Climate as a Three Body Problem

Last week I had the enormous pleasure of spending an entire day with a group of colleagues from across the energy transition, grappling with the difficult questions of how to deploy more energy infrastructure rapidly, responsibly, and sustainably. Over dinner, we compared notes on what we're watching and reading these days. Evan Vaughan recommended the new Netflix adaptation of Three Body Problem, the first novel in a series by Cixin Liu.

I devoured the entire 8-episode first season in five days. My hunch was confirmed: based on Evan's description, it sounded like a climate allegory, and it absolutely is, but in a more interesting way than I first imagined. Allow me to explain, without revealing any major spoilers. I think we can actually understand our fundamental dilemma in mitigating climate change as a Three Body Problem of its own. Our ability to move forward with new solutions is being scorched, pulled, and iced out by the varying proximity of three enormous forces: belief, chaos, and gravity.

Belief

The crux of the story is that humans make contact with an alien civilization, and they embark on a journey toward Earth. While this fact is initially a closely held secret, at a certain point, the general public learns of it, and all hell breaks loose. The alien race is still 400 years from arrival, but the panic is real, visceral, and immediate. How will humanity cope with this looming, long-term threat? One that could threaten the survival of humanity but whose direct impact will mainly be felt by our 12th-generation descendants?

The climate allegory here is quite obvious, but the collective reaction it depicts does not align with what we observe about our collective reaction to the climate threat. A key difference that could account for the disparity: a burning bush moment. An event occurs - undeniable, instantaneous, immediate proof to every living person that these aliens are real, and they might not be friendly.

We have had no such collective burning bush moment for climate change. Each subsequent year of intensifying fire, flood, and heat might be bringing us closer to collective revelation, but it's a slow boil. There is enormous power in the evidence of our own experiences. Personal experiences can shake the very foundational core of what we believe to be true, while someone else's earth-shattering experiences, relayed secondhand, simply do not have the same impact. One of my favorite podcast series, The Grey Area, featured a recent episode that cast alien encounters in a different light, relating them to spiritual experiences. When we reach the limits of what we can understand, and the phenomena we encounter exceed those limits, we are left simply with belief. What do we believe to be true? How do we explain the unexplainable to ourselves? How does the nature of that belief reinforce our hopes and desires? Most of us are not climate scientists, and even within that community, we reach limits to our understanding. When we acknowledge that the future is unknowable, what really sets scientific prediction or probabilistic theory apart from a belief that our science is truth?

Chaos

My favorite philosophical question is the question of objective reality. How do we know what is real, and what isn't? As a non-physicist, I'm endlessly fascinated by quantum physics. The idea that two particles can be in some way linked by their essence and reflect the experiences of one another across vast distances, or that a photon's behavior changes when it is observed, incredible! There is no end to the things we do not understand and cannot imagine. Another recent episode of The Grey Area delves into near-death experiences and how to find room in life for the things science cannot yet explain. Quantum physics are a great example of this: we have some experience of these observed phenomena, but little to no understanding of how they actually work.

Much of our climate future is similarly unknowable. Consider what the technology of computers looked like 50 years ago and imagine what it could look like 50 years from today. Technology will evolve in ways we cannot imagine or predict, but if we acknowledge that, how do we continue striving to change an uncertain future using the tools we have today? I particularly liked how Dr. Ellen Langer framed this problem in her guest appearance on an early episode of How to Build a Happy Life, aptly titles "How to Know you Know Nothing":

"I think that everything that you’re doing because of the future is based on a mistaken notion about predictability. Prediction is an illusion. […] But if the planning for the future is giving you a happy present, that’s fine; there’s nothing lost by it. When you stick to your predictions, you’re limiting yourself rather than expanding your universe of possibilities."

She counsels being goal guided, rather than goal governed. Addressing the fear we have today that the climate is warming by taking action with the tools available to us helps to address that fear, and is unlikely to be a course of action we regret in the future. However, we need to be flexible in our thinking so we can adjust our future actions when the goals or rules we set forth today no longer apply - why continue to work toward a technology-specific target in the future if a different, better option has emerged?

Sitting with uncertainty is hard. Lots of people prescribe therapy (and I'm a fan!), but maybe philosophy can also help. For the hat trick, you could check out this episode of The Grey Area exploring this very question. Another strategy for grappling with a challenging problem eluding your comprehension is to look at the problem in a different way. That's what a computer science graduate student found when she looked at the whale songs of sperm whales from a different perspective, literally. By rotating the visualization of the whale songs by 90 degrees, she discovered patterns that had previously eluded scientists. You may have seen breathless headlines recently about a whale alphabet, speculating that one day we could talk to whales, which have emerged from this new research. An episode of The Daily breaks down what scientists actually found and what it could mean for our ability to communicate with whales.

If we could talk to whales, does that mean we could talk to aliens? Or is our framing of this question much too narrow? Our brains evolved alongside our language, and the ability to share information with each other was an important part of our survival. Other species communicate information using methods that we don't recognize as language, but communication can also serve different purposes, like social bonding. Our interpretations of the phenomena we observe are fundamentally influenced by our individual experiences and cognitive patterns, so the best thing we can do to expand our understanding is to seek out new experiences and build new cognitive pathways.

Gravity

Have you ever thought about economic growth in terms of physics, or thermodynamics? A recent guest on Planet Critical attempts to understand our economic future using this framework in one of the more challenging episodes I've listened to in a long time. I actually laughed out loud several times at the long, awkward pauses after he finished saying something completely baroque or deterministically bleak. I think he's a little overconfident in using a formula to explain or predict human behavior, but I did find the discussion of energy needs to be quite interesting. He asserts that reducing future energy demand is essentially impossible without reducing the population or the size of our civilization. The size of our civilization forms a type of gravity, and growing our civilization and our economy requires a surplus of energy. He claims that 7.1 watts of energy are needed to maintain every $1,000 of accumulated economic production. All the buildings we build, roads we construct, and people we produce, require energy to maintain. Even the information we accumulate requires energy to preserve. Within this framework, it seems unlikely that we will ever regret building more transmission lines than we think we need, and "overbuilding" solar is really just a question of timescales. It's a fascinating way to consider our future energy needs and the way civilization accumulates, and squares with the vision of growth put forward by a recent guest on the The Ezra Klein Show. These two episodes make a great pair for the juxtaposition alone, but proceed with caution if your day can't handle any more overly-pedantic mansplainers.

Your palate cleanser should be this beautifully poetic episode of Planet Money about junkyard economics. Guest Jon Ralston leads NPR's reporters on a journey through the detritus of our civilization, where much of what we throw away can find a new life. In the gravitational pull of our consumption, there is much that can be reborn, thanks to the Jon Ralstons of the world.