http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/ ... 7732638181
Lance Michael Foster said...
"There was a computer game called "SimEarth" I had back in the 90s. You could play different variants, including evolution-tinkering. One of the variants focused on human civilization. You had a limited amount of "energy" that you could allocate to different areas, such as health technology, energy (conventional, nuclear, etc.), manufacturing, technology, war, communication, environment, philosophy, agriculture/food, etc. The goal was continually balancing and allocating resources to see how long you could get civilization to survive.
The thing was, no matter what you did, or how careful you were, almost any route you went eventually led either to nuclear war, or overpopulation which led to starvation and disease (and sometimes war). Whether it took decades or a couple of hundred years, the result was a devastated planet and crumbled civilization.
Then one day, I did a radical rethinking and allocated most of the energy to "philosophy" (which in this game represented acceptance of death, enjoyment of life, ethical behavior), and very little or nothing to any of the others, including health technology. After all, improvements in health tech meant more people survived, so more food was needed, which eventually meant more energy was taken from other areas, which resulted in environmental destruction and war over remnant resources.
Low health tech meant a natural balance of steady depopulation to a sustainable level of low population. That meant less competition over limited resources. High "philosophy" meant people accepted life for what it was and treated each other ethically, both within a civilization as well as neighboring states. The result? Civilization, such that it was, lasted tens of thousands of years. The game said I had won."
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26 Aug 2011, 7:22 pm
