Ascendant Eye, 12th Day of Hagwinter, 526 M.E. (Electra): "The poor don't eat cheap sugar and white flour because they lack moral character; they eat it because a starved belly demands the quickest, cheapest fullness available, and food cartels engineered poison to be cheaper than a single honest apple from an orchard." - George Orwell 

A poorly conceived and mismanaged war in Iran has led to disruptions in trade routes through the Strait of Hormuz and by Houthi rebels in the Red Sea. Those disruptions of trade routes are preventing, among other things, fertilizer from getting delivered to global farms, which will result in diminished crop yields and eventually famine. Famines lead to unrest, mass population displacements, and eventually more global conflict. 

Nearly 217 million people around the world currently face high levels of acute food insecurity. However, the complex global distribution system that feeds the world’s growing population is susceptible to disruption because of its very complexity. Potential disruptions may include droughts and other natural disasters, pandemics (e.g., covid), or conflicts (e.g., Russia’s invasion of Ukraine). Failure in one part of the system can trigger a domino effect creating further shocks in related systems at local, regional, and global scales.   

Cascading hazards often reinforce each other, such as when one issue strains the resources needed to respond to another. A shock in one place - a war or a failed harvest, for instance - can ripple through global trade and politics to have disproportionately large consequences elsewhere. In addition to the food chain, that effect can occur to the equally complex global manufacturing supply chain. For example, as the output of a critical good falls, export bans are introduced and conflicts over access rise, creating further trade disruptions. 

Beyond food-chain and supply-chain disruptions, the world is facing numerous other potential threats and catastrophes, from nuclear war to engineered pandemics. Recently, a multidisciplinary team of experts from numerous fields identified emerging issues they deemed most in need of greater attention. They identified, among other threats, AI in nuclear systems and in the bioengineering arms race, global famines, climate change, and supercharged surveillance states. .

Climate change is the driver behind several of the identified risks, including large-scale heat stress, the uncertain future of the ocean carbon sink, climate-induced population displacement, and political radicalization and polarization driven by ecological destabilization. They further warned of "termination shock" if geoengineered solutions to climate change, such as aerosol dispersal, are used to temporarily mitigate the incoming solar radiation without a simultaneous reduction in the concentrations of greenhouse gases.       

Another broad category of concern is the collapse of truth in the age of AI. In addition to AI-generated disinformation, they cited concerns about the erosion in the quality of decision-making processes due to inadequate education, ideological biases, and poor mental health. While not a new phenomenon, the decline is accelerated through AI content and the internet. 

And as if all that weren't enough to keep us all up at night, the study also cited instability and collision of Earth-orbiting satellites, such as SpaceX’s Starlink system, which accounts for 35.3% of all objects in the low-Earth-orbit. The accumulation of satellites raises concerns about the Kessler Syndrome, where collisions generate space debris faster than it decays. The tipping point would be when there is such density of objects in orbit, that a collision sets off a self-sustaining cascade of collisions, rendering low-Earth-orbit unsafe for satellites. This would threaten modern communication technology, GPS, and global communication systems. What's more, as the satellites drop from orbit, they leave conductive, electrically charged particles in the atmosphere, weakening the Earth’s magnetic field and exacerbating ozone depletion, leaving humanity vulnerable to solar storms and radiation. 

I walked three miles yesterday - a Jefferson - and will shoot for a four-mile Madison tomorrow as I attempt to resume my alternating-day walking schedule.