A modern day Hari Seldon, Peter Dawe forsees the complete unravelling of our global order and the way of life we take for granted. According to his complex systems modellers at exoshock, the major disruptions to our global political, social, environmental and economic systems, heading straight towards us, are practically unavoidable due to a combination of rapidly approaching resource constraints, climate disruptions and political inertia.
But although he predicts that collapse is inevitable, he’s also determined to reduce the fallout by establishing a community in a remote corner of East Anglia that, while initially small, will serve as a seed which – over the next 1000 years – will ultimately grow into, and form the epicenter of, a stable, flourishing, harmonious order spanning across the whole globe and operating in line with historical and natural principles.
On the one hand, the modellers at exoshock will labour to understand the precise form which the dynamics of the disruptions we are due to face in the future will take, along with the optimal initial conditions for the seed community design to enable it to successfully develop into a new stable and benign world order. On the other hand, the community in East Anglia will strive to develop the capabilities and conditions that are necessary and optimal for it to “weather the storm” of the challenging future circumstances we are destined to face and successfully persevere, grow and develop in accordance with the plan.
I’m entitling this blog Chronicles From Terminus after the planet where the first Foundation in Isaac Asimov’s novels was based as I find the parallels between ExoShock and the Community and the First and Second Foundations in Asimov’s Foundation saga quite striking. Peter Dawe’s motivation to both simulate the collapse and use that knowledge to plot a trajectory for a small community to shorten the dark ages and chaos that follows also bear an uncanny resemblance to the goals and strategic approach pursued by Hari Seldon and his team of psychohistorians.
A further uncanny parallel is how a series of crises propel the Foundation that Hari Seldon founded on Terminus to Galactic prominence and how Peter Dawe also forsees a series of crises propelling his foundation in East Anglia to future global prominence.