Below is the transcript for my Demographic Doom Podcast episode #58, released on 24 May 2021. The "home page" for this episode—with annotations, links, corrections and a place for comments—is the YouTube version (35 minutes). The audio version is housed at Podbean and is available on most major podcast platforms, including iTunes and Google Podcasts. The main website for this project is DemographicDoom.com. Twitter: @DemographicDoom. Glenn Campbell home page: Glenn-Campbell.com
This transcript is based on the automatically generated YouTube transcript, corrected by me based on my memory of what I said. I have not checked the transcript against the actual broadcast. Editing consisted mainly of inserting punctuation and paragraphs and removing repetitive words and phrases. Passages in bold text are ones I consider particularly quotable. Items in [square brackets] are minor grammatical corrections. Items in {curly brackets} are factual corrections or amplifications. —Glenn Campbell
I'm Glenn Campbell. I call myself a demographic philosopher. I'm looking at life and trying to predict the future through the lens of demography, or the study of human populations.
A couple of days ago, I saw a two-hour documentary while flying from Denver to Atlanta called “Spaceship Earth” about the Biosphere 2 project in the 1990s, where eight people were locked into a closed system in Arizona. They were locked into this utopian sort of spaceship in the Arizona desert to spend two years without any air or food coming into this system. Essentially, this was an experiment in an interstellar spacecraft, you could say. It just never left the ground. It's this very impressive architectural marvel north of Tucson. I've actually visited Biosphere 2 as a tourist. 2009 is when I visited, when it was already turned over to other parties.
This documentary described the project from the point of the view of the participants—the bionauts {I’m not sure if that’s the proper term.}—who took part in it and the people who organized it. At the time, I just thought of it as a rich man's vanity project—the rich man being Ed Bass, a billionaire who funded this project, but I see from the documentary, there's also a rich human story here.
The reason I want to bring this up and discuss it in this podcast is that it applies in some ways to my proposed project, the “post-nuclear family”, where you would take eight people, eight adults and in effect put them on a spaceship to raise a family together. I want to compare and contrast these two systems, and perhaps Biosphere 2 can give us some insight into how my system might work or might fail, because obviously the biosphere system failed.
To cut to the chase, they were supposed to lock themselves into this closed system for two years without any air being injected from the outside, without any food from the outside. They would raise their own food. They would produce their own oxygen by all the plants they had in there with them. The project was seen as a failure because eventually they had to add oxygen to this system. It was not a closed system. The carbon dioxide just kept building up and eventually they had to inject oxygen into it. And sooner or later, the whole project collapsed. It became a cultural joke, and eventually the original plan was aborted, and it’s now just devoted to conventional research. {Correction: The original 2-year mission was completed, but later missions were apparently cut short.}
I found my own visit to be very fascinating. I have lots of photos, and if you look at the YouTube version of this podcast, in the description, I have links to my own photos of Biosphere 2, which is a fascinating visual place, and links to a lot of other things. This is a podcast that I'm not scripting. Most of my podcasts I write out before I do. [In] this one, I'm just flying by the seat of my pants, so you should also look at the YouTube description for any corrections I may have about Biosphere 2, any mistakes I may have made.
There's all sorts of ways you can say why it failed. I mean, you can talk endlessly about why it failed. It was a big, showy project—very expensive, $200 million, I think—to build essentially a giant greenhouse with many different biomes. It had a desert. It had a rain forest, and it was obviously for show. They had all their eggs in one basket in this one project. You could have taken $200 million and distributed over a lot of little projects that would have accomplished a lot more scientifically, but this was a big, extravagant, showy project, and it's kind of obvious from the beginning that it would fail. That's how I felt in 1991 when I read the news stories: that this thing is going to fail in some way.
But the documentary put it all in a different perspective for me. I now see the human story of the things that led up to this project. It’s not just a rich man's project. It's a lot of little people, a lot of smaller people, who were engaged in this.
It was born basically in a commune in the 1960s. The group cohered around this one charismatic leader, and one of their first projects was to start a commune, essentially, in the desert of New Mexico. And from there, their projects just grew bigger and bigger and bigger. At some point, they hooked up with this Ed Bass, an oil billionaire from a rich Texas family, and he funded their expeditions.
Their next expedition after the communal farm was to build a boat. They built a ship themselves, obviously funded by somebody, probably by Ed Bass, and they sailed around the world in this sailing ship and engaged in all sorts of profit-making projects. One that comes to mind is they designed and built a hotel in Tibet (or was it in the Himalayas? Could have been Nepal.) so it wasn't entirely socialist. It was a Capitalist endeavor, to go around the world and engage in these innovative businesses. They learned how to execute big projects and eventually it grew into this giant Biosphere project.
Of course, it failed, and everybody went their separate ways. It's just very amusing to hear each individual story of the bionauts and the people who organized this thing. Obviously, many people chose not to participate. There's no interviews with Ed Bass himself. Some of the bionauts apparently didn't participate, but it's still a riveting story, and I'm kind of glad I was trapped on this two-hour flight where I just had just enough time to see this documentary.
So how does this compare to my proposed system? My proposed system as discussed in other podcasts is called the “post-nuclear family”. I'm trying to address a demographic issue, in that mankind, the developed world, does not seem to be able to produce enough babies, and it's obviously because, for individual parents, babies are not a profit-making enterprise. It's very expensive, very risky, to raise a child in the modern world, and my proposal is to distribute the risk by having a number of adults joining forces to raise children together.
My initial group of adults would be maybe eight adults, maybe four couples, which is a lot like the eight bionauts who entered Biosphere 2. I want to compare how my system, which hopefully would succeed, compares to this Biosphere system, which obviously failed.
I think the Biosphere failed because it tried to do too much. It tried to do everything all at once, instead of doing a lot of little experiments that would have added up to some scientific progress, they chose to focus on a single big, massive, showy project where they tried to do everything. They assembled everything of Earth under this dome and went around the Earth to decide what sort of plants and animals they're going to bring into their system. It was just too big. It had to fail. If it wasn't carbon dioxide, it would have been something else.
So that's the first lesson I would apply to my system: Don't make it too big. Don't try to do too many things at once, because if you do, it's just going to be too heavy. It's going to be too big. If the system is too complex, then some part of the system is going to fail. In my project, I'm just making little baby steps.
Right now, we have what is called the “nuclear family”. Where a man and a woman—or two men and two women—get together romantically and decide to raise kids. They raise one kid; maybe they raise two kids, but at that point, you're pretty exhausted, and the vast majority of families these days don't go on to three or four or five kids. So these few people who do produce babies, they're not producing enough of them.
My first step would simply be: Instead of four couples raising their children separately, maybe these four couples should join forces and raise their children together in one house. My whole system flows from that one concept, because once you decide to do that, it raises all sorts of questions, and I have to answer those questions as best I can. How are you going to organize these eight people? And how are you going to keep these eight people from killing each other—which the bionauts were on the verge of doing. At some point during their two-year project, as carbon dioxide built up in the environment, so too did tensions among the crew members, where they wanted to strangle each other and strangle their handlers in the outside world.
So how do you prevent that? First of all, these eight people would be cooperating on this one project but not necessarily anything else. What my project holds the promise of is that you can be a parent one day a week instead of eight days a week. When you have eight adults and can distribute the responsibilities among eight adults, then in theory, one adult can be on duty in the family on any one day, and the rest can go off and do whatever they want.
I'm not imposing any restrictions on what these people do in their private lives. It's a lot like a community church, where people come in for Sunday services or community events, and they all participate in the upkeep of the church, but when they're not in church and not participating in community events, they're off doing their own thing. They're pursuing their own careers. They have their own private and personal lives that do not have to mingle with the lives of the other adults.
[This] is a great contrast between with the Biospherians. The Biospherians were trapped with each other. They couldn't escape from each other, and in my system, I propose that there is an escape. As long as you perform your duties in the family, which might be 10 or 20 percent of your life, the rest of your life can be devoted to anything you want, without any restrictions. You can have any relationships you want. You don't have to spend all your time with the other adult participants. Maybe in this group of eight people, there are couples who choose to live with each other, choose to be married to each other, but you don't have to be. People can get divorced from each other and still support the family.
So that's my Number One lesson of Biosphere 2: Don't make it too big. Whatever utopian plan you have, you got to ease into it, step by step, you can't do too much at once. You can't take on wholesale changes to your life. You can only take on small changes. Small changes can add up over time. This system 50 years after it starts could be radically different from how this thing started, but you have to ease into it. There has to be a gradual evolution into this new way of life.
One of the ways that Biosphere 2 failed is that it tried to find solutions for all of humanity. It tried to be a model of sustainability for all of humanity, and I don't think the post-nuclear project should try to do that. The world has huge demographic issues. We're facing economic and political ruin because of our demographics, [but] it's not the job of any one family to fix society. One family should only try to achieve its own goals and fix its own society.
The reason you would want to participate in a family like this is because it serves your own needs, your own need to build something for the next generation and pass your wisdom on to the next generation. It has nothing to do with trying to save the Social Security system or save your country. You're trying to save yourself and the community you feel you belong to. That's the only reason to engage in this project. If you don't feel strongly enough about it—about saving some of yourself for the next generation—then you simply don't participate. This has to be a self-motivated project, [and] it has to be a self-funded project, because we can't count on an Ed Bass being able to fund this thing for us. We have to fund it ourselves.
So when these eight people get together and decide “We want to raise our children together,” that should be all you need. You don't need any government support. You don't need any permission from anyone else. You just need to find these seven other people that you're close enough to, that you trust enough, that you could engage in this project with. That's probably the single most difficult challenge of this project: how to find these other like-minded people who you trust and are willing to essentially engage in a lifelong commitment with.
You know, marriage is a lifelong commitment between two people, and the post-nuclear family would be a lifelong commitment between eight people, so there's a huge challenge there. How do you anticipate all the conflicts you're going to have in the future?
If you choose good people to start this project with—people who believe in certain principles of conflict resolution, certain principles of how children should be raised—and you make a good selection at the beginning, that's probably the most important thing for the success of the project on the long term. If you make bad choices, just like a bad marriage, things can turn horrible very quickly.
So if you think finding a good romantic partner is difficult, imagine trying to find seven good partners. The only saving grace here is that you don't have to be in perfect sync with your seven partners on everything. You don't have to live with your seven partners, you only have to agree on this one project. You only have to agree on the childrearing project and the essential philosophy of childrearing and the essential philosophy of dispute resolution. Other than that, you can go on and lead your own life, develop in your own way, change in your own way, as long as you continue to maintain and support the family.
The post-nuclear family should be guided by ideology. There should be a set of principles that you coalesce around, but they should be very simple principles, because the risk is if you embark on something that's too radical, that's too ideological, there's the risk is that your children, once they grow up, they don't want to do it anymore, because it's just too hard. It's just too strict, which has been the demise of many a religious group and religious cult. In the kibbutz system of Israel, for example, which raised children in its own way, it was just too hard, and the children themselves, once they became adults, didn't want to do it.
So whatever your ideology is, it's got to be simple. There should be, like, 10 commandments, 10 principles that children can recite and everybody can look at as guiding the family—certain principles of fairness and intellectual discipline and things like that, all boiled down to about 10 commandments that everyone has to live by and that can stand the test of time even as the world changes—because I see this family as something that should last forever, should last for hundreds of years.
Once you start a post-nuclear family with between 9 and 18 kids, you keep it up. You make sure there's always between 9 and 18 kids. Actually, 9 is my long-term target. So in the post-nuclear family, it's essentially just a big family like we have today. There are families with 6 kids, and that's not too uncommon in human history, to have 6 kids or 8 kids. And I'm proposing 9 kids, evenly spaced in age from 0 to 18, who do a lot of their own self-care. We have a lot of internal care, where older kids are taking care of younger kids, and we have an organizational system that does things like clean house and gets the meals made. This is all part of the family culture that you build over time. And you don't want that family culture to just vanish as kids age out, so as one kid becomes an adult and leaves the family, you bring in a new baby. You just keep the family going forever, even as the founding adults age and die. There will be new adults that were born in the family.
The ideal is to just keep this thing going, like a sort of spaceship. Think of it like an interstellar mission where it takes multiple generations to get to your destination. How would you organize it? And this is the way I propose organizing it.
A funny thing about the Spaceship Earth documentary is it never mentioned children. Not even once did it mention children {that I recall}. It was all about environmental sustainability and not one word about demographic sustainability. I suspect that the group just figured, since it was born in the 1960s when we thought there was a population explosion, I think the philosophy of the group would have been, you know, just no babies at all. In fact, in the entire two-hour documentary I saw only one glimpse, a two-second glimpse of two children playing. Other than that, it was all adults. Although they had obviously given a lot of thought to environmental sustainability, they didn't seem to give any thought to demographic sustainability, which I think is more important in the long run—that you have children to take over for you.
Of course, if you believe that the human race has no right to exist, that we are just a pox on the planet, then you don't care about having children, but if you do believe that humanity is worth something and it should be continued, then you have to find a way to do it. You have to find a way to bring new children into the world.
Right now, we're focused on the problems of nations—nations that have too many old people and not enough workers—and I see that problem is really unsolvable because nations can't do anything to encourage or force people to have more children. If it doesn't make economic sense to people, you can't get them to do it, no matter what tax credit you give them or what incentives you give them. It's just not going to work. So I'm not trying to solve the problem of nations, and this family should not try to solve the problem of nations. It should just try to solve its own problems, the problems of its eight founding members, who want to preserve something into the next generation.
One of the things I enjoyed about the Spaceship Earth documentary is it was very subtle. There was there's no narration. It's all the story is told by the participants, and there's little details here and there. For example, when the when the Biospherians were locked into their cocoon in September of 1991, there was great drama. It was a big press event where they walked into this portal and closed the door. The way the press portrayed, they just closed the door and sealed them in, but of course the door didn't close just right. We see them monkeying with the door, trying to get it to close, and from there on, of course, it just kind of…
Things were wonderful in the beginning. It was euphoria in the beginning, but then various problems would crop up. Of course, there was the carbon dioxide problem, too much carbon dioxide building up within the dome which deprived people of energy. They couldn't run anymore. It's like being at a very high altitude. They couldn't exert themselves. There was also not enough food. They were growing their own food, and they just weren't producing enough of it. And this was further hampered by the doctor.
The oldest member of the team was this 60-year-old doctor who had some ideas about longevity. He felt that people could live to be 120 if they just restricted their caloric intake. He was 60 years old, and he personally planned to live to 120, but he did not participate in this documentary because he died of natural causes at the age of 79. {He died of Lou Gehrig’s disease, which I consider “natural causes”, because everyone dies of something.}
So not only was there not enough food, but they were being restricted by their doctor. The doctor was deliberately trying to restrict their caloric intake to try to extend their lifespans when they were just trying to survive {in the moment}. Not only did they need to survive and produce enough food, but they had to obey all these dietary restrictions. There couldn't be any refined sugar. [There were] all sorts of things that they had to do because it was a project that had to do everything all at once. [They] had to not only survive but have this perfect diet.
Eventually, as carbon dioxide rose and the food supply dwindled, of course everyone shriveled up, lost weight and they were snapping at each other, until the decision was finally made to introduce new oxygen from the outside, and suddenly everyone was revived again. Their spirits came back.
So thinking about how the post-nuclear family would fail, what are the equivalents of a carbon dioxide buildup? Well, there could be one member of the family of the founding adults who just starts becoming a problem. This one problem employee… you know, every office encounters them. You have one employee who makes everybody else's life difficult. How do you handle that? That's something you really got to handle on the fly.
But the Number One thing is: Who do you have going into this biosphere with you? Who are these seven other people? That's probably the single greatest contributor to the success of the project. If you've got the right people, then you can overcome any obstacle {just as conventional families do}. If you've got the wrong people, then one or two bad apples can utterly destroy the project.
Once you have these solid eight founding members, then it should be easier {in subsequent generations} because you are raising your next generation. You are raising the people who are going to replace you. The whole project of childhood is training them in your philosophy and training them in ways they can replace [you]. You don't have that option going in—You have to select existing adults.—but once you have your existing adults, the whole focus of the project is to raise good children who will carry on in your footsteps.
It's a big indoctrination program—as is every family. It is an indoctrination program in your way of life and your language and your way of looking at things. Children are like little computers that come out of the womb ready to be programmed, and childhood is this 18-year project to program them. You have to have an educational system. You have to have an ideology. And when parents come into this household {for their scheduled duties}, they are participating in this project. They're not just caring for the kids, because to a large extent, the kids will care for themselves. They are pushing an ideology on these kids. They are teaching lessons to these kids. And each of these eight people have different lessons to teach.
Let's say Biosphere 2 had a more ambitious plan: Not only would eight people go in and survive but they would produce children who would survive after them. That would be more like what I'm thinking of. So what it would be like to be a child born into Biosphere 2, who knew only [this] environment that was created for them. I think that's a fascinating story.
Imagine being born into Biosphere 2 and being able to play in the desert and the rain forest and the ocean, inside this closed system, and only gradually learning that there's an outside world beyond the Biosphere. You know they would eventually have to interact with it, and that's a good metaphor for childhood.
In childhood, you are creating an artificial environment. It's a sort of Disneyland for children, where all the morality works, all the rules really work, the whole system really works. It's an artificial environment created by the parents to transition their children from a very simple childhood to be being able to handle all the complexities of the outside world. This is what childhood is. It's an artificial world that you create.
In this case, we have eight people creating this artificial household. I am proposing that the eight founding parents do not live in the household. They live their separate lives in their own homes and apartments and only come into the household for their scheduled duties. Part of the reason for this is you want to preserve a kind of Disneyland, a kind of artificial ecosystem, within this biodome that is the family. Eventually, you're going to teach children how to get by in the outside world, but it starts out as an artificial environment. The family is, by its nature, an artificial environment, and by having the parents not live at the household, they don't corrupt the environment with their adult activities.
There are things that adults do that you don't want children to do. There are things that adults are exposed to in the outside world that you don't want children to be exposed to. The household is our sort of biosphere where we create this artificial environment with its own rules and its own internal culture that you want to try to preserve.
So I urge you to check out this documentary. It was released only last year, 2020. Spaceship Earth. I'm sure you'll find it on all your usual platforms for movies and things. [You should] think about utopias and how they work and how they don't work, and if you were to build a utopia, how would you do it?
