Blue Banana & Cura Annonae

Oleg Batygin: This happened more than eight years ago. Back then I was working for a powerful Korean company. I'd been put in charge of developing a software product that's fairly popular today. At that point I was finishing up the architecture design and planning to assemble a team.

I don't like, and I'm not able, to immerse myself completely in a single task. When I'm working on something with real enthusiasm, intriguing ideas about something not directly related to the task at hand invariably come into my head.

I always let myself get carried away by these "extraneous" ideas. Simply because, once I get distracted by them, I immediately come up with fresh thoughts about my main task. Every airplane has two wings, and I'm more productive when I'm doing two things at once.

The same thing happened that time too. As soon as I'd dug deep enough into the architecture of the future application, the idea for a striking article came into my head. The more enthusiastically I worked on the article, the more intriguing the application's architecture became. And vice versa. The more original and striking my structural solutions were, the bolder and more vivid the article became.

This article became the cause of the abrupt, very strange, but extremely positive changes in my life.

The article was called "The Systems-Engineering Threshold of Our Civilization's Fragility." Its central idea was that the fragility of any continuously growing information system inevitably increases along with the growth of its complexity.

The more complex the system, the higher its operational risks. With literally every new civilizational "story" built on top, the potential consequences of the whole edifice collapsing become ever more catastrophic, and the collapse itself ever more likely.

The metaphor of the "edifice of civilization" lets you grasp intuitively why a catastrophe brought about by, say, the collapse of the Roman Empire looks pretty vanilla next to what awaits us if what we've built comes down.

When a single-story bucolic structure, built of dung and resinous logs by the delightful master craftsman Lukyanov, collapses, the chance that any of its occupants will perish is low. In the collapse, comparatively small masses are set in motion. The resulting chaos won't be great, and a victim of the catastrophe will be able, relatively easily, to work out a safe corner in the collapsing structure and survive there.

Now compare the collapse of a wooden suburban house with the legendary collapse of the Twin Towers. The amount of destructive energy and the amount of chaos that arose in the second case were enormous. And the chance of survival for the victims of the catastrophe extremely low. Tending toward zero.

The cause of death for people during the collapse of large structures is, as a rule, chaos. The mind of someone inside a collapsing skyscraper isn't up to the task of working out a path to safety within so chaotic a medium.

He can save himself only as the result of a very fortunate confluence of circumstances. That is, in effect, he can save himself only by a miracle. Not a magical miracle, of course, but the only miracle there is in the world, the miracle of the rare chance.

The collapse of our existing civilization will in many ways resemble the collapse of the Twin Towers. But, of course, it will be more horrific. The larger and more complex the construction, the more energy and chaos its crash produces. And our present-day civilization is a uniquely vast edifice.

A highly chaotic medium is a many-handed killer. A person dies in it because he turns out to be incapable of predicting the next event. But let's take a closer look at the "hands" of the monster in question. What exactly will threaten a person caught in the thick of a catastrophe on a civilizational scale.

During the fall of the Roman Empire there was no serious famine in the cities. The Cura Annonae (the system for supplying Rome with grain) at some point ceased to exist, but cities in those days weren't as large as they are now.

Around the cities there were numerous sources of food. Forests, fields, and pastures. Romans left the capital "for the land" comparatively easily. Say, between the years four hundred and five hundred AD, the population of Rome shrank from seven hundred thousand to one hundred thousand people. These people didn't die and didn't vanish into thin air. They went off to live by subsistence farming. To produce food for themselves and for the townspeople who remained.

With the Maya civilization things probably went a similar way. By all appearances, in the ninth century AD an unusually severe drought struck the Yucatán. The cities became hungry and uncomfortable. And the people simply abandoned their developed culture and returned to the forests.

Naturally, today such a mild scenario for dismantling civilization seems entirely impossible.

If we take, for instance, the Blue Banana, the megalopolis stretching from the western shores of Britain to the base of the Apennine Peninsula, we see a vast, continuously urbanized territory. A gigantic, arc-shaped city running through the whole of Europe, with a population of one hundred eleven million people.

What would happen if food stopped reaching this city, one can imagine. The situation shown in Jean-Pierre Jeunet's film Delicatessen is comparatively mild among the possible scenarios.

Practically all the food consumed by the Blue Banana is produced beyond its borders. If the present-day Cura Annonae collapses, people will, with enormous probability, devour one another before they reach the lands one can live off.

You have to understand that for the survival and structural integrity of so fantastically complex and vast a civilizational formation as a megalopolis, food alone isn't enough. You need water, electricity, fuel, medicines. You need hundreds of categories of resources, the disappearance of any one of which can negatively affect the availability of the rest.

The Blue Banana, of course, isn't the only one of its kind. There's the American BosWash, home to forty-five million people; Indonesian Java, home to one hundred forty-one million. The Japanese Taiheiyō—a population of eighty-one million people. The Pearl River Delta in China, home to one hundred twenty million.

It's clear that all these megalopolises are the coordinating nodes of the current civilization. These gigantic concrete fields without a single source of food, where the population density is so great that people simply wouldn't be able to find room for themselves in the streets if they came down to the ground from their homes, govern the extraction and distribution of all the resources in this world.

The nodes in question are linked into a single network by a multitude of overt and hidden connections. We know how responsive the modern economy is. A serious problem in one of the nodes immediately echoes throughout the entire system.

It's very important that "those living on the land" today are also, for the most part, extremely specialized. In the event of a catastrophe they'll find themselves in the preferable position. But it will be hard for them to survive too.

The megalopolis takes from a mining settlement some rare-earth metals or other, which you can't eat and which are unpleasant to touch. In exchange it gives the settlement food, energy, medicines, and everything else necessary for life.

In the event of serious problems in the megalopolis, the settlement's resource base will immediately start to crumble. And a shortage of resources "on the land," naturally, will aggravate the problem in the megalopolis. A chain reaction of collapsing production links will set in.

Nor should one forget, in all this, the tens of thousands of harmful and dangerous production cycles. All the chemical plants and nuclear power stations whose integrity depends directly on the integrity of the social system and the supply system.

One must remember the colossal volume of accumulated weapons of mass destruction. The wreckage of the collapsing "great society" will undoubtedly be led by random, spontaneous leaders. Their level of social responsibility won't be high. And the temptation to use nuclear or chemical weapons, on the contrary, will be extremely great.

In short, if our civilization falls, it won't just bruise itself and break a bone. It will be smashed to dust and ashes. And we'll be very lucky if those ashes aren't radioactive.

A catastrophe on such a scale may not merely throw humanity back into the caves. It may erase people from the face of the Earth altogether. And along with them, most of the present-day biosphere.

If the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union falls off the roof of the Spasskaya Tower, he will surely bruise himself fatally. The only question is whether the General Secretary clambers about on that roof often enough to fall off it with a hundred-percent probability. And to that question one can answer with confidence. Yes, he clambers up there quite often enough!