Tipping the Scale

I was talking to a friend about the general state of the world around us, and we came to a simple conclusion: Humanity does not scale well. It was something of a triviality at the time, a basic aphorism that arose out of a conversation because it neatly explained the central theses of that particular conversation, but in the intervening years, I've noticed that it seems to be more generally applicable.

It is, however, not a particularly obvious conclusion to come to. After all, by some measures, humanity is a remarkably successful species, mostly due to its spread across the globe. While people are sometimes given more credit than they are due for the impacts that humanity is capable of having on the environment, the fact of the matter remains that human beings have the capacity to deliberately create a mass extinction event that rivals any of those in the fossil record. And for quite some time, the fear was that this would come about because of rivalry and hostility between different groups.

People are, it seems, expert at not getting along with one another. But that, I think, ignores the fact that all animals compete for resources, and not necessarily only when said resources are scarce. Humans  have come to inhabit every ecosystem on Earth that is even marginally livable, because for many people, time and again, the answer to competition was to look elsewhere for sustenance, if not always prosperity. The human migrations that have produced the phenomena people refer to as race and foreign languages were all driven by the fact that human groups could only grow so large before they found themselves incapable of meeting the challenges of their local areas through cooperation. It's built into the basic architecture of the species.

Of course, there is a problem with the idea that humanity does not scale well because there are legitimate barriers that mean that it cannot scale well. Humans, like all animals, are driven to reproduce. While there are large numbers of people for whom being parents is a sub-optimal choice, for many others, it's simply the thing to do. Sometimes that's for reasons of economics and other times out of reaching for a form of joy, but whatever the reason, there are a myriad of reasons that people seek to multiply.

I don't know how that tension will ultimately resolve itself. It's possible that it never will. But I suspect that eventually, the limits of humanity's ability to scale will catch up to humanity's ability to use technology to expand those limits. This will not result in the end of humanity, more than likely. But it will be highly disruptive, even though it's become more and more clear to me that the inability of humanity to scale indefinitely is known, if not always understood.