Paving Paradise to Put Up an AI Data Center

Ending the Stability of the Holocene

Depending on where you look, humans in our current physical form have been around for maybe 100,000 years. Agriculture and the modern state as an organizing system for humanity both started around 8000 BCE, plus or minus a millennium or two. And while there is robust chicken-and-egg debate regarding the origins of the state vs. agriculture and which came first, and whether or not a hierarchy is a necessary component of large social organization (read “The Dawn of Everything” for more on that), it’s only taken from then until now to develop air travel, breakfast cereals, modern medicine, and the Internet. Were our ancestors simply lazy hunter-gatherers for 90% of their existence until finally buckling down and getting into the serious business of farming and creating nation-states? Perhaps. But the more likely answer is our modern ecological era known as the Holocene.

“The Holocene Epoch began 12,000 to 11,500 years ago at the close of the Paleolithic Ice Age and continues through today,” according to an article on Live Science, putting it around 10,000 BCE and conviently right before the point where we currently mark the beginnings of the state and agriulture. It began at the end of the last Ice Age and began a relativly warm compared to the previous several thousand years) and most importantly stable period of Earth’s climate. Prior to that, Earth’s climate was not specifically well suited to human development. But that nice little flat-ish spot to the far end of the graph represents the Holocene, and we probably owe our civilization in large part to that.

I’d like to reiterate that the key factor of the Holocence is stability. Which is not to say there wasn’t weather, fluctuations, droughts, or wet seasons. By and large, experts seem to think that century over century, the majority of the world’s climate was somewhat predictable. This means that you could count on a crop to return steady yields, which in turn allowed the accumulation of calories and nutrients that large scale agriculture provides. Whether states created agriculture or the other way around, the two have a strong correlation at least. Over the centuries, knowledge built upon itself to create systems of increasing complexity. And it all happened in that last little section of the graph. Before that, our ancestors scratched by a subsistence existence, moving between pockets of habitability and never being able to settle long enough to set the wheels of civilization in motion.

By this time that sudden jump at the year “0” on the far right is probably causing some concern. And while the temperature jump itself is a problem, the instability it represents is what we should be worried about. Extreme weather has become more frequent in my own lifetime. Every season brings a new “once in a century” natural diaster. The western United States is consistently on fire, while the southeast gets hammered by stronger hurricanes each year. All over the world, heat domes threaten large populations; many of which were not built to withstand those temperatures. (Extreme heat, by the way, is the deadlist form of extreme weather.) And even in places that have systems in place to handle the weather, aging infrastructure is being strained to its limits. These changes are being driven by climate change caused by human activity. Which is why some have been calling this final portion of the Holocene by a different name: the Anthropocene. And it marks the beginning of an ecological era where human activity is a primary driver of the climate.

Techno-optimists will tell you not to fret. That we will innovate our way out of this situation. I suppose this is possible. I certainly don’t feel like we can do this without a reliable carbonless energy source, a new economic structure, and serious cuts to consumption in the Imperial Core (i.e. - the Western “developed” nations). After all, independent of human caused climate change, we are still using the resources of 1.7 Earths per year! These problems will only get worse as we continue to use carbon emitting energy sources to power the technology needed to fight the extreme weather events. Just another feedback loop.

This is not to say that we should start cracking one another’s skulls open and feast on the goo inside. However, I think it’s safe to say that in the coming decades, the stable climate that allowed us to develop agricluture and build our civilization will no longer be so stable. Over time, this will result in a dramatic loss of compelxity in the systems that support us. Are we destined to return to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle? That might be the case in some places. Others will adpot a solarpunk vibe, successfully combining a low consumption lifestyle with some of the modern amenities that make life easier.

Regardless of where we all end up, I’m fairly confident humans will end up somewhere, despite what some of the more pessimistic doomers will say. And the important thing to remember is that this will all take time. It all seems like it’s going a million miles an hour right now, and it sort of is. Systems that we’ve taken for granted are starting to break down before our eyes, and that’s a scary prospect. But I feel like what I’ve said above is projecting out decades and beyond, not next week. There is plenty to do in the meantime. I’m trying to say yes more often to enjoying the little things in life that might not be around ten or more years from now that I might have once considered frivolous. I’m considering finding a job that might pay less money, but is more fulfilling and aligned with my values. I want to get more involved with mutal aid groups near me, but that’s still a goal for future me. But if we really are entering a period of decreased system complexity, we will have to recreate the functions of those complex systems on a smaller scale on our own. On the bright side, we lived that way for the majority of our existence.