Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos

by M. Mitchell Waldrop

“How do we survive the next hundred years without a ‘Class A’ catastrophe? That is, something that can’t be set straight in a generation.” In edge-of-chaos terms, avoiding such cataclysms would mean finding some way to damp out the very largest, most destructive avalanches of change. “Originally, number one on my list of Class A catastrophes was nuclear war,” says Cowan, “with a Class B catastrophe being something like World War II. But by the time of the first meeting, rapprochement between Russia and the United States was such that the nuclear war problem was down around number five on the list. And what emerged very quickly instead was the population explosion, the [Paul] Ehrlich-type catastrophe. Then came possible environmental catastrophe, such as the greenhouse warming, which I myself didn’t think of as a Class A catastrophe, but which others have seized upon.”