How Are You Going To Survive the Pyrocene?

 Preparing for the Pyrocene begins with becoming someone others will want beside them when the lights go out.

The AI monster is strangely effective. We imagine creating an intelligence more powerful than ourselves. But it escapes our control. Perhaps it deceives us, or it acquires capabilities we didn't anticipate. In the darkest versions of the story, it eventually decides that humanity is an inconvenience and kills us. Regardless of the plausibility of this scenario, it has one major advantage as a story: we understand the stakes. The threat is immediate, comprehensible, and visceral. It is about survival.

The possibility that computational intelligence could one day pose an existential threat . Despite their profound disagreements about the nature or probability of the danger, people find themselves discussing evaluation, monitoring, precaution, coordination, and governance. Fear focuses attention because it transforms an abstract technological question into a simple, personal one: Will we survive this?

The Pyrocene has the opposite problem. The danger is less hypothetical but more difficult to perceive. There is no monster, no moment when the machine awakens, and no single antagonist whose intentions we should fear. Instead, there are more heat waves, more droughts, more floods, more wildfires, more crop failures, more insurance companies withdrawing from markets, more communities running short of water, and more electrical grids struggling to meet demand. The event happens. We respond. The event ends. Then, ordinary life resumes.

But what if the events aren't the story? What if the changing relationships producing them are?

And what if the real question isn't whether climate change will affect you, but something much simpler: How are you going to survive the disruptions that are coming down the road?

The Systems That Keep You Alive

Most of us rarely consider how improbable our everyday lives actually are. I turn on a faucet and clean water comes out. I open the refrigerator and find food produced hundreds or thousands of kilometers away. I flip a switch and electricity arrives. I go to a pharmacy and expect to find medicine, manufactured elsewhere on the planet, sitting on a shelf. Fuel arrives at service stations, trucks arrive at supermarkets, telecommunications networks connect us, banks record transactions, hospitals remain open, and crews haul away sewage and garbage.

Thousands of systems interact continuously to make ordinary life possible. Almost none of us understands them all, and certainly none of us could recreate them alone. Modern life has made us forget how dependent we are on one another because those dependencies have become so reliable. The water usually flows. The lights usually turn on. Supermarket shelves are usually stocked with food.

This reliability creates the illusion of individual autonomy. I earn my own money. I buy my own food. I own my home. I drive my car. I pay my bills. I take care of myself. However, without the surrounding systems, the autonomous individual disappears remarkably quickly. What seems like independence is actually made possible by an immense network of relationships that usually remains invisible because it works so well.

This is why the Pyrocene is ultimately not a story about atmospheric chemistry. It is about whether the systems that keep you alive continue functioning.

When Disruption Becomes the Environment

The fire historian Stephen Pyne uses the term Pyrocene to describe an emerging age of fire shaped profoundly by humanity's combustion of fossil fuels – the “third fire” that has transformed the atmosphere within which other fires burn. I use the term somewhat more broadly in a previous post (It’s the End of the World as We Know It). The Pyrocene is not simply wildfire. Wildfire is one of its most dramatic manifestations. The deeper phenomenon is a changing field of relationships among atmosphere, heat, water, vegetation, fire, oceans, infrastructure, energy, agriculture, economies, and human institutions.

A flood is an event. A wildfire is an event. A heat wave is an event. The Pyrocene is the changing landscape within which such events occur and interact, and within which their consequences propagate through other systems. Eventually, these effects reach the infrastructure on which everyday life depends.

Extreme heat can increase the demand for electricity while straining generation and transmission infrastructure. Drought can impact agriculture, water supplies, and hydroelectricity. Flooding can damage roads, bridges, sewage systems, and electrical equipment. Wildfires can destroy communities directly and disrupt transportation, communications, and power. Crop failures in one part of the world can lead to price increases elsewhere. Disruptions do not have to occur outside your window to affect you because the systems that support your life extend far beyond your local area.

That is the part our event-oriented perception has difficulty seeing. We are remarkably good at responding to things that happen in front of us, but we are considerably less adept at recognizing slow changes in the relationships that produce those events. For example, we notice immediately when the Wi-Fi stops working, yet we remain oblivious to the possibility that the house itself is catching fire.

What Happens When the Truck Doesn't Arrive?

Imagine something relatively modest. A severe weather event disrupts transportation to your community, leaving the supermarket without deliveries for several days. At first, it is merely an inconvenience. Then, some shelves begin to empty. People start buying more than they usually would because they don't know when the next shipment will arrive. This behavior makes sense individually but accelerates the shortage collectively.

Now, add intermittent electricity. Fuel deliveries are delayed. Municipal water becomes unreliable. A family member needs medication. Communication networks become unstable. None of these failures necessarily constitutes an apocalypse. In fact, that is precisely the point. Modern communities depend on multiple tightly coupled systems, and disruption can spread from one system to another.

How long could you function under those conditions? More importantly, who would you function with?

Who in your neighborhood knows first aid? Who can repair an electrical system? Who can grow food? Who has tools? Who has transportation? Who understands water purification? Who can organize people without antagonizing everyone around them?

And perhaps most importantly, who can be trusted?

Trust is infrastructure.

We rarely think of it that way because trust isn't visible on an electrical grid or municipal engineering plan. However, when formal systems become unreliable, relationships begin carrying out functions that were previously performed by institutions. People share information, exchange resources, divide responsibilities, care for vulnerable neighbors, and solve problems locally. The success of these arrangements depends not only on physical resources, but also on the quality of relationships that are already in place when the disruption begins.

The Myth of the Solitary Survivor

Popular culture has given us a familiar response to the possibility of social disruption: the prepper. Stockpile food. Store water. Buy a generator. Accumulate fuel. Fortify the property. Acquire weapons. Become self-sufficient. There is nothing foolish about keeping emergency supplies; resilience requires preparation. The mistake is believing that individual preparation can replace functioning relationships.

No one possesses all the knowledge, skills, and resources necessary for long-term survival in a seriously disrupted environment. For example, you may have six months of food, but you may need medical treatment. You may have a generator, but you may not have the necessary parts to repair it. You may know how to grow food, but you may need someone who understands water purification. Even if you have every conceivable survival tool, you will eventually need another human being.

The fantasy of complete self-sufficiency exists only because a functioning society normally provides what the self-sufficient individual cannot. A prepper can imagine withdrawing from society because society remains quietly present in the background, manufacturing the batteries, medicine, replacement parts, ammunition, fuel, and equipment on which withdrawal depends. Remove those supporting systems for long enough, however, and the contradiction becomes obvious.

The most valuable survival technology may turn out to be other people.

Selection Returns

This is where an idea from evolutionary biology becomes suddenly relevant: multilevel selection. Natural selection does not operate only through isolated individuals. Humans survive through groups, and what benefits an individual within a group is not always what helps the group survive. Under stable conditions, that distinction can remain relatively invisible. Under stress, it becomes harder to ignore.

Imagine a community experiencing prolonged disruption. Some individuals cooperate. They share information, exchange resources, contribute their skills, keep their promises, and establish a reputation for being reliable. Others hoard whatever they can, deceive their neighbors, exploit shortages, and repeatedly take without contributing. A highly selfish individual might initially accumulate more resources than anyone else. At the individual level, this strategy may seem successful.

Groups make choices, too. Who do you trust with scarce supplies? Who do you invite to the planning meeting? Who do you ask to watch your children? Who do you want beside you during an emergency? And who does the group eventually refuse to tolerate?

Selection is therefore occurring within the community. The capacity to function well within a cooperative group may itself become a survival advantage. That is easy to forget in a society where money allows us to conduct many relationships transactionally. In a severely stressed environment, reputation may matter again. Reliability may matter. Reciprocity may matter. Character may once again acquire immediate survival consequences.

Groups Are Selected Too

The process does not stop with individuals because communities differ. Some possess strong social networks, trusted institutions, and habits of mutual assistance. People know one another. Information moves rapidly. Local knowledge is valued. Leadership is distributed. Problems can be solved before they become crises.

Other communities have low levels of trust, weak institutions, and deep internal divisions. Information is unreliable. People assume that others will defect, causing cooperation to collapse quickly because no one wants to contribute while everyone else takes. Under normal conditions, both communities may function adequately because larger systems compensate for their differences. Under repeated disruption, those differences can become consequential.

A community that can organize food distribution, maintain water systems, care for vulnerable residents, repair infrastructure, and resolve conflicts has an adaptive advantage. This does not require its members to be morally superior. Cooperation is functional. It makes knowledge, resources, and capabilities distributed among many people available to the group.

The Pyrocene may therefore create a changing selection landscape. Individuals will encounter pressures tied to their ability to function within groups. Groups will encounter pressures tied to their capacity to cooperate internally. Communities will encounter pressures tied to their ability to adapt to changing environmental conditions.

Survival plays out at multiple levels simultaneously.

Before the Emergency

This may be where the fear generated by the AI monster becomes unexpectedly useful. The possibility of future computational intelligence escaping human control has led people to envision catastrophe before it occurs. The Pyrocene asks us to perform a similar imaginative act without inventing a monster.

This does not mean that civilization will suddenly collapse one Tuesday afternoon. That image – is itself just another version of the apocalyptic narrative. A more plausible danger is repeated disruption. One system fails and recovers. Then, another system fails. Recovery becomes more expensive. Insurance becomes unavailable in some places. Infrastructure deteriorates faster than it can be repaired. Food becomes more expensive. Water becomes less reliable. Migration increases. Institutions face stresses for which they were not designed. What was once exceptional becomes increasingly familiar.

The near future may sometimes feel like living inside the opening chapters of an apocalyptic science-fiction novel. But perhaps science fiction has taught us the wrong survival lesson. Its hero is often the individual who needs nobody – the survivor with the bunker, the weapon, the supplies, and the plan.

Multilevel selection suggests almost the opposite lesson. Your ability to survive may depend increasingly upon whether the people around you survive, and their ability to survive may depend upon you.

That changes the question. Instead of asking only What do I need to survive? we might begin asking What relationships do we need to survive? Who do I trust, and who trusts me? What can I contribute? What can others contribute? How do we make decisions when information is incomplete? How do we deal with people who exploit cooperation? How do we extend trust beyond our immediate group? How do neighboring communities cooperate when resources become scarce? How do we keep competition from destroying the larger field that sustains all of us?

These are not questions for some distant post-apocalyptic future. They are questions about resilience in the Pyrocene. The environment is changing, and selection pressures will change with it. We cannot know exactly what those pressures will be, how quickly they will arrive, or which communities will encounter them first.

But one proposition is becoming increasingly difficult to believe: that any of us is going to successfully navigate what comes next alone.

Perhaps the first step in preparing for the Pyrocene is therefore not building a bunker. It is learning how to become someone others will want beside them when the lights go out.