How do you say anything definitive about the future of human civilization? About the fate of humanity?Without either being alarmist or dismissive; downplaying or exaggerating?

The systems of the world—including aspects of both the physical and the social environments—are constantly changing. Human welfare depends on both the nature of change and the rate of change. The changes we see in the world are a mixture of beneficial and detrimental. Things are changing at an accelerating rate, which often exceeds our ability to adapt. At least, for some of us. Maybe most.

The people pushing to accelerate change are always those who see—and seek—benefits for themselves, but discount the detrimental effects on others. That is humanity. We are self-serving—or at best community-serving, where “community” has radically different meanings. We have limited powers of empathy. Everything and everyone outside of our narrow scope of concern and attention is irrelevant and ignored. If we weren’t able to focus, we could never act.

The problem with ignoring the big picture comes down to the nature of complexity. We often don’t see the connections between things outside of our attention. But those things are nevertheless important. Although it might take time for the negative side effects to propagate back to us, and for us to feel their impact.

It might be best to accept that this is always how humans will behave. Especially when the negative side effects take longer to appear than an individual human lifetime. We might care about our successors, our offspring, but we assume that they will have to adapt to the situations in which they find themselves. We might leave them better tools, or more wealth, but we deny our ability to control the environment.

And it’s true: our impact on the environment is not “control”. At least, it is only partial control. We can change it, but generally only in one direction, but increasing the amount of chaos and entropy in the system. We can predict some of the consequences of increasing entropy, but we cannot manipulate them in any specific way. We could, if we wanted to, take steps to reduce the entropy of the system, but it would come only at enormous cost of adding entropy elsewhere.

Part of the irony is that the increasing entropy we see in the climate, and in other systems—both natural and artificial—is directly a consequence of attempting to reduce entropy elsewhere, such as in our homes, bank accounts, offices, and vacation destinations. At least, if one is sufficiently wealthy, with access to the energy, power, resources, and labour necessary to maintain and improve those places.

It is, of course, somewhat ironic, and certainly tragic, that the entropy in the climate is not a direct result of negentropy in our private spaces. But the release of CO2, and the resultant greenhouse effect, are capturing orders of magnitude more heat than simple waste from working people and machines, which is generating orders of magnitude more entropy in the system.

Our environment—again, in all aspects, not merely the climate or biosphere—is changing radically. Many of those imposing the change assume—perhaps rightly, but perhaps naively—that they have sufficient power to adapt and benefit from these changes, without being harmed by them. Global wildfires notwithstanding. (One can always rebuild a house.)

Whether we will be able to enjoy the outdoors, or a trip to a shopping centre, is a different story. Perhaps we will all end up living underground, growing our food in vertical shafts using reflected or artificial light. Perhaps all the rich people will move to Iceland or Greenland or other cold places with geothermal energy.

What I am asking is: do we want a world that is mostly predictable? Or do we want one that is mostly unpredictable? But really, do we have any say in the matter? Does anyone—even the wealthiest and most powerful person—really have any say, in the case where no one agrees? Or more to the point, when the natural environment has gone completely rogue? What about when society goes completely rogue? Can even a dictator, with absolute political power, control a mob of one hundred million angry people? What if even the soldiers refuse to listen to them? How many soldiers does it take to control one hundred million angry people with nothing more to lose?

The spectre of revolution is not new. But “revolution”, since the 18th century, implies some kind of organization. More likely the mob will behave in unorganized, uncoordinated ways. Or as an erratic collection of thousands or millions of different factions, imagining and attacking enemies with no apparent logic.

At least, that is one extreme possibility. If we make the least effort to include the majority in our plans for a new world order. If there are no such plans. If the plan is more disorder, because chaos affords certain opportunities for the opportunist which are too enticing to resist. Disruption is disorder. Collapse is disorder. But none of these things are under anyone’s control.

I can’t seem to be systematic in my thought on this subject. It simply seems as if the people ostensibly in power are seeking maximal chaos, minimal predictability. They want to destabilize every system, and shake every tree. They believe they have the tools to nagivate chaos, and increase their own power, by enlarging the domains in which they—so they think—have absolute control. The chaos around them, they assume, will not be a threat. Only those within that chaos will be in danger. They will be fine.

I guess we’ll see.