We have a problem of beliefs,
a problem of interpretation;
no knowledge,
know it, we have it.
The problem is to believe.
That’s it, the most difficult.
I’m going to ask you tonight not to believe what you’re going to hear
since overall the message again
is both simple, perhaps simplistic,
and totally inaudible.
Humanity has stopped progressing
in just about all his prime areas.
You will tell me, you realized
with the result of the American elections.
Certainly.
But this result eventually is perhaps the symptom
a much larger problem,
which is the simultaneous attainment of all our ceilings.
So how do we come to this conclusion?
Well, looking at records,
since after all, each record is beaten by the following
and it gives us a perfect visualization of the dynamics
of this evolution of the maxima of human capacities.
Whatever the field in which you use it, you study it,
you end up having a vision,
especially if you have the chance to have a great precision.
This is the case in sports archives,
they are on very long series
which begin in the 18th century,
and who, as you see here,
on top ten athletes in men’s and women’s high jump
will show you a very important progression
human abilities in this simple discipline
which will grow by more than 30% during the twentieth century
marked by two important extra-sporting events
and that will have an impact on the decline of these capabilities,
the first and second world wars.
And especially on the end, you see for 30 years, this plateau,
reached for men as for women,
with immense difficulty.
Currently, for Bondarenko or Blanka Vlašić,
to try to overtake
what the record holders got 30 years ago,
in somewhat doubtful conditions
but which show, in any case,
a very strong element,
on which all of the sport, athletics, swimming, weightlifting
is ultimately concerned.
It’s the same evolutionary scheme for the whole,
including the size of US basketball players on NBA parquets
which no longer evolves for 30 years at 2m.
It’s here.
It does not evolve anymore.
Why do I tell you that?
Because in this area,
when we look at all the countries,
of 100 countries followed for a century,
finally the average size inside these countries
strictly shows the same evolutionary function.
Some have progressed, others are regressing
but we come to a plateau of abilities
which are, in biometric terms,
very important,
marked by this function.
Mankind has grown but it is no longer growing.
For life expectancy, the work Juliana Antero had published 2 years ago
has been confirmed in a recent publication in Nature
and shows that after Jeanne Calment’s record of 122 years in 1997,
finally the deans of humanity are at 116,
obliged to pass on the relay of this performance,
if there is one,
to last longer than others.
But in any case, marked by this plateau again,
not at all the one that the transhumanists would like to give us
an idea to which we would go to 150, 175, 200 years,
no matter what writings are still in the national press.
You also see that for all participants in the Olympic Games,
it’s the same thing.
Just upstairs below, we will go to one of the maxima
associated with the selection of this particular group
on which we have no evolution at all.
What are the assumptions to explain this?
The first is a question of endogenous limit,
a question of internal limit.
Our genome is, as for all species,
exploited almost thoroughly.
And we will not grow much more
and we will not be much older
than we are right now.
We already see in some countries
these values flow back.
This is the case of the average size of the population in Egypt.
We are not surprised that this happened 20 years before the riots of 2008,
hunger riots,
because there is a very strong relationship
between available energy,
– nutrition has this energy through food –
individual size and population size,
that is to say the demographics
and ultimately the life expectancy.
On this one, in France, precisely
we see that although it has progressed a lot in the twentieth century,
for the past 5 years, women’s life expectancy has been stopped,
and no significant progress has been recorded.
On the contrary, last year, a five-month decline was assigned
by specialists from INED.
We have some problems on this slope
especially since for the second hypothesis,
which is not exclusive of the first,
we finally see
increasingly important constraints
and who have some difficulties finally
to follow this evolution.
The first is that of emergence
or the reemergence of infectious diseases
with this
an association with bacterial resistance
more and more quickly transmitted
facing an antibiotic arsenal
that can be described as rather shaky.
The second is the increase in temperature
which we know perfectly but which shows year after year,
records whose steps are getting higher and higher
and that show that this trend is accelerating
especially since it leads to a phenomenon that will concern
that of an arctic polar heat wave
at this moment
since the temperature is currently 20 ° C
higher than the seasonal averages.
We imagine what could be a + 20 ° C on the summer 2017 in France
on nuclear power plants, but especially on the elderly
and infants.
The question that will also be the next one is that of the impact
that this effect will give on the level of the seas.
If cities and coastal capitals can ask themselves the question
what their level will be when you pass 4 ° C,
it remains specuative.
We had an episode at + 1 ° C
which concerned New York in which, in October 2012,
Sandy’s waters have submerged one-third of Manhattan.
Biodiversity with the decline of pollinators
will also have a big effect,
probably on agricultural yields
and these are already stagnating for 20 years,
even regress in a third of the agricultural producing regions
in the world.
Finally, energy per capita,
that is, the availability put for each individual
has also reached its peak
about twenty years ago
in the most developed countries,
OECD countries.
So we can ask ourselves the question, with all of these elements,
to know if we have not finished our growth phase
and optimized this one to go up to this asymptote
encountered at the beginning of the 20th century
at the same time
where we meet the increasingly important constraints.
Our adjustment margin with respect to this scheme
quite contradictory
is currently
we had posed with Bernard Swynghedauw and Gilles Bœuf
a few years ago at the museum.
Behind that, it is very clearly
to understand what will be the mechanisms of emergence
of these new constraints
or that re-accelerate.
It’s the ones we pushed back
in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries with our technology
and who now come back to us
with a power tenfold.
In this area, it is probably necessary to turn to the living
to understand how these mechanisms are put in place.
The mechanisms of emergence will be those that will allow
to understand the rules and relationships that are very simple.
I mean, simple when you analyze them two by two only.
If you look at how performance evolves with age
on the stadium tour,
just for the best mini, younger, junior,
seniors and even nonagenarians,
see that an equation as stupid as the one at the bottom
will explain 99% of the variance of these individual records,
of these real data.
You have an expression of exponential growth
which is this energy that we talked about in previous presentations
and those of decay, which is another exponential form,
which is simply the growth of entropy.
That is to say, we do not arrive with time anymore
to maintain all of our repair systems.
Finally getting old,
it’s never more than allowing oneself to be invaded by entropy.
This curve, you find it on all scales.
That is to say, you have it at the cell scale,
at the level of the organ,
of the organism and the individual.
You even have it at the scale of the species.
You also have it between the species.
We will find the same cycle
on the cotton leaf,
at the worm
and in the dog.
We see extraordinarily strong invariance elements
throughout the living.
At all these scales, it’s the idea of fractal self-similarity
which was developed just now.
In relation to that, if we want to build and continue to understand,
we have to go down to the physics scale
to see how these different elements intermingle.
Physics approaches life through thermodynamics,
thermodynamics of dissipative systems
with an evolution towards complexity
as energy dissipates
and that she specializes.
In this domain,
physics will always have for object
to use the moment of maximum entropy:
that is, the moment of zero performance, zero.
That is to say also considering
the possibility of an end for each of the systems.
This is exactly what we absolutely refuse.
Why do we refuse it?
Simply because there is an adaptive capacity
extraordinary of this denial
and I explain myself.
If I am alive today and refuse the hypothesis of my death,
I’m planning for tomorrow
that myself or my descendants will realize.
It is this extension, in this form of eternity
that can be projected on the long or the very long term.
In this field, it is one of the problems, on the contrary, of current science.
Since this denial, in a science that will become more and more authentic,
certify the absolute limits,
will give us an idea of the theoretical limits.
This is the indemontrabiity of Gödel’s theorem.
These are physical limits and conceptual limits.
What is finally after the Higgs boson?
What are we going to have to create as instruments?
What size are we going to have to give them to be able to generate
the new theories that will answer the limits of current theories?
Étienne Klein did not tell us about it.
He could talk about it for weeks.
90 years of [Dulenes] weeks would be fulfilled
a speech by Étienne Klein on this area.
But we can see that all of these phenomena will depend on
of technical limitations which are, they
those of economic, political and financial means
who will be supporting this research.
This is the problem of ITER at Cadarache
around nuclear fusion currently.
There are biological limits
which means that we will not cross three meters.
There is nothing that allows us to think historically,
compared to the human genome,
in relation to his physiology,
in relation to its history,
that it is possible.
Mathematically, it is possible.
Here again, some people are deluding themselves
thinking that if it’s mathematically possible,
then it will be realized, we will be dead,
since a long time
before that can be the case.
Methodological limitations,
since going farther and farther to the confines
bigger numbers, big data,
or more and more distant causes,
science can only clash with universal laws
on which she has no hold.
Meanwhile, technè escapes us.
The too complex explodes us in the face.
We just put in place
the sarcophagus on Chernobyl,
which ultimately results from another denial,
that of designing the vulnerability of political organizations.
It is a form of faith
that perfectly described Svetlana Alexievich
in “The Supplication”,
which earned him the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Fukushima is the result of another denial,
another improvidence.
How could we build
these instruments at the edge of an ocean
which since time immemorial has overwhelmed this people with waves
more than 20 meters?
This is a question that will be left to our grandchildren.
In economics, the externalities that were written off,
obviously assumed complete resilience of natural systems.
We now know that this is not the case.
The limits of the planet,
of which we are too consumers,
and maybe too many to consume,
will soon force us to reduce the wing.
What will be the result of these two trajectories
who are on the road to collision?
It can be accelerated decay
or, if we know how to anticipate it,
maybe we’ll reduce the impacts
and will we be able to accompany this reflux?
Probably, on that, we will have to consider a number of facts.
Yes we are mortal.
We know it,
we have adapted to it since the beginning of time.
But at the scale of the species, the indices are more and more numerous,
more and more consistent and obvious.
And we still can not believe it.
Maybe it’s time to dare:
to dare to develop an acute awareness of this finding,
dare to share it, that’s what we’re doing tonight,
dare to accept being integrated.
Perhaps it is also time to face all of these problems simultaneously
because they have a common root.
If you want to test original solutions,
they must be adapted to this common origin.
Finally, develop a science of interactions that we have seen
how much they are not linear,
They are complex
and this complexity will allow us to better understand
the evolution of the risks that threaten us.
Beyond science that does not know how to tell its legend,
it is probably also necessary to invent the stories of the few,
rare perhaps,
who will find the little doors,
left by Alice,
these little doors behind which is access to the future world,
a world that will be very different because a lot more constraining.
So once these stories are written,
maybe we can believe it again
and in the meantime, we have to celebrate art,
the art of the party,
the art of dance
and for that to probably preserve love and hope
which are our two little parcels of eternity
which, by nature, will remain unlimited.
Thank you.
(Applause)
”
Be First to Comment