United Space Ship: Dumpster Fire

@midjourneybot: /imagine: ecological disaster

Imagine you get a knock on your front door one day and when you open it up there’s two little green aliens with giant eyeballs staring at you. Your first instinct is to run, but then you notice they are wearing lulu lemon joggers and slurping on fresh smoothies. “Sup!” they say, “we come in peace. Actually, we have a gift for you”.

Despite your confusion about their outfits, you invite them in for tea and cookies. 🫖

The aliens explain that they have been monitoring the Earth very closely for thousands of years. They pull out their “holographic presentation thingy” and show you the Earth 5,000 years ago. It’s teaming with all kinds of plants and wildlife. As they slowly march the hologram forward in time, the aliens show you how each location on Earth suffered catastrophic loss of life within just a few decades of first contact with human beings. You watch one-by-one as animal and plant populations collapse in the Middle East, China, Europe, and then the Americas. The aliens explain to you that human beings are the destroyers of worlds the rest of the galaxy is super worried about. Like, when Oppenheimer detonated the first atomic bomb, the rest of the galaxy went on notice that humans are technologically close to interstellar travel. The rest of the galaxy already knows what we do to planets, and animals, and people weaker than us.

As the timeline of the alien’s hologram reaches the Industrial Revolution, you witness the world’s economies fill our air and our rivers with industrial waste which eventually decimates the wildlife in our rivers and our seas. All that’s left is a planet full of fences and endless rows of monoculture produce. Whenever humans walk in “tall cotton”, every other living thing living gets bounced from their homes (including some human races unfortunately). As the alien’s hologram progresses to today, you see every place humans settle turns into one big dumpster fire. Literally. Today there’s a Great Pacific Garbage Patch choking out marine life, while forests around the world are burning to the ground. 🗑️🔥

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The aliens say, “Look, we have the technology to make new planets and we’ve already made an entirely new Second Earth for you guys to have. For reals. We harvested DNA from all your creatures and populated Second Earth with every creature from First Earth except…?”

“Except?” they repeat while looking at you expectantly.

“Humans?”, you wonder (while still trying to figure out why two little green aliens came knocking at your door).

I went looking for a relevant alien giphy that was funny, but I kept laughing about this interstellar gas. If that isn’t funny to you, then you should cancel me right now. Cancel me. Just X out of this page right now.

“Exactly.” the aliens say, “Second Earth has the exact same continents and oceans and rivers and plants and animals. It’s exactly like Earth in every way, except it doesn’t have humans. Next week we are going to quantum-space-jump Second Earth directly into a binary orbit with your planet, replacing the moon, so humans can go back and forth between the planets if you want.”

@physicsnerds: I know this would never work. It doesn’t matter. Its a pretend scenario so save your comments.

As you get more cheese and crackers for the aliens you say, “That’s great guys. Sounds like our environmental problems are solved. So why are you telling me? Like, why did you show up and knock on my door? How can I help?”

“Well”, the aliens say, “we monitor all the Earth’s communications. Our advanced technology noticed that every time you talk to your television, your computer, and your phone…you are usually complaining about how everyone else is ruining the world. And after a lot of deliberation by our intergalactic alien senate, we have chosen YOU to be sole ruler of Second Earth. You can have Second Earth free of charge but our only condition is that anyone you invite to live on Second Earth must be given their land for free too. Don’t worry about any invasion from First Earth because the Second Earth is protected by our alien forcefield that’s completely magic to you.”

The aliens invite you aboard their spaceship to see Second Earth and it’s incredible. Second Earth is teaming with life. It has clean rivers and looks like our world 5,000 years ago. The aliens give you the keys to the protective magical forcefield and return you to your house on First Earth.

You have two weeks to decide all the new laws that will govern Second Earth.

Text this story to a friend who would love it. Tell them it has alien farts and everything.

So, will you allow everyone on First Earth to get a couple acres of land on Second Earth?

What criteria do you use to determine citizenship?

And why is that?

Are black people allowed?

Are brown people allowed?

Are white people allowed?

What about fat people?

What about poor people?

What about mentally challenged people?

Are republicans allowed?

What about democrats?

Are communists allowed?

Can the new citizens of Second Earth live anywhere they want?

Or will you set aside some land reserve for the other animals already living there?

If you set aside a land reserve, what percent of Second Earth’s total land mass would be preserved?

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The reason I ask all these policy related questions is because the dumpster fire we have here on Earth is a policy related failure. Our economy has completely ruined our planet, but it’s not a failure of Capitalism.

For example, the reason there are no beavers left in America is because John Jacob Astor wanted to be a billionaire (just like every other person). When white people arrived in America, there were an estimated 40-60 million beavers that lived here. Imagine how wet our forests would be today with 40-60 million more beavers living in them. During the colonization of America, each beaver pelt traded for about $180 in 2023 money. So why wouldn’t John Jacob Astor finance expeditions to go harvest them all? He wasn’t breaking any laws. He didn’t avoid any beaver pelt taxes. He simply “privatized” wild animals that may or may not have been “public”. Eventually, Astor used his beaver money to buy half of Manhattan and then a first-class ride on the Titanic. 🤑

Thankfully, the Astors are huge supporters of the Metropolitan Museum of Art which we all get to enjoy today. I have spent weeks in that museum so I’m still kinda torn on whether I care about those 40 million beavers. Like, maybe 1 million dead beavers is a good trade for the Met’s entire Egyptian collection. 🤣

Blaming all that loss of biodiversity on one guy is an oversimplification, but the point is still true:

Unchecked capitalism will destroy any environment on any planet.

I’m a realist, so I’m a strong believer in capitalism. We desperately need entrepreneurs to solve difficult problems that the rest of us are too busy, too lazy, too stupid, or too scared to solve. The only way that’s going to be worth it is if founder’s receive an outsized share of the economic value that gets created by solving those difficult problems. Capitalism isn’t good or bad. Capitalism makes you more of who you already are.” If you were generous before becoming rich, you’ll become more generous. If you were greedy before becoming rich, you’ll become more greedy. If you were dishonest before becoming rich, you’ll become more dishonest.

Unfortunately, it only takes a few bad actors to ruin the entire global environment so we can no longer rely on capitalism to self-regulate. That’s preposterous. America should be absolutely ashamed of itself for failing to implement a Carbon Tax with serious teeth. America is already responsible for 25% of Earth’s historical carbon emissions. We have literally overcooked our own economy on coal and petroleum for decades despite the overwhelming scientific research. Yuck. The British pay more taxes on British Petroleum (BP) than Americans do. Think about that. If the taxes on Carbon were more severe, entrepreneurs would race in to capitalize on that opportunity.

Text this to a friend who complains about (the lack of) carbon taxes.

Fines for environmental contamination should make companies so fearful that it’s actually less expensive to invest in the policies and procedures that prevent the contamination from happening in the first place. The reality is we only have one planet Earth. Look around, space is lonely. We have to start cleaning up our planet and the only way that is going to happen is with stronger environmental policy.

Rural subsidy policies are just as bad for our environment. Taxes and fines “prune” behaviors from an economy while subsidies and redistributions “fertilize” behaviors into an economy, right? Well how many more decades are we going to subsidize corn and sugar? Americans are already exploding out of our oversized jeans. I understand why we need to over produce those calories as insurance against famine, but what about all the other economic redistributions from cities into rural communities?

Why are we preserving those ways of life?

The only serious reason that we should subsidize rural communities is called Violent Barbie Jeep Racing. Now you probably think I’m joking, and I am, but Violent Barbie Jeep Racing is no joke.

I’ve lived in the poorest, ruralest communities in our country. In those places, bravery is a currency. For example, as kids we used to play a game called “tree tackling”. On the coldest winter days we would pile on the sweaters and try to knock over dead trees like we were football linebackers. Bravery points were awarded based on how far away you were from the tree when you selected it for tackling.

I loved living in those small towns, but the amount of land required to sustain a single person outside of cities is a huge opportunity cost to the biodiversity that could inhabit that same land. In 2020, 51% of all farms in America earned less than $10,000 in sales while consuming an average of 81 acres of land. Let’s read that again.

Fifty-one percent of all farms. Less than ten thousand dollars per year.

That’s $123 of revenue per acre per year. For that much money, those farms would be better off raising beavers. Countries ought to have a beaver pelt law. If you can’t make more than five beaver pelts of revenue on an acre, the state needs to eminent domain that acre and turn it back over to actual beavers. Like we should get the beavers a little deed to the property and everything.

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So 51% of farms in America make a few beaver pelts per acre per year. See why that whole John Jacob Astor story was important? The next 30.4% of all farms in America earned less than $100,000 in sales and consumed an average of 304 acres of land. So that means between 50-80% of all farms operating in America today provide poor economic returns on their land. Here’s the data from the US Department of Agriculture if you want to see more.

https://www.nass.usda.gov/Publications/Todays_Reports/reports/fnlo0222.pdf

I don’t know what the right answer is for redistributions and subsidies into rural farm lands, but I think the next few decades are going to be transformative. There is already a huge discrepancy in the economic efficiency between the smallest farms and the largest. New robots, new sensor networks, and new water management techniques managed by artificial intelligence will dramatically increase this discrepancy. In the future, our economy will deflate the price of non-industrial farmland as long as politicians don’t continue to subsidize the rural lifestyle. It’s already a poor economic use of private capital.

We don’t need to bring back coal jobs and we don’t need to bring back farm jobs. Robots and clean electricity are our future, so let’s use policy to propel our economy further in that direction. The economics that underpin the price of solar electricity are plummeting right now and the Sun emits 90,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 calories of free energy every single second. You would already know that if you read chapter 2 of my first book, “Uncertainty”. Hold down the ⌘ key (or long press) when you click those links and it will save your place here.

Here’s a 6-min video from Vox about the plummeting price of solar.

Eventually clean water will become more expensive to the production of healthy calories than the land. We will probably see dramatic growth in vertical farms that not only use advanced hydroponic techniques, but bioreactors. Why grow the whole strawberry plant when all we want are the strawberries? Why grow the whole cow when all we want are the ribeyes? I hope bioreactors literally decimate the price of non-industrial farmland so we can actually have one chance to rewild our wild.

Let's #rewildthewild

In the 2.0 version of this story, I’m going to discuss the impact of artificial intelligence on our Dumpster Fire. For now, here’s a 6-min video about ai changing the underlying economics of Waste Management in America.

👊,

Stuart

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United Space Ship: Dumpster Fire