Groundcheck 2022: Prof. Dr. Manfred Laubichler - Global Futures - von der Erkenntnis zur Umsetzung

Thank you very much, Professor Fleece. Dear Madam Secretary of State, dear members of the Bundestag, Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen. This is an interesting experiment. I have been working in the United States for over 30 years. I was asked if I could give a lecture in German. I said, not in German, maybe in Austrian. And I hope that it won't be as bad as my countryman Arnold Schwarzenegger. But in terms of climate issues, it wouldn't be that bad, because he does a lot of sensible things. What I want to tell you today is a topic that interests us very much at Arizona State University. A few years ago, we had an internal discussion and the focus of sustainability, which somehow looks more into the past, turned to global futures. As a whole, the university is now trying to address the problem of global futures, plural, with the essential question that it is the responsibility of science to make a contribution to how we can find paths into the future that do not end in complete catastrophe. So that's the topic of Global Futures. And today it is about conveying some theoretical knowledge and answering the question, at least indicating how this knowledge can be used to make concrete decisions that make it more likely that we will find paths that somehow enable us to survive as a global society. With these topics, it is recommended in Berlin that I now turn to Walter Benjamin, who has a very detailed insight into our problem situation with the Angel of History, Angelus Novus, this famous painting by Paul Klee. The future happens inevitably. Our problem is that we mainly look into the past. Until now, science has mainly dealt with the past for centuries. Of course, this leads to a not very good connection between past knowledge and future decisions. The theme of the German Archaeological Institute with Groundcheck tries to fit exactly into this gap. What can we learn from the past specifically for the future? I think this is one of the essential tasks of science in the beginning of the 21st century. In short, Ms. State Secretary has indicated that we have a certain challenge. The challenge is that we live in the Anthropocene. The Anthropocene, however, as was already mentioned in the previous lecture, is not from about, but is part of a very long co-evolutionary development. And it is also about better understanding this co-evolutionary development, the interactions of people with their environment, for example. As part of this development, we have radically reconstructed our planet. Today, as you know, there is no longer a square centimeter of the Earth's surface that has not been influenced in any way by human activities. For example, we find microplastics everywhere, from the depths of the oceans to the Arctic and Antarctic. A consequence of our constructive activities on this planet is that we no longer live in a safe operating space or operating zone. We live in a period where the earth's systems are experiencing new dynamics. And in these new dynamics, our current life model is no longer safe. Global systemic risks and system breakdowns occur everywhere. I mostly live in New Mexico, in Arizona, and there we have the biggest forest fire in the history of New Mexico. It burns, it overflows, you know the pictures. Science is therefore required to develop a new understanding of these problems. I think this is a minimal requirement that society can put on science. Is there anything smart about it? What do we know? One of the essential insights that is really important for the future is that we must understand that we are part of long-term co-evolutionary processes. What does that mean? In the course of evolution, in the last 3.5-3.8 billion years, a lot happened, but sometimes something more interesting happened. And we call this a major evolutionary transition. The origin of life, the origin of the first cells, multicellular life, social insects, and ultimately also human society are such major transitions, which of course bring a different form of dynamics into the evolutionary process. Major transitions are characterized by the fact that they create radically new organizational forms. A multicellular organism works differently than a unicellular one. A complex human society works differently than hunter-gatherer societies. Part of this restructuring of organizational forms is that energy is redistributed, i.e. new energy systems, that information and knowledge flows are restructured, and that, of course, the flows of matter are reorganized. This is a major transition. As a consequence of these major transitions in evolution, new feedback mechanisms are also structured, both positive and negative feedback mechanisms. So we need this systemic consideration, complex systems. And for our discussion here, it is of course clear that the Anthropocene and the Technosphere, as a manifestation of the Anthropocene, represent such a new major transition in evolution. What does it look like? If we now look at the planets and the traditional spheres of the planet, from the biosphere to the hydrosphere, atmosphere, and so on, then they are all connected to the new Technosphere to the innermost. And the Technosphere, i.e. we, influence these planetary spheres very dramatically, both on the level of energy flows, of matter flows, as well as on the level of time scales. This planetary dynamics, which we understand to some extent, has its own temporal logic. Since the Technosphere exists, it has come to an incredible acceleration. Just an example, especially important for climate change. The carbon cycle is now much faster and much more dramatically larger than it ever was in the history of the earth. Now we come to a very specific example of the Technosphere and human co-evolution. About 10,000 years ago, 10,000 years ago, we or any of you were a very well-behaved two-legged naked monkey. We had a basal metabolic rate of about 90 watts per day. Today, each of us consumes over 11,000 watts. That's over 100 times more. To illustrate this, you see here this metabolic scaling curve. This is a quasi-nature law in biology. 10,000 years ago, we were exactly where we should be. Today we are way off the charts, as they say. And that's a logarithmic scale. So that's much more dramatic. That's much less dramatic. If it wasn't logarithmic, we'd need a few more floors to see where we are. How do you get there? So this is part of our work. So you can grasp the dynamics of anthropocene mathematically. And that's a equation. Don't worry, I'm not going to start doing math here. But this simplest form of equation can give us something enlightening. Today, we are no longer just a biological individual. We are an extended or a social individual. That means we and the infrastructure we need for our daily life in parts. And this social metabolic rate is divided into two essential parts. The growth rate, i.e. how we produce more and more infrastructure and more individuals. But also the so-called maintenance, the maintenance component. And the problem with any form of global future is that the maintenance component is the predominant part of our energy consumption today. We're not growing that much anymore. But we're consuming an incredible amount of energy to maintain the infrastructure that has grown for about 6,000 to 8,000 years. Of course, this makes energy transition so problematic. Because we can't say we're going to consume less energy in the future. The predictions say we're going to consume more energy because of these maintenance functions. And that's why it's so important where the energy actually comes from. So with such formal equations, you can describe the dynamics of the last 10,000 years reasonably well. What actually happened here, and this is now an interaction between the formal system observation that we do and what the German Archaeological Institute does, you can trace the dynamics of the Anthropocene here. And what we see here is that the Anthropocene, structurally speaking, then arises when there is a closed, positive feedback loop between population growth, knowledge growth and energy consumption. This is, so to speak, the engine of the Anthropocene. And interestingly, to get into this, contingent events were crucial about 7,000 to 8,000 years ago at the beginning of the Neolithic Revolution. Namely, that we can say in a certain way that there was a stable event, a time window, in the beginning of the Holocene, where a new ice age that marked itself did not take place, which enables this dynamic. But then, through the various historically developed societies, this Anthropocene engine works very well. Continuous population growth, knowledge growth, growth in energy consumption, on the abstract level. And in each of these spiral-like curves, through innovations, there was an acceleration of this system. To illustrate this visually now, the basic dynamics is described by exponential growth functions. Each exponential function inevitably leads to a singularity, i.e. a potential system collapse. But as a human society, we observe the collapse of systems locally, but not globally. And Ms. Fliss has already indicated, there were always adaptation and innovation strategies. And each of these innovation strategies enabled us to practically continue, to continue to grow exponentially. And in each of these innovations that were behind it, there was a further acceleration of the system. A short interlude. We have analyzed this in detail, especially the dynamics of the last 100 years. Ms. Fliss has already had some of these curves. These are the great acceleration curves of exponential growth. And if we analyze this in more detail, then we find that around 1975, the intrinsic dynamics changed structurally. And now you can ask yourself, of course, why 1975? What happened in 1975? This is about the coupled economic, socio-economic, technical and environmental system. In 1975, there were a few interesting things, such as the end of Bretton Woods, the regulation in the world economy, the beginning of global tourism, the beginning effects of the Green Revolution, which enabled further population growth, and so on and so on. Whenever I give a lecture on this, colleagues always come to me and say, yes, 1975, we have already found this somewhere. So somewhere in the mid-1970s, the dynamics changed. And this also shows why the forecasts of the Club of Rome were not wrong, but incomplete. Because they came to a structural dynamic in the system that allowed the prediction of the Club of Rome with the limits of growth to continue through such an innovation push. The question is whether the next singularity that we are heading for, whether we will also be able to get out of this catastrophe through innovation, or whether at some point we will really hit the wall. This is the realization, and what can be derived from it? Which political, which scientific consequences can be derived from these insights? To sum it up, we have a few fundamental properties of the complex co-evolving earth system and its co-evolution. Every complex system is controlled by a network of complex regulatory structures. Every biological organism, every ecosystem. These complex structures construct their own niches. Ms. Felice has already pointed out that the adaptation of human societies always led to the construction of new niches. The dynamics between the constructed niches and the regulatory structures of the systems are characterized by interesting new feedback mechanisms. And every stable system, or long-term stable system, is characterized by a balance between positive and negative feedback mechanisms. This can be visualized, we don't have to go into it, it's just a graphical representation of these feedback loops. Now we come to the problem. With the beginning of the Neolithic and the beginning of the knowledge evolution of humans, we have systematically managed to get negative feedback loops out of the system. This enabled us to create this positive feedback loop between population growth, knowledge growth and energy consumption. This is the anthropocene or the innovation engine of human society. A consequence of this positive feedback loop and the elimination of many negative feedbacks from the system is that we have actually been able to observe this exponential growth for about 7,000 to 8,000 years. And of course, this also leads to the fact that human societies have increasingly emancipated themselves from their immediate environment. And ultimately, the current crisis is a consequence of this dynamic over the last 7,000 to 8,000 years. So what can we do with this view? We ultimately have to bring negative feedback loops into the system. For example, a negative feedback loop would be real pandemics. We have seen that COVID has managed to transform global society dramatically over the last two years. But compared to other historical pandemics, it is still relatively harmless. And of course, part of the elimination of negative feedback is the growth of medical knowledge and the elimination of certain diseases, especially infectious diseases. We don't want to bring many infectious diseases into the system now. So what kind of negative feedback loop, that is, regulatory feedback, can we bring into the system? In the sense of human societies, we are talking about values, norms, laws and regulatory principles. These are the regulatory structures that characterise human evolution, especially social and cultural evolution. The question is, on what scale? They are not sufficient, as we can see with the conflict in Ukraine, for humanity to behave reasonably as a whole. Of course, the focus of the Foreign Ministry is that climate policy is foreign policy, or foreign policy is climate policy. Ultimately, it is about the successful implementation and establishment of binding norms on a global scale. That is the negative feedback we need to make this system controllable. Of course, there is a difference that we can derive from the system theory between hierarchical forms of regulation and lateral or on one level. In politics, it is often said that we have national states that join together into larger units such as the European Union and then ultimately the UN. Ultimately, it is this hierarchical structuring that is a form of regulatory feedback. Of course, there is also the feedback of a global civil society that can organize itself. I think we need both forms of feedback loops in the system. The last thing I would like to address is the role of science here. In a certain way, one can say that science is substantially to blame for the global crisis, because it was science and technology and medicine that essentially took out many of the traditional negative feedbacks of the system. We always called that progress. The question is now, how can science positively contribute to bringing negative feedback loops back into the system? Of course, this is not possible with the current structure of science. These inter- and transdisciplinary cooperations are needed, such as the Groundcheck Program of the German Archaeological Institute. I would now like to conclude with an infrastructure on how we can work together on transdisciplinary knowledge. Because we have also learned that the traditional model that science creates knowledge and then has to implement or can implement politics does not work. We need a partnership of civil society and politics and a method with which we can do this. We developed it in Arizona, but it is now also very much in Berlin. It is the so-called decision theater, where decision-makers and science develop a problem awareness together. Science then constructs formal models that make the problem in some way modelable and then these models can be developed together and ultimately lead to decisions that are supported by all decision-makers. So this is a classic example of a transdisciplinary dialogue. And this is a picture of such a decision theater that was just before the pandemic, they did it at the House of Cultures of the World, also with representatives of the Bundestag on questions of mobility. So with such new procedures, new methods, we hope that science in conjunction with civil society and decision-makers can really take part in solving global problems. With this I thank you for your attention and I think we now have a coffee break.