Vajk's Dilemma
© Laurence B. Winn
For example, perhaps the most famous of such programs is the Forrester world dynamics model used by the MIT-lead Club of Rome that produced the 1972 report The Limits to Growth. Some of the details of that report, being in error, make the entire range of findings subject to derision from interests not well served by a focus on limits.
However, for a first look at a system as chaotic as the world economy, Limits was a very good try. It correctly predicted the current world population of six billion. It was on the mark with its prediction of runaway growth in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, and it was very likely correct in its prediction of a peak in world material standard of living around 2000. Many present-day prognosticators see the report's predicted 2080 die-off due to famine, disease and war as somewhat optimistic, especially in Africa.
Dennis Meadows, who lead the MIT team and authored the report, did indeed vary the conditions of the model in order to test "what-if" assumptions. If, for example, we had zeroed population growth by 1975, restricted capital growth by requiring that investment equal depreciation and recycled everything, then the model gives us long-term (but not perpetual) equilibrium at an average world income level of around $3 U.S. per day, equally distributed among nations. If we wait until 2000 (oops), equilibrium is no longer sustainable.
There was no model that suggested the possibility of sustainable growth without unlimited resources, which you can get only from space. In the same year Limits was published, then President Richard Nixon shut down the U.S. space program for planetary exploration with human crews, presumably to avoid embarrassing the Communists. For awhile after that, optimists persisted in a lot of talk about space habitats, and by 1975, J. Peter Vajk of the University of California's Lawrence Livermore Laboratory had published a paper titled "The Impact of Space Colonization on World Dynamics".
The chief criticism of the Forrester model of world dynamics had been that it consisted of only one "sector", in which the entire world economy was treated as a single "lumped" system, everything averaged. Vajk found that predictions from a two-sector model adequately represented the output of models with as many as 10 sectors, so he settled for the simpler two-sector approach. Then he added a third sector, a space industrial infrastructure ala Gerard K. O'Neill, interacting with the terrestrial economies.
