Seven years ago, I met a group of leaders in Boston representing some of the most impactful philanthropic organisations in the world spending over a billion dollars collectively. And I was struck by the deep sense of overwhelm, even despair, they were all experiencing.

I asked them a series of questions: “Do you feel a sense of acceleration in recent years? In world events? In the news cycle, your social media feeds and even in your own life?  If so, does it feel to you as though something shifted in recent years to make that happen? Do conversations around these issues feel more fraught, fractured and intractable?” 

I often pose these questions at lectures and workshops all over the world. In Boston, as elsewhere, the group largely responded with vigorous nods and exclamatory yeses.

The ensuing conversation revealed that this philanthropic crowd, committed to solving humanity’s biggest challenges, were saturated with despondency. The world was breaking, and their job was to try and fix it. Yet they felt almost paralysed, unable to recognise how a viable future for humanity could be achieved.  

So pervasive is this sensation of accelerating planetary destabilisation that it even has its own word, ‘polycrisis’, which captures the idea that humanity is experiencing multiple, simultaneous interacting crises: rapid political shifts, an intensification of violent civil wars, constant economic fragility, unprecedented cultural and partisan polarisation – all amidst deepening ecological and energy crises.

Coined in the 1970s by a small number of academics, in the last few years ‘polycrisis’ has become widely recognised as a way to make sense of this novel condition, so much so that even the World Economic Forum’s 2023 Global Risks Report uses the term.

Yet the polycrisis concept is largely oblivious to parallel trends: the planet-wide proliferation of new disruptive technologies in many of the core systems that define human civilisation such as in energy, transport and information; as well as the rising popularity of calls for systemic transformation, especially among young people, in all major regions.

As such, the ‘polycrisis’ framing obscures how seemingly disparate crises and transitions are manifesting a more fundamental planetary process of transformation: the looming obsolescence of the current global order, due to a great shift in the relationship between this order and the planet itself.

Phase transitions

When we bring together the best of our sciences and view them through a holistic lens, the most robust scientific explanation of our current condition is that we are in the midst of a planetary phase shift: a planetary-scale metamorphosis that will determine not just our geopolitical and economic future in the near term, but the very fate of the human species in the long term. Humanity finds herself on the cusp of the next great leap in our evolution potentially heralding the end of scarcity within our lifetimes. But if we fail to leap, we could abort this momentum and plunge into an abyss.

Clues to the dynamics of this planetary phase shift can be seen in the way change works at far smaller scales of physical, chemical, and biological systems. At these scales a “sharp transition” in the degree of organisation within the system can be triggered by rapidly shifting external pressures – such as when we apply heat to boil water, turning it into steam.

At these small scales, scientists measure the ‘phase’ of a system – its level of organisation – by examining relevant physical forces like temperature and magnetism. But on the planetary scale involving human civilisation and its relationship to the earth, understanding the ‘phase’ of the entire planetary system requires a much wider lens capable of making sense of the astonishing complexity of human and earth systems.

When we do this, we can see that the very same patterns of change we find among molecules and cells, are playing out across societies and civilisations through the evolutionary march of culture and technology.

The evolutionary flow of life

In The Demon in the Machine: How Hidden Webs of Information Are Finally Solving the Mystery of Life, theoretical physicist Paul Davies of Arizona State University argues that life can be defined as an astounding combination of ‘hardware’ and ‘software’. The ‘hardware’ is a configuration of matter which harnesses energy from its environment with surprising efficiency and dissipates it as waste back into the environment. The ‘software’ consists of the complex information structures – such as the genetic coding – by which that configuration of matter and energy is organised and instructed to self-reproduce. 

Despite the seemingly dualistic distinction, it's important to recognise that here, hardware and software are clearly not separate realities, but simply abstractions of how life really works.

This helps us understand life as a peculiar complex adaptive self-reproducing ‘phase’ of matter, energy and information. This crucial role of information in the evolution of life is rooted in one of the most fundamental laws of physics: the second law of thermodynamics. The law is often defined to assert that disorder in the universe as a closed system, measured through a quantity known as ‘entropy’, always increases over time.

But ‘disorder’ is not the right word, because fundamentally this is a law about energy. In a closed system – a system isolated from anything else – hot things will always get cooler, which means they will increasingly disperse their energy. In an open system, entropy can decrease and energy become more centrally structured under an influx of external energy from outside the system.

If the temperature, pressure and chemical potential of a system are uniformly distributed across the system, then it’s in a state of equilibrium. The second law states that energy in a closed system necessarily tends toward equilibrium. Entities accumulating high concentrations of energy therefore tend to distribute their accumulated energy out across the system, moving closer toward equilibrium.

For instance, if you crack an egg and scramble it, the energy dissipation process tends toward uniform distribution as the egg moves into equilibrium with its environment. You’d never expect to unscramble and uncrack the egg – after you’ve cooked yourself your breakfast, you know that an accidental wave of your hand won’t put you back where you started (thankfully).

Another way of understanding the second law is through something physicists call the principle of least action, which means that in a closed system particles will always take the path of least energy, the most energy efficient path. When your scrambled egg is settling nicely into your plate, having been distributed fairly evenly, it’s because its constituent particles are taking the most energy efficient paths of motion available to them. This in effect maximises the flow and distribution of energy.

Thermodynamics and the patterns of nature

The very same phenomenon can be found operating within the evolution of living systems. According to renowned Duke University mechanical engineer Adrian Bejan, the principle of least action shows up in nature as a simple but ubiquitous design principle which he calls ‘constructal law’:

So for any system to persist in time (to survive), its energy flows must flow most easily (most efficiently) and be optimally matched to (i.e., in harmony with) the flows of the environment.

Bejan argues, therefore, that fundamental physics accounts for diverse patterns in nature from the way trees grow, to how rivers flow.

Life can therefore be understood as an energy-dissipating system that contributes to increasing entropy in the universe by extracting ‘free energy’ in the environment and dissipating it as heat, all as efficiently as possible through paths of least energy. Through millions of years of evolution, this has driven living systems - from cells to the biosphere - to increase in complexity, resulting in higher forms of energy throughput culminating in a total increase in cosmic entropy.

This perspective reveals the critical role of information in the evolution of life. The material structure (matter and energy – ‘hardware’) of living systems enables them to consume and dissipate energy from their environment. This precise complex structure is codified through genetic information (‘software’). To survive, living systems need to process information from their environment so they can predict environmental conditions. They then translate this information into organising their material structures to maximise the efficiency with which they extract and dissipate energy.

If living systems can’t do this, they fail to adapt to their environmental conditions and cannot survive. This throws new light in evolution is really all about.

Evolutionary competition between species selects for living systems which can maximise the efficiency with which they harness and dissipate energy in harmony with environmental conditions. At every new stage of this process, life is navigating its relationship with earth in an evolutionary dance between its hardware and software.

The X-curve at the dawn of humanity

Evolution therefore involves an increasing complexification of both the hardware (material-biological organisation) and software (cognitive capabilities) of life. When whole species of living systems successfully restructure themselves to adapt to their environment, this evolutionary leap amounts to a phase transition in which the rules and properties of the system are reconfigured giving rise to new, more adaptive living systems.

That higher level of complexity involving a new ‘phase’ of evolution generates new emergent effects that could not have been predicted just by looking at the previous phases (like how when you combine two molecules of hydrogen and one of oxygen together, they form a system of liquid water with new, emergent properties that were previously not present).

Emergence means that each evolutionary phase transition to adapt to certain conditions will bring with it a new set of unanticipated emergent behaviours and side-effects. This create a new ‘information gap’ with environmental conditions. And so it ushers in a further evolutionary struggle, which either drives species to a further phase transition, or to extinction.

This helps us rethink age-old questions – such as the ongoing debate over how homo sapiens became the last survivors among competing groups of hominins including neanderthals during the last ice age. Some suggest that neanderthals were driven to extinction by rapid temperature and vegetation changes due to climate change. Others argue that the problem was neanderthal interbreeding.

A fascinating study by German climate physicist Alex Timmerman suggests something else. Timmerman created a sophisticated model simulation to compare these factors. He was only able to realistically simulate neanderthal extinction by factoring in homo sapiens’ greater capability to exploit scarce glacial food resources. In other words, humans survived over neanderthals because of greater efficiency in securing and processing energy flows from food resources.

As energy flow efficiency improved, homo sapiens became better at finding food than their neanderthal counterparts. And as their population grew exponentially, they rapidly displaced the neanderthal population. Both the growth and decline population trajectories of homo sapiens and neanderthals occurred in roughly S-shaped profiles, overlapping each other to form a pattern that looks like the letter X. This X-pattern can be found over and over not just in the rise and fall of societies, but in the march of technology through human history.

The hardware and software of civilisation

Evolution increasingly gave rise to the appearance of a huge proliferation of different organisms adapting to an unfathomable variety of environmental conditions, including superorganisms – a group of synergistically-interacting organisms of the same species. One of the defining features of a superorganism is that its individual members need the collective to survive: think ants, termites, or honeybees. They cannot survive independently for an extended period.

Today, the human species has become a superorganism operating on a planetary scale, interconnected through a vast, complex network of computational sensors, with its activities impacting the entire earth. This is what the Canadian engineer John Milsum called 'the technosphere'. Yet the processes that got us to this point are not different from the physical processes that have driven biological evolution for millions of years. They are precisely the same.

Civilisations are not different to life, but merely the most complex social-ecological extensions of life on a large-scale. Just like any other living system, human societies and civilisations consist of ‘hardware’ (material structures which extract energy from their environment and dissipate it back into the environment), and ‘software’ (informational structures which determine how these material and energetic structures are organised).

The capabilities of this hardware and software are far more complex and far-reaching compared to other species. Our ‘hardware’ extends beyond our bodies to the tools we use to interact with our environment; and our ‘software’ extends beyond our own minds to the cultural rules, norms and values by which we organise our hardware.

In other words, the hardware of societies and civilisations consists of their systems of material production. These encompass how they extract and dissipate energy, move through the environment (transport), find and consume food, as well as extract and utilise materials.

Their software consists of the informational systems by which these material production systems are organised, structured and regulated. These encompass culture, governance, societal norms, ethical values, worldviews, ideologies, and legal frameworks.

Since the appearance of the first human settlements about 12,000 years ago, humanity has continued to evolve through what I’ve broadly termed our collective technology and culture, and the constant interplay between them.

Technology in this sense is also fundamentally informational. It represents how human superorganisms interact with their environment to produce and design material adaptations derived from the earth, to produce the things we need, and as such is informationally codified. The more our technologies produce for our material needs by maximising energy flow efficiency in a way that works in harmony with environmental conditions, the more effective and competitive they are.

How technology works and is adopted depends on the informational structures codified in our culture. And how our culture works is constrained and enabled by our technological infrastructure. The material and informational structures of human civilisation are interwoven and determine the human superorganism’s relationship with the earth and, through our contribution to entropy, the cosmos.

The dawn of civilisation

This throws light on another unresolved debate on the origins of human civilisation. Some believe that the first human civilisation in ancient Mesopotamia (comprising the lands of today’s Iran, Iraq, Turkey and Syria) came about due to the revolutionary technology disruption that was the domestication of plants. Others say it was the paradigm-shifting cultural innovation of ritual prayer.

Previously, most historians leaned toward the former, arguing that rising population pressures pushed hunter-gatherers to find new forms of large-scale agriculture, freeing up human labour. With newfound time to reflect, agriculture gave way to the emergence of temples and religious cultures. But new archaeological evidence has complicated this verdict. Temples, it turns out, existed hundreds of years before the domestication of plants.

By this token, pre-existing religious cultural sensibilities celebrating humanity’s relationship with nature led to the use of plants in ancient rituals. Religion thus spurred on the domestication of plants and the rise of food producing economies.

Which came first? Perhaps neither culture nor technology were singularly responsible, but instead being interwoven mutually compounded each other in a self-reinforcing feedback loop between technology and culture, and culture and technology. This feedback loop accelerated until it created an evolutionary phase transition. Human settlements then leapt forward through the Neolithic Revolution into a new stage of existence with the dawn of the first civilisation, and with it a coupled set of agricultural and cultural practices.

The dawn of industrial civilisation

We see the same pattern at work many millennia later at a more recent inflection point that gave birth to the industrial age and the current form of human civilisation. In their book Rethinking Humanity: Five Foundational Sector Disruptions, The Lifecycle of Civilizations, and the Coming Age of Freedom, James Arbib and Tony Seba from the technology forecasting think-tank RethinkX argue that the most pivotal factor in the dawn of industrial civilisation was an information disruption.

Around 1450, a German inventor and craftsman, Johannes Gutenberg, brought together a number of previous innovations to create the letterless printing press. Now, you could print a page 200 times faster than a hand-written manuscript in a matter of minutes. The first paper Bibles printed by Gutenberg cost ten times less than a manuscript. And that was just the start. As printing presses cropped up everywhere, the technology improved, competition kicked in, scale increased, and book prices plummeted.

Within decades, manuscripts became obsolete. The power of Europe’s established political-religious organising systems which relied on a monopoly of information to survive was shaken to their core. The printing press information disruption rippled out across Europe enabling previously unthinkable changes in how we see the world. As the Church and state lost control over information, this laid the foundations for the Reformation, separation of Church and state, and ultimately even the scientific revolution and Enlightenment.

A new understanding of reality dovetailed with a belief in individual rights, underpinning the emergence of democracy, a new social contract where individuals controlled their own labour, and free market capitalism. The printed book therefore “triggered cascading waves of disruption that lasted centuries and impacted every aspect of society, fundamentally changing our view of the world and our place within it”.

At the same time, novel ideas for social, economic, and political systems to organise and manage society fed back into the production system, creating a new industrial paradigm which scaled up across the UK, northern Europe and the United States, rapidly expanding across the world through conquest and imitation: culminating in the emergence of the global industrial superorganism.

Technology disruption as evolution?

Arbib and Seba’s account is based on studying dozens of technology disruptions in history, uncovering a consistent pattern: When disruptive technologies improve so much that their costs are about ten times cheaper than prevailing technologies in the market, the new technologies become so economically competitive they eviscerate the incumbents with surprising speed.

Not all technologies are disruptive. Those that are experience dramatic improvements in both costs and capabilities. As costs decline and performance improves, disruptive technologies become better and cheaper at meeting an important demand in society. Eventually, they reach a ‘take-off point’ after which they exponentially displace the old technology.

During this process, the new technology grows in an S-shaped profile, and the old one declines in an S-shaped profile, overlapping each other to form a graph that looks like the letter X – the same X-pattern we saw with the displacement of neanderthals by homo sapiens.

This pattern is the same because they are part of the same evolutionary process. Technology forecasters focus on costs and market prices, but it makes sense to understand this in terms of energy. Technology is not a ‘thing’ out there, but an extension of homo sapiens’ ‘hardware’ – our material capabilities relative to our environment. The technosphere represents the suite of tools through we interact with the biosphere.

Costs and market prices of our dominant technologies are an imperfect proxy for fundamental physical processes: the efficiency with which matter and energy are processed by the technology to fulfil their designated purpose. Money after all is merely a medium of exchange for actually existing goods and services: in other words, economic flows ultimately reflect energy flows. A technology scaling along an S-curve of cost and capability improvements is following the same evolutionary pattern rooted in the constructal law, the principle of least action, and the second law of thermodynamics: maximising energy flow efficiency.

When a disruptive technology becomes ten times ‘cheaper’, it’s becoming approximately ten times more efficient in using and dissipating energy. That greater efficiency brings an evolutionary advantage allowing it to rapidly outcompete incumbents in meeting wider human needs and demands. Yet the technosphere is only one dimension of evolution: the other is the noosphere - consciousness, information, ideas, culture and how they configure the technosphere.

Culture as the ‘genetic code’ of the next leap

Arbib and Seba’s approach also highlights the inextricable interlinkages between technology and culture. In their account, the technology disruption of the printing press created a new possibility space for European societies. But technology was not the determining factor in the emergence of industrial civilisation. The transformation of European civilisation only happened because of the influx of new ideas made possible by such a foundational technological change. New ideas allowed European societies to develop completely new ways of understanding the world and organising behaviour – a massive cultural paradigm shift – that in turn spurred on further technological innovation.

Arbib and Seba explain this by categorising human civilisation into two fundamentally intertwined complexes: the production system, encompassing all the foundational systems by which we meet fundamental material needs across energy, transport, food and materials (corresponding to ‘hardware’); and the organising system, encompassing how the former systems are governed, regulated and managed by society through economic, political, military, cultural and ideological structures and values (corresponding to ‘software’).

A civilisation’s survival depends on whether this “organising system” is fit for purpose. Defining how that civilisation understands the world and governs behaviour – encompassing models of thought, belief systems, social systems, political systems, economic systems, and governance structures which impact ways of thinking, seeing and making decisions – a civilisation’s organising system played the key role in determining how successfully it could manage and regulate its production system relative to environmental conditions. Societies which failed to organisationally adapt to both the new material capabilities of their production system and emerging environmental conditions ultimately collapsed, while those that succeeded broke through to new vistas of possibility.

Together, these production and organising system shifts represent the new frontiers of human evolution. And that’s because foundational technologies – such as how we produce energy or food – are related fundamentally to how we interact with the earth to process matter and energy. This means that when we change that technology, we’re not just swapping out old tech for new in the same static system – we’re rewriting the very systemic rules of behaviour, manufacturing, extraction and distribution, replacing them with new rules and properties defined by the way the new technology works.

Each time we do that those new rules are of course defined informationally. This means that for every foundational technology disruption to actually lead a society or civilisation to advance requires a corresponding informational transition across society – a restructuring of organisation, governance and culture – to adapt along with it.

Yet Arbib and Seba’s theory of the life cycle of civilisations is incomplete. This is clear from their reductionist approach to explaining the phase transition from the feudal to the industrial age.

The breakdown in the feudal information monopoly explains how traditional Church-controlled religious ideas could be widely scrutinised, but not much else. There is compelling evidence that other informational seeds of the coming scientific revolution came from fruitful inter-civilisational exchange between Europe and the Islamic world. Historians agree that this exchange allowed European scholars to access the scientific ideas of the Greeks and the innovations of Islamic scientists. Europe’s great information disruption created a new space for these ideas to flourish. Even Islamic civilisational approaches to public and international law, human rights, and civil rights were imported into Europe.

The other missing piece of the puzzle, of course, is empire. Arbib and Seba make no mention whatsoever of the role of matter and energy in the great transition to industrial capitalism. Historians largely agree that colonial empires – particularly the one involving British trans-Atlantic slavery – played a key role in mobilising the wealth and resources that were critical in enabling Europe to industrialise.

As new industrial technologies emerged, this spurred on cultural shifts which disrupted existing imperial structures. The steam engine, for instance, at first accelerated slavery by speeding up the efficient transport of slaves. Eventually, steam power massively improved the productivity of mining using machines and led to the emergence of the factory system of industrial production. Muscle labour was no longer cost-competitive, leading to its rapid disruption and thus the disappearance of the slave-trade within decades. Simultaneously, new human rights movements emerged in slaveholding nations demanding its regulation, reform and eventually abolition.

Industrial capitalism was born from the bowels of empire and on the backs of slaves. But it also accelerated a civilisational phase shift to a new system precipitating the collapse of empires of direct rule. Civilisations, just like organisms, have risen and fallen throughout history through interlinked life cycles.

Our broader evolutionary lens demonstrates that the dawn of industrial civilisation cannot be reduced exclusively to local technological innovation, cultural transformation or international colonisation. Just as evolution has always involved a complex dance between matter, energy and information, the advance of human civilisation to a planetary scale has involved a constant interplay between all these dimensions spanning both technology and culture.

Life cycles in nature from cells to civilisations

Understanding this interplay requires a broader investigation of how phase transitions work not simply at the small scale of physics, but at the larger scale of populations. One of the most powerful frameworks to do this was developed by the late Canadian ecologist Crawford Stanley Holling of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Vienna, who studied predator-prey dynamics across a huge variety of species including insects, birds, fish, and other creatures.

Complex natural systems work in rhythms, Holling found, moving through a ‘front-loop’ stage of growth and accumulation and a ‘back-loop’ stage of rapid reorganisation leading to either renewal or collapse. He called this process the ‘adaptive cycle’.

For a forest, for instance, the adaptive cycle begins in Holling’s first stage with the rapid growth of a new tree species in a recently cleared environment. This process maximises production and accumulation.

As the vegetation becomes denser, and the linkages within the system proliferate, the forest moves into the second stage of the cycle where it reaches a slower-growing state of conservation.

During this stage, it becomes increasingly stable within, and highly adapted to, a limited number of conditions in its immediate environment. As the system becomes more tightly bound together, this leads to increased rigidity – reducing resilience and the capacity to absorb change.

Information on environmental conditions moves through the forest as energy and matter is invested in new growth seeking to adapt to prevailing conditions. As the forest ecosystem grows, it trades resilience for efficiency, preferring to reuse existing material structures to increase connectivity. When mapped on a graph, this growth-conservation trajectory looks like an S-curve. Holling describes these two stages as the ‘front-loop’ of the adaptive cycle.

Eventually, a major environmental disruption occurs that upends the landscape to which the forest system had adapted. This creates an ‘information gap’ between the matter-energy phase comprising the forest and its wider environmental conditions.

A phase transition begins and the forest crashes to a simpler state. Previously accumulated materials and energy are released in the third stage of the cycle. Mapping this on a graph looks like the inverse of an S-curve – instead of moving up exponentially, it moves down.

Within the clearing created by this accelerating release of materials and energy, a space for renewal and uncertainty emerges. Novel combinations of new forest species – new configurations of matter and energy – can spring up as they mobilise new information about surrounding environmental conditions, harnessing solar energy and translating this into new material adaptations utilising the resources of the old forest. This ushers in the fourth and final stage of the adaptive cycle involving the reorganisation of the forest system.

Holling dubs this closing period of the adaptive cycle the ‘back-loop’. This back-loop then leads to a new growth phase, thus beginning a whole new adaptive cycle. All life on earth moves continuously through this sequence of overlapping adaptive cycles. The undulating rise and fall in S-curves across the ‘front-loops’ and ‘back-loops’ of this appear unmistakably like an X-pattern.

The forest example illustrates that a life cycle can’t be understood as a process contained to any one single organism, or even one single species – it involves a flowing and evolving nexus of relationships between multiple living beings and species across the full spectrum of domains constituting the plant and animal kingdoms, and the wider environment.

Being able to ride through an adaptive cycle is a crucial feature of a living systems’ resilience. The circle of life consists of a complex web of different species, different complex adaptive systems, all interrelated through mutually supportive adaptive cycles of growth, decline and renewal. Holling called this nested diversity of life a panarchy.

This vast panarchy of plants, mammal, bird, reptile and amphibian species exists in an astounding equilibrium, an extraordinary planetary balance sustained by the safe operating space of the interconnected land, ocean and atmospheric systems that comprise the Earth System.

This has profound implications for our understanding of ourselves. Each of us is an integral part of a continuum of life embedded not only in a wider community of humans, but in wider communities of other living beings, and as such in the earth itself.

So, it should be no surprise that the universality of the adaptive cycle across the natural world is visible across numerous areas of human society, including technology, organisations, and the global economy. That’s because it reflects the thermodynamics of fundamental physical processes as they unfold at different scales across systems from cells to societies.

The planetary adaptive cycle

The adaptive cycle framework also throws startling new light on the emergent planetary implications of the global polycrisis.

In an extraordinary paper published in 2004, Holling argued that major transitions “brought about on a global scale by the Internet and by climate, economic, and geopolitical changes” suggest that industrial civilisation is moving into the “back-loop” of a planetary-scale adaptive cycle – following the same patterns as “the inherent rhythms” of natural systems.

For Holling, humanity has occupied a front-loop of growth since the Second World War, whose consequence has been “not only an accumulation and concentration of wealth, but also the emergence of greater vulnerability because of the increasing number of interconnections that link that wealth, and those who control it, in efforts to sustain it.”

Around the 1980s, this growth period appears to have approached the second conservation stage, where emergence and novelty are inhibited by the very connectedness and strength of the system as it has become ever more tightly bound.

The movement to the “back-loop” stage in global industrial civilisation began, Holling suggested, with the fall of the Berlin wall and the collapse of communism. The resulting victory and spread of democratic models of governance have become their own undoing as they demonstrate an inability to adapt to emerging crises:

We are entering the back-loop of reorganisation that entails the collapse of accumulated connections and the release of bound-up knowledge and capital. However, it also opens a creative potential and the opportunity for ‘creative destruction’ as described by Schumpeter.

As we move more rapidly into the “back-loop” stage, this creative aspect of destruction is visible in the release of knowledge and the dispersal of prevailing concentrations of material power, creating the opportunity to reassociate them in “novel and unexpected ways to trigger regrowth or reorganisation into fundamentally new front-end learning loops”. That process is “inventive, inherently unpredictable, and uncertain”, opening new opportunities for breakthrough change even as it creates intensifying chaos as previously stable “back-loop” structures collapse.

“The scale of the issues is such that they are beyond the reach of any one company, sector of the economy, or government”, observes Holling.

The terrifying, exhilarating back-loop of industrial civilisation

Holling’s recognition that the adaptive cycle applies to human civilisation as a whole helps us explain the prevalent but paradoxical sensations of acceleration and uncertainty many of us are going through. If Holling is right, these sensations reflect a planetary-scale transformational process signalling an inflection point at the very heart of humanity’s relationship with the planet as industrial civilisation moves into the third and fourth stages of its life cycle, paving way for the birth of a new life cycle.

When a system enters a phase transition, all its internal sub-systems are re-ordering leading to a period of total flux that culminates in a new system state. Understanding how this process works at a planetary level requires us to recall that the life cycle of human civilisation is being driven by multiple constituent adaptive cycles at the smaller scales of the systems and structures that define it – both technological and cultural.

Of course, one of the biggest signals and drivers of this process is visible in the environmental crisis. This is not just about climate change. Numerous ecosystems whose stability is essential for the ‘safe operating space’ of the ‘Holocene’ permitting human civilisation to flourish are now in flux. Scientists like Johan Rockstrom and Will Steffen of the Stockholm Resilience Centre in Sweden have developed the ‘planetary boundaries’ framework to quantify how human activities could destabilise these critical ecosystems into new system states that are difficult to predict but outside the equilibrium essential for human survival. Human activities are at risk of breaching most of these planetary boundaries across land, water, soil, forest and atmospheric ecosystems.

This planetary environmental crisis results from how the industrial matter and energy phase of human civilisation destabilises earth systems. For the last 200 years, material throughput across human societies has been dominated by hydrocarbon energy sources known as fossil fuels. The exponentially increasing release of carbon dioxide is unbalancing the planetary carbon cycle and as a result trapping greater quantities of heat in our atmosphere and oceans. The consequent abrupt change in environmental conditions is placing unprecedented pressures on human civilisation. The adaptive cycle framework suggests that this is, therefore, an evolutionary transition – and to move through it will require commensurate whole-system transformation.

To some extent, that process has begun in the 'technosphere'. The global energy system driving this planetary crisis is experiencing a fundamental phase transition. In 2023, the flagship report of the International Energy Agency announced that humanity is approaching the “beginning of the end of the oil age” as new energy and transport technologies based on electricity from renewable power sources come to the fore. Though the precise parameters of the coming decline of oil remain disputed, most major analysts project that by 2050 global oil production will be significantly diminished. Its October 2024 forecast, still too conservative, forecasts the inevitable arrival of the Age of Electricity as we near the 2030s as renewables scale faster than previously thought possible.

Perhaps the biggest signal of the inevitability of this transition away from oil, gas and coal comes from data on Energy Return on Investment (EROI) – which measures the quantity of energy inputs required to extract corresponding energy outputs.

In 2017, two economists from the Science Policy Research Unit at the University of Sussex in Brighton, England, analysed EROI for global fossil fuels. They found that the global EROI of fossil fuels peaked around the 1960s before declining rapidly (almost by half) over the last few decades. As this has happened, the costs of producing energy from fossil fuels has gradually increased, while resulting energy returns have diminished. Increasing energy prices have temporarily masked the EROI decline by buoying the industry through larger profits for fossil fuel majors allowing them to pay off debts, expand operations and attempt to innovate. But even with modest technological innovations in fracking, these cannot stave-off the inexorable long-run decline of fossil fuel EROI.

By 2030, according to French energy scientists, the global oil industry is on track to consume about a quarter of the energy it produces just to keep producing more energy. By 2050, this will rise to about 50%: a situation that is economically and energetically impossible to sustain. As a result, the scientists warned, if civilisation does not wean itself off oil dependence within less than a decade, we may find that we lack an economically viable fossil fuel energy source to sustain the transition to alternative post-oil renewable energy sources.

The long-term decline in the EROI of the global fossil fuel system is directly connected to the long-term decline in the rate of global economic growth – a complex relationship which most conventional economists are ill-equipped to understand. Economic modelling by Professor Tim Jackson of the Centre for Sustainable Prosperity at the University of Surrey has found that today’s crises of recession, stagnation, stagflation and increasing inequality can be explained as a direct consequence of declining global EROI.

The global industrial food system, too, is reaching multiple critical thresholds due to feedback loops between these overlapping environmental, energy and economic crises. Rising energy costs are increasing costs of all inputs into industrial food production and distribution, which is heavily dependent on fossil fuels. This is compounded by the growing impacts of droughts, heatwaves, floods and other disasters, increasing risks of simultaneous crop failures across food basket regions.

This is not simply a ‘polycrisis’, an idea which offers little meaningful insight into how and why these crises are happening. They are interconnected phase transitions occurring across key systems of material production, which are accelerating as part of the third release stage of the adaptive cycle of our industrial civilisation.

As production system crises escalate, our individual and institutional capacity to sense-make in response is diminishing. Across the organising system major political, economic, cultural, ideological and ethical systems are unravelling. The volume of information has never been higher. So too are levels of confusion and polarisation. Societies largely focus on the symptoms of these interconnected phase transitions rather than the systems at their heart. In the process, we are wrenched apart as people blame ‘outsider’ groups.

Our civilisation’s governance structures are rapidly losing legitimacy as they cannot cope with the multiple, simultaneous phase transitions we find ourselves in. Liberal norms and values that dominated in the “front-loop” are now widely contested as political polarisation in liberal democracies reaches a crescendo. Culture wars dominate public discourse, and record numbers of people question representative democracy as a functional political structure.

Social media is reinforcing these trends with algorithms that incentivise people to coalesce around closed loop filter bubbles which block out views outside the groupthink of the respective community, undermining the flow of fresh information, the capacity for self-criticism and error-correction, as well as the overall capacity for collective sense-making.

Conventional societal identities are being eroded, contested and replaced with narrower forms of identity politics. Growing public scepticism toward the globalisation of industrial capitalism has created a political vacuum filled by nationalist populism.

Organisationally, this is an ‘information gap’ which reflects how human civilisation has moved deeply out of equilibrium with the planet. The prevailing ideas, norms and values by which the dominant structures of industrial civilisation expanded to planetary scale served their purpose during the front-loop of industrial growth but are now inhibiting our very survival in the back-loop.

The industrial organising paradigm successfully expanded on the ideological premise of ‘homo-economicus’, human reality defined as individuals achieving happiness by competing to maximise material accumulation. The 'polycrisis' proves that this ideological framework no longer works and is complicit in our destruction. As we move deeper into the back-loop, we are confronted with the need to develop a new way of seeing the world that empowers us to mitigate the most destabilising impacts of the release stage, while allowing the seeds of the fourth and final stage of our civilisational life cycle to blossom: reorganisation.

This new way of seeing the world should place humanity’s emergence as a planetary species at its centre. That reveals the biggest information gap of all: the inability to see that we are in the midst of a great transformation that could entail the dawn of a whole new life cycle for humanity on a planetary scale.

The planetary phase shift

The 'polycrisis' is real enough. But it’s a surface level symptom of multiple, simultaneous phase transitions at the core of the ‘hardware’ and ‘software’ systems that define human civilisation – which together can be understood as a planetary phase shift. But if all we see and respond to is the polycrisis – the symptoms of this process as it weakens industrial structures – that will derail the planetary phase shift to a new life cycle.

Just as incumbent structures are in decline, overwhelming data shows that new structures are rapidly emerging in their place. The emergence of those structures represents what Holling saw as the final ‘reorganisation’ stage of the adaptive cycle, the groundwork for a new life cycle for humanity representing a shift to our role as planetary stewards. This includes compelling evidence of an emerging planetary cultural transition.

In June 2024, the largest poll of its kind by the United Nations surveyed 75,000 people representing 90% of the world population, finding that over 80% wanted governments to strengthen climate change commitments. As many as 86% wanted to see countries set aside geopolitical divides and cooperate on climate action, with 72% wanting a fossil fuel phase out. A separate 2024 survey of 22,000 people across the world’s largest G20 economies found that 68% of people want major political and economic reforms to prioritise health and well-being of people and nature above material wealth.

On governance, a poll of 19 countries across five continents found majority support for increased multilateral cooperation, and even for major multilateral institutions like the UN – wanting them to take a lead on human rights, terrorism and climate change.

According to the World Values Survey, there’s also been an unmistakeable increase in global support for gender equality as “part of a broader cultural change that is transforming industrialised societies with mass demands for increasingly democratic institutions.” Despite a persistent majority view that men are better political leaders than women, “this view is fading in advanced industrialised societies, and also among young people in less prosperous countries”.

In a context of intensifying conflicts, nationalism and polarisation, the scale of consensus around such issues is striking. While experiencing divisive regressive cultural, economic and political forces, we are simultaneously witnessing the emergence of shared values on a scale never seen before in history.

These seemingly paradoxical trends are twin manifestations of the same fundamental process: an emerging planetary-scale cultural phase transition. The regressive sentiment is symptomatic of the decline of the industrial life cycle; the emerging shared moral vision signals the potential for a new life cycle altogether.

This represents the seeds of a new planetary-scale way of understanding humanity’s place in the world and organising our economies, politics and societies. To succeed, this new vision will need to harness information about our relationship with environmental conditions and translate this into planetary-scale collective intelligence.

That in turn will need to guide material and energetic reconfigurations within the key phase transitions unfolding across the key production systems of our civilisation. It is crucial to recognise, then, that the technosphere is already in the throes of transformation. System change strategies should not be designed in a theoretical vacuum, but in cognizance of this specific moment in which the industrial age technosphere is being disrupted by the rapid emergence of a new technosphere commensurate with what the IEA calls the coming "Age of Electricity".

The challenge ahead is to guide and design this technosphere to maximise and distribute the benefits within planetary boundaries. That requires fundamental choices at every scale and in every sector.

Central to this transformation is the energy phase transition. While incumbent fossil fuel industries enter an accelerating spiral of self-cannibalising decline, the energy landscape is being disrupted by continuously improving solar photovoltaics, wind turbines and battery storage. Unlike fossil fuels, the more we use them, the cheaper and better they get. As such, they are experiencing exponential cost declines and performance improvements, with EROI equal to or higher than fossil fuels. This is driving exponentially increasing adoption rates.

Projecting these cost curve and adoption rates forward shows that solar, wind and batteries are on track to disrupt, dominate and transform the global energy system within the next two to four decades. A major study last year led by University of Exeter’s Global Systems Institute found that “a global irreversible solar tipping point” has already likely passed due to technology learning curves and economic factors, suggesting that solar energy will largely subsume global electricity markets between 2050 and 2060 even without further climate policies – great news, except for the fact this would be too late to avert the risk of dangerous climate change.

Ultimately, the speed, impact and design of the energy phase transition is up to us – governments, businesses and civil society can delay or accelerate it. Deployment could be dangerously slower in poorer regions due to lack of funding and logistics; equally, it may be faster in some such regions due to higher solar potential and fewer incumbent roadblocks.

But the energy phase transition is just the beginning of a larger planetary transformation. The new energy system can be optimised in counterintuitive ways that transcend the conventional strictures of the industrial era. If we deploy the system thoughtlessly, within existing hierarchies, we could create a suboptimal energy system. This could lead to an energy crisis, at worst.

But if we harness these technologies to take advantage of their most powerful features - like the inherently distributed nature of solar power - we could achieve the unimaginable. One approach, for instance, will be supersizing solar and wind generation capacity by around three times existing demand, which can be done well within potential material supply constraints. The IEA Photovoltaics Power Programme calls this implicit storage because it allows the quantity of battery storage to be reduced by up to 90% in most regions of the world, while still maintaining 100% system stability even during the winter period and eliminating the need for fossil fuel inputs.

Instead of curtailing excess electricity, this new energy system will create an unprecedented opportunity to harness it for new applications – including electrifying road transportation and residential heating, water treatment and desalination, waste processing and recycling, metal smelting and refining, chemical processing and localised manufacturing, cryptocurrency mining, distributed computing and communications, industrial-scale carbon removal, as well as creating new clean fuels such as ammonia and hydrogen.

This system would generate three to five times the energy we produce today but at near-zero marginal costs for most times of the year: creating a new phase of total clean energy superabundance. If we incorporate the world’s deserts, this new planetary solar energy system could generate as much as ten times the amount of energy humanity uses today without need for oil, gas and coal.

Such superabundant near-zero marginal cost electricity will allow us to power both a worldwide ‘circular economy’ that rigorously recycles materials and all new renewable energy manufacturing.

It also represents the first step to a planetary future that could amount to the next 'giant leap' in human capabilities. As renewable energy entrepreneur Jesse Peltan observes, the ability to manufacture new renewable energy capacity solely using existing renewable energy capacity will be the next phase transition tipping point which dramatically reduces the cost of new energy production and allows it to continue scaling entirely without fossil fuels. In theory, this could unlock the ability to harness all the available energy on the planet – Kardeshev’s iconic definition of a Type 1 civilisation.

Complimenting storage innovations are grid expansion and interconnection capabilities within countries and across international borders. Enabling energy to be transmitted between nations and regions through a globally interconnected grid will further drive down the need for local storage (by as much as 50%), paving the way for a new planetary energy commons in which superabundant electricity is exchanged across the earth.

The current energy phase transition is accelerating in tandem with phase transitions across our civilisation’s other foundational systems of the technosphere which produce transport, food, and information.

In transport, electric vehicles are experiencing similar exponential cost declines, performance improvements and adoption rates. As with renewables, they are on track to dominate the market between 2030 and 2050, making petrol and diesel vehicles obsolete. Again, we could do this in regressive ways (trying to replace every single vehicle on the road today), or recognise the counterintuitive opportunities that are emerging (a Transport-as-a-Service model would allow us to reduce the number of vehicles by as much as 90%). Without needing to ship oil, gas and coal, not only will a significant amount of international transport no longer be needed, but the huge infrastructure used to manage the oil, gas, coal and combustion industries will be obsolete - and available to mine for materials. No one has yet calculated the potential this has to make steel and other metals cheap and abundant.

In food, the key technologies experiencing exponential cost declines, performance improvements and adoption rates are precision fermentation to produce vegetable proteins (using the same process to produce beer), combined with cellular agriculture to programme animal proteins. Together, these technologies are on track to reach exponential adoption in the 2030s, at which point food scientists project they will “completely disrupt traditional animal-based agriculture”, while using a fraction of the water, land and fertiliser. We can't successfully and sustainably scale up these new food technologies without abundant clean energy - trying to do so in a context of chronic fossil fuel dependence would disastrously boost carbon emissions, but if we ensure new precision fermentation hubs are powered by solar electricity, for instance, the efficiency gains would be unthinkable. The knock-on opportunities without the need for animal agriculture, freeing up huge quantities of land, make no sense within the current paradigm.

In information, we’ve already experienced a series of escalating disruptions involving computing, the Internet, the smartphone, video streaming, digital media and social media. Driven by exponential improvements in computing power, these information phase transitions have dramatically decreased the costs and distributed the capacity to produce information. Yet the revolutionary potential of these disruptions remains constrained by prevailing industrial organising structures of highly centralised political and economic power.

The latest great information phase transition is being led by artificial intelligence (AI), where the most visible disruption is in chatbots from Large Language Models (LLMs). At current rates of improvement, operating LLMs will become so easy and cheap they will be ubiquitous within the next decade. Yet chatbots represent only a small portion of the AI sector. Other innovations involve business processes, robotics and 3D sensing. As these continue improving exponentially along learning and cost curves, AI’s impacts in autonomous robotics will increasingly replace many areas of manual labour.

At its apex, the total disruption of manual labour would remove the primary limiting factor in economic prosperity – labour productivity – opening the door to a new era of unfathomable productivity improvements. If organised well, this could open the door to eliminating work drudgery and ‘bullshit jobs’, widely distributing prosperity, and creating new time for leisure and creativity. But if badly managed in the context of the centralised industrial organising paradigm, it could lead to unprecedented inequalities, mass unemployment and social chaos. The abuse of AI to weaponise fake news, infringe privacy and automate warfare gives us a sense of how the information phase transition can be abused at a grotesque scale capable of destabilishing our societies from within.

This highlights the gravity of the inflection point we've now arrived at: it's one that requires fundamental choices where ethical values and self-interest in human survival collide. The consistent theme is that only by prioritising human interconnection with the earth in a context of planetary stewardship can we actually successfully transform our technosphere and evade collapse.

Seeds of a new civilisational life cycle

These different phase transitions cannot be understood in isolation. It’s their convergence on a planetary scale that heralds a breakthrough system of production beyond fossil fuels. At their heart, what will make all of them possible will be the energy phase transition.

Due to their energy intensive nature, rapid advancements in AI will only be feasible based on an optimised, supersized planetary-scale renewable energy system. So too will the widespread adoption of precision fermentation and cellular agriculture which, if powered by renewable energy, will be orders of magnitude more efficient in energy, water and land-use than livestock agriculture.

Technology learning improvements and cost declines will also be accelerated under advances in AI. The energy and information phase transitions will allow brewing of single-celled organisms to occur up to ten times cheaper than industrial food production, making it possible to produce animal proteins without killing animals locally, anywhere, at low cost. And by disrupting livestock agriculture, these new food technologies could free up vast areas of land – as much as 2.7 billion hectares worth – no longer needed for animal farming. This land could then be available for rewilding, reforestation as well as regenerative agriculture on hitherto unprecedented levels. Natural carbon sequestration would become feasible on a previously inconceivable scale.

The energy and information transitions in transport will not only accelerate adoption of electric vehicles, but dramatically reduce costs of autonomous driving. Eventually, it would end up cheaper to use an autonomous electric public bus or private taxi than to own and manage your own vehicle, after which individual car ownership will likely drop almost entirely in most urban areas, replaced by new hybrid public and private modes of “Transport-as-a-Service”. It’s likely that autonomous driving will have a rebound effect in wider AI and 3D sensing, accelerating improvements in autonomous robots that in turn would increasingly disrupt manual labour.

Together, these overlapping phase transitions point to the unfolding potential for a post-scarcity production system underpinned by clean energy superabundance – a system in which many of humanity’s greatest challenges today can be eliminated. This would turn conventional economics, which entraps today’s unresolved debates over ‘growth’ and ‘degrowth’, on its head.

The next system could unleash an unprecedented degree of economic productivity alongside a huge retraction in humanity’s material footprint on the planet due to the far smaller (300 times smaller to be more exact) material and mining requirements of solar, wind and batteries relative to oil, gas and coal. Conventional economic measures of GDP growth will be unable to make sense of this paradoxical increase in prosperity amidst the dematerialisation of the economy.

Optimising for clean energy superabundance will confound traditional national borders and incentivise mutual cooperation between countries on a planetary scale. Emerging possibilities for rewilding and circular economy practices will enable the regenerative design of this system within planetary boundaries by permitting industrial-scale drawdown of atmospheric carbon at low cost, and freeing the land and oceans from intrusive, extractive activities. Altogether, these phase transitions represent an unprecedented possibility space for humanity’s ability to collectively meet its material needs without destabilising the earth.

The paradigm shift to planetary self-awareness

We know that there is a catch.

These phase transitions represent human choices, not techno-inevitabilities. If we delay these transitions to protect the prevailing order, we increase the probability that industrial civilisation collapses under the weight of the polycrisis.

Simply accelerating these transitions is not enough. While we need to move as fast as possible before being derailed by energy and environment collapse or political state-failure, we simultaneously need to intentionally design the new emerging human systems to value the Earth System.

If current production system phase transitions remain trapped within the industrial organising paradigm in contempt for planetary boundaries, that centralised hierarchical structure will restrain them from reaching their necessary potential. The emerging system would be badly designed, skewed for the benefit of a few rather than decentralised for the benefit of all, and vulnerable to probable crisis and collapse.  

Historically, only civilisations which co-evolved organising systems capable of managing the uncharted frontiers of their new production system evaded collapse and ventured into new civilisational life cycles. Today, we face the same fork in the road on a planetary scale.

As the industrial order breaks down, we need to make an evolutionary leap involving a complete revolution in our institutional, governance and cultural frameworks. That requires facing up to the obsolescence of the industrial paradigm and its constituent ideologies of reductionist materialism and homo-economicus, to develop a new post-materialist, whole-systems planetary paradigm that recognises the most pivotal lesson: we can only survive and thrive on earth when we are committed to the survival and thriving of the earth itself.

Our technology and culture represent respectively the ‘hardware’ and ‘software’ frontiers of our continued evolution as a species. Our organising system provides the informational norms, values and governance structures by which we make sense of the world – regulating how we mobilise matter and energy to produce what we need to survive in that world. The multiple, simultaneous phase transitions across our foundational technologies of production amount to a shift to a whole new system of ‘hardware’. Yet it is a process still in motion, whose final success requires a collective reorganisation of ‘software’ – human culture, economics, politics and values – which recognises the planet at their centre.

The technospheric dynamics of the planetary phase shift suggest that humanity is on the cusp of a great leap in our material capabilities which, if organised within a paradigm committed to safeguarding planetary boundaries, could enable the abundant, local and cheap production of energy, food, knowledge, mobility and materials for the benefit of all. This could usher in a potential new Age of Abundance in which human beings for the first time in history can be free of concerns around material survival in a way that regenerates natural ecosystems. From an evolutionary perspective, humanity could transform from a dissipative superorganism degrading its planetary life-support systems into a regenerative superorganism that enriches and enhances them.

During this planetary phase shift humanity finds herself moving rapidly between these last two stages of our civilisational life cycle – release and reorganisation. As the old structures of the industrial age weaken and decline, so too do the prevailing narratives, norms, values and worldviews which informationally rationalise and legitimise them. Humanity is entering a period of radical indeterminacy in which our information sensors feel in disarray as they scream the signals of acceleration, while simultaneously seeking certainty and comfort in the familiar and tribal.

On the one hand, this is hardly a novel predicament for the human species. Our ancestors stood at this precipice many times before. Hundreds of times, in fact. Collapse involves tremendous suffering and terrifying calamities, but it also sunders the status-quo, and creates the opportunity for a new beginning, part of the long adaptive cycle of human cultural evolution.

On the other hand, this is a unique moment. It’s the first time we are facing the possibilities of collapse and renewal on a planetary scale. Previous civilisations saw opportunities for people, knowledge and culture to relocate and re-emerge in different ways as prevailing political orders crumbled under their own weight. But today there’s nowhere else to go.

It’s earth or nothing. The stakes could not be higher. We either breakthrough into a new planetary paradigm or we breakdown. If we really want to get to Mars, we ain't going to do it before we crack this. This prospect rightly feels daunting, frightening. But this is also the first time in history that humanity has the tools to see what’s coming and make choices.

Contrary to the celebrated diagnosis of the renowned geographer Jared Diamond, past civilisations did not “choose” to succeed or fail. Unlike our ancestors, we have the tools, frameworks, data and science to recognise and respond to what is happening to us as a species. And we have the benefit of hindsight, gifted to us by the toils of those that came and went before us. No previous civilisation has been able to see the lessons of the past, recognise the risks of the present, and actively build a new future.

So as the incumbent system spirals through the release phase, our challenge is to minimise the forces of collapse while laying the groundwork and breaking the barriers to allow the seeds of the next life cycle of civilisation to blossom.

The evaporation of the industrial paradigm is imminent and inevitable. The emergence of a new post-carbon civilisational life cycle for humanity is not. To survive the planetary phase shift, the entire social, economic, cultural and political organising systems of human civilisation need to be reoriented toward planetary values. That means embracing our function as stewards of a long evolutionary process by which the earth is becoming awake to itself.

As humanity moves deeper into the release stage of the planetary phase shift, incumbent social, political, economic and cultural systems which have evolved around the centralised, fragmented competing hierarchies of industrial structures will increasingly lose effectiveness and meaning.

To galvanise the final reorganisation stage of the life cycle of industrial civilisation, we will need to bravely experiment with new decentralised models of localised ownership and creation, global collaborative models of product design and technology development, transborder mechanisms of political cooperation, participatory economic structures, worldviews which recognise the symbiosis of human life with the earth, and values which privilege human-planetary interconnection and mutual thriving over unlimited material consumption for its own sake. We will need to do this not in a vacuum, but with the goal of harnessing and designing the technospheric transformation that is already underway which holds the seeds of superabundance if we can close the 'information gap' through a cultural paradigm shift that embraces the planetary.

Simultaneously, we will need to resist the temptation to cling desperately to the past success of the dying industrial order and see beyond the hall of mirrors comprised of escalating cultural and political polarisation. Our most powerful asset will be the collective capability to recognise the dynamics of the planetary phase shift now underway, its unprecedented risks and unfathomable opportunities, and most crucially, its role as a precursor to the next stage in human and planetary evolution as one and the same thing. 

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