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Thus, in terms of these dimensionless combinations the growth curves for all animals collapse to a single universal curve.
Our effective metabolic rate is now one hundred times greater than what it was when we were truly “biological” animals, and this has had huge consequences for our recent life history. We take longer to mature, we have fewer offspring, and we live longer, all in qualitative agreement with having an effectively larger metabolic rate arising from socioeconomic activity.
sublinear scaling and the associated economies of scale arising from optimizing network performance lead to bounded growth and the systematic slowing of the pace of life.
only now with the advent of global warming are we beginning to appreciate how sensitive the natural world and the environment are to small changes in temperature and the threat that this imposes.
What is shocking is how few people, even many scientists, appreciate that this sensitivity to temperature is exponential. The reason for this sensitivity is that all chemical reaction rates depend exponentially on temperature.
all of the central features of life from gestation and growth to mortality are exponentially sensitive to temperature
all biological rates and times such as those associated with growth, embryonic development, longevity, and evolutionary processes are determined by a joint universal scaling law in terms of just two parameters: the number ¼, arising from the network constraints that control the dependence on mass, and 0.65 eV, originating in the chemical reaction dynamics of ATP production.
for every 10°C rise in temperature the production rate doubles. Consequently, a relatively small increase of only 10°C leads to a doubling of metabolic rate and therefore to a doubling of the rate of living.
If global warming induces a temperature increase of around 2°C, which it is on track to do, then the pace of almost all biological life across all scales will increase by a whopping 20 percent to 30 percent. This is highly nontrivial and will potentially wreak havoc with the ecosystem.
it’s not only “good” but also crucial that individuals, whether organisms or companies, die—even if they themselves may not be quite so joyous about it.
No creature, whether a bacterium, an ant, a rhododendron, or a salmon, “cares” or even “knows” about dying;
One of the great ironies of this continuing war against death is that we have actually made spectacular progress in extending our life spans over the past 150 years without any explicit dedicated program to do so.
First, a major contributor was the astonishing decrease in infant and child mortality.
The city as the engine for social change and increasing well-being is one of the truly great triumphs of our amazing ability to form social groups and collectively take advantage of economies of scale.
the experience of our hunter-gatherer ancestors many thousands of years ago. They, too, were dominated by infant mortality, but once that is factored out, they could expect to live to sixty or seventy years old.
As you continue to increase in age, the time remaining before you die becomes increasingly shorter, eventually becoming vanishingly small. This leads to the notion of a maximum possible age that a human being could conceivably live, which turns out to be less than around 125 years.
A survivorship curve simply represents the probability that an individual will live to a given age and is determined by plotting the percentage of survivors in a given population as a function of their age. Its converse is called a mortality curve and is the percentage of people who have died at a given age, representing the probability that an individual will die at that age.
the mortality rate for most organisms remains approximately unchanged with age. In other words, the relative number of individuals that die in any time period is the same at any age.
A constant mortality rate means that the number of individuals that die in some time period is directly proportional to how many have survived up until that time.
This is precisely the rule that many decay processes in the physical world follow.
despite these enormous gains and the continuous evolution toward ever-increasing average longevity, the end point of the curves, where the probability of surviving vanishes and the probability of dying is 100 percent, always remained the same: they all converge on about 125 years.
The leading causes of death are overwhelmingly associated with damage, whether in organs and tissue (as in heart attacks or stroke) or in molecules (as in cancer)—infectious diseases play a relatively minor role.
Even if every cause of death were eliminated, all human beings are destined to die before they reach 125 years old, and the vast majority of us will do so well before we reach that ripe old age.
Natural selection only needs to ensure that the majority of individuals in a species survive sufficiently long to produce enough offspring to maximize their evolutionary fitness. Once this has happened and they have performed their evolutionary “duty,” how much longer they live is of much less importance, so large variations in individual and species life spans can be expected.
Semiautonomous subsystems of organisms, such as our various organs, age approximately uniformly.
the closed situation we have engineered for ourselves on Earth, with our almost total reliance on fossil fuels rather than remaining open and being powered externally by the sun.
Slums, which arose as a response to rapid population growth and industrialization, were notoriously overcrowded with unsanitary and squalid living conditions.
Thomas Robert Malthus is usually credited with being the first person to recognize the potential threat posed by open-ended exponential growth and connect it to the challenge of resource limitation and availability.
An unfortunate consequence of Malthus’s analyses was that they were interpreted as effectively blaming the poor for their own predicament because they persisted in reproducing too rapidly.
Perhaps of greatest importance is that in complete contradiction to Malthus’s expectations, agricultural productivity did not increase linearly with time but instead tracked population growth and increased exponentially.
Most economists, social scientists, politicians, and business leaders typically justify their optimistic views by appealing to the canonical mantra of “innovation” as the magic wand that will keep us exponentially afloat.
The original argument of Malthus was wrong because of the unforeseen technological advances in agriculture stimulated by the spirit and discoveries of the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution.
endogenous growth theory, which holds that economic growth is driven primarily by investment in human capital, innovation, and knowledge creation.7
While it may not be unreasonable to hold the view that collective human ingenuity and innovation facilitated by a free market economy is the secret for maintaining long-term open-ended growth in defiance of potential collapse, I find it somewhat baffling that this is often coupled with a denial or, at the very least, a deep skepticism concerning some of its inevitable consequences.
Independent of how superbly innovative we are, ultimately everything is driven and processed by the use of energy, and the processing of energy has inevitable deleterious consequences.
You are extraordinarily efficient in your use of energy relative to anything that is man-made.
Thinking of us as an animal using thirty times more energy than we “should” given our physical size, the effective human population of the planet accordingly operates as if it were much larger than the 7.3 billion people who actually inhabit it.
If the most optimistic of cornucopian thinkers are correct and the world’s population reaches 10 billion by the end of the century, all living at a standard comparable to that of the United States, the subsequent effective population would then exceed a trillion people.
It is a matter of faith that the free market system geared to open-ended growth, even when tempered by governmental intervention, stimulation, and regulation, can find a meta-stable balance between making significant profits and solving the problem of sustainability.
A crucial element in how life has been sustained is that the energy source, namely the sun, was external, reliable, and relatively constant.
From a scientific perspective the truly revolutionary character of the Industrial Revolution was the dramatic change from an open system where energy is supplied externally by the sun to a closed system where energy is supplied internally by fossil fuel.
because our dominant source of energy is now an integral component of the very system it is supporting, its supply is hostage to continually changing internal market forces.
the production of gases such as carbon dioxide and methane as entropic by-products from burning these fuels, leading to the well-known greenhouse effect in which heat gets trapped in the atmosphere.
the processes that govern the weather and the life history of plants and animals are exponentially sensitive to small changes in the temperature at which they operate.
Remarkably, concepts like energy and entropy, metabolism, and carrying capacity have not found their way into mainstream economics.
Just as the concept of a mysterious, almost limitless, dark energy is invoked to “explain” why the physical universe continues to expand exponentially, so the specter of an almost limitless supply of innovative ideas is invoked to explain why the socioeconomic universe will continue to expand, overcoming all obstacles in its course.
Smart and ambitious people are drawn to cities, and this is where our new ideas are incubated, where entrepreneurship flourishes, and where wealth is created.
more energy is delivered by the sun in just one hour than is used by the entire world in a single year.
The process of burning fossil fuels releases energy stored in chemical bonds that hold the atoms and molecules of coal, oil, or gas together.
On the other hand, the sun, which consists primarily of hydrogen and helium, is fueled by nuclear energy stored in the bonds that hold nuclei together. It is released as radiation when hydrogen nuclei fuse together to form helium nuclei.
