The Biosphere Is Made Out of Six Atoms, Right?

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The biosphere is made up mostly of six atoms that almost all organic life is made out of, and trace amounts of the rest of the periodic table. Most of the nickel and the chromium and the iron are bound in rocks way deep underground, far away from the biosphere. We're undoing what took billions of years to make, which was the right elemental constituents for a healthy biosphere. So either we have to make our built world mostly out of the same elements that nature makes stuff out of, or if we're going to use other elements, we have to figure out how to have close loop, atomic cycling on them. And where those processes that we create we can insure

This week I'm speaking with Daniel Schmachtenberger.

Daniel is a founding member of The Consilience Project, aimed at improving public sensemaking and dialogue.

The throughline of his interests has to do with ways of improving the health and development of individuals and society, with a virtuous relationship between the two as a goal.

Towards these ends, he’s had particular interest in the topics of catastrophic and existential risk, civilization and institutional decay and collapse as well as progress, collective action problems, social organization theories, and the relevant domains in philosophy and science.

Motivated by the belief that advancing collective intelligence and capacity is foundational to the integrity of any civilization, and necessary to address the unique risks we currently face given the intersection of globalization and exponential technology, he has spoken publicly on many of these topics, hoping to popularize and deepen important conversations and engage more people in working towards their solutions. Many of these can be found here.

We talk about the current state of the phase shift, whether we are past the point of no return for social collapse, Daniel’s three generator functions of existential risk, the definition of an adequate social architecture that avoids existential risk, how technology creates asymmetric advantage that debases the planetary life support system, why we need to create technology that leads to ‘metastability’, the pollution of the epistemic commons, why we need to define problems in a comprehensive way where the solutions don’t create worse problems, the vows Daniel made as a teenager, what progress is being made at solving the generator functions of existential risk, the auto-poetic nature of trauma, and the necessity of a mature relationship between certainty and uncertainty.