The Complex Nature of Overpopulation and War: Understanding the Impact of Changing Variables

Overpopulation and war are more complex problems because there are more variables involved. And because the nature of the problem is of that kind that the variables affect the solution to the problem more.

In other words, what happens with overpopulation and war is that almost completely new solutions have to be found again and again, as soon as only a few variables change. In both cases, they change very often.

In a space probe, the team that has to work out the solution is isolated from such changing variables. This allows them to focus on a predetermined set of parameters. The number of parameters is very large. But they don’t change very much in the course of the project (or in the course of developing the solution). For example, the weather is such a variable. But we can postpone the mission for a few days to have more ideal weather for the launch. Moreover, it hardly affects the device itself. And once the craft is out of Earth’s atmosphere, the weather doesn’t affect the craft and its 19.9 billion long journey at all.

In both war and overpopulation, the weather has a very strong influence on almost everything and every possible solution: the climate and its change will reduce the maximum number of people that can populate the Earth. As the weather becomes more extreme and space for humans becomes more limited, the number of conflicts will increase. So there will be more wars. And that’s just one parameter that Voyager 2 hasn’t had to take into account since its launch until now.

So we are very smart when we can limit the problem to a defined number of changing parameters. As an animal species, we are not good at a proliferation of parameters (for a particular problem). We are also not good at adapting to parameters or variables that change frequently. Our system (e.g. politics, democracy, etc) is not very good at that either. And at the same time, we don’t want it to be too quick to implement far-reaching changes. Because individuals of our species don’t always like that (see, for example, the influence of inflation on people’s savings: most people don’t want their savings to be worthless within a year because of inflation. They want some security in purchasing power – and surely that certainty should be fairly stable for a decade or so (which is indeed exactly what close to but no more than 2% inflation means when you apply the rule of 70).

Study hard. Learn a lot. Continuously adapt yourself. And help as an individual to make the world a better place.

[Reactie gewijzigd door freaxje op 3 augustus 2023 16:57]

2023-08-03 13:46:24
#NASA #receiving #signal #Voyager #communications #restored