TAP – The Adjecent Possible

From the astonishing evolutionary advances of the Cambrian explosion to our present-day computing revolution, the trend of dramatic growth after periods of stability can be explained through the theory of the “adjacent possible,” says theoretical biologist Stuart Kauffman.
Tracing the arc of human history through the tools and technologies we’ve invented, he explains the impact human ingenuity has had on the planet — and calls for a shift towards more protection for all life on Earth.

From the transcript:

We cannot deduce what is in the adjacent possible that the evolving biosphere will create, then become. 
We do not even know what can happen. 
In fact, we can use no mathematics based on set theory, which is all of mathematics, to deduce what the biosphere is going to become, or the economy. 
This means we are at a fantastic third-phase transition in science, we’re beyond Newton, we’re beyond quantum mechanics. We’re beyond the exquisite view that Copernicus had 480 years ago, that the world is a clockwork. The biosphere is not a clockwork. 
The paper that just published, it came out three days ago, and I’m pretty proud of it, it’s actually worth reading.
We can’t deduce what is in the biosphere and will become, but we can make a mathematical theory of the statistics of the process. I call it the Theory of the Adjacent Possible or TAP. It’s really based on one idea. Things can be combined to make new things.

So there is the equation. Mt is the number of things in the economy at some time now, say 10 things. So how many things will be in the economy in the next period? Well, if the 10 things work, we’ll keep them, but we could actually try to jury-rig something new out of any single thing among the 10 or out of pair of things among the 10. The printing press is a recombination between movable type and a wine press or any three things or four things. Watch what happens to the number of things, pairs of things, when the number of things goes up. If there’s 10 things, there’s 45 pairs of things that we might fiddle with. If there’s 100 things, there’s 4,500 things we might jury-rig with. And if there’s 1,000 things, there’s a half a million things we might fiddle with.

Therefore, this process, the TAP process, has the property that for a long time the number of things increases very, very, very slowly, then something stunning happens. There’s a hockey-stick explosion and the number of things reaches infinity in a finite time. 
There’s a singularity and a brief burst explosion for 40 million years of the Cambrian explosion. […]

“so tools to make niches for new tools”

And it’s where we are now, and the signatures of the anthropocene are exploding upward now all over the place.
We need to find a better adjacent possible we’re rampaging over the planet and the hope is in soils.
So I’m going to talk briefly about compost […]
More fundamentally we can find good fungal bacterial communities and we can coat seeds with it and sell the seeds around the planet
or we could fill biochar and we can use biochar across the planet most usefully we can take a really good fungal bacterial community put it into biochar or some other matrix mix it into fertilizer and get that fertilizer out across the planet.

“let’s get rid of fertilizer”

I’m going to just end with the following:
fungal bacterial communities are precisely something that can create novel adjacent possibles that can bubble forth with solutions to soil problems. The good news is we can do it now.

“we are of nature ladies and gentlemen”