I’ve become a follower of the Collapse subreddit. I initially dismissed it as a bunch of alarmist doomers but the more I looked into the more I realized that even if they end up being wrong modern civilization is a lot more fragile than most people think.
Climate change, resource depletion and environmental damage all have the potential to severely destabilize the entire system we have built.
I really wish we had a lot more rigorous research into this subject.
It’s two hours long and you may not agree with some of the alarming conclusions but they have clearly put in a lot of work into their thesis. More people should be aware of these possibilities.
I used to be in the “peak oil” scene — and by that I mean, I listened carefully to my friend, who was really into the peak oil scene.
It’s an illusion. The world goes ‘round.
It’s the same thing humans have done for a hundred thousand years: sit around a campfire telling ghost stories.
As long as you don’t take it too seriously, it’s fine to enjoy it. But I think it’s a mistake to get too into the idea that civilization is fragile. As the pandemic showed, social norms are flexible when they are required to be.
EDIT: I’ll listen to this presentation, maybe, but the first minute is already looking pretty bad. It’s a guy on stage telling a ghost story. He even opens up with “you’re young, so the tendency is to say ‘doesn’t scare me! Doesn’t scare me!’”
A former partner of mine is an artist, and has a different perspective on the world than most engineers, combined with an amount of melancholic clarity.
She pointed out that the central idea of Armageddon, Judgement Day or the end of everything is largely common to most societies. If you look at the core of the philosophical concept and strip away any religious parts, it doesn't normally imply the end of all humans. But for you as an individual, the distinction is moot if your village is burned down and everyone killed or sold into slavery.
I think this concept represents a fundamental fear which most humans go to great length to reduce the risk of. Lots of potential doomsday scenarios can be viewed with this lens. It doesn't mean that the risk being discussed is non-existent, but mitigating measures will most likely reduce the risk and impact dramatically.
The fear of the fall can cause the search for the solution to prevent the fall.
The fundamental logic of peak oil is sound, even though a bell curve is not appropriate when considering the global economic consequences: at some point any finite resource must run out, exponential growth always means the last half of a finite quantity is consumed in one doubling period. It’s not a law of nature that alternative tech will appear just at the right time, and in one sense we got lucky with alternative oils and renewables. To the extent that one can talk of “making our own luck”, I expect at least some of the people who developed all those solutions did so out of a fear of peak oil.
I don’t think that peak oil has been truly debunked. Conventional oil production has indeed peaked and shale has come in to fill in the gap.
However shale oil is a lot more expensive and this does propagate throughout the economy.
Right now oil prices are still at 75 dollars a barrel. That’s still much higher than before we hit peak conventional oil. It could be one reason we never really recovered from 2008.
It seems to me that we are stuck in an “oil price strait jacket”. Demand keeps rising until the price shoots up and then goes down hard but making a lot more oil isn’t feasible either. We could be in a long slow energy stagnation. This is evident in the amount oil imported into Europe for eg.
Shale oil has probably saved us from an outright disaster.
Your answer makes no sense. There is no peak wheat, it's not a non-renewable resource.
The difference between peak oil and shale oil is the EROI which is very bad (between 1 and 2) compared to conventional (20 to 50). This would make it absolutely useless as an energy source, except we also get free Nat. gas out of it.
Once the EROI on all our fossil energy sources gets below 1 we won't be able to use any, despite some of it still being in the ground.
A better analogy than peak wheat would be: this is like peak fish except we now have better bottom trawling fishing nets, and electric pulse fishing to be able to get the last remaining fish out there.
Except it makes total sense. There is a clear transition happening to non oil energy sources. Oil is a fungible good with alternate energies for many applications. It makes no sense to talk about peak oil if oil demand will soon greatly lessen.
As technology increases with oil extraction and alternate energy sources come into play, the peak oil scenario will likely not be realized.
> There is a clear transition happening to non oil energy sources.
No transition. Energy usage is stacking up. Globally, renewable energy sources are built in addition to fossil energy sources. See source below - compare relative vs. absolute :
Peak oil doesn't care that the relative share of oil as an energy source is decreasing (which is true) . It's the global number of oil barrels extracted out of the ground that matters.
Shale is not economically viable, regular oil is profitable at 10 dollars a barrel, shale needs 60 dollars or more. That is an extreme difference that we are not feeling because of massive amounts of credit pumped into the shale boom. Once the fake money dries up and the market prices that shale oil at its correct value you are in for a world of pain. Imagine the gas a the pump station going x6 and that affecting the rest of the economy. That is a world based on shale instead of conventional oil.
Shale is profitable because oil prices per barrel hit over 100$ in the 2000s. It's our answer to the OPEC oil cartel, and the reason they dumped all their oil for pennies on the dollar at the start of Covid - "This time we'll REALLY drive shale out of business and we can raise prices again in 5 years!!!"
Today from a cursory google, oil prices per barrel are over 70$.
Fortunately for our society we subsidized it to survive this brief period.
But we won't have 50 more years of complacent oil usage without alternatives. Oil at 75 dollars a barrel is expensive enough that renewables are profitable, so by the time supply becomes a problem and prices rise even more, renewables will be available in quantity to cover for it. Before, probably.
There are multiple, independent studies that have concluded that global human society has gone into overshoot. So much so that it is an unwritten consensus on that. There's even this site[1] that calculates the day of the year when humanity has consumed that year's entire resources and is dipping into annual overshoot.
Maybe,but i think that can go both ways - bad things really do happen, often due to causes that are easily predictable with hind sight. I feel like assuming that the world cant end is just as unrealistic as always assuming the world will definitely end due to issue of the day (i mean "end" in a metaphorical way)
> But I think it’s a mistake to get too into the idea that civilization is fragile.
Take the US, for instance. The constitution has been in force since 1789. That's 222 years. You don't get to 222 years by not being stable. If the Civil War and the 1960s didn't destroy the US, it's pretty stable.
And yet... we have historical examples of civilizations collapsing. When it happens, it often happens fast (or at least slowly, and then fast). It seems unwise to say that it can't happen to us.
And, sure, social norms can be flexible. Not all problems can be fixed by changing social norms, though. Like, say, drought causing food shortages. Flexible social norms aren't going to solve that; they're just going to lead to looting becoming acceptable.
Oh, to be clear, I think it will happen. I just don’t think it’s going to be something so predictable. Almost by definition, a civilization collapses due to a surprise — some belief was wrong.
And there’s value in questioning our (often unexamined) beliefs. But taking it too seriously, thinking that you’ve got it figured out and that others are fools for not listening to you — well… Maybe you would have predicted the meteor to the dinosaurs, and maybe they would’ve been fools for not listening, but there was also very little any of them could have done to change the outcome.
Pick your favorite civilization collapse story. What would you have done, at that time, to change it?
One could argue “at least I would’ve seen it coming.” That’s true; be informed. But I object to the idea that everyone is generally foolish for not taking these concerns seriously. The concerns are mistaken far more than they’re correct.
Rome didn’t really collapse but rather wither away slowly over hundreds of years. Even still the most useful parts lived on five without the empire aspect which didn’t matter for most people.
In the end I think we overestimate the effects collapse. Look at much of Europe over the 19th and 20th centuries. Unbelievable levels of suffering and many millions needlessly died over those 200 years. But for most life just went on.
A cursory reading of history is enough to show that civilisations collapse regularly.
It's not possible to comment on this topic credibly without being aware of this.
As for "flexible social norms" - there was an attempted coup in the US, South Africa is on fire, Brazil is literally on fire, and the UK is opening up to Delta having apparently persuaded itself that 50,000 cases and 500 hospital admissions a day aren't a problem.
It’s probably better for the thread to avoid any specific modern political collapse theory. For example, I think it’s nutty to say that the attempted coup in the US had any chance of collapsing civilization. But I can’t really say that without sounding insulting, so my “flamewar territory” alarms are starting to go off. And that makes me a sad panda HN user.
Suffice to say, yes, civilizations collapse. But that isn’t really the point. Everybody dies, but if you claim each day that one specific person is going to die of X, you’ll be mistaken more times than not. I see the same pattern in most collapse theories.
> It’s the same thing humans have done for a hundred thousand years: sit around a campfire telling ghost stories.
Now your argument is fundamentally different, and more reasonable.
> Suffice to say, yes, civilizations collapse. But that isn’t really the point. Everybody dies, but if you claim each day that one specific person is going to die of X, you’ll be mistaken more times than not. I see the same pattern in most collapse theories.
There has been doomsday climate hysteria, but usually not in the scientific community, and in my experience it is most often found in derisive and mocking tabloid headlines, somewhat similar to your original argument.
Yet here we are. Our current trials and tribulations are nothing compared to the Black Plague, the Hundred Years‘ War, WW2, even the stress of the Cold War and the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Yet here we are. Maybe it’s not so fragile after all?
Sure, of course. But suppose you're standing on the precipice of WW2 or the Black Plague and you can clearly see them coming, even if there's some uncertainty about when, and what exactly will happen. Wouldn't you try to prevent them?
Historically, people always have, and sometimes they've succeeded. The Cuban Missile Crisis is maybe a good example of this. During that era, there was a widespread feeling that we were dangerously close to nuclear war. Surely that sense of danger was a critical part of the reason cooler heads prevailed in the end.
Apply the criteria for criminal attempted crimes. You have to do more than just attempt it, you have to have a realistic possibility of succeeding.
Sticking pins in a voodoo doll isn't attempted murder, no matter how seriously you believe it will kill the person.
So how would that event in the US have succeeded in overthrowing the government? What would the next steps have been? Even if they killed everyone in the building, would the rest of the government/military/courts/etc. agree to follow orders from the new kings? Why?
By the way, they didn't kill that police officer. It turned out later that he died of natural causes. Be careful of fake embellishments of real news.
The boundary between what is factually impossible and legally impossible with regard to “attempted $crime” is not one that I, a non-lawyer, would be comfortable asserting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impossibility_defense
> So how would that event in the US have succeeded in overthrowing the government? What would the next steps have been? Even if they killed everyone in the building, would the rest of the government/military/courts/etc. agree to follow orders from the new kings? Why?
Here's how it would work:
The process for electing the president is that states certify their electoral college votes in what's known as the Certificate of the Vote. On 1/6 the certificates are counted and objections are raised. It takes one Senator and one Representative to raise an objection in writing, and Republicans had planned on objecting to Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan at least. Objections are settled by voting in the House and Senate. Each chamber gets a vote, and if they agree the objection is sustained and the votes discarded. If they are split or disagree, the objection is overturned. Democrats had a majority in the House while Republicans had a majority in the Senate, so this would have went in favor of Joe Biden.
To succeed then, the Republicans needed to get outside of the regular Constitutional order. Their main objective on 1/6 was to delay the certification past that day. There is no precedent for this. At first Trump wanted Pence to simply refuse to certify the vote and then force the GOP friendly states to "recertify" their results. Trump only needed a few states to recertify to win. But Pence refused to do this, hence the chants of "Hang Mike Pence".
However, the invasion of the Capitol gave new life to this idea of recertification. The hope here was that if the proceedings were disrupted, we were in uncharted Constitutional territory. This would have given additional time for Trump to try and twist the arm of the various states, as he had been doing before 1/6 to the states of Arizona and Georgia (at least).
Once the states recertified their votes, they would have reconvened the Congress and VP to certify the election. This puts the Democrats in a tough spot. They could have let the "recertified" results stand, in which case Trump would win. Or they could object. If they did, then the Republicans could also object. This would throw the recertified votes out.
But here's the catch. If no candidate has 270 electoral college votes after the counting, then the matter is put before the House, but not in the normal way. Instead, each state delegation gets 1 vote, for a total of 50, with 26 to win. State delegations are decided by the states, and Republicans would have a 26-23 majority in this scenario (PA would have tied, if they don't agree their vote doesn't count). The House would then vote for Trump, and he could have been President despite losing the popular vote and the electoral college.
There's a lot that needed to go right for Trump for this to work, and that's why it didn't. But it went a lot further than it should have, and definitely broke a 240 year streak of peaceful transitions of power in the US. In fact, it seems like the only reason the vote was able to be certified on 1/6 is because Mike Pence refused to leave the Capitol with the Secret Service. Had he left with them when they wanted him to, the proceedings would have been delayed indefinitely.
All of that is just using the existing legal systems, isn't it? If it succeeded that way, it would have been a clever legal trick and not a coup. If it was illegal, then it wouldn't have been recognized by anyone else any more than a random person declaring himself to be president, would it?
The voodoo doll seems like a weird example to use, these people weren't sitting in their houses imagining it. They literally broke into congress in search of congresspeople, you can watch videos and hear people say "where are they"... they went to their offices and congressional chambers to find them...
Analogies aside, if you don't think it was an attempted coup... what would it have made it one? I'm legitimately curious (I don't think incompetence is an excuse, and courts usually don't either).
Thanks for pointing out the disparity about Sicknick. To anyone else who isn't aware... the autopsy determined he died from a stroke the day after. These people still assaulted police officers to gain access to the Capitol.
It's funny considering how USA intensely finance and prepare coups and revolutions all over the world. I'm from one ex-USSR country and living in another ex-USSR country. It happened several times right in front of my eyes.
USA funds several media outlets so that they publish a precisely mixed mash of truth and lies. People mindlessly consume the mash and start to get a feeling they live in an imperfect society that can be very easily improved ("just get rid of your current president and you'll start living awesome life the same moment! it's so easy, folks! no other effort required").
Then they start publishing a real recipes for starting a turmoil (via figures like notoriously known Navalny).
Then, when the coup fails, USA start pressuring: "It's an agression against democracy! It was a peaceful protest! Sanctions! Sanctions! Sanctions!" (if the coup succeeds, the only result is that people start living in worse conditions - check Arab Spring countries or any other country where color revolution succeeded - they're doing much worse economically and in all other areas of life, including "democracy").
When the protest which was much milder happened in the US itself, it's suddenly "totally different thing".
BTW, just this week mercenaries from USA trained in USA killed president of Haiti.
It's technically a different thing because this attempted coup was domestic, and I don't think the whattaboutism accomplishes much... there's no hypocritical rhetoric in the thread you're replying to.
The US has certainly inflicted coups abroad, and I also disagree with those... but I suspect you weren't commenting to get my opinion on the matter.
The only ones creating trouble were the fbi informants that were there as agitators. Why haven't these people been charged yet? The rest were let and even motioned in. They took a tour and left peacefully when asked.
You made one true claim and two ridiculous claims. Then you give evidence for only the one that has been established. Was it FBI informants crushing capitol police against doors and beating them on the ground?
Peak Oil, in the very narrow sense of there being a point of maximum oil production before it starts declining as what remains becomes harder and thereby more expensive to extract, will probably happen eventually.
The broader hypothesized 'Peak Oil' phenomenon wherein the decline in oil production causes enormous societal upheaval and possibly the collapse of industrial civilization will almost certainly not happen, because as it turns out the reserves of relatively easy to extract oil are pretty large, plus a large amount of additional reserves (shale, tar sands, etc) become economical to extract at a relatively small increase in price. Add in the fact that electric cars will probably do away with most of the market for oil over the next couple of decades, and it's likely that, by the time we run out of oil, it will have been used only as an input for various industrial processes for a couple of centuries.
And of course, this was the same argument used against the 'Peak Oil' idea when it was a big thing, it's just come into better focus with the passage of time.
> Peak Oil was predicting a very real phenomenon, but it hasn't happened yet (oil, being finite, will have this happen eventually).
That's true only if you define Peak Oil so unusually as to make it true. The concept behind Peak Oil is that in the (near [1]) future, the available supply of oil will fail to meet the total demand for it, and then we'll be stuck in a world where there is forever an inability to get the necessary oil. In this model, it's great to be an oil supermajor holding one of the last great reserves of oil--you can basically charge what you want for it, and so it's worth spending hundreds of billions of dollars to get it.
An alternative model for the future is that the demand for oil peaks before the supply is. In this model, that same oil supermajor is now in a terrible position, and shelling out hundred of billions of dollars for new reserves is a stupid idea. In essence, from a planning perspective, this is the exact opposite of what Peak Oil predicts.
The current trends seem to indicate that it's the second scenario that is going to come true, not the former situation. Combined with the fact that more specific predictions about when it will happen have continuously failed to come true, it's hard to find much about Peak Oil thati sactually correct.
[1] The imminence of the catastrophe of peak oil is usually highlighted by its prophets, but it has been generally less assumed by planners working under its assumption, so it's debatable to what degree the imminence is a critical prediction of the theory. Whatever the case, nearly every single prediction of when the peak would occur has already been passed without that peak having happened.
AIUI US oil production actually did peak at more or less the originally predicted time, and the 1970s oil crisis was a reflection of that. Obviously it didn't result in the total collapse of civilisation, but it wasn't totally insignificant either.
The problem with most these malthusian style analyses is a presumption of a first-order system within their models. Human society is more able to adapt than deer herds, between both social changes and technology with second and third order effects.
Peak oil, is correct is some sort of technical sense, but continues to be consistently misforecast due to underestimating both technical innovation and exploration. Cost-effective reserves grew much faster than depletion, and now we also have alternatives and increased efficiencies that have reduced/flatlined consumption even as feasible capacity continues to increase. That doesn't mean there isn't some finite limit (and even if there wasn't, that we wouldn't want to limit CO2 regardless) but that the modeling process is just too simple.
To provide some context, I think it is worth quoting this article[0] from February:
> In a Thursday statement, the fossil fuel giant [Shell] said its “oil production peaked in 2019,” and that we can now expect it to decline gradually by 1 or 2% per year. Shell also said its total carbon emissions peaked in 2018 at 1.7 gigatonnes.
Yes, but the term 'Peak Oil' implies the catastrophic and sudden crash in the availability of oil, not in the slow decrease in production due to alternatives. (Don't get me wrong, I'd like production to decline much faster for climate reasons!)
The 'Peak Oil' hypothesis was that all the wells would run dry without good alternatives and society would be trapped between a rock and a hard place because of that. Again, not necessarily for better, humans figured out more technologically advanced ways to extract oil to avoid this outcome (fracking and tar sands).
> The 'Peak Oil' hypothesis was that all the wells would run dry without good alternatives
This was literally never it. Peak Oil never had anything to say about the pumping capacity of oil, it was about the expansion of supply relative to demand.
That "preppers" decided this meant immediate societal collapse is there and your problem with comprehension.
I hear you, and I regret that the Environmental movement feels the need to ratchet everything up to a catastrophe. But surely if “peak” means anything it means that we used to grow, now we contract, and therefore peak oil has already occurred.
> “peak oil” ... It’s an illusion. The world goes ‘round.
Are you suggesting that oil is not finite??? Or that we have an easy replacement at hand contrary to the people that says otherwise such as in the "Planet of The humans" documentary?
"Adapt" doesn't mean things will be better. Or even "okay".
Climate change won't make humanity extinct and the planet will not notice it happening. But you will definitely notice your life being dominated by trying to get the government to pay out on your house (aka life savings) which was destroyed in a wildfire after the insurance company went bankrupt from a "black swan" event.
And yet, we are here, with oil priced around 100x what it was when the book was published, so that it is being outcompeted by alternatives for several uses. It's not great, but people are adapting just fine.
And by the way, that wildfire may have been caused by Global Warming, the the house price (that's actually what is bankrupting you) is really not because of this collapse.
Anyway, the conclusion is that we should focus on adapting faster and better. I'm not sure if playing doom is helpful.
It's not the house price: it's your house is destroyed and the land is no longer viable. What do you do?
Same problem with coastal real estate: your house is now uninsurable against flood, and then gets flooded and is destroyed - what do you do?
Take a recent disaster: say as a resident you believe the Miami condo you lived in was structurally unsound, but the management does not: what do you do?
"Adapt" means quite different things at different scales, and you currently live in the "oh, yeah its a big more expensive" part of that. But no middle class person can afford to straight lose the value of their house if they own it.
In all these cases you're alive, you probably have running water, food and power. But you're poorer - by a lot, and your quality of life is reduced. You "adapted".
Essentially no one can afford to lose the value of their house. That's the point: you're going to take a 100% loss on the value of the land and building.
I was an infantry soldier and learnt very fast how fragile the logistics of necessities can be in the modern world.
I don't believe that world civilisation will collapse (at least not in any way that can be prepared for), but I have moved out of the city, begun to farm organically, and have a plan to cook and live without mains power or fuel for months on end. I know people think I'm a nutjob, but I've also seen first-hand whole cities who thought that progress was a one-way street end up in terrible circumstances.
That said, I'm not an alarmist. I am a founder, put a sizeable amount of my wealth into the global stock market, drive cars, fly (outside of COVID-19) to various places, and - most riskily of all, IMO - live only 1.6m above the high water mark/strand line of the sea.
> live only 1.6m above the high water mark/strand line of the sea.
Wow. I put myself in your shoes for a second and felt fear. Otherwise your life sounds pretty desirable. I always wanted to do the same (be self-sufficient in such ways). I probably will never be living like that (unless homelessness count, bleh), but good for you, I envy you. :)
> Wow. I put myself in your shoes for a second and felt fear.
It is actually the only thing that keeps me up at night. I am crew on a lifeboat and need to live within a certain distance from the boathouse, otherwise I would move tomorrow. The RNLI is too important a part of my life to leave behind otherwise. I may be able to afford some land higher up (60m+ in the future).
> I always wanted to do the same (be self-sufficient in such ways).
I am definitely not self-sufficient (especially not socially)! I could maybe take care of my family for one calendar year (one growing season and one winter), but it's a maybe. If we're talking about a situation where people are physically (violently) competing for resources, then I'd be in the same boat as everyone else (by design, I'd add - I have no desire to be the lone survivor behind a fence or whatever while other families starve).
> I probably will never be living like that (unless homelessness count, bleh), but good for you, I envy you. :)
Thanks! It actually happened because I gave up on living in a city. Certainly, there's a lot of people I knew in SF/Bay Area, London, and Dublin who could do what I did overnight (probably even as a side project), but don't, so I don't think funding is the limiting factor for most.
I hope things work out for you. I know it's trite to say online, but if you decide to do it, it's certainly a path you can take. It will involve sacrificing other paths not taken, though - the bill for opportunity cost escapes no-one.
> I am definitely not self-sufficient (especially not socially)! I could maybe take care of my family for one calendar year (one growing season and one winter), but it's a maybe.
For what it’s worth, the fact that you’re denying being self-sufficient, tells me that you’re not a nutjob, no matter what other people say.
A relatively simple lockdown was enough to drastically impact our “just in time” supply and manufacturing system. We’re still recovering from that, and likely will be for months, if not years.
Even mere rumors of TP shortage caused such a shortage to actually occur through mostly social interactions.
Larger scale disasters will definitely screw things up for us all.
Yes there was a brief TP shortage. I think the bigger takeaway was that a large portion of the workforce just stopped and there wasn’t a material reduction in the standard of living.
I’ve come to believe fraction of of the workforce could keep the economy going at current levels and much employment is only marginally productive and exists only to distribute the wealth of society.
That's a sort of tempting thought and it's mostly right IMO. My suspicion is that it doesn't take that many people to keep the factories running but it does take a lot of people to make new factories and improve efficiency at existing ones. And modern society is so predicated on growth that you literally need these efficiency improvers or the wheels fall off. On any give day or week or perhaps even year they don't matter. But over a decade they probably do.
There wasn't just a TP shortage, there was a sudden shortage in prescription medications as supply chains were interrupted. The FDA had a list of medications that were impacted and were in short supply, and many of them were on the WHO list of essential medicines.
That tracks with my gut feeling: many jobs (possibly a majority, but I’m not confident that it’s that many) exist as a fig leaf for the government to say “see, these people aren’t on the dole. Look how close we are to full employment.”
There wasn't really much of a shortage though - at any given time there were warehouses full of residential toilet paper, what their wasn't was capacity to keep supermarket shelves stocked when regular customers all suddenly doubled their purchasing pattern.
A supermarket stocks maybe 150 packs but sees well over that in foot traffic per day: if a relatively small number of people simultaneously think "hmm, I might need more this week" then it's pretty easy to empty the shelves.
This of course gets compounded by the group of craven **holes who decided "this is my time to get rich!" and also realized it's not that expensive to buy out every pack in a store because toilet paper is not expensive.
The well managed supermarkets reacted to this by doing per customer day by day rationing, which smoothed shelf stock levels out a lot almost immediately: if there was a problem, it's that we don't have enough automated systems to detect and level this off: it's pretty reasonable in fact to have basic prohibitions against single purchasers buying "wholesale" level quantities out from supermarkets, and directing them to the regular supply chain system when they try.
Another thing that happens is that when Costco is the only place in town with TP in stock, then you end up buying 48 rolls or whatever because that's the minimum purchase size.
The part that I don't get about this is it rests on the narrative that such drastic societal collapse has happened on a grand scale. While small civilizations here and there have collapsed and political orders have gone away and been replaced by others at no point do we see humans descend into mass anarchy only to have to rebuild civilization.
Many doomsayers point to the fall of Rome as a supposed example of a major power falling and descending people into some kind of 'dark age'. There are two problems with this.
Firstly, the Romans didn't feel like they had actually fallen. As far as the people of the empire were concerned they were Roman even after the old roman imperial system went away. Instead of one exact 'date' of the fall of the empire, the empire slowly faded, and didn't really completely end until 1354 AD. By some people's imaginings, it still hasn't ended (namely the Hapsburgs who still claim to be the Holy Roman Emperor).
Secondly, the dark ages as we imagine it didn't exist. The dark ages were not a time of sudden societal collapse. Rather they were a time of major growth. Lots of things happened during the 'dark ages'. Lots of discoveries made. Lots of voyages undertaken. Lots of empires arose and fell (but the people didn't really notice much).
The idea that suddenly everything we know is going to go away and we're all going to have to huddle inside is, in my opinion, not founded in reality. It's sure fun to LARP though.
The key word is 'pretty close'. Firstly, if what I read is correct, it only impacted the mediterranean basin, whereas bronze age civilizations existed in China, India, and the Americas as well.
As the article you linked points out, Egyptian and Greek civilizations were affected, but apparently there were other strong civilizations that were doing exceedingly well at the time at the expense of Egypt and Greece.
That's my point. Certainly, from any one perspective, societies can collapse, but that's just a localized problem. Never have we seen humanity suddenly thrust wholesale into some fantastical dark age.
Globally today we are much more connected than the Mediterranean basin was back then. We are so interdependent on global stability now that any major local crisis has impacts everywhere.
Along with environmental and economic collapse, I'm worried about political collapse. Basically, I worry that democracies will either cease being democracies, or become so mired in their own bureaucratic processes that it's impossible to decisively act when an emergency arises.
We can say that the latter has already happened in the U.S., but it could always be worse and the emergencies we have to deal with can get worse too. We need to be able to deal the problems facing the next few generations by making rational decisions based on long-range planning. It doesn't seem to be happening, and when people get frustrated with the political process they don't just give up on their leaders, they give up on the whole democratic system and turn to strong-man leaders who can "get things done". The decline in public regard for democracy has been going on world-wide for awhile now.
We are almost certainly plummeting towards the next collapse of the roman empire. This time "western civilization".
But it's not that bad!
Rome's collapse took around 100 years, from 376 - 476[1]. If you consider Byzantine as a continuation of Rome, the final collapse didn't happen until 1453 [2]. So it took a full 1077 years for Rome to fall.
Plenty of time for our lifetimes to pass in relative comfort. We're, what, 10 years, maybe 20 years, into the process of our civilization collapsing?
I think what we're mostly seeing that's giving us the fear of collapse is a slowing of rapid growth after WW2 [3]. We've lived our whole lives in a time of rapid economic growth. Just because that's regressing to the mean doesn't mean the ride's over.
Well rome didnt see a meteoric rise of technology in 100 or so years before collapse. also modern weaponry could make collapse a lot more interesting than we imagine. I dont agree with a lot of r/collapse but have to accommodate that post ww2 prosperity has brought in a lot of 'global optimizations'. take that away and access to cheap plentiful energy & things could get bad fast.
Rome didn't collapse overnight, it took literally hundreds of years. It was a "collapse" in the sense that the standard of living and technology fell from the previous peak in some regions, but even then, not much of one because Constantinople endured and other empires were untouched (e.g. China).
The only sudden collapse that's possible is the result of a full-scale nuclear exchange that kills most of the major cities on Earth - but the risk of that has steadily decreased sine it's peak around the 60s-70s.
A long, slow multi-generational decline however is quite possible for a place like the US though: the US has an ideological bent that allows it to decide to sacrifice it's own citizens, and that's been growing stronger. Increasing rates of crises due to climate change could definitely lead to some new generational poverty, but that's the point: that's a "collapse" in the true Roman sense, and definitely not in the "I'm going to survive it in my fortified bunker" sense. It's more Americans losing their houses and discovering what it's like to be poor when the bailout money is "efficiently" managed.
Anyone know the name of the longstanding psychological phenomenon where people tend to believe they're living through an inordinately pivotal inflection point in history, when in reality: they're 'almost certainly' incorrect?
> we're mostly seeing that's giving us the fear of collapse is a slowing of rapid growth after WW2
We grow more in a few days than the world did at the height of Rome's power. We're also richer almost everywhere on the planet than we were at the peak of the post-WWII boom.
These ghost stories are a cheap way of defending complacency. If everything is going to shit in 2040, why bother acting now to better yourself, your community, your country or the world?
It seems to me that a certain amount of growth comes from further specialization. At one end of the scale, you have a few people in the clan or tribe specialize in turning rocks into spear points, and others specialize in hunting, and the whole group eats better. At the other end of the scale, you have a globally-integrated supply chain.
At the other end of the scale. That is, there's no further to go. All the benefits that can be reaped from this process, we've already reaped. There is no further growth to gain from this approach.
(Or not much. It is possible for the supply chain to further globalize and specialize, but not orders of magnitude more. And, as we regard China as an enemy, and look at what happened with Covid, we may even pull back from the amount that we already have.)
That is supposedly what happened with Rome. A very modern society (by our standards) was replaced by barbarians (by our standards). Those barbarians eventually developed a lot of the same social and political structures as Rome.
It was a regression from a unified pan-continent society to isolated tribes. How advanced those tribes were is hard to say because most didn’t write things down.
As far as I know what followed Rome was a period of unrest and lessened commerce. From that aspect at least it was “worse”.
And it took over a thousand years for a city larger than Rome to appear again anywhere in the world. Sometimes things just crash and nothing replaces it.
I've followed r/collapse for at least 4 years. In the beginning, it all sounded completely crazy. There were a lot of different theories about how it would all come apart, most of them nutty, some legit. The more legit theories have been sifted to the top as world events like COVID, massive recessions, shortages, local natural disasters, and global climate change have come to the fore. Couple that with the political instability over the Trump years and that insane media atmosphere, and collapse has basically gone mainstream.
At first it was articles that would be on r/collapse starting to show up on r/worldnews and r/politics. Then they started showing up on hackernews and now on the New York Times.
Collapse is happening. But it's not showy or sudden, but more like watching a corpse rot. Big systems fail slowly, grinding down their parts. A giant spaceship in freefall is pretty slow due to the scale. We're not in freefall yet, but all the moorings of modern life are coming undone.
But surely this is precisely how people begin to believe in any conspiracy theory? How many flat earthers would tell exactly the same story? How many anti-vax? Clearly humans begin to believe the evidence for something when they are exposed to it a lot. And this is what the Internet provides for every conceivable theory from Pizza Gate to Global Warming. “I found the evidence compelling” isn’t sufficient for finding the truth, unfortunately. This is The genius of the scientific method is that it automatically does not trust itself.
But in the case of systems collapsing due to climate change, it's the scientific community with mountains of evidence saying our topsoil is disappearing, coastal cities will start to flood, typhoons and droughts will become more frequent, and food supplies are at risk.
Climate change, resource depletion and environmental damage all have the potential to severely destabilize the entire system we have built.
I really wish we had a lot more rigorous research into this subject.
Here’s an interesting presentation from Marc Jancovici https://youtu.be/Vjkq8V5rVy0
It’s two hours long and you may not agree with some of the alarming conclusions but they have clearly put in a lot of work into their thesis. More people should be aware of these possibilities.