The Big Picture
The Simple Fix
Pick a big goal, watch which wall the system hits first
You run civilization. Press one of the six big goals below, the control panel jumps to that scenario and the live output changes. You can also turn the valves by hand. The goal is not to win; it is to see how every well-meant decision breaks a different layer.
The “lifespan” number is not a forecast, it is an indicator. The effect of the valves is a set of hand-written rules based on couplings documented on the site (Haber-Bosch ↔ natural gas, trade credit ↔ leverage, the Jevons rebound, r > g, EROI); the coefficients are illustrative. It solves no time series and is not a calibrated macro model. All it shows is the structure: whichever valve you pull, the system breaks at the limit of its weakest layer (Liebig's minimum), and no intervention stays isolated.
Six big goals
Press a goal, the panel jumps to that scenario, the estimated lifespan shows above.
Control panel
No layer has broken yet, but the highest pressure is here. Turn one valve a little further.
Layer 3 · The Feedback Loop →The manager's tragedy: why there is no simple fix
Zero out the friction and its cost in one layer, and the freed entropy piles up in the other three. The system is four coupled equations; solving one does not solve the rest.
The market reacts in milliseconds, the lithosphere in decades. Because the manager sees instant green/red on the screen, they assume the feedback has no lag; by the time they notice the decision has hit the L0 wall, it is too late to turn back.
No legal (L2) or financial (L3) transaction can zero out the net available exergy and low-entropy matter spent in the layer below. Abstraction creates no matter; even the most abstract layer still feeds, every year, from the first.
The real models, this game's serious counterparts
This toy is a cartoon of a research tradition decades deep. The main efforts that actually model these questions:
- World3 / Limits to Growth, Meadows et al. 1972, 2004 update, system dynamics with stock-flow and delays; the ancestor of the genre.
- Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs), Climate-economy coupling: DICE/RICE (Nordhaus), PAGE, FUND; and the process IAMs behind the IPCC scenarios: IMAGE, MESSAGE-GLOBIOM, REMIND-MAgPIE, GCAM.
- Stock-flow-consistent (SFC) macro, Every financial liability has a matching asset: Godley & Lavoie 2007; GEMMES (Bovari, Grasselli, McIsaac), which couples it to climate damages.
- Biophysical economics models, Energy and matter put into the production function: MEDEAS, LOCOMOTION, HARMONEY; Steve Keen's energy-augmented work.
- The planetary-boundaries framework, Rockström, Steffen, Richardson et al., the source of the “which limit is crossed first” logic; six of nine thresholds are now breached.
- EROI / net-energy analysis, Hall & Klitgaard, Charles Hall, traces the energy spent to get energy.
There is no simple fix, because this is not a problem to be solved but a tension that comes from the shape of the system, locking the four layers to one another.
See the same four layers set side by side, statically: Horizontal Cross-Section →