A dry lake bed in Lyneham, which I pass by everyday. Seeing such things motivates a certain kind of disposition in me, and is perhaps a kind of physical symbol for the (metaphorical-ish) situation we now find ourselves in Australia. It’s been recently filled by the hailstorm.

So, I’m applying for the Santa Fe Institute (SFI) Summer School which will occur in June/July this year. SFI has enamoured me with even the sheer prospect of visiting since my first year of university, so I’m rather excited. In a sense, it is something to hope and yearn for amidst fire, lightning, flash floods, hail and gale force winds over the last few weeks here in Canberra.

As part of the application, I have to write a statement of research interests and a bit about why I’d like to visit SFI. The only design constraint as far as I can tell and/or infer is that it may be no more than two pages. Now, I figure, why not cross-post it on Medium.com? Hit two birds with one transcontextual stone; communicating my research interests to a broader audience, and get the application done to go to ostensibly one of my favourite places on Earth I’ve never seen.

Let’s get right into it then. I’ll endeavour to be quite transparent here, by the way.

For context, the working title for my PhD, which I officially started as of last week, is “Critical Infrastructure Security under Existential Anthropocene Risk”. I chose each word based upon academic work I have read over the past year, both from my Honours research (on Tipping Points in the Earth System), and out of a broader interest in existential risk. The Anthropocene is the new geological epoch we now find ourselves within; geologists and Earth System scientists identify it by the fact that humans have made their mark in every “sphere” of the planet. From microplastics in the Mariana Trench, to altered evolutionary trajectories for countless organisms, and of course, anthropogenic climate change.

The “existential” element regards how our perturbations and unconscious “forcing” (a technical term) on various Earth sub-systems (eg. the Amazon rainforest, biodiversity in the oceans, melting ice sheets and Arctic sea ice, etc…) are driving the Earth into a dynamically unstable regime. Leading Earth System scientists Will Steffen, Tim Lenton, Johann Rockström and others published a paper on this precise topic called Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene, which in my view is required reading for all human beings planning on being on this planet over the next few decades.

From Steffen et al. (2018), illustrating the Hothouse Earth pathway.

By the way, “existential risk” is a tricky term to define, of course. As a rough attempt here, existential risks are those which threaten the sustained existence of complex societies and/or life such as current human civilisation, and most of the biosphere. If you’re after a nice academic definition, the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford has a lot of work on the topic.

As a personal aside, I do wish climate deniers were right about us all being “climate alarmists”. You know, it’d be nice if my research didn’t chill me to my bones, making it difficult to get to sleep every night and strike me with dread in my soul when I read papers or look outside at the flooding, storms and fires in my literal local environment of the Australian Capital Territory.

I like to joke with people about how these days, turning on the news (or as of relatively recently), looking outside the window is effectively my PhD research. My PhD will hopefully aim to use the Australian bushfire crisis, the drought, extreme weather disruptions of infrastructure as presently unfolding case studies; presuming that no further cataclysms interrupt my ability to do such research, that is.

Okay, enough heavy-hitting semi-personal stuff.

Why SFI?

Historically, SFI has been a kind of Mecca for research into complex adaptive systems. Back in the heyday of mathematical studies of chaos, much of the relevant research took place at SFI. Even now, fascinating research in the field of mathematical chaos is still taking place there. After the GFC, researchers connected with SFI began to think about using thermodynamics principles for understanding economic systems, advancing the fascinating field of “econophysics”. Geoffrey West, an SFI researcher, released a fantastic popular book called Scale which outlines how cities can be considered in quite close analogy to organisms. Some of my intellectual heroes like Douglas Hofstadter and Stuart Kaufmann have had strong interconnections with the Santa Fe Institute.

I fondly recall reading several books like Complexity and the Arrow of Time by Lineweaver, Davies and Ruse, and Complexity a Guided Tour by Melanie Mitchell. It may have been Mitchell’s book which first introduced the domain of network theory to my mind, which has ever since provided an invaluable lens through which to understand the world around me.

It would be no exaggeration on my part to say that visiting the Santa Fe Institute is one of precisely three things on my bucket list. The other two are visiting Greece (due to my obsession with Ancient Greek philosophy) and learning German so I can read Prometheus und Epimetheus, Ein Gleichnis by Carl Spitteler.

Research Interests

Okay, so now with regards to existential risk, infrastructure and ostensibly helping to save the world from imminent collapse due to our twiddling of knobs on the Spaceship Earth’s dashboard — why complexity?

I’ll admit, it feels strange to ask this question since for the past three years, complexity theory (specifically, network theory and dynamical systems) have been my overwhelmingly preferred lenses through which to understand natural phenomena. Complexity is everywhere if you look closely enough. Most of the time, you don’t even have to look closely, you just need to ask the right questions.

Take the bushfire situation in Australia at the moment as an indicative example. People are asking “what’s causing these bushfires?” and expecting a single, causally deterministic answer. Complexity theory admonishes linear, reductionist approaches since at minimum, such an approach is inaccurate and insufficient. Technically, “climate change” isn’t a precise answer. There’s always more than one cause for complex phenomena. In the case of the bushfires the Indian Ocean Dipole (on which global anthropogenic warming has had a major influence) and sudden stratospheric warming above the Antarctic have played major roles. Additionally, so have other complex causal interactions like the drought, CO2 fertilisation, land-use change, forest management, colonialism… etc…

As it happens, one of my research interests is sensitivity analysis, which seeks to dissect and understand which causal factors, parameters and drivers are the most important for a given context and phenomena.

There are no linear, reductionist answers that will satisfy true questions on such matters. In my mind, only complex pictures, ones which paint the causal network out in fuller, richer detail, will get us closer to reality; and therefore closer to solutions.

On the infrastructure side, considering cities like organisms was a major innovative move in the complexity sciences made by many SFI researchers like Geoffrey West. The new science of cities provides a profoundly strong metaphor and bridge towards using tools and psychotechnologies (a phrase I’m borrowing from a favourite scientist of mine, John Vervaeke) from microbiology, ecology, biochemistry and possibly even cognitive science. Such scientific innovations move us closer towards understanding how cities work, and how they can fall and collapse. Infrastructure security can never make sense by taking the traditional reductionism route of, say, only looking at “water security” and “water infrastructure”, as if filtration sites, water extraction, desalination and many other components aren’t heavily dependent on so-called “energy infrastructure”. My first PhD paper on the “System Boundary Problem” will cover this topic extensively.

An image I took of a segment of Melbourne’s electrical and transportation infrastructure. Where do the infrastructure system boundaries start and end?

Out of interest, I figured I might list a few of the research topics lately on my mind. If you will, please allow me a few lines of unabashed word salad/academic jargon/technical lingo (to use some Russell conjugation):

Generalised notions of flows through networks (a kind of “conduit theory”) utilising graph theory, network theory, fluid mechanics, biology, information theory and extant knowledge on infrastructure

Supply chain analytics and disaster response utilising dynamical systems and bifurcation theory for prioritisation and decision-aiding methods

Plectics (from the Greek word for woven, coined by Gell-Mann for studying simplicity and complexity) and system boundary problems across disciplines (topic of my first PhD paper!)

Dynamical systems and network theory approaches to the cliodynamics of civilizational collapse

Robustness of transdisciplinary modelling methodologies (going a bit meta with this one, but happens to be the main focus of my current research at the Fenner School) using Legitimation Code Theory and a healthy dose of scholarly metaphysics

Utilizing the Maximum entropy principle from non-equilibrium thermodynamics to understand non-stationary time series from Big Data on cities and economics

Attempting a mythopoetic + dynamical systems definition of so-called “Game B”

The first three of the above interests will form the conceptual base for my PhD publications. Since I’m doing a thesis by publication, I’ve got a comfortable degree of wiggle room to swim and play with the complexity which abounds in such fields.

In my mind, it’s all part of the same damn thing; which is doing my utmost to help avoid existential risk and the collapse of complex human society in my lifetime, which I really do unfortunately believe is a genuine risk.

Here’s hoping Australia itself doesn’t collapse before I finish them all though.

Addendum (21/1, one day after first draft): Excuse my urgency and possibly unrefined pseudo-essay here, if you will. I very much would have liked to have spent more time writing up this application, but yesterday we had a severe hailstorm that damaged both my workplaces (Questacon and the Australian National University), various government buildings, cars, CSIRO research greenhouses, and filled the streets with leaflitter which is now quickly drying in 30 degree(Celsius) heat and transmuting into fuel for ostensibly potential lightning-lit fires later in the week.

Parliament House, two weeks apart. The image on the right was taken on the 20th of January.

As such, I hope you (dear reader, whether it be an interested passer-by on Medium or the SFI staff person reading this and evaluating my application) will excuse my lack of adequate citations and allow you to Google them for yourself if you really wish to fact check me. We are all adults in the room, after all.