Wikipedia has a great post on Moore’s Law and it shows that law to be astonishingly accurate over many orders of magnitude. I won’t be the first to say, “It can’t last forever.” However, it seems everyone before me who put a specific date on their end of trend has been wrong. In fact the rate has actually been speeding up so far this millenium but I will still say, “It can’t last forever.” In my blog I talk about forever as a specific date of 7,000 CE just to make it a computable number. A quick look at the chart comparing Transistor count to Date of Introduction shows very approximately 1,000 transistors in 1970 and 10,000,000,000 in 2020. Or … seven more zeros in fifty years. Now if we extrapolate that out to 7,000 CE some 5,000 years we will see that it is absurd. Just divide 5,000 by 50 and we get 100 which if we multiply it by the rate of seven more zeros per that time period and we get 700 zeros which is a bit more than the 10 to the 80th the number of atoms in the Universe. It would be something like for each atom in the universe there would be a universe of atoms but we need to do that some eight times over to get into the ballpark. But who’s counting? It’s just to make a clear point of the absurdity of Moore’s Law going on “forever.” It is unlikely that Gordon Moore every considered such a silly extension of his law. He no doubt ment it applicable for the forseeable future, back in the early 1970s and even at that for maybe ten or twenty years and not forty.

The majority of adults in the world have now grown up exposed to at least a distant knowledge of computers and in the shadow of Moore’s Law. How will these people behave, who expect the world to continually get better exponentially and have wonderful new products arriving almost daily that are based on that fabulous new technology, when it stops arriving so consistently?

Technical librarians are awash in new data and the new CERN data banks are having so much super precise data from their atom smashing that even random single digit bit flips are becoming a worrisome problem. Google has such massive amounts of data that it is reported they are taking these extremely rare data flips as a growing problem. With more and more computers and computer data arriving constantly and constantly faster what will happen when some known flaws, or unknown flaws or perhaps some unknowable flaws come creeping into the data. Some of which corrupts the data in a chain reaction sort of way and turns it all to random matter? The computer creators seem to think we have another ten years of growth in speed and memory density but then what? On the other side of that projection there probably hasn’t been any time when the future looked any more positive and things were worked out.

My point is that for a young person this particular trend will probably come to an end. By that time there may well be a thousand CPUs faster processors on the home computer and petabytes of data storage and fiber-optic rates of new data combining into most peoples homes. Then what? What will slow things down and will it matter. One would suspect that every form of super high quality entertainment could be available and probably be totally boring. Or humans being what they are and adapting to whatever is happening to them, be it pain or pleasure or probably anything else that doesn’t physically destroy them, they will just consume whatever is available and want more and better. I don’t watch much sports on my high def TV, some but not much, and it constantly amazes me that people are filling these huge sports stadiums.

So, people will probably adapt and just like Oliver Twist want more.

The new More’s Law. “Please, sir, can I have some more?”

I attended a Friends of the Bancroft Library lecture, sponsored by the Townsend Center for the Humanities lecture with Dacher Keltner and Kevin Padian as the featured speakers. Kevin spoke first with an eloquent paean of praise for Darwin which was quite pleasant for the 60 students and faculty people present. Here is a site which gives a flavor of Padian’s thought and style.

Dacher Keltner spoke next and was much more specific with some of his modern research results about Darwin’s 1872 book The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, . He said he was astonished at how prescient Darwin had been in his observations of emotions and how his observations were being substantiated so well with modern experiments

They were introduced by the Director of the Bancroft, Charles B. Faulhaber.

After the lecture the public was invited to tour the Darwin exhibit in the Bancroft Library’s foyer. There I had the opportunity to talk to each of these men for several minutes about what they spoke about and of course my pet theories which I have developed on this blog. I discussed Charles Darwin’s Original Idea with Kevin Padian and showed him the title page of the Bancroft’s 1st edition of Origin of Species and the spines of the first six editions of that book and how there is no mention of Alfred Russle Wallace author of the book The Malay Archipelago which was being prepared when he wrote his letter to Darwin. Darwin even credits Wallace with the ideas which prompted this rush to publication of his abstract of the idea. I have read occasionally that Wallace’s name was also on the title page. Padian was also familiar with Patrick Matthew but said there were also others whom had similar ideas. To which I replied, that was so but Matthew nailed the idea and the book had been published the year before the Beagle sailed and may actually have been on board throughout the voyage. The Royal Navy was desperate for Naval Timber for its wooden ships which was in short supply. He appeared shocked when I said I had read On Naval Timber and Arboriculture but there are not many people who have even heard of it these days.

Dacher Keltner was surprised when I told him I had read The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals in a first edition in the Berkeley Public Library back in the 60s. I still have some 5 by 5 flow charts of my own facial expressions I made back then based on Darwin’s method. I told Keltner I was planing on having his mentor Paul Eckman as my Man of the Year as I think his work will still be famous 500 years from now as will Cesar Millan’s similar work on dogs. He is now the hero upon whom the TV character Cal Lightman is based in the popular show Lie To Me. Keltner said he had never seen it, that he doesn’t have time for television. That shocked me because he himself is functionally the model for one of the characters in that drama. TV is of course remote, even diametrically opposite, from scientific reality so perhaps he shouldn’t waste his time contaminating his perceptions that way.

I also talked with Charles B. Faulhaber for several minutes about my giving a talk on The Drake Plate of Brass which he has consigned to the storage vaults beneath the library. I mentioned that it is easy to find Sir Conan Doyle’s name engraved into the plate if you look for it. He wants me to publish first in some juried scholarly place such as the California Historical Society rather than reveal it at some public lecture. That would be better because it would give people time to review more leisurely and dispassionately what I have to assert. This plate has been creating contention for some 70 years so what I say should be perfectly clear.

Sigmund Freud wrote Moses and Monotheism  which was not published until  after his death in 1939. Apparently he didn’t want the trouble of defending  his unusual theory on the early history of the Jews from attacks. I read this book many years ago when an undergraduate and it probably influenced me in unknown ways although not as much as Abraham Maslow which I encountered about the same time in 1957 before he became famous. This post came about because yesterday I was discussing Moses with my coffee shop interlocutors and as usual it devolved into a stupid argument which everyone seemed to enjoy. It seems everyone has a vaguely supportable theory as to how our modern-day religions came into being. I like mine as I am sure you like yours and my friends like theirs. Here’s mine for the origin of the Western monotheistic religions of the Book.

The Ancient Egyptian polytheistic religion was well over a thousand years old in 1398 BC when Tiye, later Queen, was born into a branch of the Royal family. She married the pharaoh Amenhotep III while both were still children by modern standards. They ruled for about 39 years until he died. Her son Akhenaten then ruled with his wife the beautiful Queen Nefertiti. Because of her intelligence and forcefulness Tiye had great influence on both of these pharaohs and it was at this time the state religion converted from a polytheistic one into a monotheistic one. Tiye may well have been the primal force behind the conversion. Tutankhamun (King Tut) was born 1341 BC when Tiye was about forty-three years old and he became pharaoh when he was nine years old probably about the time of her death. It was during her life that the state religion converted to monotheism and immediately after her death and King Tut’s short reign that it reverted to the old entrenched priestly polytheism. It appears that either she was totally responsible for the new Amarna religion or at a minimum had tremendous influence for the foundation of that religion.

My argument is simply that the monotheistic religion coexisted with Queen Tiye and died with her. Many people living at that time would probably have liked the new monotheistic religion and wanted to continue practicing it. When the polytheistic old guard priest class reasserted itself with the death of King Tut, (a possible homicide) it did so with a vengeance. They forcefully suppressed the new religion and tore down or defaced their monuments. That desecration is physically apparent to this day. What isn’t so apparent but would be an obvious action concomitant with this physical destruction is that if the priests were destroying the monuments they were also suppressing the beliefs and the believers inspired by what was represented by those monuments. These monotheistic believers would have been prevented from worshiping publicly and would have been forced to practice their religion in secret. That happened in Japan after the Japanese Roman Catholic Church was declared illegal and went underground after the Shimabara Rebellion in the 1630s. That church was called Kakure Kirishitan existed in secret for hundreds of years. The same thing may have happened in Egypt causing the timing of  The Exodus to be difficult to establish.

Apparently a time came when the authorities in Egypt became annoyed with them and they were told to reconvert to the standard state religion of their ancestors or leave the country. Some chose to leave as a group and after they were departing as an easily identifiable cohesive group they were pursued by the Pharaoh’s army with the intent of exterminating them and eliminating the problem. This was a group of people who were unwanted in their place of birth and unwanted elsewhere and therefore they had to impose themselves in a new land through force or die. They stormed and captured Jericho and later all Israel successfully. Anther example of this was the Aztecs in Mexico. where a ostrocized group came into a new land and formed a new empire. Each of these cases are examples of a group of people forced by circumstance to become a cohesive force or die. They chose to unite.

This theory makes a consistent rational of reasons for leaving Egypt and explains the uncertain timing of the event because the monotheists had gone into secret worship to escape persecution for worshiping the religion which I think was first created by Queen Tiye. Apparently some disaffected old polytheists had come along on the Exodus which accounts for the Golden Calf story. This all happened almost a thousand years before most of the modern Bible was written so the religion went through many changes before it came to what we recognize as the people of the Book religions.

The standard keyboard needs to have the delete and back-delete button moved to a more easily accessed position. The typical space bar is only used on a tiny portion of its area which one can easily check by observing where it is shiny. After checking a few of them it will be observed that they are always shiny under the N key. A serious problem with the standard keyboard is that the delete and back delete require taking one’s eyes off of the screen to hit them accurately. I have redrawn the keyboard in such a way as to make these functions more intuitive and much easier to perform without taking one’s eyes off of the keyboard.

A keyboard layout with Delete, Backspace-delete and cursor improvements.

The space key remains in the position actually used by most typists. It is the most commonly struck key. The other frequently hit key is the back-delete key because of the frequent changes of mind on the part of the typist of what has just been entered. So that delete key has been placed just to the left which seems natural as it is going backward and deleting. The forward delete key is placed just to the right because it seems most natural to delete forward in the same way that one would delete backwards but just moving in the opposite direction. The cursor keys are arranged in the same way and the up and down cursors are more extreme actions of this same movement so it is natural to move one’s hands in a more extreme motion but of the same general type. These actions can be made into mouse movements by depressing the shift key with the little finger at the same time as the thumbs are used to depress the arrow keys. This eliminates the need for a mouse or other external mousing controls.

The keys which require taking ones eye’s off of the keyboard are made smaller and set slightly away from the touch typing keys. All of the usual text typing keys are placed exactly in the same location as usual with the exception of the \ | and the `~ keys. It seems a Spec key located in the lower right of the keyboard which activated the Character Map would be very useful for easily entering a plethora of those frequently used but unusual characters never found on keyboards. Lots of the other keys have been simply dropped off of this keyboard as it is intended for text entry which is what most keyboards are used for in daily practice.

Near full size typing keys for laptop with new space bar keys.

 Laptop computers could be improved by making their basic keyboard larger by removing infrequently used keys such as the F-keys and placing them under the Spec key. When that key is hit the Character Map appears on-screen and below it the F-keys with definitions which appear when pointed at with the cursor.

Will someone make this keyboard for me?

Human extinction is inevitable if you look at species survival in a long enough time frame. What species are varies with definition and what the problem is at present but with hominid line of species it is in the rage of a million years or so between gross identifiable features. By the definition of inter-breedablility then the species to be considered must be living and capable of breeding. Horses and donkeys have been physically different enough to be called separate species for the last five million years but can still be bred to form mules which are big as horses and as strong as donkeys. The mules are usually sterile but not always so they form a good surrogate for talking about humans and their inter-breedability with chimpanzees. There have been no known cross breeding except for the possible Humanzee Oliver which may have had a chimp mother and human father as the tests were done on mitochondrial DNA which proved the maternity but not the paternity. It really doesn’t matter much to my discussion of humanity’s life expectancy and extinction risk. If humans were a free ranging species we might expect to have a normal species expectancy of another million years. But, in case you haven’t noticed, we are not a typical species because we have created weapons of extermination (WOE) and have them stockpiled for instant use. Therefore, as I discussed yesterday in, Humanity’s “Laws of Stability” in the year 7,000 CE, unless we find a way to contain these weapons and the knowledge of how to create them humanity is doomed to an early extinction. At present we are not even remotely close to controlling these weapons and it is just random luck that there hasn’t been a major war where they were used in quantity. It is unlikely that luck will last much longer because various resources will run out and be unable to supply the exploding human population.

So, the question becomes, what should be humanity’s appropriate response to the extinction risk?

1. Eliminate H-bombs. — Impossible to do and to verify.
2. Eliminate bio-weapons. — Impossible to do and to verity.
3. Reduce population to pre-industrial levels. — Impossible politically.
4. Enforce Copenhagen Protocols and reduce. — Too little too late.
5. Continue consuming maximally. — Works fine until the crash.
6. Store critical agricultural seeds. — Very slow if any recovery.
7. Store every speicies in the EarthArks. — Humanity’s 2nd chance.

The http://www.earthark.net/ is the index site for organizing The EarthArk Project.

The goal of The Earthark Project is to maximize the long-term survival and health of humanity and the Earth.

Humanity’s long-term survival requires laws which regulate a librating stability. Librating means having an inherent tendency to move back towards a potentially stable central position. This is an important concept to understand because our present world is out of balance and will soon swing back towards its stable point and beyond. Our current human population growth for the world is doubling every 40 years and that would cover every bit of land with human flesh in a few hundred more years. That is impossible and so something must happen before my postulated date of 5,000 years in the future. I choose that date for fixed point in time as being the same length of time from now back to the construction of the pyramids. If humanity has been highly organized for that length of time then it can be assumed it could last that much longer if future people lived in that life style.

There are two problems which must be solved or that humanity can’t survive that long. Unlimited human population explosions and H-bomb explosions or stated slightly differently, resource exhaustion and humanicidal super weapons. Humans have unlimited fecundity as all living creatures do but we also have super weapons with the ability to exterminate our species. The combination of those two abilities creates some special problems which require special solutions. (1) How can the human population be regulated to some specific number which is easily in balance with the Earth’s ability to supply their needs. (2) How can the knowledge of weapons of extermination be controlled and eliminated from a world where access to all information ever possessed by humans is instantly available.

In the future the “Laws Of Stability” must make it possible for the human population to librate about some stable point. Those living people would be the ones to choose what number of people they thought would be most in balance with the Earth’s resources at that time. I can only make a guess at what that number would be but it will probably be about 100 million total humans living at a given moment. That is the number alive at CE 1 when the Roman Empire, the Chinese Han Empire were thriving as agricultural societies. They were clearly within the Earth’s ability to sustain them because the various measures such as CO2 in the atmosphere, were librating. It wasn’t until about 1825 CE that the Earth began to show signs of not being able to cope with the excess of human pollutants and they began to build up in the air and oceans. At that time there were 1,000 million people. Then with the beginning of the industrial revolution, with lots of fossil fuel burning, the pollutants built up and soon exacerbated the various sustainability problems. In a librating system there would be natural forces which would push the number of humans to lower than 1,000 million. However, at present because human ingenuity has been so very successful the return to normal has been put for a while. We now have 6,800 million people inhabiting our planet. There will at some point be a restitution of our planet to a lower population number and the higher our population grows before that happens and the more the Earth’s resources are pushed from the balance point the further will be the drop. A simple calculation of dividing the present population of 6,800 million people by the clearly sustainable number of 100 million people gives us, at present population, 68 times too many people. But a libration of that population would possibly go 68 times below the middle-value sustainable-number which would be 1/68th of 100 million or 1,470,000 people. I have never heard of anyone making such a strange calculation but it makes a certain strange sense. On the other hand it would seem that anything which killed off all but 1.7 people per 6,800 would kill everyone. One thing this rather peculiar calculation seems to indicate is the severity of the readjustment problem. Our super successful technological civilization has brought us to a very imbalanced and dangerous situation.

The second factor which the future “Laws of stability” must solve is the prevention of the knowledge of how to make Weapons Of Extermination (WOEs). I am all for maximizing the flow of information on the Internet but clearly we must not have the ability to destroy all humanity within easy reach of everyone. Some people are so despairing about the world and themselves that they commit suicide. These people would clearly be at risk for destroying the whole world along with their personal selves if given the opportunity. WHO the World Health Organization estimates that over 1 million people succeed in committing suicide every year and perhaps there are 20 million attempts every year. It is impossible to know how many of these people would choose to take the world with them but even a small percentage when multiplied by a million per year becomes a very large number. If there were only 1% who would do such a thing if available that would have been 10 thousand attempts by the successful suicides. That is the low-end of the estimate but the high-end is really dangerous. If 10% of the 20 million attempted suicides would have been willing to destroy the whole world that would be 2 million attempts per year. Clearly the human population would not survive very long if this number of attempts were made to destroy it. I am trying to maximize human happiness and that requires a long-term survival of humanity.

In this post I chose 5,000 years of human stability for a fixed number for making estimates. That gives us some specific measure of the severity of the two most critical problems facing humanity, population explosion and knowledge of weapons of extermination. For civilization to survive as many years as it already has these two problems must be solved.

WOEs to the Earth with excess humanity.

Americans are fat and getting fatter and will continue to get even fatter because of so many embedded stupid laws. Everywhere one goes it seems there is a prohibition against vigorous physical activity. For example school kids should be encouraged to get as much physical energy out as possible during their so called physical education periods but whenever I pass the high school playing fields on my BART train the kids are almost always sitting down listening to some instructor of physical education. Rarely do I see them even walking let alone running or playing. About the only time you see kids actually playing is when they illegally break into a school play ground after hours by scaling a chain link fence. The reason the grassy playing fields are closed is because the school district might get sued for millions of dollars if a kid falls down on a smoothly cropped grass playing field and scuffs his knee. But today I saw an even crazier example of who knows what kind of stupidity it is, I don’t know what to call it, it is a new kind of stupidity and deserves a new name. How about super-stupid! They have erected a chain link fence between two children’s slides. It is not ten steps between the bottoms of these two slides. It can’t be different jurisdictions because both of these children’s slides are in the city of El Cerrito. (at 37.9078 -122.3036)

Children's slides facing each other on opposite sides of a fence.

On the left of the fence you can see a tan slide and on the right there is a red one. There is a chain link fence between them with a locked gate. The fence doesn’t keep any reasonably agile kid out and only forces them to break the law and get into low-level trouble. But the craziness of two public playgrounds being separated by a worthless fence is hard to comprehend—except for really stupid laws. And what’s with the concrete edging around the playing area? Kids knock each other about all the time when playing and obviously some of them are going to fall onto that stupid concrete wall and rock work around the benches. And who are these embedded in concrete benches for anyway? Apparently the fat kids who are too lazy and weak to even play or their fat superiors.

The cereal food industry claims that sugar laden food isn’t bad for children because they just burn off the energy with their high metabolism while playing. But my observation is that kids are prevented from playing by every means possible. They are told they are free to do anything they want but then prevented from doing almost anything. Here in America it’s rather like yesterday’s blog about the internet in China given by Isaac Mao. There they make a big thing about how free the people are to do anything they want on the internet but then the authorities make extreme efforts to prevent anyone from gaining any access to anything outside of the most banal controlled materials. America may be more free, for the moment, but these kids are being raised to sit still, be quiet, think only what they are told to think and say only what the politically correct bumpkins around them tell them to say. Quite frankly I am glad I grew up in a freer country and a freer time.

The Brave New World is here but then it is well past 1984.

The man who was the first to blog in China, Isaac Mao, spoke to the UC Berkeley, I-School today about the internet in China and about the public’s problem of getting unlimited access to the World Wide Web. I don’t want to say or imply what he didn’t say but it seems that there is very restricted access to the internet outside of China for the chinese citizens. Many sites we take for granted like Picasa, Blogger, twitter, Facebook, WordPress, YouTube are totally blocked and even Google has been restricted. Apparently the governmental power doesn’t punish people for accessing forbidden materials; they just make it impossible for people to get certain stuff. Apparently there are huge lists of forbidden words which are watched by their site restricting scanners. It is like the silly American TV forbidden nasty words which are not permitted on the air except the Chinese effort is much more extensive and more political.

Mao spoke of China as being like an island with a sharp edge which is very difficult to cross. However, he and others have exerted a lot of effort to create openings in the Great Wall of China, which they now called The Great Firewall of China. The current authorities are threatened by the outside world and are trying to keep it out and they are threatened by the inside world and are trying to keep it in. The computer geeks have found many ways to circumvent the controls without breaking any laws using such techniques as embedding interesting materials in large quantities of mundane material. Another more technical and more powerful method was to use a site called Tor project which uses a matrix of computers to scramble messages and then reconstitute them at their targeted address. This site came on-line on Sept 24 and rocketed in popularity. No doubt the authorities are trying to circumvent Tor. It is a computer war game with very high stakes. The authorities have a serious problem because with data transfer rates so high a few seconds of access can let oceans of text data get through.

I have more ambivalence about what is going on with information transfer than most computer geeks. In general they want absolutely unlimited flow of data but I have this 7,000 year view of the human problem and in that long run there are certain kinds of information which will destroy humanity. For example, once someone leaks the exact details of how to build an H-bomb and the exact details of how all of these devices are made and readily available to everyone with a computer then forever more humanity will be at risk of some small group or who knows some individual of making an Earth shattering weapon. I have no inside information of the most horrendous weapons but I certainly wouldn’t want them to be common knowledge or everyone would be doomed. We are already doomed but hopefully not at the hands of any and every single individual. If we had only a few individuals like Leo Szilard with a truly creative genius for destruction the planet and all the people on it wouldn’t last long. He is a great hero at present but I doubt that he will be held in high regard after the world has been subject to his inventions.

After the lecture I had a conversation with a technology professor and his wife from The Norwegian University of Science and Technology. We discussed the lecture and world problems and found that we were in surprising agreement about almost everything. They were far more optimistic about the world and particularly America finding technological ways out of our impending problems than I am but then I am probably the most pessimistic person in the whole world. I consider the game lost and that is why I am trying to create The EarthArk Project to provide a backup plan for after the collapse.

Some people will think this trivial but I don’t. I am entitled to 62% discount on public transportation tickets here on San Francisco Bay Area’s, Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART). I deserve it for no other reason than I am over 65 years old. It would be assumed that since these special tickets are given for a disability, in this case being aged, that they would be convenient to obtain for disabled people. Au contraire, my friend. You can’t get them at the local BART station where everyone else buys tickets and so you have to go some particular place to get them. It just so happens that in my East Bay locality there isn’t a single place where the tickets are available within really easy walking distance of the local Berkeley BART stations—the stations which I typically use. So … I must go to an inconvenient grocery store location, or an an inconvenient drug store location, or the inconvenient grocery store or a drug store location at the other stop where I usually get off. It is not too bad for me personally most of the time because I am not walking handicapped just yet but it does require a round trip walk of about eight blocks total just to get the senior tickets. Normal healthy people can purchase their normal 100% tickets at the BART station without taking a single step but if you have a physical problem it’s going to be a long walk.

Sorry, we’re sold out. We don’t know when we will get some more… was the response to my pathetic request at my first choice, and my second choice and my third choice of places to get the tickets. Because I had had this, sold out, problem before I had planned to get the tickets a few days ahead of my totally running out of them. So this particular time I had actually gone to all three of my usual  purchase locations a second time and still hadn’t gotten any new tickets. Next I went to the person in the BART booth, I can’t call it a ticket booth because they don’t sell tickets, and asked what to do. They told me about four local places to purchase them, and I said I had been to all of them. Actually, I lied a little because one of the stores would have been about a mile walk both ways and I hadn’t actually gone there yet. But, at one of the drug stores I had asked the same question and they said everyone trying to get tickets was complaining that no one had them including the one I hadn’t gone to. So, it was just a little bit of a fib. On my third try at another BART ticket booth the clerk gave me a list of “Transit Store” Ticket Exchange Locations. Aha, maybe I’m on to something.

On the list was Richmond station, which is the very last station on my particular branch of BART. So, with the last money on my ticket I went out there to the end of the line. As it turns out the tickets are for sale there but not in the station itself. I asked the station manager and he told me where to go. Out the toll gate down a long corridor up two flights of steps, a short walk across a plaza and voila there you are. They did sell tickets so I bought enough for a month.

After all of this fuss I went online, did a Google search and discovered http://www.bart.gov/tickets/ where I found that I could have avoided much of the problem by purchasing the tickets online. In the numerous face to face encounters I had had with various real human beings selling these tickets one would suppose that someone would have mentioned the online purchase option. Being computer literate I should have started with a Google search but I hadn’t done that because I was getting along buying them at stores and I thought I was dealing with the old brick and mortar culture. What did I learn?

Before you do anything do a Google Search and before you go anywhere do a Google Earth.

Why be concerned about the year 7,000 CE (AD for old folks)? Because that’s about half way to 12,000 years past the present and why that date because it is the same number of years since back to the beginning of the Holocene. That Holocene date is the end of the ice ages and the beginning of agriculture and modern human society. It’s a fixed and measurable point in time.
A simplistic calculation estimates that humanity is half way through its life expectancy. Why choose half way for some unknowable process? Because of all of the species who have ever lived almost all of them have gone extinct and if we were to look at any one of them we would probably be dipping into the central portion, when they are alive, and an average that will be half way through their existence. Maybe on one end or the other of the middle half but if we choose civilized man that extension of reference zone would only inserting 7,000 years ago and 7,000 years into the future for this arbitrary but fixed date. That would be 5,000 CE and 7,000 CE. Thus, just for a guess for where civilized humanity is at in its life cycle saying half way is reasonable for most geological purposes. That estimate gives us some solid perspective on where humanity might consider itself. That fixed date gives something better to work with than just floating about somewhere between zero and infinity.
Using an exact date gives us some idea of what the promethean word sustainable environment might mean and what humans as a group should be considering relative to the environment. One thing becomes obvious when looking at humanity this measured way and that is that it can not carry on the way it presently is for very long. When politicians use the word sustainable when referring to the environment they generally mean something relevant to their political career. Usually to them that means the next election and rarely does it mean so long a period of time as the life expectancy of their youngest voters. For a young voter, say age 20 with a normal life expectancy at that time sustainable would mean would mean a period of 70 years of balanced environment. Something becomes obvious. When politicians talk about sustainable, like sustainable oil production being secured by drilling some more oil wells they are clearly lying because even a perfunctory scan and a bit of thinking about world oil supplies shows that no informed person will claim there will be the same amount of oil as is presently being pumped from the ground being produced continuously for another 70 years. Sometimes, some of the experts will say 20 years but it would be hallucinating for them to say 70 years or bare face lying.
With that little bit of speculation about time of oil production, other things could be used, compared to my hoped for projection for civilized humanity continuing for say 7,000 years a simple calculation of dividing 7,000 years by 70 years gives a minimum of a multiple of 100 times error of that possibility. It is like telling your girlfriend you are going out to dinner and you have $70 in your pocket for dinner and a movie but in fact you know you have only $1 or less. She is going to have a rude awakening at some point during your evening together and some serious disappointments. Your lady friends estimate of your worth and your sanity is going to plummet.
Humanity is in for a rude awakening of the same type and some serious readjustments as to how we are going to live. We can probably live a very satisfactory life style that has many components of our current high-tech civilization but it is very unlikely to have gas guzzling cars, airplanes and farms. Yes, farms because they consume lots of oil in the form of equipment and fertilizer.
There will be some changes, that is inevitable but what could those be which in the long run will bring about the maximum of human happiness. To start with the whole human population of the Earth would have to be regulated at some much smaller number than it is at present. A nice round number would be something like 100 million. In any case it must be regulated to some number which would be determined by those people at that future time but they must do it because even a small group of free breeding people would expand to our present population in a few centuries. They must be limited or there would soon be the same overpopulation problem and crisis and collapse which we are about to experience. On average each person in this sustainable society would have two children and that should be sufficient to calm any desires for unlimited fecundity.

Another problem is armed conflict with weapons of annihilation such ah H-bombs and bio-weapons. These are now available and with the current mind-set and political institutions the will eventually be used. However, when one thinks of a 7,000 years of future civilization these devices simply can not be available they must some how be contained and even the information on how to make them must be isolated and the materials that can be used to make them must be monitored. Anyone obtaining any of those things would have to be isolated permanently as untrustworthy. No one has the right to be able to destroy humanity and those who seek that ability need to be thwarted.

For humanity to live for 7,000 more years it appears that either they are reduced to a primitive condition which occasionally percolates up to a technical civilization which destroys itself again as we are presently doing or a sustainable population finds a way to live in balance with the capacities of Mother Earth.

A sustainable stlye of living will ultimately produce more human happiness.