Croesus's Mistake. How Predictions on the Future of Humankind can Backfire

King Croesus of Lydia is remembered mainly for having been fabulously rich. But his story also involves the misunderstanding of a prophecy, and how that led him to his doom. When he consulted the oracle of Delphi, he was told that he would "destroy a great empire" should he attack Cyrus, the Persian ruler. Croesus understood that the Oracle meant Cyrus’s empire, but the truth was that it was Croesus’s one to be destroyed. Oracles can be dangerous, indeed. In this post, I discuss how some modern oracles on the future of humankind can have adverse effects when they are misunderstood.

Models of the future of the world are created on the basis of data and equations. Their record is reasonably good but, in most cases, negative predictions were widely disbelieved. That was the case for the various “peak oil” studies that started being produced in the 1950s, and that in the 1990s predicted the start of the decline of the global production of oil and liquids during the first two decades of the 21st century.

A 2013 scenario by ASPO (association for the study of peak oil) for the production of oil and gas liquids.

Although these studies were officially ignored, in the early 2000s, Western governments started acting as if they were perfectly aware of the peak oil problem. One countermeasure was an increasing military effort to control the Middle East's oil resources. Another, much more effective, was to funnel huge financial resources into the production of "shale oil" (or "tight oil").  Shale oil is oil trapped in a solid underground matrix that would not flow and hence could not be extracted by conventional methods. The development of "fracking" technologies made this resource available. It was a small miracle that delayed the production peak by at least ten years. 

But shale oil was also an example of Croesus’s mistake. Those who went big for it probably thought that it was a problem of quantity. That is, they thought we were actually “running out” of crude oil. Since shale oil is theoretically much more abundant, many of them genuinely believed that the new resource would give them “centuries of abundance,” if not infinite supply (some snippets found on the Web confirm this attitude). They didn’t realize that the cost of extraction was the crucial parameter and that the theoretical abundance of a resource doesn’t mean much. It is the cost of extraction that limits the amount available. To say nothing about pollution and destruction all over where shale oil wells were created. Shale oil didn’t solve the problem. It only delayed the cliff but made it steeper.

But who decided to go for shale oil? And why? The mechanism that led to this decision remains obscure to us. I am reasonably sure that it didn’t involve a group of shady figures collecting in a smoke-filled room to decide the oil production strategy for the next 20 years, maybe after having engaged in a session of adoration of the demon Baphomet (including the obligate human sacrifice). But there was no public debate on this decision, no attempt to involve public institutions such as universities or research centers, nothing like that. That's not surprising; we all know that, in a democracy, the people never make important decisions. Simply, the financial elites decided to pour vast amounts of money into the development of shale oil. It is likely that the peak oil studies strongly influenced the decision, although that cannot be proven. But, clearly, the idea that crude oil would soon become scarce and expensive was a factor in deciding to invest in a resource that promised to produce an equivalent product, although at much higher costs. 

And now? Shale oil production growth seems to have reached its limits, and the war in Ukraine showed how delicate the supply of fuels to the Western world is. Even though the term "peak oil" remains taboo in the public debate, we face the energy supply problem again. 

Likely, no group of shady figures will meet in Baphomet's temple to make a decision (although they may still perform human sacrifices, just for the fun of it). But the elites will do something. They will not keep financing shales: the investments in shale oil haven't generated profits, and they will not sink any more money on a losing enterprise (they said it explicitly on Bloomberg). They may go for all sorts of gooey, dark stuff that can be turned into a combustible liquid or gas: oil shales, tar sands, methane hydrates, or whatever. Among other things, that would wreck forever Earth’s ecosystem. Or, God forbid, they may decide to make an all-out effort for biofuels. That would never work, but it would have the side effect of causing billions of people to starve to death once the world’s agricultural production is largely diverted from the task of producing food for people to producing food for cars (such an outcome may not be considered bad by the elites). A rush to new nuclear would not be so bad, but useless considering the time involved in creating the new plants needed. To say nothing about the nightmarish strategic problems it would involve.

So, replacing oil with an equivalent liquid fuel is a big problem. It would be much easier to go for new forms of energy, but the elites have big problems understanding how a silicon slab that doesn’t move, emit smoke, or make any noise can produce abundant and cheap energy. So, they can’t understand how renewables can take over the energy system and will probably oppose the idea. And they may well be successful.

In any case, the problem goes way beyond the simple need for liquid fuels. There is much more. If the rush to shale oil was created by the diffusion of the peak oil meme in the 2000s, nowadays, another meme is returning to be discussed after having spent a long time in the recycle bin of the global memesphere: the results of the Limits to Growth study of 1972.

A recent (2023) re-calibration of the 1972 “Limits to Growth” model performed by Arjuna Nebel et al.

The “Limits to Growth” meme is much more impressive and worrisome than the peak oil one. It is not just a question of running out of something: the collapse occurs due to a combination of several factors, including pollution (mainly in the form of climate change). Note how the curves collapse rapidly after having peaked: it is a manifestation of the “Seneca Effect” (growth is slow, but ruin is rapid). If the elites reacted to peak oil with such a major effort as to move to shale oil, what could they concoct to contrast the cliff after the civilization peak?

One thing is sure: the elites will decide on the basis of qualitative, intuition-based considerations without paying much attention to quantitative data. It is likely that they will be influenced by the discussion in the social media sphere. And that makes the situation worrisome. If you follow the debate, you surely noticed how many people are angry at this or that social, political, religious, or ethnic group (or the whole humankind). Just like Croesus understood the Delphi oracle in reverse, they understand the models in reverse and accuse the human population of being the cause of the impending collapse. From this, it is but one small step to advocate the elimination of the cause of the problem. In literal terms and forever. That wouldn’t work. In a complex system, there are no causes and no effects; there are only forcings and feedbacks. Exterminations solve no problems, they create worse ones. But the elites don’t think in dynamic terms.

Does that mean that a group of adorers of Baphomet will actually collect in a dark basement, somewhere, to plan for the extermination of a large fraction of humankind? Impossible to say, but it may well be that what we say in our blogs and social media has a much larger effect than we can imagine. In the end, anyway, the future always turns itself into the present the way it has to.

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Some of my posts on mass exterminations published in the old version of the Seneca Blog

9. Creating your Own State https://thesenecaeffect.blogspot.com/2022/08/the-age-of-exterminations-how-to-create.html

8. How to Destroy Western Europe https://thesenecaeffect.blogspot.com/2022/05/the-age-of-extermination-viii-how-to.html

7. Going Undercover https://thesenecaeffect.blogspot.com/2022/05/the-age-of-exterminations-v-can-we.html

6.  The Great Famine to Come https://thesenecaeffect.blogspot.com/2021/10/the-age-of-exterminations-vi-great.html

5. Suicide as a weapon of mass destruction https://thesenecaeffect.blogspot.com/2021/10/the-age-of-exterminations-v-killing.html

4. How to kill the Rich https://thesenecaeffect.blogspot.com/2021/10/the-age-of-exterminations-iv-how-to.html

3. Why you should be worried. https://thesenecaeffect.blogspot.com/2021/10/the-age-of-exterminations-iii-you.html

2. How to exterminate the Young https://thesenecaeffect.blogspot.com/2021/09/the-age-of-exterminations-ii-how-to.html

1. Exterminating the Witches https://thesenecaeffect.blogspot.com/2021/09/the-age-of-exterminations-who-will-be.html