The Arithmetic of Life and Death (24 page)

Gwen took a deep breath and considered what she had discovered. On the one hand, Polynesian culture at the middle of the second millennium did not have any of the modern advances that we take for granted today—processes, technologies, and fertilizers that have multiplied
the productivity of agriculture by many times. And the people of contemporary times are not preoccupied with the construction and transportation of massive stone statues.

On the other hand, although Rapa Nui is volcanic, its land was not otherwise consumed by massive deserts, or urban sprawl, or great tundras like those of Russia and Canada. And the resources of their island were not consumed by the trappings of modernization: trillions of sheets of paper, billions of electric appliances, millions of internal combustion engines, thousands of power plants.

Gwen, who had just recently believed that she had a life expectancy of more than ninety years, found herself becoming distressed. However, before she could conclude that planet Earth had exceeded a population level that it could predictably sustain without war or catastrophe, she looked for corroborating evidence. There she found:

Right then and there, Gwen should have concluded that the Earth was reaching the end of its ecological tether. However, she knew that estimates of the peak sustainable population of Rapa Nui ran as high as 10,000, which was 156.25 per square mile and more than 38 percent higher than the world’s current population density. So, in one last grasp at optimism, she decided to cruise through the Web site of the United Nations Population Information Network
before she logged off the Internet. There, she discovered that the U.N. predicts that the world’s population will reach 8.2 billion in the year 2030, which is about 156.3 people per square mile.

Gwen also learned that the world’s population is predicted to level off at 11.6 billion sometime around the year 2200. That is a density of more than 220 per square mile and approximately two times the population that was demonstrably incapable of surviving on the remote, near paradise of Rapa Nui.

Today, largely due to annexation by Chile and a tourism economy created by the mystery of the
moai
, there are two thousand people again living on the island, which is only about thirty per square mile. But there are still no forests on Rapa Nui. There are no Easter Island palms. There is also no agriculture of significance. The island of Rapa Nui has become a sparsely populated dependency fed by imports, which are paid for by tourists, who come to see the great stone symbols of its destruction.

Most of the
moai
, by the way, were still standing in the late 1700s. Over the next three or four generations, though, the citizens of Rapa Nui pulled them down. Maybe they finally got the message.

D
uring difficult times such as these, you may be inclined to conclude that the world is against you. That, however, would be an incorrect conclusion. The world is not against you; Nature is. And it is personal.

The essence of Nature is an infinity of possibilities. At any given point at any given time for any given action, an incalculable number of distinct things can happen next. For the most part, this is good news. Over the long run, the principle of infinite possibilities has been essential to the creation, diversity, and mystery of life.

But day-to-day human existence is just a bit different. An infinity of possibilities does not always work to our advantage. That’s because there is usually only a finite set of things that can go right. In fact, we human beings tend to define things that way. For instance, when the lawn mower
is working, one thing is going right. But when the lawn mower is not working, one or more things have gone wrong.

Although we can define the things that we want to go right, we cannot limit the behavior of Nature by similar definition. Instead, Nature requires that there always will be an infinite number of things that can happen next. Among the infinite number of things that can happen next, most will not affect you. Some, however, will. Among them, there is always a number of things that can go wrong. Unfortunately, this number is also infinitely large.

Anyone who has ever taken a lawn mower out of the garage for the first grass cutting of spring understands this problem. There is one right condition: The lawn mower works. Somehow, though, over the course of winter, one or more things have gone wrong: The spark plug has been fouled, the wire from the spark plug to the engine will no longer carry the spark, the gasoline tank has inexplicably taken in water, all of the oil has mysteriously turned into black goo, the plastic throttle has broken, the throttle cable has rusted to the point where it can no longer convey changes to the carburetor, the gas can has disappeared, the blade has become duller than C-Span, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

This is the Lawn Mower Principle. It states that there is usually one thing that can go right, but there are an infinite number of things that can happen, so there must be an infinite number of things that can go wrong. (It could just as easily be called the “First Law of Golf,” because it is a principle that all golfers immediately grasp.)

The Lawn Mower Principle works everywhere, not just in the yard. In theory, for instance, business travelers can
reach their destination on time. However, it rarely happens in real life: The plane arrives late to the gate because of traffic control delays, boarding is delayed while a connecting flight clears traffic control, passenger loading takes too long because the flight attendants have to check seventeen of the new carry-on steamer trunks, pullback is delayed because the In-Flight Kitchen has failed to include the required number of Kosher pasta salads, luggage is lost, flights are canceled, and airports are closed due to fog, snow, earthquake, or the arrival of Air Force One.

By the Lawn Mower Principle, there are many more things that can go wrong than can go right. Therefore, it is our job in life to act to limit the likelihood of negative outcomes and to increase the probability of a positive outcome. Without question, the most serious negative outcome that we have to limit is the probability of our extinction. According to those who study the evolution of our planet for a living, about 99.9 percent of all of the species that have ever inhabited the Earth are now extinct.

We would all like to believe that we humans are different; that our chances of survival are something better than 1,000 to one. In more than a million years of existence, we have already survived lions, tigers, and bears, Ice Ages, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, tsunamis, tornadoes, hurricanes, floods, drought, famine, plague, pestilence, war, and the invasion of British rock and roll.

But more things will go wrong. More than 90 percent of all existing species may fail to survive the next million years. If we are to avoid their fate, then we will have to evolve. However, successful evolution in the Information Age will be very different from what it was in the Stone Age. In this new age and in each age after it, our survival will depend
less on our willingness to fight and more on our courage to do what is right.

In this vital endeavor, arithmetic tells us:

Intelligence is not just a gift; it’s a choice. Make it and evolve.