Understanding Risk, Hyperobjects, And Cascading Events
Recognising the part played by Risk, Hyperobjects, and Cascading Events, in the unfolding global energy problem.
I highly recommend the book above, for anyone finding the usual references on risk as being a little “Dry”, it presents the concept in a way that I found inspiring, when I read it, more years ago than I care to tie down.
This is a all stuff we need to know in the Engineering Domain of safety, but in recent years seems to be increasingly thrown aside, “To get things done”.
In essence, the book describes probabilities of breakdown, and what happens during breakdowns.
There are many phenomenons in nature covered in the book, from shifting sands, and snow avalanches, to earthquakes, to the breakdowns that happen between cloud layers, or between clouds and Earth, when bolts of lightning form.
In all cases, there are very little indications before the final event, but in all cases it was something that had to happen sooner or later, given certain tensions building up, with catastrophic effects when it does happen.
The tensions, in the case of the global energy problem, are the constant systemic economic pressure on all people to continue contributing to the extraction of energy from Earth.
The activity of energy extraction is at the point where we cannot, and dare not continue to keep doing, as we can see now many catastrophic, as yet minor localised events happening, these are getting larger with now a third of a very highly populated country becoming underwater, at some point all of these events will converge to an overall sudden climate and economic disaster, ending in extinction.
I’ve done my best as a long term practicing Systems Engineer, to analyse in detail all of the relevant topics, and to trace all effect through to all causes.
If we are clever, we can avoid such an event, but it requires us overcoming some common misperceptions, and understanding where we are on the shifting slopes of the run-up to this disaster.
- The events leading up to a cascading event are heavily non-linear, despite beginning as something that might have looked linear.
- Disastrous cascading events cannot be predicted or planned for, other than taking radical measures immedately eliminating all possibilities of the final event.
- Profit driven business, that is all profit driven business, is the systemic driver of energy by extraction. I know this is a controversial thing to say, but it is the hard truth. The good news is that there is a way out, an actual technological fix, which again I have analysed “To death”, namely the case around domestic and community solar hydrogen. A community could be a bunch of householders, a government, a business, a platform, a metaverse, a bank.
The key to success (Survival!) with this last bullet point, is to issue money on the Joules received and put to use from the sun. The money should be issued to all people in the community. Since it is difficult sometimes to identify the community, the ideal scenario is to issue free money as a kind of solar backed UBI to all people, in trust that they will setup, or become involved in whatever solar hydrogen capabiliy is required for each community, since by this, all will maximise their/our solar stipend, and all will become energy independent.
The only way to deal with a hyperobject, is an opposite hyperobject.
The hyperobject needed to reverse the negative one we see unfolding around us now, is the positive one that will by created the instant money is given for free to all people representing the Joules received and being put to use from the sun.
