Is CACTUS just a clever name for old well understood ideas?

CACTUS stands for Complexity Accelerated Collapse of a Thermodynamically Unsustainable System.

It’s originator is a retired mining engineer turned reclusive prepper named Hideaway who lives on a doomstead somewhere in Australia.

In Australia, cactus is slang for something that is ruined, broken or finished.

So yes, CACTUS is a clever name.

But does CACTUS introduce any new ideas in the science of human overshoot, or does it simply recycle old ideas previously discussed by other overshoot scholars?

When Hideaway’s CACTUS theory was first introduced about a year ago we had a few drive-by shooters who were upset that we claimed CACTUS had new ideas. Unfortunately they never stayed long enough to offer any evidence.

A few un-Denial regulars have, ever so gently, so as to not offend our beloved recluse Hideaway, suggested that other overshoot intellectuals, like for example Alice Friedemann, have previously discussed CACTUS ideas, but again, no evidence was provided.

I’m as well read on overshoot science as any chemiosmotic eukaryotic multi-cellular energy dissipater with an extended theory of mind in this universe.

I think I’m aware of all the great overshoot minds, and have read some, if not most of their work.

Having said that, I’m also an oldish guy with less than perfect memory, and adequate, but not outstanding intelligence.

To the best of my recollection I do not recall anyone clearly articulating several of the most important elements of CACTUS.

I also like to think I have good integrity which means if anyone has evidence that I’m wrong and CACTUS is indeed just a clever name for old ideas, I will retract my claim and apologize.

Let’s revisit the core ideas of CACTUS which were first summarized here.

1. Modernity requires abundant minerals and energy.
2. The majority of minerals and energy we use are non-renewable and finite.
3. Recycling is economically and/or technically impossible for most minerals.
4. For those minerals that can be recycled, there are losses in the recycling process that still result in long term depletion.
5. The quality of mineral and energy reserves decline as they deplete, because we always harvest the best quality reserves first.
6. Mineral and energy extraction technologies must increase in complexity to compensate for falling reserve quality to maintain flows of resources. For example, compare modern directional drilling now required for fracking with early oil rigs. Or the giant trucks and other machines now required to haul and process low grade copper ore.
7. Rising complexity increases the materials, processes, skills, locations, and number of people needed to design, and manufacture the technologies.
8. Rising complexity requires a growing market to support the increasing cost of designing and manufacturing technologies. For example, a smaller population would not buy enough phones to make a TSMC factory in Taiwan viable, and therefore the advanced chips needed for oil exploration and extraction would not exist.
9. A growing market requires a growing economy and population.
10. A growing economy and population increases the consumption of all minerals and energy.
11. Wastes generated by the growing economy and population create increasing frictions to further growth.
12. This self-reinforcing complexity growth system drives an increase in mineral and energy flows until technology, markets, and population can no longer keep up with growing waste frictions and declining reserve qualities, and a critical mineral or energy becomes unavailable in the quantities required.
13. Scarcity of the critical mineral or energy triggers a system wide technology breakdown cascade because many technologies depend on it, and many other technologies depend on those technologies, via an ultra-complex network of dependencies.
14. The unavailability of many technologies then causes many more mineral and energy flows to become unavailable in the quantities required because the quality of remaining reserves makes extraction difficult or impossible without the latest technologies.
15. This self-reinforcing collapse of complexity, technology, and resource flows is certain at some point in the not too distant future and will result in a supernova end to modernity and civilization.
16. Nothing can be done to prevent this outcome, just as nothing can be done to prevent the collapse of a star.
17. It’s not possible to have modernity without infinite growth on a finite planet which means modernity will be short lived everywhere in the universe.

This summary I wrote of CACTUS is based on collating hundreds of comments by Hideaway made at various sites over several years, and is not 100% accurate, as a few corrections from Hideaway are expected, nor is it complete, as Hideaway is working hard now to incorporate the science of super-linear systems and networks of networks into his theory.

Many of the ideas in the above 17 points are of course not new, and have been widely discussed by many people.

I claim a few of the core ideas are new, or are rarely discussed. These include:

• Modernity requires growth in non-renewable energy and mineral flows to exist, and this dependence is grounded in physics that cannot be changed. Many others discuss the dependence of growth on human behaviors like the maximum power principle, and human constructs like our fractional reserve debt backed monetary system, however no one until now has clearly stated that modernity must have growing non-renewable energy and mineral flows to exist.
• This dependence on physical growth is profound because it implies that no form of sustainable modernity is possible anywhere in the universe. It also means that all of the many overshoot aware intellectuals that promote degrowth, steady-state, circular economies, population reduction, or a great simplification as useful responses to our overshoot predicament are wrong. That includes the most famous Limits to Growth study by Dr. Dennis Meadows et. al. which claimed we needed to stop growing to be sustainable.
• Modernity, when it emerges anywhere in the universe, will be short lived due to the previous points, and will end as a supernova. We have in the past explained this supernova behavior using a few words such as those in points 13-15 in the summary above. Hideaway has been working hard to incorporate the science of super-linearity and networks of networks to provide a more solid scientific explanation for the expected supernova collapse of modernity.
• CACTUS explains why we have not detected any aliens, and why we should have gratitude for being alive to witness a rare and fleeting peak of what is possible in the universe.

Today in a comment Hideaway gave us a preview of the essay he is working on:

When we take all the human stories out of the equation, we are left with raw physics of our system of civilization.

All the human stories ,of money, debt, religion, patents, agreements, governments, laws, contracts, etc all just function to make us get along and trust each other enough to function as a civilization in larger groupings than we otherwise would.

Ants use pheromones to get along and co-operate, money debt, contracts, laws, governments etc are our equivalent to pheromones, just way less efficient..

Coming down to just the physics to explain what happens when limits are reached, we have to understand how civilization has scaled. The raw data shows super-linear scaling in several aspects relative to each other.

Energy use has grown exponentially relative to population (growing or stagnant), that’s super-linear scaling. Material use has grown exponentially compared to energy use, again whether growing or stagnant, which is another aspect of super-linear scaling. Materials moved (not just used, includes all wastes, overburden, strip ratios of mines, lower ore grades, etc), has grown exponentially compared to materials used, again growing or stagnant, another aspect of super-linear scaled growth. Materials moved times distance moved, is also growing exponentially compared to just materials moved, so more super-linear scaling!!

Physics and math tell us that all super-linearly scaled energy dissipative systems end, in a finite time singularity, a physics and math term, meaning fast collapse or phase change. A large star going supernova in a fraction of a second after millions of years of life, is a finite time singularity.

So what happens at this singularity? Basically there is not enough energy to do all that is required to maintain the system let alone grow it, yet any area the system tries to cut back on, feeds back immediately to cut the energy available again, shrinking the system.

This is where the network of networks science comes in. Civilization is basically a network of many different networks, all interdependent upon each other. For any business it has a network of suppliers and customers, but also uses networks of logistics, communications, electricity, water, waste removal etc. Even a household has it’s own networks and interacts with the other networks like government, roads, electricity, water. Everyone of the networks is never independent of the other networks, they are interdependent.

What the science and math of network of networks show is that when you start losing some nodes in networks, the resultant feedback can magnify the effect in other networks nodes, that that lead to a cascade of collapse of all the networks, once a critical quantity of nodes are taken out. Basically the cascade of failure becomes self reinforcing.

Think of civilization as a machine, the most complex machine you can imagine. The machine is working, but you take out a wire here, then over there, then loosen a nut here, then another one over there. At some point when you have either taken out or loosened too many things, or taken out something critical, the machine just stops running. It may do so catastrophically if the wrong wire or nut was affected.

When there is not enough energy to run our civilization, it’s the same effect as pulling out random wires or undoing nuts or bolts randomly in a giant machine; it’s taking out different nodes all over the place because there is not enough energy to keep every aspect functioning, and it’s all happening very rapidly, too rapidly to be making decisions on what gets cut.

With the super-linearly scaled growth within civilization, by the time we get to where there is not enough energy for maintenance of the system, the system has looked fine up to that point, yet the energy available for the next point in time is not enough, so things unravel randomly, especially at the fastest growing aspect of energy use, which is the movement of materials. But if those materials, including waste materials can’t be moved as much, then the availability of materials used, has to decline, because we can’t get access to them, but they are needed, to produce the energy we do produce, which makes energy use fall further, faster.

Of course we humans have all the human stories, placed on top of the physical energy and materials, so use finance, money, debt, letters of credit, contracts, laws and trading agreements. These promises to each other, increasingly can’t be met, so start to lose meaning, which breaks the physical movement even more.

Realistically all the finance, laws, contracts, trade agreements, etc are just further nodes in the network of networks that are more more fragile than we consider, especially when the physical nodes start unravelling due to lack of energy.

This is of course a lot of what I’m working on in the essay, but it’s a lot to put it all together, including the maths that shows why it all collapses quickly..

The absence of discussion and understanding of CACTUS by all of the many intellectuals who discuss overshoot issues is quite remarkable. Not one famous person has even mentioned CACTUS since it was introduced a year ago, let alone explained why they think it is wrong.

I of course think this silence is explained by Dr. Ajit Varki’s Mind Over Reality Transition (MORT) theory, which all of the famous overshoot intellectuals have also ignored since I started discussing the profound implications of MORT over 10 years ago.

Everyday I see super smart people with high integrity saying things that are so obviously wrong that no other explanation than MORT suffices.

Dr. Sabine Hossenfelder is one of my favorite and most respected physicists. I’ve read her book twice and she’s made a career of calling bullshit on scientific nonsense like string theory. Yet her ignorance of CACTUS and what is physically possible, despite having a brilliant physics mind, is so embarrassing that it can only be explained by MORT.

We are using a ridiculously tiny part of earth’s resources, so at the moment we have literally barely scratched the surface, so even if resources are theoretically finite in practice we haven’t long reached the end.

But even more importantly economic growth doesn’t measure the amount of resources used because we can growth with more efficient and smarter use of resources.

And of course you can beat limits by going the Elon way off the planet.

As another recent example, world famous and respected energy expert Art Berman wrote an essay a few days ago on entropy. He does an excellent job of explaining entropy but misses the key CACTUS insight that modernity must grow or else it will collapse.

https://www.artberman.com/blog/the-entropy-fee-the-hidden-physical-cost-of-technology

The Entropy Fee: The Hidden Physical Cost of Technology

Technology is commonly seen as the defining engine of modernity and, for millions, almost as an article of faith. In this secular theology, progress is the gospel, innovation the sacrament, and technological advance the miracle expected to solve problems from climate change and disease to poverty and resource scarcity.

The expansion of technological, economic and material growth over the last 200 years is the greatest in human history. The problem is that growth adds complexity, and complexity requires energy to build, maintain and replace. Technology may increase efficiency, but those gains aren’t free. There is a physical cost that money cannot eliminate.

Today, virtually every aspect of daily life—from food and shelter to travel and communication—depends on a continuous flow of concentrated energy and electricity to sustain the metabolism of modern civilization. About 80% of that primary energy still comes from fossil fuels.

Fossil fuels are concentrated stores of chemical free energy with an extraordinary capacity to do useful work. When we burn them, some of that energy is converted into mechanical work or electricity, while the rest is ultimately dispersed as heat. The fuel itself is transformed largely into CO₂ and water and dispersed into the environment.

Energy is conserved, but its capacity to do useful work declines as entropy increases. That’s the physical-world version of the progression from box 1 to box 3 in Figure 1.

Entropy therefore describes a fundamental tendency from concentration toward dispersion. Civilization runs in the opposite direction locally. We concentrate ores into metals, assemble materials into machines and buildings, move supply chains across continents, and organize matter into increasingly elaborate technological systems. None of this violates the second law of thermodynamics because maintaining that local order requires a continuous flow of usable energy while producing still more entropy elsewhere.

Technology does not float independently above civilization as invention, innovation or creativity. It is embedded in civilization’s physical metabolism. The device gets smaller, the transaction faster and the human effort lower—but the supporting network often becomes larger and more complex.

Technology compresses what we see while accelerating the energy and material throughput we don’t see.

That’s the trap. Complexity itself has a maintenance cost—the entropy fee. Technology cannot free us from this cycle because it both enables and depends on continuous energy and material throughput. Entropy and complexity are therefore embedded in growth.

Technological solutions to resource and environmental constraints often add new components, infrastructure and dependencies that must themselves be built, powered, maintained and eventually replaced. When those dependencies encounter limits of their own, further technological solutions are required. Complexity compounds upon complexity, increasing the system’s maintenance burden and consuming a growing share of the usable energy and resources that might otherwise be available for additional growth.

That is the complexity trap. Growth adds technology and infrastructure; technology adds complexity; and complexity requires continuing flows of energy and materials to maintain it. Efficiency can reduce the cost of particular tasks, but it cannot eliminate the physical cost of maintaining the larger system. More complexity means more to build, coordinate, repair and replace.

The result resembles the Red Queen effect at civilization scale: “it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.” An increasing share of society’s effort must simply maintain the organized complexity it has already created.

This is not a mistake or a catastrophe, nor is it simply the result of bad policy or too many regulations. It is a physical consequence of maintaining a complex civilization of more than eight billion people. Technology is not an abstraction. It is organized matter doing useful work, and organized matter has a physical cost.

That makes this less a problem to be solved than a predicament to understand.

Notice that Berman correctly understands modernity requires energy and material flows to maintain itself, but he does not understand that modernity requires growing energy and material flows to not collapse.

I know from reading and listening to many of Berman’s excellent podcasts and essays that he believes that energy depletion will soon cause lifestyles to simplify back to something like the 1950’s when we used less energy but still had comfortable lives.

His understanding is as wrong as that of Dr. Dennis Meadows, and pretty much all of the other overshoot thought leaders.

So no, CACTUS is not just a clever name for old well understood ideas.