Dr. Jack Alpert | Imagining a Sustainable Civilization.. | CACOR Zoom 2022-02-16

Topic: Dr. Jack Alpert | Imagining a Sustainable Civilization | CACOR Zoom Meeting

Time: Feb 16, 2022 13:30 Eastern Time (US and Canada)

Edited CHAT record…

Bio:

Dr. Jack Alpert is director of Stanford Knowledge Integration Lab, a Lab which he started in 1978 at Stanford University.  In 1992, the Lab left Stanford and became a non-profit research foundation.  The research focused on how people gather and process information to understand dynamic systems.  Over the years the Lab has transitioned its focus to the relationship between human cognition and civilization viability.  The current work is on discovering and implementing behavior that “changes our course” and creates a viable civilization.

His website is http://www.skil.org/

Summary:

Knowledge is imperfect.  Every behavior does not produce expected results whether you are an individual or a nation, but some things are very determinant.  If you drive your car until the gas tank is empty it stops.

If it stops in the middle of a desert with no water for hundreds of miles and no cell phone service and little chance of anyone coming your way.  You made some choices that are going to kill you and everyone in the car.

Global civilization is a little more complicated than a car running out of gas in the desert.  However, there is a good chance that when oil, coal, gas, and uranium energy deliveries decline and we don’t find the technology to make wind, solar, or fusion support us, we will be fighting each other over the last loaf of bread until at the end of this century only 600 million subsistence farmers survive and there is no path upward.

If the car–running out of gas in the desert–is a good representation of our civilization,

1. Why are we having trouble explaining it to the 7.8 billion people who are in control?
2. Is the car in the desert model the starting point to help us describe a viable global civilization?
3. Do we know which collected human behaviors would keep that new civilization viable?
4. How do we get people, living in this new civilization to take them?
5. How do we have the people living in our present civilization take the behavior that would avoid the expected on-course tragedy and transition from where we are to this viable civilization?