay of roughly 1300 years does not seem like a long time to wait for an event this enormous in magnitude, and humans have been waging war on each other, in one way or another, for substantially longer than that.

Overpopulation Problem? What Overpopulation Problem?

Some people seem to be horrified at the sight of these images. For me, it is more a sensation of melancholy. These masses of people can exist only for a brief moment in the history of humankind. Overpopulation is a problem that will solve itself rather quickly although, unfortunately, not without pain.

I keep reading more and more comments about overpopulation on the social media. It is not just an impression: the trend of increasing interest in population matters is visible in Google Trends. Still weak, but it is there.

It is puzzling how the question is returning. It had disappeared from the media after it had been popular in the 1970s, at the time of the first "The Limits to Growth" study. At that time, there were less than 4 billion people and that was viewed as a huge problem. Then, somehow, it became unfashionable to mention overpopulation, just as it became unfashionable to consider "The Limits to Growth" as anything more than a completely wrong study written by people not smarter than Chicken Little (it wasn't the case).

Now, with twice as many people - 7.6 billion humans - we see a return of the idea that - really - there may be a little problem of overpopulation. Humans are so many that they are appropriating a larger and larger fraction of the ecosystem. That means less and less space for other species which are, indeed, fast disappearing. When you read that, in a not too remote future, the only large animal left on the Earth will be the cow, well, that makes you think.

A specific streak of the discussion is that overpopulation is not just a problem, it is "the" problem. If we could reduce the number of humans, it is said, then all the other problems, pollution, global warming, resource depletion, would all become automatically much more manageable - if not completely solved. This opinion is often accompanied by statements that the reduction must be accomplished by fair and nonviolent means: voluntary birth control only. That doesn't prevent some people from accusing the "Greens" or the "global elites" of planning the extermination of most of humankind. Others see an evil plot in the growing population, accusing the powers that be - governments, religious organizations, the Illuminati, the gnomes of Zurich, or whatever - to be engaged in a global conspiracy aimed at hiding the dangers of overpopulation.

Personally, I am not too worried about human overpopulation, nor about these pretended evil conspiracies. Not that I think that there aren't too many people around. The point, I think, is that if today overpopulation is a problem, and it is, it will solve itself rather quickly (although not without pain). No need for evil elites plotting extermination, nor of well-intentioned activists teaching the poor how to use condoms. The system itself will cause the human population to collapse.

The current 7.6 billion people on the Earth are alive in a very special moment of human history. It had never happened before and it is unlikely that it will happen again the foreseeable future. So many people are alive today because there exists a sophisticated and incredibly complex system engaged in keeping them alive. The stupendous transportation system that carries food all over the world is powered by fossil energy and controlled by the financial and political system we call the "globalization." As long as fossil energy and globalization exist, people will be fed and population may continue growing.

But for how long? The whole system is under heavy strain because of depletion and pollution. Natural resources are more and more costly to produce while fighting pollution - also in the form of global warming - is becoming more and more expensive. A new major financial collapse will be sufficient to disrupt the transportation chain which ships food it all over the planet. Without this system, the food will rot where it is produced and the people at the other end of the chain will starve. It will be the Seneca Cliff of the whole system, including the human population.

There are other factors which may also work in the direction of reducing the human population. Think how interesting are the 400+ million tons of human flesh existing today for predators such as viruses, bacteria, and assorted parasites - we are their prey and we are rapidly becoming an abundant and easy prey. And there are more possibilities, from reduced fertility caused by heavy metal pollution to the old-fashioned, but always effective, large-scale wars. (1)

Recently, I published a paper on the Journal of Population and Sustainability where I looked for some historical examples of how populations (not just human ones) crashed down in the past. I found more than one reason that can lead to an abrupt collapse. An especially poignant example is that of the horse population in the US. It experienced a fast when the horses went down from some 27 million in 1920 to about 3 million in 1960. No one called for the extermination of horses but they had lost their economic value - replaced by machines -  and so they were not cared for anymore and not even allowed to reproduce. And that was the Seneca Cliff for horses.

Why not a similar cliff ahead for humans? They, too, have lost their economic value, being replaced by machines. You say that humans are not horses? Sure, but think about something: who decided the fate of horses? And who decides the fate of humans? You get my point, I guess. With humans rapidly becoming technologically obsolete, there would be no need to wait for an energy cliff to bring down civilization as a whole before seeing their numbers radically curtailed.

So, you may like to read my paper in the Journal of Population and Sustainability.




(1) I know that Paul Ehrlich cried wolf too early about population collapse, in 1968. Sure, that means population will keep growing forever, right?

(2) To explain this point, the fate of horses in the US 

The Elephant Skin Table: a Reminder of Human Cruelty at the Summer Academy of the Club of Rome in Florence

One of the participants (*) of the Summer School of the Club of Rome looks at an exhibit of the "La Specola" museum in Florence. This table is made using the skin of an elephant and it was a kind of furniture fashionable during the 19th century. The museum has inherited several items of this kind. Correctly, they are not normally shown to the public except in special occasions, such as the visit by the participants of the Summer Academy. Yet, these objects remind us a human attitude toward wildlife that's still common among us. 

For many of us, it is a surprise to discover that, today, 97% of the vertebrate biomass on land is composed of humans and of domesticated animals, leaving only 3% for wildlife (these numbers are obviously approximate, but they seem to be reasonably accurate.) 

Apparently, something monstrous has been taking place during the past few centuries: we managed to exterminate most of the Earth's wildlife and we keep at that as if it were the true human purpose on this planet. As the human population continues to increase, the wildlife population must necessarily decrease. How far are we from the time when there will be no wildlife left? In 1970, Isaac Asimov had optimistically estimated as 2430 AD the year when the last animals of the planet would have been killed but, at this rate of increase of the human population, the complete extermination of vertebrates could take place much sooner. It is an enormous change, something that compares with the greatest disasters recorded in the history of the biosphere  

But human beings seem to be unfazed, or at least most of them. Evidently, they are humanocentric and things haven't changed much from the time when the elephant skin table shown in the La Specola museum was made. Humans continue killing everything as they increase in numbers and whatever disputes the human right of appropriating all the spaces and all the resources of the Earth is ruthlessly eliminated.. 

Will humans ever change their attitude? Hard to say but, at least, I saw these numbers shown for the first time in a public debate at the 1st Summer Academy of the Club of Rome, in Florence, in Sep 2017. The issue was raised by the Club's co-President, Ernst von Weizsäcker, who noted already on the first day of the school how most of the current ideas on how the world is supposed to work were developed in an age when the earth was almost empty of human beings. 

Today, von Weizsäcker noted, the situation is completely different and he mentioned the data about the 3% of wildlife remaining. Then, we should change the way we see the world; challenging the humanocentric view of the world that remains entrenched in the mainstream environmental movement. 

Yet, this information didn't seem to make inroads in the discussion. As far as I can tell, it was never mentioned again in any of the many sessions of the Summer School in Florence. Let's say that von Weizsäcker's talk was a start, at least; but was it already too late?

*(image reproduced with the kind permission of Joséphine von Mitschke-Collande, who appears in the photo)

Centennial of the death of Ishi, the last of the Yahi indians

A hundred years ago, on March 25, 1916, Ishi died in San Francisco. He was the last of the Yahis of California, exterminated over a period of a few decades, starting with the great "gold rush" of mid 19th century.

The story of the Yahis, as well as of many other Indians of California, is still actual: it is the story of how the search for mineral resources leaves behind a trail of death and destruction. In Ishi's times, it was because of gold; in our times, it is because of crude oil and other minerals that we consider even more important than gold. Human attitudes don't seem to change so much in these things and will probably remain unchanged as long as there remains something to be extracted on this planet.

A few years ago, I wrote a brief story of Ishi for my daughter Donata (in Italian, here)