Human Critical Mass

(From OpenStax College textbook content about nuclear fission.)

A few evenings ago I got to have a long rambling chat with a couple of friends, the type you would want to be with for the end of the world. (Those are the best type of friends. We have plenty.) We talked about various aspects of the world these days. One of them quipped, “This is why we don’t usually talk about the Apocalypse with Bonnie. She says the parts we’re thinking but don’t say out loud.”

What prompted that remark has to do with where we may be going, not just in this country but in many others.

Travel Chaos as a Sample

We talked about the chaos at British airports as hordes of families tried to fly away for a holiday while their kids were on midterm break. In case you haven’t seen news about it, the government wants to blame it on the pandemic but Brexit is involved too. Brexit caused an exodus of workers who returned to the EU, leaving labor shortages all over the country. Not enough farm workers to harvest crops, not enough abattoir workers to butcher meat, not enough truck drivers to deliver goods, not enough workers…

As the pandemic knocked the travel industry to its knees, people there either retired or found other jobs. A lot of them hopped to the hospitality industry, which was also hit hard by the pandemic but began to find a new footing sooner. To aggravate matters, practically all pandemic mitigation measures were lifted. Prevalence has receded to about 1 in every 60 people, give or take a little. (It varies among the four nations of the UK.) Even at this level, absence from work or school due to illness is as though we’re having a bad winter flu season all the time. It isn’t unusual for the nearby hospital to need to cancel large swathes of its scheduled surgical procedures because too many medical staff are out sick.

Last week the UK’s air travel industry gave us a vividly sour taste of something I’ve harped on that has generally been ignored up to now:

What happens when the group of people available to do something drops below critical mass?

Having flight crews is not all we need to keep flights moving. Air travel requires armies of people doing other jobs too. They supply meals, drinks and snacks for the flights and for people waiting in the airport for their boarding time. They do security screenings. Perform air traffic control. Refuel airplanes. Maintain and repair airplanes. Handle baggage. Transport people between parking lots and the nearest city and the airport. Check in passengers. Staff retail shops in airports. Exchange foreign currencies. Provide special assistance to people who need a wheelchair or are blind and need an escort. Clean everything.

There aren’t enough workers. Not at just one or two points in that list, but peppered through it. Resulting chaos ranges from flights cancelled at the last minute because no pilot is available to simply not being able to keep up with all the more mundane jobs, resulting in cascading delays and lengthy queues.

Brexit set up the UK to be especially badly affected, but the same pattern is biting elsewhere too, not purely as a ripple effect of the pandemic. The world has plenty of other issues in the mix. In the UK we’re world-leading at it. We have an extra factor.

I said out loud that we’re in deep trouble if we drop below critical mass. I said what the others were keeping quiet.

What Does That Mean?

Much of what we have come to rely upon as part of civilization (especially in the developed nations) needs a certain amount of scale. Making computer chips requires huge buildings specially constructed so they will not vibrate. The circuitry is incredibly intricate with infinitesimal tolerances. Even if you have the know-how and equipment to make the chips in your garage, in practice you can’t because every passing vehicle and perhaps even footsteps made by someone in the house can convey enough vibration to ruin the batch.

Need high grade steel to construct a multistory building, lay railroad track, build a bridge or add a ship to the Navy? With the right stuff, you could make steel on the back 40 acres of your farm, but it wouldn’t be the grade you need, and where will you find a rolling mill to process it after it’s cast?

And on and on and on.

Many elements of the way we live are like this. We need more than a minimum threshold of people working on them, which I call human critical mass. In nuclear physics, you only get a chain reaction when there is enough nuclear material to reach critical mass. Many things we do require a group that is big enough to make their endeavor move forward.

Every organization, large or small, has a critical mass threshold. Think about any business or charity you’ve ever worked in. Would it still be able to carry on well enough without 10% of its people? 20%? Half? Where is its critical mass level?

Last week in the UK, we saw what happens when the workforce in the air travel industry drops below its critical mass. We also saw that people don’t have to die to leave an industry short of enough people to run it adequately. People can simply be… not there any more, or not there enough of the time any more....

The USA’s CDC estimates Long COVID hits about 20% of patients. Nobody knows yet whether Long COVID becomes more likely after reinfection. Nobody knows yet how much impact there will be from other diseases that take advantage of the damage COVID leaves in the immune system. It also isn’t completely clear how many COVID patients emerge with lasting injury even if they don’t have Long COVID. Some studies suggest that could be happening to as many people as about three out of four. They may be at work, but not quite up to as much as they used to be able to do.

And here in the UK, very smart number-crunchers estimate the impact of Brexit is roughly double the impact of the pandemic.

We can muddle along as long as we still have critical mass in critical places. But with too much mishandling, too much misjudgement of how things like climate change and Brexit and COVID and war in a breadbasket country and a muddled supply chain pile onto each other, we could drop below critical mass where we would very much dislike the consequences.

If we like what we have, the basics plus conveniences and comforts and ease of modern life, we should be paying more attention to this type of critical mass. Without it, things we are accustomed to would grind to a halt. Getting them back could take a long time.

The British air travel industry saw last week’s chaos coming, but couldn’t get the right authorities to take action to prevent or at least ease it. (Thousands of their replacements and rehires are unable to work until the government completes or reinstates their security vetting.) That’s a lesson for us. To get through these times, we need to face and grapple with problems. Ignoring them and hoping they’ll disappear doesn’t cut the mustard.

So let’s grapple with problems when we notice them, before they grow too big. Let’s make sure we maintain critical mass at critical places.

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About the photo accompanying this post:

Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0.

Attributions: Paul Flowers of University of North Carolina - Pembroke, Klaus Theopold of University of Delaware and Richard Langley of Stephen F. Austin State University with contributing authors.