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It's not some science fantasy effect from 2001.
This electronic display emanating from Australia's largest computer is a picture of the condition,
past, present and future, of planet Earth.
The program was originally devised by a scientist working from the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, Jay Forrester.
It was developed under the auspices of the Club of Rome by an MIT research team to present
a complex model of the world and what we humans are doing to it.
The program, called World One, doesn't pretend to be a precise forecast.
What it does, for the first time in man's history on the planet, is to look at the world as
one system. It shows that Earth cannot sustain present population and
industrial growth for much more than a few decades.
It shows that simply cleaning up our car exhausts and making
some small effort to limit our families simply isn't enough.
It's like an electronic guided tour of our global behaviour since 1900
and where that behaviour will lead us.
Well this is the printed version of what we've just seen on the television screen.
And what looks, at first, to be just a maze of computer
characteristics is really a system of very simple graphs which project what's
going to happen to the planet over the next 150 years if we don't do something
drastic to stop it .
Down the left-hand side of the graph is the date 1900, 1940, 1980, 2020, right down to 2060.
Now each of these lines of letters represents a curve showing some aspect of the
condition of the planet. The further out this way they go, the greater that figure is.
The further this way the less. For example, P represents population so here it
is at 1900, and then it comes up to 1940, it starts to take off. Here we are at 1980,
up to the turn of the century, and then it starts to peter off.
Let's now have a look at this next curve, the Q curve, which is the quality of life
and this is represented by, for example, the amount of space people have,
the amount of money they have to spend, the amount of food they have to eat.
Now it increases rapidly up to 1940, but from 1940 on the
quality of life diminishes and here we are, about the turn of the century, and we
come up to the year 2020 and it's really come right back.
More people of course means that you start to chew up your
supply of natural resources, and this is this curve here, the N curve, that shows
that slowly but steadily the pool of natural wealth in the world;
natural resources, minerals, oil and so on, is slowly but steadily diminishing.
So this is the situation - as population increases, the quality of life decreases,
and the supply of natural resources decreases.
But have a look at this curve here. This is called the Z curve and it represents pollution.
Now predictably enough as the population increases up to 1980, pollution increases.
There's more rubbish. But from 1980 to the year 2020 pollution really takes off.
This is assuming of course that we don't do anything about it.
So the year 2020, the condition of the planet starts to become highly critical
and if we don't do anything about it this is what's going to happen.
The quality of life is going to go right back to practically zero.
Pollution is going to become so serious, right out here, that it will start to kill people,
So the population will diminish, right back here, less than it was in the year 1900.
And at this stage, round about the year 2040, 2050, civilised life as we
know on this planet will cease to exist.
Well hopefully of course it won't be allowed to happen, but it's taken this kind of shock treatment
to nudge governments into doing something and slowly we are. We're starting to clean up
our atmosphere, we're starting to recycle our rubbish, we're doing something
positive about population control, but so far our efforts have really been just a drop in the ocean.
The Club of Rome comprises some 70 men of widely varying backgrounds,
but their common concern is that the world problems cannot be solved by individual nations.
I spoke with Professor Hugo Thiemann, director of the Battelle Institute in Geneva,
Dr Aurelio Peccei, founder of the club, and Dr Alexander King, director of the World Bank
and the United Nations' OECD.
Dr. King, now you're describing the world as a closed system where all these
things are interrelated and yet the government, the control of the system, is by individual nation-states.
Now how do you convince them to cooperate?
The sovereignty of these nations is no longer as absolute as it was.
There's a gradual diminishing, whittling away of sovereignty, little bit by little bit,
especially, of course, the smaller countries where it's more obvious,
but the bigger countries have to do a good deal of this by agreeing to international
arrangements for the Law of the Seas, or for the limits of fishing or for control of the wavelengths and radio
and a hundred and one other things, but especially in a technological field I think.
This is going to be increasingly so with the developments next year.
I was at an important meeting in Washington a couple of weeks ago and Peterson,
the former Secretary of Commerce, was saying the same thing from an economic point of view -
that the general world economic situation, the interdependence of countries,
on their food and fuels and so on, is leading to an interdependence
which has seeds of draining away of sovereignty within it.
So I don't think one can envisage an idealistic of jumping to a world federalism or anything of that sort
but the building up probably in the next decade in a number of particularly sensitive fields,
like energy, raw materials, the use of the oceans, space and so on, of a number of what
people are tending to call regimes, which will not be ordinary United Nations-type of organisations
but semi-management organisations. There'll be a great deal of consent in them.
Dr Peccei views the European common market as an elementary example of the kind of regional cooperative
which is going to be necessary. What responsibilities does he see for Australia?
You are in a splendid position. [REPORTER] What should we do?
You have food, energy, space. You are distant from other centres,
so you can, for a longer time, feel rather more independent than interdependent.
but things of the world are going so fast that I I think that the enlightened leadership
in Australia should see down the road that Australia will have to lose some of its own self decisions
in order to acquire something else which may be purely political in a very wide sense, or maybe also security.
The Club of Rome is reluctant to point the finger at any one nation, yet clearly nations like the United States
which consumes approximately 60% of the world's resources, will, in the club's view,
have to accept a severe cutback in its voracious appetite. But the club's utterances
are cloaked in a velvet democracy in the hope that their facts will gently persuade.
We will ask "who is making the decision?" and whether the decision makers of today
whether they perceive the problems, what kind of problems, and the interactions of the problems.
That's a very pragmatic approach.
[REPORTER] Has the time come, Dr. King, when we're going to have to say we can no longer entrust
our resources and the exploitation of those resources to private enterprise?
Is the time come when governments will simply have to take more control?
Simple nationalisation and things like that wouldn't help at all
because we've got to keep an incentive approach and many of the good aspects
of private enterprise are very necessary here, but not in the old exploitative way
where the market forces dominated the whole situation.
[REPORTER] Dr Peccei, can you tell me what my lifestyle will be in 100 years' time?
What sort of car I'll drive, what sort of house I'll live in, what sort of food I'll be eating.
Probably you will have a smaller car, you will use more common transport means,
you will work far less hours, you will have a wider cultural possibility than today,
you will not be so much pestered by immediate needs
because through technology, organisation of the markets, the basic needs will be taken care of
and I think that you will love nature and continue then what I think
you are doing now to protect our environment, to avoid this man-made world
where the creatures of nature, the animals, the plants,
the green spaces, the wilderness, is bound to disappear.
To the Club of Rome the status symbols of the year 2000 will be the inverse of today's.
Prestige will stem from low consumption. That personal consumption will have to
be less is plain enough, but for that privation to be seen as prestigious
would seem to indicate some radical rethinking, at least for the fat cats of the planet.
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