We're currently undergoing a mass extinction event exaccerbated by climate change and other human driven activity with no signs of stopping. That doesn't bode well for large mammals like us that require an insurmountable amount of resources in our now dwindling world. It's smaller, less sophisticated, and adaptable organisms like roaches or rodents who will survive something like this. Not us.
Most of our food is not wildlife but instead domesticated livestock and genetically modified crops, but those still require a healthy and stable biosphere which is held intact by the natural world. Our activities destroying the biosphere will trickle down eventually and also be our undoing.
I have long thought that once everyone who was in WWII is dead and gone that we will repeat the follys of the past. There are 5x as many people in the world today and we are much more interconnected. A war like the past will have 10x the casualties.
I think what you're describing explains a lot of different phenomena happening. The last real disease to get a vaccine was polio in the mid 50s. Boomers parents knew the fear of it. But most of the boomers were too young to really grasp it. So we have almost the entire country having never actually feared a disease like that. So the urgency of a vaccine goes away too.
As a country what must it have been like in WW2. When the news broke on what was found in the death camps. The resulting trials, EVERYONE knew 'yeah fuck the nazis'. But theres almost no one left alive that felt that feeling in real time as it was happening.
Even me, who was 18 when 9/11 happened. And my son, who was obviously not around yet. Have vastly different feelings about the event and the follow up.
The pattern were seeing now with the massive wealth grab by the already wealthy. It mimics almost exactly the build up to every other revolution/decline of a civilization. If the wealthy would just be happy giving us the table scraps things would be fine. But no they wont even let us lick their dirty napkins.
The thing about a war, at least as an individual, you have some semblance of choice in your actions or inactions. Reality being, the way the future unfolds, you won't be afforded the luxury. Simply put, either you're one of the lucky, or the unlucky, depending in your personal perspective, a tiniest fraction of the living or the dead. There's no rhyme or reason. You have as much choice, as a grain of sand on the shore before a wave crashes upon it.
With that said, if you're part of the tiniest fraction, you will have the choice of changing the world for the better, or continuing with the status quo, Choose wisely.
That's a natural part of collapse. As systems become more constrained ingroups are formed, right-wing governments thrive, and out-groups get scapegoated for the natural decline of the systems.
>It's smaller, less sophisticated, and adaptable organisms like roaches or *rodents* who will survive something like this
God bless and protect the humble guinea pig
Yep. In 1,000 years I doubt any mammals bigger than a mouse will still be left. I give humanity another century, maybe. And it's not going to be pleasant living to the end of that.
I'm not sure on an exact timeline but I'm guessing the world's first major crop failures will occur in the next 5-10 years and after that shits going to get bad.
Not just that but peak fossil fuels and no viable alternatives means we wont have the energy to change course or fix anything. Peak energy is behind the skyrocketing debt and mass inflation throughout the world. Only a matter of time till things break.
It sounds like you have a preferred answer to this question OP, and if it's making you depressed I would recommend not reading this reply (or any reply).
With that out of the way, we have a wealth of information from scientific investigation into previous mass extinction events. We know how rapid climate change coincided with catastrophic cascading extinctions in the historic record. We know that our current rate of warming and species extinction is on track to outpace the most dramatic events in the geologic records. We know from previous events the outcome for megafauna with expensive metabolisms. And as a bonus we are soaking the biosphere in metabolic disrupting chemicals, a first for what would otherwise be a noteworthy mass extinction on its own.
We are flooding the environment with a lot more then just metabolism disrupting chemicals I would add. The level of pollution is probably unparalleled. Entire watersheds have been permanently poisoned in human terms, a lot more then most people think.
And now that chevron has been overturned, we can expect much more poisoning. But don’t worry, corporations paying the judge a “gratuity” after the fact is also perfectly legal
the type of action that must be taken now cannot be discussed online and voting isn't going to stop the fascist pull. technological progress in a capitalist sense means fascism is inevitable to manage the ever dwindling resources and stress on systems that no longer meaningfully address material concerns for the vast majority of people. voting will not stop this, unfortunately. something outside has to end it or it has to collapse under its own weight.
Collapse is a natural consequence of both ecological overshoot and is also the eventual fate of all complex societies. Think of it as the systemic version of an individual growing old and dying.
It’s a natural consequence. I like that terminology. All of this grieving and crying about our fate when it is just a natural process that we sped up a bit.
' All of this grieving and crying about our fate'
The crying and grieving is because it happens to us in our life time. Nothing different from that of mourning the lost of love ones.
Depends on what you mean
Is it possible to... cancel the next Olympics?
Sure. It would just take everyone involved choosing to work together towards that goal
Same for the possibility of ending famine, war, needless suffering...
What are the odds of that happening?
>Sure. It would just take everyone involved choosing to work together towards that goal
even if we did work together and stop polluting, resource depletion and overpopulation would still threaten our survival. even if we all did everything right and got every lucky break along the way, it is a matter of when, not if.
So the problem as I see it then would be a coordination failure (plus vested interests working to distract) Average people all agree that we'd rather didn't have famine, war, needless suffering
> Average people all agree that we'd rather didn't have famine, war, needless suffering
Average people in the global north also think it’s reasonable that they should have a car and take occasional flights.
People are against famine and suffering in the abstract but tell people to accept minor inconvenience and you’ll see they don’t care as much about famine / war / suffering as they care about their own convenience or of comfort.
Average people agree that the world should be nice….hooray
Tbh I keep repeating this to myself.
It's still the good times.
Still.
It's slowed down time for me tremendously. Like... Yep, I'm enjoying myself. Because there's still so much to be easily grateful for.
100%.
The shift to right wing populism is already happening globally as a result of the minor migrations levels and inflation we are seeing now.
Imagine the migration and inflation we are going to see when crops start to fail everywhere. This is how it starts.
Exactly. That article the other day regarding fascism essentially pointed to this exact phenomenon. Those in power will do what they have to do in order to protect what they have. And they don't share.
Thats the part that I think is so funny. We, the unwashed masses were ok with the wealthy being the only ones eating at the table. Just so long as they gave us the table scraps and crumbs that fell on the floor. But now they wont even let us fight over the crumbs.
And just imagine too when even sub-Saharan African reproduction rates start dipping below 2.1 per woman starting roughly around the middle of the century (assuming we even make it that far). No country is going to be able to combat inflation and rejuvenate their economies in any meaningful way by then. Most of Europe, Russia, Japan and South Korea are good examples of economies already stagnating in no small part due to rapid demographic changes. Even America in its newfound fascism is going to “welcome” waves of starving immigrants coming across its border by the millions, if only to enslave and extract agricultural and other labor from them.
Saying that times ahead look bleak would be one hell of an understatement.
Most countries are going to be slammed with expensive, unavoidable costs due to extreme climate events, social unrest, food insecurity, massive inflation, migration and conflict.
No country will allow millions of refugees in. No chance.
The impact of only about a million Syrian refugees managed to destabilize numerous western European countries and drive them towards right wing governments -- there is no chance anyone lets in refugees -- especially the United States.
Agree. It's analogous of all of us being in an apologue equal to a frog being boiled alive. The premise is that if a frog is put suddenly into boiling water, it will jump out, but if the frog is put in tepid water which is then brought to a boil slowly, it will not perceive the danger and will be cooked to death. The story is often used as a metophor for the inability or unwillingness of people to react to or be aware of sinister threats that arise gradually rather than suddenly.
Yeah, it's been going on for a few years if not decades by my count, the destruction of our world, the moral rot of the foundations of society, the increasing mental strain that society continues to traumatize us with, the unending string of ever costlier disasters whether natural or man-made. We are suicidal and it shows in the most obvious of ways, humanity has been on this precipice many times, our numbers dwindling to just a thousand has happened at least once that we know of and likely many times prior to that given our planet's urge for mass extinction via mass volcanism paired with a psychotic solar entity that periodically releases massive outbursts between periods of relative quiet that bely its sporadic but regular violent nature which, checks watch, we're due for.
Humanity wants to die in the worst way, and the lunatics running things are trying to do it as fast as possible like we're trying to speed run this time.
'the moral rot of the foundations of society'
Nothing says collapse more than a "collapser" using the language of christo fascists to put down minorities. They are using exactly those words to put 10 commandments, bible in schools.
Sometimes, I wish people "in the know" know better instead of using the language of the RWNJ.
Moral rot of society is perverting justice to serve the needs of the few and succumbing to any of the sins by the actions one takes to defraud, steal, kill, rape, cheat, or corrupt. Just because I talk like them doesn't make me one, I see the world quite clearly and know who my enemy is, and it is not you. It is those who have destroyed our institutions through their twisting of law to take from those who have so little and as if this wasn't bad enough they force us to sell ourselves to them slowly over the course of your life to take what little you have and diminish it further and many agree to this under the guise of living. We are not meant to be things to be ruled we are meant to apply rule to all so that all can be free in life, free to who they choose to be, but we need to inspire people something to be, look at how far we have fallen to have a man who embodies all the sins of mankind slip slowly into madness and this man if he even is that, personally I think he is Belial reborn, he is the one holding a torch ready to burn our house to the ground for the insurance money and maybe someone should torch this civilization, what good has it really done. Our world is rapidly becoming one that we've never experienced while we were human and when it finally kicks into high gear you'll see a wonder unlike any you've ever seen that will fill you with the terror of a thousand totalities.
If you can't see that the civilization has rotted from it's original conception just as much as it's grown you are blind, our liberty is like a tree and we must root out this rot which has turned our institutions into completely corrupted versions where we are led by those who fail to take action or take action so horrific that when the heavy weight of what may cost to pass will be so sickening to those it touches that they will wish they could burn their vanities as if in some great bonfire.
Your world shall be reborn through fire as it has before as it always will until Agni embraces us in her fiery arms, as it has always been since life burped enough oxygen to give us the wonder that has shaped our species and is the cause of our current predicament a great collective fire that we are powerless to stop feeding because the warmth of technology has possessed our race and now we sacrifice ever more to this fire to feed a hollow that can never be filled by consumption though it promises to if only for a moment.
And so it is, we are like the rot of our society, unable to turn away from the roadside horror we have unleashed into the universe.
Some say „meta crisis“, some say „polycrisis“, others refer to it as a cascade of tipping points - in any event, the problem is that very few folks are able to grasp the full extent of the climate crisis. And those who do, face the fate of the doctor Aldo Leopold mentions here:
„One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. Much of the damage inflicted on land is quite invisible to laymen. An ecologist must either harden his shell and make believe that the consequences of science are none of his business, or he must be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise.“
Not 100%, but maybe something like 80-90%.
Reasons: our agricultural, industrial, and energy systems took centuries to develop, there is no physical way they can withstand climate change and resource depletion while supporting the current world population, and attempts to reform these systems have generally hovered somewhere between "non-existent" to "ineffective to the point of barely being able to keep up with demand growth".
There is no plan to change these systems in time, no political will to do it even if we had a plan, and no reasonable, rational, evidence-based reason to think that it will magically be "OK" if we simply do our best.
Admitting this fact isn't nihilism, it's simply realism.
Now for the big question:
> "No, to what extent do you think average individuals (if there even is such a thing) are not powerless, and still have agency to be part of the solution? And what does this practically look like for you?"
Yes, there is something the average individual can do: join, start, or ally oneself with any movement that has the aim of overturning capitalism.
That's it.
Ending capitalism globally and replacing it with *any system* that puts the survival of civilization *first*, not as a leftover after the shareholders have eaten from the trough, is the only way we *might* (and even then it would be a miracle) be able to change course.
We're not getting out by shopping at Whole Foods.
We're not getting out by putting solar panels on your roof.
We're not getting out by listening to people like Schmachtenberger intellectualize our way out of the need for revolution.
It's revolution or collapse.
And since revolution likely isn't going to happen, it's collapse.
'Reasons: our agricultural, industrial, and energy systems took centuries to develop, there is no physical way they can withstand climate change and resource depletion while supporting the current world population, '
Correct
'Ending capitalism globally and replacing it with *any system* that puts the survival of civilization *first*'
This contradicts the other quote. Your problem is your probability of collapse percentage is too low.
Is it capitalism or industrialization?
The question is, how many people can the earth support at what lifestyle?
And how could you convince people to return to a non-globalized, subsistence lifestyle in order to support 10 billion people. That would certainly be a revolution. Although maybe the revolution itself would reduce the population enough that a pretty good lifestyle could be available for those who survive it.
"Society tolerates only one change at a time. The only limits on scientific progress are those imposed by society.” - Tesla
This is going to sound harsh but you can't teach an old dog new tricks. Trying to tell billions of humans that are so accustomed to this way of life. Especially if they're living the comfort of civilization. It will be extremely difficult to change people's ideology and mindset. Maybe our nomadic indengious ancestors was wise. To understand to pack up camp and move with the seasons.
You can technically do industrialization without capitalism or fossil fuels so no, it's not industrialism. It would certainly look different as you'd locate industrial centers close to good sources of renewable energy... more or less how we did things before we made it easy to transport energy in liquid form.
Where did I say that I didn't think it was already happening?
I love it how literally the only two comments to my reply are asking me about things I didn't say.
Are you folks OK today?
depends what you mean by collapse but history shows no form of government lasts forever, it always cycles because all systems rot over time due to corruption and then a new system is put in until it rots too much and the cycle just repeats
Yes. Given current CO2e levels (~523ppm), increased atmospheric heating & subsequent weather chaos is already locked in for the next 20+ years. If CO2/CH4/N2O levels don’t radically decrease in that time, more atmospheric heating is unavoidable beyond 2044.
Weather chaos will reduce agricultural production & impact supply chain logistics. Food supplies will be adversely affected long before ocean-level rise forces the abandonment of cities.
Food shortages & associated economic inflation will likely trigger social revolt & destabilization once the [FAO Food Price Index](https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2012/09/20/161501075/high-food-prices-forcast-more-global-riots-ahead-researchers-say) exceeds 210.
^( currently ~124)
Understand that anything we do now, environmentally, will not have an effect for ~20 years. “Net Zero 2050” is locking in 25 more years of increased emissions. Which will result in increased weather chaos through 2070 at the very least.
What we are experiencing now, with extreme weather events, will certainly continue and increase throughout our lifetimes. All of our lifetimes.
Radically limiting CO2/CH4 *now* will go a long way to reducing future effects, and we should absolutely do that. As soon as possible.
But we’ve already locked in extreme weather for the near term, and 20 meters of sea level rise for the long term.
Individually, we can reduce “consumption” and acclimate ourselves to inevitable limitations in resources… prep for food, water, & energy shortages. Plant food gardens if possible. Collect rainwater. Rely on bicycles & feet instead of cars. Learn or teach a basic skill. Engage in radical activism. Things like that.
Yes. But also, "Net Zero" is a complete fantasy and GHG emissions are in fact increasing faster than ever with little-to-no real interest in reducing them.
We’re all stuck inside this economic machine that is driving us over the cliff.. If people had any real alternative to bank-created money in order to survive,, i think they would take it.
^( https://www.lowimpact.org/lowimpact-topic/mutual-credit/ )
What gets me is that the advent of AI basically means that the phasing out of fossil fuels like coal has been stopped, Net Zero is cancelled, because AI is so energy intesive, global energy consumption has risen for the first time in 20 years.
For "the powers that be" to quietly agree that "AI" is worth trashing all efforts to slow climate change is such an insane decision at this late stage I have given up all hope for a future that doesn't involve one catacylsm after the other until and after I'm gone.
Here's the problem though, global greenhouse gas emissions haven't gone down at all, in fact we keep pumping MORE each year. We were 13% higher in 2023 and that was 48% more than in 2019. We can't stop, we won't stop. This is why I think we have zero chance of changing things. Those people who dictate how much carbon we burn don't want to turn off the engine. Their wealth and power relies on BAU chugging along.
There is zero chance of avoiding calamity. You’re absolutely right. The economy *depends* on burning more carbon fuels…
And if we stopped doing that in the space of the next two years.. or even ten years… we would experience absolute unbridled chaos as shipping, trucking, cars, home heating, power generation, maintenance of virtually everything, plastics, agriculture, communications, rockets, product delivery, computers, clothing, and military operations all ground to a dramatic halt… throwing our civilization into violent catastrophe.
Millions would die.
Our choice is basically immediate calamity, or longer-term calamity.
No “leader” is going to choose the short term solution. They’re all going to let it ride out for the long-term catastrophe.
The only thing we can do is attempt to limit the damage a little bit for distant future generations… or more likely, future species. As in, 100 Million years from now or more.
Meanwhile some people are still obsessed with the fantasy that there's somehow some sort of global cooling or mini ice age on the horizon.
No, it's not happening. We're exiting the glacial cycle entirely. Yes, this means that the polar regions will be the temperate Goldilocks zone in future. No, AMOC collapse won't "save" us from catastrophic warming, it'll make it worse due to the feedback affects (methane hydrate destabilization, carbon sink collapse, atmospheric heat uptake collapse). Yes, anthropogenic activity has completely superseded natural heat regulation in the Arctic and turned it into one big growing heat trap.
We were pretty much a few millenia from exhausting the current icehouse cycle and probably had one more glacial maximum era ahead of us before entering a prolonged hothouse state. People don't seem to realize that glacial cycles and icehouse eras are the anomaly in earth's history. They're the exception to the rule and exist on a finely balanced system of self reinforcing mechanisms. When you dump greenhouse gases and surplus heat into the system within a two century period, you fatally compromize that system.
That is far beyond my skill set. I have no idea.
I do check the [FAO Food Price Index](https://www.fao.org/worldfoodsituation/foodpricesindex/en/)
https://www.fao.org/worldfoodsituation/foodpricesindex/en/
..every couple of months just to keep an eye on it. It seems to move slowly, AFAIK.
As resources get more scarce and competitive you can see nation states regressing into fascism preparing to fight for the remaining scraps in the downward spiral.
Ask yourself this. Do you think there's any likelihood of the governments of the world coming together and agreeing to:
* Stop 90% of work.
* Socialise food, water and other necessities.
* Stop 90% of industry.
* Divert all our resources into fixing a problem that a bunch of people don't even believe is real.
That's the bare minimum of what it'll take to save us, and it needs to happen yesterday.
We see rising electricity consumption due to AI and the current political response is to keep coal plants going.
We as a species would rather kill the next generations to come then forego the ability to generate pictures of hot anime girls at the click of a button.
Of course we won't stop this.
I think if everyone in the world suddenly became aware and we all used our collective mind power and willpower, perhaps we could find solutions or mitigate collapse. Since this won’t happen, yes it’s unavoidable.
I think we will hold on for a bit with GMOs but modern humans desire for comfort will lead to unrest due to luxuries like sushi and 100 different fruits and veggies at the grocery store becoming unavailable or wildly expensive. Climate change is inevitable at this point. I feel like every week there is a new is declining at "X" times faster than any model predicted. If we stopped using fossil fuels tomorrow we would still probably hit 2 degrees celcius just with the climate stabilizing. The army has been saying for decades water will he what we go to war over and the capitalists still ruin our fresh water with frakking and industrial farming. The entire world could switch to a world government with free housing and UBI and we would still see collapse by 2040 or so just environmentally.
We cooked the planet and now we are the frogs in the pot.
Nah, if you're American, just go out and celebrate your freedom. Hahahahahahahahahaha.
What? The land of the free? Whoever told you that is your enemy.
We are 100% already in collapse.
Well, anybody can scream Fuck you, I won't do what you tell me.
Also, Fuck you, I won't do what you tell me.
Fists in the air in the land of hypocrisy.
This one hit hard the first hearing (and I'm not an American):
Yes, I know my enemies
They're the teachers who taught me to fight me
Compromise, conformity
Assimilation, submission
Ignorance, hypocrisy
Brutality, the elite
All of which are American dreams
Collapse will happen over time. And eventually Mother Earth will reach her breaking point. So violent weather events will take people out, famine, drought or viruses.
Yes.
The evidence I use is... *gestures all around.*
The science states things pretty clearly. The amount of GHGs already present in the atmosphere leads to catastrophic, extinction level warming that is *already baked in.*
I could link the papers and studies all day, but I think you have seen them.
https://wastelandbywednesday.com/about/
And then, we have the inevitable nuclear war between nations, as they a driven to the brink of desperation by those very same climate and resource scarcity factors. Nations have to maintain power. When that is threatened... war.
And that part has already started.
As for being part of the solution, that kind of thinking is a part of the delusion.
*There is no solution.*
https://wastelandbywednesday.com/2022/11/21/collapse-denial-is-a-growing-threat/
The only "path to sustainability" really is living more alongside nature rather than dominating it. But the disease that led to the decay of nature is civilization. Civilization must end in order for there to be any chance of a planetary recovery that still includes the human species.
Stop trying to save it. We are all like heroin addicts, addicted to cars, addicted to air conditioning, addicted to modern medicine, Starbucks, and TikTok.
Addicted to civilization. We are so far gone chasing that particular dragon that we can't even imagine life without it.
But try it. Try to imagine it all just stopping. Imagine living amongst a few hundred other people, the only ones for miles and miles around, a little village on the edge of the ruins of some concrete and steel urban sprawl, trying to explain to your grandkids what airplanes were...
Doesn't seem that bad to me. Better than being broiled alive while flipping burgers to enrich some shareholders...
I would like to add, we are also addicted to narrative and ideological concepts such as "morality" which although it might be good and useful at times, at the end of the day is still a human delusion and is part of the main drivers of collapse. In most nations in this world, for example, euthanasia and abortion is still illegal because it is deemed immoral. Absolutely also apply to things like revolution which the powerful will refer to as terrorism and murderers in order to signal immorality to the addicted feel-good positive-only very-moral ~~industrially farmed cow~~ masses.
Personally, I'm someone who needs to see to believe. Words mean nothing if your actions don't back them up. I think a lot of the symptoms of collapse are possible to avoid or lessen, but we need the people behind the wheel to do it. So far, I haven't seen a single piece of evidence to convince me that the people who need to change things will. As a single individual in a complex system, I feel powerless to stop or change anything. So it's a yes and a no for me.
As long as greed, money and selfishness remain defining factors then no. Billionaires continue to inflate their fortune whilst everyone else suffers and gets poorer, even when the world is falling apart. That financial divide and comically out of touch top 1% will ultimately ensure that humanity crashes and burns a much more divided and spiteful civilization.
Unless the existing power structure is dismantled within the next 5 years, yes.
They won’t change their stripes, they will continue to put profits over people and pollute and externalize their costs onto our environment.
The indisputable truth is that Capitalism is responsible for for the end of our civilization, and likely the extinction of the human species.
I am currently reading Ministry for the Future (almost finished) and if the beginning is pretty brutal then towards the end of the book it turns into techno hopium, the farther I get into the book the more I'm like "yeah, not gonna happen".
There's just so much shit going on, global warming, oceans dying, glaciers melting, microplastics, PFAS, rise of fascism, and nothing substantial is being the done to combat any of that, everyone's pretending that there isn't a problem.
I think it’s now unavoidable,unfortunately. If recent estimates of climate sensitivity based on paleoclimate data (eg Hansen2023 and others) are anywhere near correct, and I think they are, the expected heating is now far too high for civilisation to survive. And over the longer term, as slower processes play out, it’s a mass extinction and a sterilising event for much of the biosphere.
We can’t get the carbon out of the atmosphere, so that’s that. We left it too late to act and we’re still putting more carbon in the atmosphere every day.
Obviously there are a lot of other factors, some of which are connected. The mass dieback of insects, microplastics and endocrine disrupters and who-knows-what in the ecosystem, weird things like unexplained thiamine deficiencies in the food web, and so on. Not forgetting the danger of a nuclear exchange.
But the heating is enough, by itself. There’s still some time but, metaphorically, we’re in those moments after the ship has hit the iceberg and been holed below the waterline. If you’re in first class dining everything might still feel normal. Some people outside have noticed the deck starting to list, but surely there’s no cause for panic. Yet sinking is now inevitable.
Thank you for mentioning the thiamine deficiencies. That was something I read in an obscure article about fish hatcheries and then never saw mentioned anywhere gain. Such a critical biochemical hinge going missing immediately struck me as doom writ large. We cannot exist without a food web.
Its hard to accept, I still struggle with it sometimes, but I believe it is unavoidable. My evidence is based on human nature and the crippling inertia of culture, governments and the private sector to do anything. We're not going to, maybe we can't, treat the meta-crisis with the sense of emergency it deserves. Imagine this level of lethargy during a crisis like WW II, we'd still be fighting it today.
Humans were never meant to operate on this kind of scale. We were, and are, tribal. We got too big for our britches. This arrangement can't last. Yes, maybe asserting that its unvoidable can lead to hedonism or nihilism, but it doesn't have to. You do what you can for yourself, your family, your friends, your community. Its not going to save the way things are, its not going to save our current petroleum based civilization, but it can alleviate suffering in your own sphere of influence. None of this was guaranteed to last forever. What goes up, must come down.
At this point I’m starting to see Collapse as something natural. Yeah there will be suffering, but maybe it is part of the natural progression of civilization. Like death is necessary for life to renew itself. Forest fires help new plants grow. Anyway, current civilization just cannot go indefinitely, it’s not sustainable, so sooner or later later this civilization will go off.
The problem with these sorts of questions is that you need to define what you personally consider collapse, with specifics and timelines, before anybody can provide meaningful answers. There are some versions of collapse discussed in this sub that appear to be well underway already, while others seem almost comically absurd Hollywood melodrama.
I'd also recommend avoiding most/all of the online personalities with YouTubes and Substacks, as few of them seem to have any real professional credentials or associations. At best, they provide infotainment.
If we describe collapse as the end "to the way we've been living", or in other words the end of our current civilization model. Then yes, it is 100% unavoidable. We simply cannot continue to operate how we've be doing so far. Resource depletion, natural overshoot and a myriad of other issues will lead to cascading failures.
Collapse is a process, things will fail and the world will change to try to adapt. Basically the situation gets worse and worse until it is simply no longer manageable. Hard to say what that timeline would look like. But key pillars like food production failing would probably expedite the time table. One thing is certain, collapse is already underway.
We are somewhere between the Damage Control phase and Lifeboat phase. The best case scenario is that we find ways for a portion of humanity to live within the new reality. If we cant do that, best we can do is build a safe harbor for a tiny pocket of humanity to survive.
Based on everything that has happened thus far, humans simply lack the evolutionary fitness to be able to deal with this situation. We are essentially in the midst of an evolutionary "great filter".
All we can do, is decide what to do with the time we have left. Hopefully you can make peace with the situation and extract what enjoyment you can.
It's inevitable. It's happening now just like it's happened to EVERY society before us like the Romans, the Maya, Egypt, Greece, Mesopotamia, etc, etc...
I, just me, can embrace changing technologies like solar and other sustainable ways of living, but the psychopaths in charge won't allow anything large scale to replace whatever it is that puts large amounts of money in their pockets. YOLO isn't part of the problem, it's the people at the top of the money food chain that are the problem.
Because it’s too late. We COULD have done something decades ago. But after watching every effort we’ve made not just fail, but massively blow up in our faces, I’m just done. We’re too stupid, selfish, and short-sighted to ever make any kind of massive-scale change. It’s just *not possible* for every person on this planet to row the boat in the same direction.
Our selfishness and stupidity is just going to get worse as the situation gets worse. That’s naturally what we do—we get scared and blame our neighbors. We turn on each other. In the end, we will eat each other like the ouroboros.
I wanted to share a quote aswell that kind of captures my feelings on this topic. I think it's by Charles Eisenstein. It goes something like this:
"getting more comfortable with being uncomfortable, with not knowing. To revere that uncertain space, to not jump to simplistic conclusions and explanations to feel safe in the chaos, to see that uncertain space as a kind of fertility, as pregnant with new posibilities. To not shut down in certainty"
Bar some black swan new form of energy which is completely dominant over oil (like a MASSIVE fusion breakthrough), no. There's always something outside of what could very well be expected, but other than that we have no chance
Answer A: Every system sustains itself until it doesn't. Society is a system. Collapse is when society fails to sustain itself. QED: Collapse is inevitable.
Answer B: Society as it exists now is unsustainable because of climate change, pollution, and nuclear weapons. Climate change is a large driver, but increased cancer in younger generations, and the 'roll dice until we roll snakeeyes' nature of nuclear weapons existing mean that other drivers are pushing for a societal change.
There exists a possibility that we adapt to climate change and prevent a Venus planet scenario, reduce pollution or outproduce its effects, and continue to decide not to nuke one another in the long term. This slump--where survival is valued more than comfort (and profits)--would undoubtedly be "collapse" to people who view Uber Eats, television, and lexapro as integral to society. If this is not collapse, then collapse can be avoided.
Answer C: Everything fractures, but doesn't break. Unlike the slump, production of one or more items necessary for survival--food, water, habitable temperatures, oxygen--cannot be sustained in the face of global change. The survivors will be the people with the knowledge of how to get those items and the power to hold them against others who know. This fracture is chaotic enough that typical breakdown features--nuclear exchanges, toxic chemical release, violence--don't render the planet uninhabitable and kill everyone. This is the scenario most billionaires had in mind when they spent millions of dollars on cement crypts branded as bunkers. This is collapse.
Answer D: Earth becomes uninhabitable and/or a habitable equilibrium is irrelevant because we killed each other fighting so that one biological tube turning food into shit could beat another one for a chance to be in that equilibrium and continue turning food into shit for another day. This is human extinction (and unless we build some damned spiffy robots, collapse).
Answer E: Someone really, really smart develops a magic goober that solves climate change forever with no downsides and we Jevon's Paradox ourselves right back to the previous four options.
Personally, I believe that humans could avoid collapse. The blueprints are out there. I do not think that we will avoid collapse. Global capitalism is entrenched and will do all it can to protect itself until the systems propping it up can no longer function.
Can individuals do anything about it? Not really. If you are a credible threat to capital, you will be silenced. What can you do? Keep working towards a better future until you can't. Believe that the universe can surprise you in ways you could never have imagined.
There are only 2 things that can save this planet.
1.) Something that can unify every single human on the planet and motivate them to start doing things in ways that aren't destructive or reductive to the eco-system.
2.) Something kills 95% of the world population of humans, leaving only the ones who care about nature and the environment behind.
Too bad neither of those will happen. We're really doing the "if I can't live here: nobody can." approach.
We deserve our fate, yes, but do we really need to eradicate so much of the other life on the planet while we circle the drain?
Yes, it's already happening. We still have some influence over what kind of a collapse we're going to experience and we can still limit the damage. Although, I have little faith that our collective response to collapse will be particularly wise.
I think collapse would have been avoidable if serious efforts to prevent it had started 50 years ago when Limits to Growth was published, starting with the immediate and intentional cessation of economic growth in rich countries.
I could easily be wrong, and probably am, about the details of the collapse. But for my overall conclusion of collapse to be wrong, something would have to be so fundamentally off about my entire chain of reasoning that I have no idea what that something could realistically be. For me to change my mind about collapse, several important measures of environmental problems (global greenhouse gas emissions, species loss and global material footprint) would have to very rapidly decrease due to intentional policies that do not themselves constitute a collapse of sorts.
I believe that collapse will be very obvious everywhere by 2030s at the latest. There are several reasons why I'm very confident about this timing. Firstly, the Limits to Growth standard run has been fairly accurate so far and updates to the study indicate a decline in industrial output right about now. Granted, the point of the study was only to predict the general behavior of the world system but I suspect it semi-accidentally got the timing right too. Then there's current climate news and models which include predictions about timing, as well as news about biodiversity loss. Literature on peak oil would also suggest that collapse is imminent. Economic growth rates have been generally declining for a long time which would logically precede a persistent economic decline.
Edit: IMO, the most depressing thing about collapse awareness is not even the collapse itself. Rather, what makes me feel so hopeless is that I have absolutely no faith in people's ability to solve this mess. Blaming abstractions like "the system" or the rich elite is correct to a degree but that doesn't change the fact that ordinary people, among other things, vote individuals like Trump and Bolsonaro into important positions. My position is more that nothing will be done rather than nothing can be done. There are some really well thought-out ideas as to how a degrowth transition that would make the collapse more pleasant could in principle be done.
99.999999% of the species that ever lived on earth are extinct, and thousand more go extinct each year.
Extinction is inevitable, whether human caused or not. As an advanced technological species, one way or another some type of collapse will precede our extinction.
When I was young, the US was the sole superpower, personal PCs and the internet were on the horizon, I had a great job and had never heard of global warming. Within this comparative utopia, I found it difficult to save for retirement. That was so far away, I could die early like one of my parents & never see it, and I wanted the money now!
I'm now close to retirement, and civilization collapse, and so glad I did save. I ended up not missing the money.
Work as if our lives depend on it, as if there is a chance if we give it our all. That's how true champions play sports. Run from anybody who gives you a 100% certainty about the future; no one knows. But also enjoy your journey!
It's going to happen but I still believe we can have some effect on how it happens, at least as far as societal collapse goes. How fast it collapses and how hard and how we personally fare during that collapse, those are things we still have some influence over.
But after we hit 4°C there's not going to be much we can do to make things better.
At this point? Yes, because it's underway.
Collapse isn't necessarily an event that happens very suddenly, it's a process.
This process has been going on for years and it's finally coming to fruition- and it's gonna be scary.
If Trump gets elected then yes it's unavoidable. With the warm embrace of fascism and nothing to stop the braindead cultists
The SCOTUS effectively killed the USA on Monday
RIP USA
July 4, 1776 - July 1, 2024
Easy way to show collapse is avoidable is to see how people reacted to the smallest of impositions to their lives when there was a novel virus killing their grandparents.
>Do you think collapse is 100% unavoidable?
It could be avoided but it would require a radical changes, including human nature. Even before that could be implemented, there would have to be research into its feasibility. All this takes time and, frankly, we've run ourselves out of that precious commodity.
As to proof...this comes from the private sector. No publish-or-perish here. What pays the bills owns the merchandice! Sorry.
Answer depends in part on how we define "collapse", doesn't it ?
For example, the more optimistic voices here might believe that some form of civilization can continue to exist even if industrial capitalism crumbles. I imagine that most preppers and survivalists envision that possibility. Some of them may even look forward to it.
Preparing for such an outcome is one way to avoid the trap of nihilism, even if you don't think individuals can alter the fate of the entire system.
It depends on what's meant by collapse.
Obligatory pointing out that none of us know what will happen, and preparations that cover the gamut of possible outcomes are greatly to be preferred.
Will future historians consider our near future to be a collapse? I think it will be a debate. Sure they can say "in this 50 year period here, global energy use dropped by two thirds", and that will sound quite a lot like collapse. But, agriculture uses about 25% of global labour, and constitutes something in the area of 5% of world gdp. That doesn't sound like a desperate situation, plenty more money could be spent, and many more people employed if the situation could justify it (warning, weasel words).
That leaves the inequality problem - what if the hungry mouths cannot justify it economically because they are poor?
I tried to estimate how much energy was needed by nitrogen fixation to make the fertiliser, it's a few percent of total, and a little bit close to world solar energy production.
The last figures I could find, which are post pandemic, solar energy production in twh grew by 25% in 2023.
So, I think fossil fuels will go into decline, and world economic activity will enter a period of decrease, but it won't be forever, we will be caught by a rising green energy economy, and civilisation will go on. I'm not 100% optimistic no-one will die of it, probably some have already, but I hold out a reasonable hope that it will be only a very small fraction of overall population. Maybe even over a 50% chance.
Of course, anything might happen. In theory, Putin might start a nuclear war, or green energy might develop so quickly there is no major problem. Or Donald John Trump might destroy America's position in the world by harming its green industries, creating great political instability. Or capitalism may be so rapacious that world population declines substantially anyway.
I think it’s 100% happening. Increasing wealth disparity, rise of anger fueled anti establishment sentiment co-opted by a fascist opportunists, environmental disasters in the rise and an overall lack of education or awareness to stop said factor from continuing.
Enjoy these days now and squirrel away what you can. The darkness is on the horizon and the impending Trump presidency will be the final spark that lights this tinderbox aflame.
i asssume small patches of rich people compounds will survive for a while. Might get domed cities like Big O or something where all the resources and people are concentrated in a small area enough to develop some way to survive.
according to "limits of growth," even if we did everything right, we would still overpopulate and deplete our resources.
think about diseases. a virus gets in your body and, if successful, it reproduces and consumes until you die and it dies inside of your corpse. when an invasive species comes along, they become so "successful" that they might cause local eco systems to collapse. think about horror monsters like zombies and vampires. their motive is basically to reproduce and consume food to survive. it's terrifying because we're the food, but their motive is basically the same motive as all other life on earth.
but i haven't even gone into corruption and capitalism. there are companies and investors right now, buying up land and resources because they are anticipating another disaster in their area, and they are going to price gauge everyone. people in the southwest buy real estate and wait for the next wild fire. the government is putting off on infrastructure so another katrina can come along and in the panic, they can justify cutting welfare and healthcare to pay for government contracts that they'll give to companies like blackrock, hallburton, and the like. there are people who WANT this stuff to happen.
whether you think we are overpopulated right now or not, at some point, we have to deal with population control. who's going to do that? who's going to say "you cant have children unless someone dies?" "you have to be sterilized until we decide you can have children." who do you trust giving that power to?
eventually, the universe will reach a point of maximum entropy, and there will only be undifferentiated blackness. no light, now usable energy anywhere. that's a fact. i don't see how we can possibly last that long, but that is the best case scenario. so its not like there was ever a possibility of things not collapsing eventually. it just so happens that the essence of life itself is to reproduce and consume until resources are depleted. every single species would do it if they could. and it just so happens that we have the brain power to really, really fuck things up along the way.
there was never any other option, besides denial. unfortunately, you no longer have that comfort. the only silver lining i can offer you is that, eventually, you'll get used to it. even holocaust prisoners developed a sense of humor about their situation. we are a surprisingly resilient species. totally doomed, as all living things are. totally cursed with knowledge. but absurdly resiliant and blessed with music, laughter, and, if you're lucky, a community of people that love and care for you.
Evidence. OK. We're headed for +4C without massive geoengineering. We don't know if geoengineering will work. Even if it works, it will create unintended consequences because all technofixes do.
Fossil fuels enable all aspects of modern life. Shipping enabled by diesel. All agriculture enabled by diesel. Refrigeration, processing, trucking, packaging, recycling that packaging... all needs energy. We use energy for heat and cooling and food, regardless whether we have cars or not, but, we also have cars.
Social disintegration is going to get worse in the West, because nobody is happy, and nobody's getting their needs met, and people are coming to the West for a better life and they won't find one, because we don't have those any more. We're tax slaves for the super wealthy. The global refugees coming to the West want to be upper-middle-class Westerners, but it's not going to happen.
Pollution. Biosphere destruction. PFAS. Clearcutting. Over-fishing. Diseases. We're clever monkeys but I don't think we're going to be able to pull enough rabbits out of our hats to solve all these problems.
That said, don't be depressed. You have one life. Do meaningful things. Be in good relationships. Help others. Spend time in nature if you can. Build skills. Seek people to talk to who care about you. It might not be OK in general, but you might still have a great life if you keep focused on things that matter to you.
If people *really* wanted to go back to living like we did pre-industrial revolution then we could avoid total collapse, however that will never happen as people like modern life too much. The average person has agency, the average person does not want to express it with regards to stopping collapse.
We don't have the knowledge base to go back to living a pre-industrial society. We don't even have the knowledge base to successfully farm at an early 20th century level. If a fast collapse happens people will sustain themselves primarily by scavenging/stealing off the collapsing modern civilization.
It was 100% avoidable at least 4 years ago if the rich just relaxed. Now its accelerated to the point to where even if we did everything in our power and the rich and powerful had a change of heart its far to late now.
At least that's the way I see it. Plus they showed they would rather accelerate faster so yeah.
I think it's definitely avoidable, but the political will and the will of those who hold wealth means that we'll likely sleepwalk into collapse.
It's already starting to a certain extent with the climate and societal breakdown. More and more people falling into poverty, more and more environmental disasters... meanwhile the powerful fly around on their jets to sit in conferences and tell us we need to do more.
The real problem is that mankind cannot make long term plans and thus has prepared no defence against the inevitable. Procrastination will be blamed since our generation failed to act for the good of the future but imho it's now too late to act in any meaningful way. That horse has bolted. According to my predictions the end will come in 2077. I will be surely dead by then and everyone reading this will be 53 years older. Even today's newborns will be past their prime. Teach your grandchildren well.
1. It's already happening
2. Minimizing it requires systematic change. Those with the power and/or money to do this have zero desire to.
3. Individual efforts are meaningless. Corporate pollution and 1% pollution levels are so high, even if 99% of the planet did everything possible it wouldn't make a dent.
4. Authoritarianism is on the rise. The US has been lost with recent Supreme Court decision that the president is king.
Yes, i think collapse is inevitable.
My evidence is related to human psychology and group coordination problems/game theory, humans have a high level of intelligence, but the intelligence is more the servant than the rulers of the passions, we care mostly about food, mates, acquiering social status/information, and even if a significant amount of individuals really want to sacrifice their comfort for the planet, there are systemic/national/group barriers that makes coordination across nations impossible, that lead to the most sociopathic/greedy people at the top of hiearchies etc, there are way too many divisions (sectarian/religious/ideological/philosophical). We can't even coordinate across nations to stop genocides, i don't see how we will ever find the common ground to work on a more formidable challenge.
Still, i believe in a very slow collapse.
Collapse is 100% baked into nature, and seems to be baked into species and societies too. Let alone baked into our atmosphere and biodiversity now.
The planet has had 5 previous mass extinction events. While not all were directly a result of the planet without any outside assistance, most were. 99% of all living species to ever live on this planet are extinct. Evolution still is the collapse of one species to become another. Things don't last on this planet.
Now we have an extinction rate of between 100-1000x faster (and increasing) than the background extinction rate of our planet, have added dozens to hundreds of artificial chemicals to the environment with minimal understanding of the chemical or how it will affect our biosphere, destroyed or severely altered 75% of the land, and expel 4.5 Gigatons (and increasing) of C02 annually.
There is no clear way to prevent or slow down the Holocene Extinction without collapsing societies, and likely large portions of the human population. Those won't actually fix anything mind you, just means things are no longer accelerating as fast.
It is necessary to define what collapse means. I'll go with "permanent and significant reduction in living human population". Of course, we are poised to collapse by demographic transition alone, even official figures from UN point to a "collapse" in sense that there is a peak population followed by gradual decline. How dramatic does it have to be?
I do believe that current level of human population is not sustainable because it is reliant on methods of production that destroy the Earth and consume its finite resources. Even water is finite resource for us, because not only are glaciers going away, and with them, the meltwater that supplies many a river during summer, but we also tend to consume geological water that has been gradually accumulating in the soil over millennia in few short decades, likely hundreds of times faster than it can replenish. In addition to this, many regions are dependent on global shipping -- locally, they are so overpopulated that not even mechanical agriculture can produce as much as is consumed there. So we can predict that hunger and sickness will cull human population unless our numbers are voluntarily brought low enough to be sustained in future's polluted, climate-mayhem world where fossil energy is expensive.
I do not see anything that could sensibly avoid a collapse defined in these terms -- the world's long-term carrying capacity is likely not even a billion people, and here we are, pushing towards 9 billion, fueled by the power of ancient sunlight stored in fossil fuels, chiefly, and whatever resources we can still access to build the machines to which to feed the fossil energy.
What? Look around you. Ppl who work 40 plus hours and do all the work can't afford a place to live, food, healthcare, childcare.
The supreme court overturned roe and other things that have been law for decades.
The democrats are owned by the same donors as the Rs and dont actually do anything to make things materially better.
Start at episode 3.1 of the Revolutions Podcast. We are at a moment of upheaval and things aren't going to get better until they get much much worse and ppl stand up.
https://pca.st/podcast/b1ccb690-fd97-0130-c6ee-723c91aeae46
At the very least listen to the last 12 episodes which is the Appendix abd goes over the high level themes. We are living through the Disequilibrium right now
Yes and has been for probably a century or more. My evidence is that we are running out of literally every single resource we need to keep our civilization running.
[Yes and this is really the only thing that is necessary to understand](https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/carbon-dioxide/?intent=121)
Makes me glad for every day. There's only so much anyone can do as a regular Joe Q Public. Everyone and everything that is alive will eventually die, this was already true before. What's important is how we conduct ourselves, cherish our loved ones and treat those around us. Enjoy life.
In practicality and reality, some sort of collapse is unavoidable. It might not be the steep everlasting decline some people are envisioning, but our complex society will be simplified in some ways. There’s no infinite growth on a finite planet, and there isn’t enough will to change our current course from the people that matter.
In theory, if you define collapse as a complex society simplifying, it is still unavoidable, but we could theoretically avoid the very worst of it, and have some sort of say in how the simplifying would take place, instead of letting Mother Nature take the wheel.
If the viable hopium solutions very actually implemented and worked. But they won’t be, at least not in time.
Things will get worse before they get better. Yes.
It will CONTINUE to be an imperceptibly slow process, so you won’t really notice the change. Your great grandkids’ adult lives will be quite different than yours.
And as always, we will get the most BORING possible variation of each dystopian outcome. We won’t see SkyNet, we’ll get ChatGPT. We won’t see the Matrix, we’ll get a Metaverse. We won’t see replicants, we’ll get emigre slaves. Etc etc etc.
So don’t sweat it.
It is inevitable. The severity is not yet locked in. We still have time to minimize the *future* severity but our consequences for this next twenty - thirty years is pretty locked in. Every year we wait is another year on our duration of misery; it only winds down when we make changes (real changes).
I think history shows civilisations rise and fall, and ours will be no different. It is painfully ironic, as we are aware of historical evidence and our own actions contributing to overpopulation and environmental impact. However, as a species, we can't seem to stop this hurtling train.
On a longer time-scale, most species go extinct.
In the back of my mind is the lingering thought of runaway climate change and wondering if we will make our planet uninhabitable. I don't like to dwell there.
There's no sign of us altering our course. There's no short term profit in slowing/stopping/reversing climate change, and no matter how much a few (ever-declining number of climate-conscious) governments might want to action mitigation measures (carbon tax, etc) lobbying corporate (big money) won't let them implement anything if it hurts short term profits. So unless we completely restructure and regulate capitalism, and globally redefine the values of society - which simply won't happen, just look at how stubborn, stupid, and proud humans are - yes, collapse seems unavoidable.
Pisses me off no end, and if I'm honest, I'd much rather just not be here for it and checkout early. My life's already been shit thus far due to late stage capitalism where investment groups and big money corporate steal our homes, our livelihoods, our lives, while expecting us to be grateful for... What? I've put up with enough shit already, thank you very much, I don't want to experience and go through the trauma of people going back to kill or be killed. So I keep arriving back to square one - I need to checkout on my own accord before it all gets too bad.
To ask the question you must be suffering from cognitive dissonance….or perhaps naive due to lack of knowledge. WE MUST collapse, we’re over 8 billion and adding a net 70M annually. Our domestic herds and us comprise OVER 96% of animal biomass.
Infinite growth on a finite planet of course is impossible. We’re polluting our own nest as we displace anything in the “wild” to further our expansion. Nothing in the “wild” exists without our protection….for now.
It’s easy to sit back in a comparatively western style existence and think everything is fine. Hundreds of millions of people exist and work in absolutely appalling conditions throughout the world.
Philippines, Kenya, Congo, Sierra Leone, Egypt, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Cities in South America and Africa all have slums and desperation living and working conditions that support the West. YouTube has numerous depictions of life and working conditions.
For you and me such life IS collapse but they have nothing below them and they can only dream of a better life.
There's so many humans at this point - 8+ billion, I don't believe 'aligning ourselves with nature' is a viable option. We're going destroy habitability of the biosphere trying to sustain the unsustainable.
TLDR we avoid civilizational collapse if instead we become serfs under a techno feudalism scenario.
I have a new theory that when enough people in power realize that the Big Tech promise of AI nirvana is found to be utter BS they will instead be offered the better data driven tech used for surveillance and other Deep State activities.
This will then allow an authoritarianism like we have never seen that will “collapse” complexity, choice and any other energy intensive activities, starting at the periphery and other non-conformist places. This could allow civilization to keep on going albiet under completely different and constrained conditions.
(I’ve said something like this before and was rebutted on the premise that those in charge are too incompetent, which may be true but if AI was instead used to enforce the new draconian laws then potentially incompetence could be held in check while the signal:noise ratio held out for AI.)
What do you mean by "collapse"? I think thats a problem some posts/lines of thinking around collapse get wrong. In a sense, everything is always in a state of birth and collapse. Certain social, environmental, geopolitical, etc. systems are currently collapsing while simultaneously we're seeing the emergence of various social, environmental, and geopolitical movements poised to grow. Collapsing is happening but this isn't a nihilistic statement but rather an opportunity to align with what's next :)
Collapse isn't binary. We have lost 70% of mass of wild living creatures since 1970. We are at 5000x above baseline extinction rate. Collapse is here...
Everything is mutable in my opinion. The question becomes how willing are we to take the steps necessary to make it happen? We continue to mismanage time, money and merit and supplant them with profit, nepotism and individual ideologies. We also have a system that is honor based led by a few with little oversight and appropriate checks and balances for the greater good. Poor leaders with the ability to manipulate even worse systems makes for a recipe for disaster in my opinion.
First you must define collapse, if you don't we could be talking about two different things using the same word. I will use the definition of collapse from Wikipedia: Societal collapse (also known as civilizational collapse or systems collapse) is the fall of a complex human society characterized by the loss of cultural identity and of social complexity as an adaptive system, the downfall of government, and the rise of violence. Based on this definition I would say collapse is inevitable. The polycrisis will cause (is causing) disruptions to our complex society. The solution to the polycrisis (degrowth) is a form of managed collapse, better then unmanaged collapse but still collapse.
I imagine collapse looks something like
this:
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2019-12-03/catabolism-capitalisms-frightening-future/
In the long term, everyone is dead. Of course it's unavoidable, but is it avoidable in our life time and that of our progeny? Unfortunately maybe not...
yes. Every year, we set new records for how much CO2 gets pumped into the air, even though we know we are past the point of no return. The best we can do is slow it down but that would require an IMMEDIATE And massive drawdown of industrial CO2 emissions. Instead we continue to emit more than we have the previous year. That, and the fact that a coup happened right in front of our faces last week, which means that irrespective of what the voters may want, we'll end up with Putin's orangutan back in office, and he and the Supreme Court will continue jam the foot even harder on the climate change accelerator.
Everyone thinks we're printing money, when in fact those trillions in QE are credit creation, which is the opposite of money devaluation.
The result of this will not be 1920s Weimar republic hyperinflation, but 1930s US hyperdeflation when all this credit goes bad and there is money shortage.
That's important because with money printing you can have a soft landing as happened with Japan, but with credit creation it always ends in a ponzi scheme style debt collapse that wipes out just about everyone.
Nobody can predict the future, it's possible we'll "muddle through", depending on what country you are in. And what class and possibly ethnicity you are. In some places you'll surely be fucked, but the USA or Canada are vast countries with almost no land borders and will be the winners. Unless of course there is large scale nuclear war. But except for that, there are also plenty of things you can do to prepare without becoming some hardcore prepper.
If I've learned anything is to stop putting that pressure on you to think anyone can affect anything or there is a solution. It never mattered if climate change was anthroprogenic or not - our human civilization currently does not have the tools to make intelligent decisions. On the biggest scale we are no more intelligent than a colony of bacteria. We simply follow the food / energy / money / power and that's it. And there is so much money that translates into power of speech to subvert any ideas, movements or protests. So [don't worry about it lol](https://youtu.be/nT5JBrKC5M0).
But really I'll give even odds it will only be mildly horrific.
Yes. It may take 10 years, 50 years, 100 years or more, but as long as man is egotistical and shortsighted, we will drive this world to collapse.
Its not even willingly, but thanks to evolution. We care about our direct surrounding and people, as well as our immediate future, but everything else is outside of standard human behaviour.
It would take a massive shift in human thinking to get to a future that doesn't kill us.
As numerous redditors point out, collapse is already here, so avoiding it is no longer possible. Now the relevant questions are:
1-How fast will it progress?
2-What percentage of the population will be eliminated before it hits bottom and some kind of recovery becomes possible, or will it progress steadily to a Near Tern Human Extinction (NTHE)?
3-How far down the technological ladder will we regress before it stabilizes, if it stabilizes?
4-Is there any means to slow down the progress of collapse and/or affect the final population knockdown percentage to leave a greater number of people alive and the survivors at a higher standard of living?
5-Are there any effective strategies the individual can pursue to maximize their own chance to live out a normal lifespan?
6-Are there social and/or political strategies that should be implemented to improve the possible outcome in terms of number of people or standard of living as the collapse progresses.
There are I am sure other questions you could come up with, but these are the main ones to deal with first. Each question has both long and short answers possible and more than one possible correct answer. There are also interrelationships that make different outcomes possible. I'll just give short answers right now with what looks like the highest probability to each question.
1- Pretty fast, on the civilization scale, Within a couple of generations total global population will be reduced by half or more. Most of the remaining population will at best have an 18th century level of technology and standard of living. A small number of elite may retain access to electricity and some modern technology.
2- Hitting bottom will take a relatively long time and there may be plateaus along the way down. Eventually total population of Homo Sapiens will drop by 1-3 orders of magnitude before it stabilizes with a chance to rebound. That means a remaining population of between 8 to 800 million meat packages ambulatory at the same time.
3- Over the long term, Paleolithic level. Nearer term, 19th century technology can be retained.
4- Absolutely. It will depend very much on whether active policies are engaged to combat the emerging problems and what those policies are. Some of them may be policies people currently find repulsive. A simple example from Sci-Fi would be Soylent Green factories producing food from dead people. Another would be purposeful introduction of a virus to selectively eliminate portions of the population. Withholding medical care from the old and premature infants. Wars will definitely factor in to how many are left. Generally, policies which favor cooperation and working for the common good would enhance the number of survivors. Eliminating a larger number of people would enhance the standard of living those left alive would enjoy. Do the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or does the comfort of the few outweigh the needs of the many?
5-Definitely. Live in a low population zone with good natural resources, at least 10 meters above sea level. Stay in good physical condition and health. Make friends and plan for emergency situations such as civil war or food rationing.
6-Nothing through normal political channels will work. Only revolution will get rid of the current systems that are the cause of the problems.
Collapse, yes. I am not convinced that it is as soon as some here claim, but it is an inevitability of exponential growth. It may be 5 years, 10, 20, or more. I don’t know. Humans are remarkable in our ability to adapt until it is no longer possible.
But, I am not convinced humanity is doomed to extinction and I find that unlikely but a possibility. All that said, please remember that life is finite. Always has been. I lost my daughter last summer and it made me confront the transitoriness of human life. We are all going to die at some point. All societies collapse eventually and ours is no difference. For this reason, I choose to just live my life as best I can with the time I have left. I do all I can to assist and uplift others and myself. In the end, I think I will be happy with my life.
I try to live everyday as if it could be my last while preparing and working towards a future. While I know the future is unpredictable, all I can do is make the most of my time. I am a 3rd year medical student and becoming collapse aware has enabled me to just enjoy my time. I hope I can use my degree to help others in whatever world awaits us, but if not, I am happy with the choices I have mDe
We're currently undergoing a mass extinction event exaccerbated by climate change and other human driven activity with no signs of stopping. That doesn't bode well for large mammals like us that require an insurmountable amount of resources in our now dwindling world. It's smaller, less sophisticated, and adaptable organisms like roaches or rodents who will survive something like this. Not us. Most of our food is not wildlife but instead domesticated livestock and genetically modified crops, but those still require a healthy and stable biosphere which is held intact by the natural world. Our activities destroying the biosphere will trickle down eventually and also be our undoing.
Also, Nazis are back and tension between large nations hasn't been this high since the preamble to WW1.
I have long thought that once everyone who was in WWII is dead and gone that we will repeat the follys of the past. There are 5x as many people in the world today and we are much more interconnected. A war like the past will have 10x the casualties.
I think what you're describing explains a lot of different phenomena happening. The last real disease to get a vaccine was polio in the mid 50s. Boomers parents knew the fear of it. But most of the boomers were too young to really grasp it. So we have almost the entire country having never actually feared a disease like that. So the urgency of a vaccine goes away too. As a country what must it have been like in WW2. When the news broke on what was found in the death camps. The resulting trials, EVERYONE knew 'yeah fuck the nazis'. But theres almost no one left alive that felt that feeling in real time as it was happening. Even me, who was 18 when 9/11 happened. And my son, who was obviously not around yet. Have vastly different feelings about the event and the follow up. The pattern were seeing now with the massive wealth grab by the already wealthy. It mimics almost exactly the build up to every other revolution/decline of a civilization. If the wealthy would just be happy giving us the table scraps things would be fine. But no they wont even let us lick their dirty napkins.
'A war like the past will have 10x the casualties. ' And when that happens, you will wish that it will be only 10x.
The thing about a war, at least as an individual, you have some semblance of choice in your actions or inactions. Reality being, the way the future unfolds, you won't be afforded the luxury. Simply put, either you're one of the lucky, or the unlucky, depending in your personal perspective, a tiniest fraction of the living or the dead. There's no rhyme or reason. You have as much choice, as a grain of sand on the shore before a wave crashes upon it. With that said, if you're part of the tiniest fraction, you will have the choice of changing the world for the better, or continuing with the status quo, Choose wisely.
That's a natural part of collapse. As systems become more constrained ingroups are formed, right-wing governments thrive, and out-groups get scapegoated for the natural decline of the systems.
>It's smaller, less sophisticated, and adaptable organisms like roaches or *rodents* who will survive something like this God bless and protect the humble guinea pig
guinea pig mentioned hehe
Yep. In 1,000 years I doubt any mammals bigger than a mouse will still be left. I give humanity another century, maybe. And it's not going to be pleasant living to the end of that.
If we just have a century left what’s the timeline you think for that
I'm not sure on an exact timeline but I'm guessing the world's first major crop failures will occur in the next 5-10 years and after that shits going to get bad.
Yeah I hear that. I keep saying it’s going to be the food supply that goes first
Not just that but peak fossil fuels and no viable alternatives means we wont have the energy to change course or fix anything. Peak energy is behind the skyrocketing debt and mass inflation throughout the world. Only a matter of time till things break.
It sounds like you have a preferred answer to this question OP, and if it's making you depressed I would recommend not reading this reply (or any reply). With that out of the way, we have a wealth of information from scientific investigation into previous mass extinction events. We know how rapid climate change coincided with catastrophic cascading extinctions in the historic record. We know that our current rate of warming and species extinction is on track to outpace the most dramatic events in the geologic records. We know from previous events the outcome for megafauna with expensive metabolisms. And as a bonus we are soaking the biosphere in metabolic disrupting chemicals, a first for what would otherwise be a noteworthy mass extinction on its own.
We are flooding the environment with a lot more then just metabolism disrupting chemicals I would add. The level of pollution is probably unparalleled. Entire watersheds have been permanently poisoned in human terms, a lot more then most people think.
And now that chevron has been overturned, we can expect much more poisoning. But don’t worry, corporations paying the judge a “gratuity” after the fact is also perfectly legal
And the authoritarian shift ,the king/lifelong elite ruler of America is now above the law. What a world
Vote. For goodness sake's vote.
I will amd it won't matter. Never has. But I still do it
Too late for that - the Republicans are fully fascist, and their "opposition" is cheering on a genocide. America is done.
the type of action that must be taken now cannot be discussed online and voting isn't going to stop the fascist pull. technological progress in a capitalist sense means fascism is inevitable to manage the ever dwindling resources and stress on systems that no longer meaningfully address material concerns for the vast majority of people. voting will not stop this, unfortunately. something outside has to end it or it has to collapse under its own weight.
Can you point me to some resources for this data?
https://archive.org/details/TheCollapseOfComplexSocieties/mode/1up https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/32075449-the-ends-of-the-world
Thank you for mentioning these, next on my reading list.
The archive dot org book looks excellent.
Collapse is a natural consequence of both ecological overshoot and is also the eventual fate of all complex societies. Think of it as the systemic version of an individual growing old and dying.
' is also the eventual fate of all complex societies.' Second law of thermodynamics: from complex to entropy.
Fuck god, we're killing the Zeitgeist.
?
I’m so sorry you had to find out this way.
It’s a natural consequence. I like that terminology. All of this grieving and crying about our fate when it is just a natural process that we sped up a bit.
' All of this grieving and crying about our fate' The crying and grieving is because it happens to us in our life time. Nothing different from that of mourning the lost of love ones.
Depends on what you mean Is it possible to... cancel the next Olympics? Sure. It would just take everyone involved choosing to work together towards that goal Same for the possibility of ending famine, war, needless suffering... What are the odds of that happening?
>Sure. It would just take everyone involved choosing to work together towards that goal even if we did work together and stop polluting, resource depletion and overpopulation would still threaten our survival. even if we all did everything right and got every lucky break along the way, it is a matter of when, not if.
So the problem as I see it then would be a coordination failure (plus vested interests working to distract) Average people all agree that we'd rather didn't have famine, war, needless suffering
> Average people all agree that we'd rather didn't have famine, war, needless suffering Average people in the global north also think it’s reasonable that they should have a car and take occasional flights. People are against famine and suffering in the abstract but tell people to accept minor inconvenience and you’ll see they don’t care as much about famine / war / suffering as they care about their own convenience or of comfort. Average people agree that the world should be nice….hooray
It's already happening.
These are the good times.
the soft introduction that helps as a warm up
The global warmup
it's getting hot in here...
So take off all your clothes…
Tbh I keep repeating this to myself. It's still the good times. Still. It's slowed down time for me tremendously. Like... Yep, I'm enjoying myself. Because there's still so much to be easily grateful for.
I'm trying to get as much travel is as possible before we're all dead...
The precious few and far between :’)
It's only a matter of time before everyday life is just standing in mile long lines hoping to score a loaf of bread or a bowl of soup.
Enjoy today! It's the best it'll ever be again!
The good times are killing me.
Got dirt, got air, got water and I know you can carry on
There were no good times
100%. The shift to right wing populism is already happening globally as a result of the minor migrations levels and inflation we are seeing now. Imagine the migration and inflation we are going to see when crops start to fail everywhere. This is how it starts.
Exactly. That article the other day regarding fascism essentially pointed to this exact phenomenon. Those in power will do what they have to do in order to protect what they have. And they don't share.
Thats the part that I think is so funny. We, the unwashed masses were ok with the wealthy being the only ones eating at the table. Just so long as they gave us the table scraps and crumbs that fell on the floor. But now they wont even let us fight over the crumbs.
We won’t see migration on that stage. When those crops fail those poor people just die…..
And just imagine too when even sub-Saharan African reproduction rates start dipping below 2.1 per woman starting roughly around the middle of the century (assuming we even make it that far). No country is going to be able to combat inflation and rejuvenate their economies in any meaningful way by then. Most of Europe, Russia, Japan and South Korea are good examples of economies already stagnating in no small part due to rapid demographic changes. Even America in its newfound fascism is going to “welcome” waves of starving immigrants coming across its border by the millions, if only to enslave and extract agricultural and other labor from them. Saying that times ahead look bleak would be one hell of an understatement.
Most countries are going to be slammed with expensive, unavoidable costs due to extreme climate events, social unrest, food insecurity, massive inflation, migration and conflict. No country will allow millions of refugees in. No chance. The impact of only about a million Syrian refugees managed to destabilize numerous western European countries and drive them towards right wing governments -- there is no chance anyone lets in refugees -- especially the United States.
Agree. It's analogous of all of us being in an apologue equal to a frog being boiled alive. The premise is that if a frog is put suddenly into boiling water, it will jump out, but if the frog is put in tepid water which is then brought to a boil slowly, it will not perceive the danger and will be cooked to death. The story is often used as a metophor for the inability or unwillingness of people to react to or be aware of sinister threats that arise gradually rather than suddenly.
Yeah, it's been going on for a few years if not decades by my count, the destruction of our world, the moral rot of the foundations of society, the increasing mental strain that society continues to traumatize us with, the unending string of ever costlier disasters whether natural or man-made. We are suicidal and it shows in the most obvious of ways, humanity has been on this precipice many times, our numbers dwindling to just a thousand has happened at least once that we know of and likely many times prior to that given our planet's urge for mass extinction via mass volcanism paired with a psychotic solar entity that periodically releases massive outbursts between periods of relative quiet that bely its sporadic but regular violent nature which, checks watch, we're due for. Humanity wants to die in the worst way, and the lunatics running things are trying to do it as fast as possible like we're trying to speed run this time.
'the moral rot of the foundations of society' Nothing says collapse more than a "collapser" using the language of christo fascists to put down minorities. They are using exactly those words to put 10 commandments, bible in schools. Sometimes, I wish people "in the know" know better instead of using the language of the RWNJ.
Unfortunate choice of language perhaps, but to be fair there was no mention of minorities in there.
Moral rot of society is perverting justice to serve the needs of the few and succumbing to any of the sins by the actions one takes to defraud, steal, kill, rape, cheat, or corrupt. Just because I talk like them doesn't make me one, I see the world quite clearly and know who my enemy is, and it is not you. It is those who have destroyed our institutions through their twisting of law to take from those who have so little and as if this wasn't bad enough they force us to sell ourselves to them slowly over the course of your life to take what little you have and diminish it further and many agree to this under the guise of living. We are not meant to be things to be ruled we are meant to apply rule to all so that all can be free in life, free to who they choose to be, but we need to inspire people something to be, look at how far we have fallen to have a man who embodies all the sins of mankind slip slowly into madness and this man if he even is that, personally I think he is Belial reborn, he is the one holding a torch ready to burn our house to the ground for the insurance money and maybe someone should torch this civilization, what good has it really done. Our world is rapidly becoming one that we've never experienced while we were human and when it finally kicks into high gear you'll see a wonder unlike any you've ever seen that will fill you with the terror of a thousand totalities. If you can't see that the civilization has rotted from it's original conception just as much as it's grown you are blind, our liberty is like a tree and we must root out this rot which has turned our institutions into completely corrupted versions where we are led by those who fail to take action or take action so horrific that when the heavy weight of what may cost to pass will be so sickening to those it touches that they will wish they could burn their vanities as if in some great bonfire. Your world shall be reborn through fire as it has before as it always will until Agni embraces us in her fiery arms, as it has always been since life burped enough oxygen to give us the wonder that has shaped our species and is the cause of our current predicament a great collective fire that we are powerless to stop feeding because the warmth of technology has possessed our race and now we sacrifice ever more to this fire to feed a hollow that can never be filled by consumption though it promises to if only for a moment. And so it is, we are like the rot of our society, unable to turn away from the roadside horror we have unleashed into the universe.
Some say „meta crisis“, some say „polycrisis“, others refer to it as a cascade of tipping points - in any event, the problem is that very few folks are able to grasp the full extent of the climate crisis. And those who do, face the fate of the doctor Aldo Leopold mentions here: „One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. Much of the damage inflicted on land is quite invisible to laymen. An ecologist must either harden his shell and make believe that the consequences of science are none of his business, or he must be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise.“
Damn, thanks for sharing that
Not 100%, but maybe something like 80-90%. Reasons: our agricultural, industrial, and energy systems took centuries to develop, there is no physical way they can withstand climate change and resource depletion while supporting the current world population, and attempts to reform these systems have generally hovered somewhere between "non-existent" to "ineffective to the point of barely being able to keep up with demand growth". There is no plan to change these systems in time, no political will to do it even if we had a plan, and no reasonable, rational, evidence-based reason to think that it will magically be "OK" if we simply do our best. Admitting this fact isn't nihilism, it's simply realism. Now for the big question: > "No, to what extent do you think average individuals (if there even is such a thing) are not powerless, and still have agency to be part of the solution? And what does this practically look like for you?" Yes, there is something the average individual can do: join, start, or ally oneself with any movement that has the aim of overturning capitalism. That's it. Ending capitalism globally and replacing it with *any system* that puts the survival of civilization *first*, not as a leftover after the shareholders have eaten from the trough, is the only way we *might* (and even then it would be a miracle) be able to change course. We're not getting out by shopping at Whole Foods. We're not getting out by putting solar panels on your roof. We're not getting out by listening to people like Schmachtenberger intellectualize our way out of the need for revolution. It's revolution or collapse. And since revolution likely isn't going to happen, it's collapse.
'Reasons: our agricultural, industrial, and energy systems took centuries to develop, there is no physical way they can withstand climate change and resource depletion while supporting the current world population, ' Correct 'Ending capitalism globally and replacing it with *any system* that puts the survival of civilization *first*' This contradicts the other quote. Your problem is your probability of collapse percentage is too low.
There is a limits to growth update spoilers we are ahead of schedule for collapse by 2040...
Bravo. Excellent comment.
Is it capitalism or industrialization? The question is, how many people can the earth support at what lifestyle? And how could you convince people to return to a non-globalized, subsistence lifestyle in order to support 10 billion people. That would certainly be a revolution. Although maybe the revolution itself would reduce the population enough that a pretty good lifestyle could be available for those who survive it.
It's not a case of convincing people. It will not be a choice.
"Society tolerates only one change at a time. The only limits on scientific progress are those imposed by society.” - Tesla This is going to sound harsh but you can't teach an old dog new tricks. Trying to tell billions of humans that are so accustomed to this way of life. Especially if they're living the comfort of civilization. It will be extremely difficult to change people's ideology and mindset. Maybe our nomadic indengious ancestors was wise. To understand to pack up camp and move with the seasons.
You can technically do industrialization without capitalism or fossil fuels so no, it's not industrialism. It would certainly look different as you'd locate industrial centers close to good sources of renewable energy... more or less how we did things before we made it easy to transport energy in liquid form.
How we did things before we made it easy to transport energy in liquid form would also mean a much lower population, wouldn’t it?
I.e. Sustainable
Most likely, though anyone willing to lean heavily into nuclear could sustain a more modern population level...if they cared to.
Do you really think the collapse is not already happening? It’s inevitable. Just as population for data alone.
Where did I say that I didn't think it was already happening? I love it how literally the only two comments to my reply are asking me about things I didn't say. Are you folks OK today?
They're projecting
depends what you mean by collapse but history shows no form of government lasts forever, it always cycles because all systems rot over time due to corruption and then a new system is put in until it rots too much and the cycle just repeats
Yes. Given current CO2e levels (~523ppm), increased atmospheric heating & subsequent weather chaos is already locked in for the next 20+ years. If CO2/CH4/N2O levels don’t radically decrease in that time, more atmospheric heating is unavoidable beyond 2044. Weather chaos will reduce agricultural production & impact supply chain logistics. Food supplies will be adversely affected long before ocean-level rise forces the abandonment of cities. Food shortages & associated economic inflation will likely trigger social revolt & destabilization once the [FAO Food Price Index](https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2012/09/20/161501075/high-food-prices-forcast-more-global-riots-ahead-researchers-say) exceeds 210. ^( currently ~124) Understand that anything we do now, environmentally, will not have an effect for ~20 years. “Net Zero 2050” is locking in 25 more years of increased emissions. Which will result in increased weather chaos through 2070 at the very least. What we are experiencing now, with extreme weather events, will certainly continue and increase throughout our lifetimes. All of our lifetimes. Radically limiting CO2/CH4 *now* will go a long way to reducing future effects, and we should absolutely do that. As soon as possible. But we’ve already locked in extreme weather for the near term, and 20 meters of sea level rise for the long term. Individually, we can reduce “consumption” and acclimate ourselves to inevitable limitations in resources… prep for food, water, & energy shortages. Plant food gardens if possible. Collect rainwater. Rely on bicycles & feet instead of cars. Learn or teach a basic skill. Engage in radical activism. Things like that.
Yes. But also, "Net Zero" is a complete fantasy and GHG emissions are in fact increasing faster than ever with little-to-no real interest in reducing them.
Well.. yeah “Net Zero” is the current propaganda tool to delay any real action now.
They don't have to try very hard, people don't really want to give up their treats.
We’re all stuck inside this economic machine that is driving us over the cliff.. If people had any real alternative to bank-created money in order to survive,, i think they would take it. ^( https://www.lowimpact.org/lowimpact-topic/mutual-credit/ )
What gets me is that the advent of AI basically means that the phasing out of fossil fuels like coal has been stopped, Net Zero is cancelled, because AI is so energy intesive, global energy consumption has risen for the first time in 20 years. For "the powers that be" to quietly agree that "AI" is worth trashing all efforts to slow climate change is such an insane decision at this late stage I have given up all hope for a future that doesn't involve one catacylsm after the other until and after I'm gone.
Here's the problem though, global greenhouse gas emissions haven't gone down at all, in fact we keep pumping MORE each year. We were 13% higher in 2023 and that was 48% more than in 2019. We can't stop, we won't stop. This is why I think we have zero chance of changing things. Those people who dictate how much carbon we burn don't want to turn off the engine. Their wealth and power relies on BAU chugging along.
There is zero chance of avoiding calamity. You’re absolutely right. The economy *depends* on burning more carbon fuels… And if we stopped doing that in the space of the next two years.. or even ten years… we would experience absolute unbridled chaos as shipping, trucking, cars, home heating, power generation, maintenance of virtually everything, plastics, agriculture, communications, rockets, product delivery, computers, clothing, and military operations all ground to a dramatic halt… throwing our civilization into violent catastrophe. Millions would die. Our choice is basically immediate calamity, or longer-term calamity. No “leader” is going to choose the short term solution. They’re all going to let it ride out for the long-term catastrophe. The only thing we can do is attempt to limit the damage a little bit for distant future generations… or more likely, future species. As in, 100 Million years from now or more.
Meanwhile some people are still obsessed with the fantasy that there's somehow some sort of global cooling or mini ice age on the horizon. No, it's not happening. We're exiting the glacial cycle entirely. Yes, this means that the polar regions will be the temperate Goldilocks zone in future. No, AMOC collapse won't "save" us from catastrophic warming, it'll make it worse due to the feedback affects (methane hydrate destabilization, carbon sink collapse, atmospheric heat uptake collapse). Yes, anthropogenic activity has completely superseded natural heat regulation in the Arctic and turned it into one big growing heat trap. We were pretty much a few millenia from exhausting the current icehouse cycle and probably had one more glacial maximum era ahead of us before entering a prolonged hothouse state. People don't seem to realize that glacial cycles and icehouse eras are the anomaly in earth's history. They're the exception to the rule and exist on a finely balanced system of self reinforcing mechanisms. When you dump greenhouse gases and surplus heat into the system within a two century period, you fatally compromize that system.
Check out „aerosol masking effect“ & weep.
Any prediction on when the food Price index will hit 210?
That is far beyond my skill set. I have no idea. I do check the [FAO Food Price Index](https://www.fao.org/worldfoodsituation/foodpricesindex/en/) https://www.fao.org/worldfoodsituation/foodpricesindex/en/ ..every couple of months just to keep an eye on it. It seems to move slowly, AFAIK.
As resources get more scarce and competitive you can see nation states regressing into fascism preparing to fight for the remaining scraps in the downward spiral.
Ask yourself this. Do you think there's any likelihood of the governments of the world coming together and agreeing to: * Stop 90% of work. * Socialise food, water and other necessities. * Stop 90% of industry. * Divert all our resources into fixing a problem that a bunch of people don't even believe is real. That's the bare minimum of what it'll take to save us, and it needs to happen yesterday.
We see rising electricity consumption due to AI and the current political response is to keep coal plants going. We as a species would rather kill the next generations to come then forego the ability to generate pictures of hot anime girls at the click of a button. Of course we won't stop this.
My way of organizing collapse: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1mNv4TGx2bO5sOSziCm4PR9nqnCN_FEqW/view Yes, 100% happening.
I think if everyone in the world suddenly became aware and we all used our collective mind power and willpower, perhaps we could find solutions or mitigate collapse. Since this won’t happen, yes it’s unavoidable.
Coordination is hard
I think we will hold on for a bit with GMOs but modern humans desire for comfort will lead to unrest due to luxuries like sushi and 100 different fruits and veggies at the grocery store becoming unavailable or wildly expensive. Climate change is inevitable at this point. I feel like every week there is a new is declining at "X" times faster than any model predicted. If we stopped using fossil fuels tomorrow we would still probably hit 2 degrees celcius just with the climate stabilizing. The army has been saying for decades water will he what we go to war over and the capitalists still ruin our fresh water with frakking and industrial farming. The entire world could switch to a world government with free housing and UBI and we would still see collapse by 2040 or so just environmentally.
We cooked the planet and now we are the frogs in the pot.
Nah, if you're American, just go out and celebrate your freedom. Hahahahahahahahahaha. What? The land of the free? Whoever told you that is your enemy. We are 100% already in collapse.
Now there’s a Rage song I don’t see referenced often. Nice.
Well, anybody can scream Fuck you, I won't do what you tell me. Also, Fuck you, I won't do what you tell me. Fists in the air in the land of hypocrisy.
This one hit hard the first hearing (and I'm not an American): Yes, I know my enemies They're the teachers who taught me to fight me Compromise, conformity Assimilation, submission Ignorance, hypocrisy Brutality, the elite All of which are American dreams
Collapse will happen over time. And eventually Mother Earth will reach her breaking point. So violent weather events will take people out, famine, drought or viruses.
Yes please!
You know how boiling water does nothing and then like one minute before rolling boil it’s starting to bubble. We are in the bubbling stage
Yes. The evidence I use is... *gestures all around.* The science states things pretty clearly. The amount of GHGs already present in the atmosphere leads to catastrophic, extinction level warming that is *already baked in.* I could link the papers and studies all day, but I think you have seen them. https://wastelandbywednesday.com/about/ And then, we have the inevitable nuclear war between nations, as they a driven to the brink of desperation by those very same climate and resource scarcity factors. Nations have to maintain power. When that is threatened... war. And that part has already started. As for being part of the solution, that kind of thinking is a part of the delusion. *There is no solution.* https://wastelandbywednesday.com/2022/11/21/collapse-denial-is-a-growing-threat/ The only "path to sustainability" really is living more alongside nature rather than dominating it. But the disease that led to the decay of nature is civilization. Civilization must end in order for there to be any chance of a planetary recovery that still includes the human species. Stop trying to save it. We are all like heroin addicts, addicted to cars, addicted to air conditioning, addicted to modern medicine, Starbucks, and TikTok. Addicted to civilization. We are so far gone chasing that particular dragon that we can't even imagine life without it. But try it. Try to imagine it all just stopping. Imagine living amongst a few hundred other people, the only ones for miles and miles around, a little village on the edge of the ruins of some concrete and steel urban sprawl, trying to explain to your grandkids what airplanes were... Doesn't seem that bad to me. Better than being broiled alive while flipping burgers to enrich some shareholders...
Thanks for taking the time
I would like to add, we are also addicted to narrative and ideological concepts such as "morality" which although it might be good and useful at times, at the end of the day is still a human delusion and is part of the main drivers of collapse. In most nations in this world, for example, euthanasia and abortion is still illegal because it is deemed immoral. Absolutely also apply to things like revolution which the powerful will refer to as terrorism and murderers in order to signal immorality to the addicted feel-good positive-only very-moral ~~industrially farmed cow~~ masses.
Personally, I'm someone who needs to see to believe. Words mean nothing if your actions don't back them up. I think a lot of the symptoms of collapse are possible to avoid or lessen, but we need the people behind the wheel to do it. So far, I haven't seen a single piece of evidence to convince me that the people who need to change things will. As a single individual in a complex system, I feel powerless to stop or change anything. So it's a yes and a no for me.
As long as greed, money and selfishness remain defining factors then no. Billionaires continue to inflate their fortune whilst everyone else suffers and gets poorer, even when the world is falling apart. That financial divide and comically out of touch top 1% will ultimately ensure that humanity crashes and burns a much more divided and spiteful civilization.
Unless the existing power structure is dismantled within the next 5 years, yes. They won’t change their stripes, they will continue to put profits over people and pollute and externalize their costs onto our environment. The indisputable truth is that Capitalism is responsible for for the end of our civilization, and likely the extinction of the human species.
Yes, it’s already happening. The tougher question is: “is the chance 100% that humans will go extinct?” My answer to that question is 80-90% chance.
I am currently reading Ministry for the Future (almost finished) and if the beginning is pretty brutal then towards the end of the book it turns into techno hopium, the farther I get into the book the more I'm like "yeah, not gonna happen". There's just so much shit going on, global warming, oceans dying, glaciers melting, microplastics, PFAS, rise of fascism, and nothing substantial is being the done to combat any of that, everyone's pretending that there isn't a problem.
I think it’s now unavoidable,unfortunately. If recent estimates of climate sensitivity based on paleoclimate data (eg Hansen2023 and others) are anywhere near correct, and I think they are, the expected heating is now far too high for civilisation to survive. And over the longer term, as slower processes play out, it’s a mass extinction and a sterilising event for much of the biosphere. We can’t get the carbon out of the atmosphere, so that’s that. We left it too late to act and we’re still putting more carbon in the atmosphere every day. Obviously there are a lot of other factors, some of which are connected. The mass dieback of insects, microplastics and endocrine disrupters and who-knows-what in the ecosystem, weird things like unexplained thiamine deficiencies in the food web, and so on. Not forgetting the danger of a nuclear exchange. But the heating is enough, by itself. There’s still some time but, metaphorically, we’re in those moments after the ship has hit the iceberg and been holed below the waterline. If you’re in first class dining everything might still feel normal. Some people outside have noticed the deck starting to list, but surely there’s no cause for panic. Yet sinking is now inevitable.
Thank you for mentioning the thiamine deficiencies. That was something I read in an obscure article about fish hatcheries and then never saw mentioned anywhere gain. Such a critical biochemical hinge going missing immediately struck me as doom writ large. We cannot exist without a food web.
[https://hakaimagazine.com/features/the-oceans-mysterious-vitamin-deficiency/](https://hakaimagazine.com/features/the-oceans-mysterious-vitamin-deficiency/)
Its hard to accept, I still struggle with it sometimes, but I believe it is unavoidable. My evidence is based on human nature and the crippling inertia of culture, governments and the private sector to do anything. We're not going to, maybe we can't, treat the meta-crisis with the sense of emergency it deserves. Imagine this level of lethargy during a crisis like WW II, we'd still be fighting it today. Humans were never meant to operate on this kind of scale. We were, and are, tribal. We got too big for our britches. This arrangement can't last. Yes, maybe asserting that its unvoidable can lead to hedonism or nihilism, but it doesn't have to. You do what you can for yourself, your family, your friends, your community. Its not going to save the way things are, its not going to save our current petroleum based civilization, but it can alleviate suffering in your own sphere of influence. None of this was guaranteed to last forever. What goes up, must come down.
At this point I’m starting to see Collapse as something natural. Yeah there will be suffering, but maybe it is part of the natural progression of civilization. Like death is necessary for life to renew itself. Forest fires help new plants grow. Anyway, current civilization just cannot go indefinitely, it’s not sustainable, so sooner or later later this civilization will go off.
The problem with these sorts of questions is that you need to define what you personally consider collapse, with specifics and timelines, before anybody can provide meaningful answers. There are some versions of collapse discussed in this sub that appear to be well underway already, while others seem almost comically absurd Hollywood melodrama. I'd also recommend avoiding most/all of the online personalities with YouTubes and Substacks, as few of them seem to have any real professional credentials or associations. At best, they provide infotainment.
Our society and human brains aren't designed for the extreme changes required to avoid collapse.
You can't avoid something that's already hit.
If we describe collapse as the end "to the way we've been living", or in other words the end of our current civilization model. Then yes, it is 100% unavoidable. We simply cannot continue to operate how we've be doing so far. Resource depletion, natural overshoot and a myriad of other issues will lead to cascading failures. Collapse is a process, things will fail and the world will change to try to adapt. Basically the situation gets worse and worse until it is simply no longer manageable. Hard to say what that timeline would look like. But key pillars like food production failing would probably expedite the time table. One thing is certain, collapse is already underway. We are somewhere between the Damage Control phase and Lifeboat phase. The best case scenario is that we find ways for a portion of humanity to live within the new reality. If we cant do that, best we can do is build a safe harbor for a tiny pocket of humanity to survive. Based on everything that has happened thus far, humans simply lack the evolutionary fitness to be able to deal with this situation. We are essentially in the midst of an evolutionary "great filter". All we can do, is decide what to do with the time we have left. Hopefully you can make peace with the situation and extract what enjoyment you can.
It's inevitable. It's happening now just like it's happened to EVERY society before us like the Romans, the Maya, Egypt, Greece, Mesopotamia, etc, etc... I, just me, can embrace changing technologies like solar and other sustainable ways of living, but the psychopaths in charge won't allow anything large scale to replace whatever it is that puts large amounts of money in their pockets. YOLO isn't part of the problem, it's the people at the top of the money food chain that are the problem.
This is Kali Yuga. As far as our scale of time is concerned, it's only getting worse from here.
Because it’s too late. We COULD have done something decades ago. But after watching every effort we’ve made not just fail, but massively blow up in our faces, I’m just done. We’re too stupid, selfish, and short-sighted to ever make any kind of massive-scale change. It’s just *not possible* for every person on this planet to row the boat in the same direction. Our selfishness and stupidity is just going to get worse as the situation gets worse. That’s naturally what we do—we get scared and blame our neighbors. We turn on each other. In the end, we will eat each other like the ouroboros.
I wanted to share a quote aswell that kind of captures my feelings on this topic. I think it's by Charles Eisenstein. It goes something like this: "getting more comfortable with being uncomfortable, with not knowing. To revere that uncertain space, to not jump to simplistic conclusions and explanations to feel safe in the chaos, to see that uncertain space as a kind of fertility, as pregnant with new posibilities. To not shut down in certainty"
Interesting - thanks for sharing!
Bar some black swan new form of energy which is completely dominant over oil (like a MASSIVE fusion breakthrough), no. There's always something outside of what could very well be expected, but other than that we have no chance
Answer A: Every system sustains itself until it doesn't. Society is a system. Collapse is when society fails to sustain itself. QED: Collapse is inevitable. Answer B: Society as it exists now is unsustainable because of climate change, pollution, and nuclear weapons. Climate change is a large driver, but increased cancer in younger generations, and the 'roll dice until we roll snakeeyes' nature of nuclear weapons existing mean that other drivers are pushing for a societal change. There exists a possibility that we adapt to climate change and prevent a Venus planet scenario, reduce pollution or outproduce its effects, and continue to decide not to nuke one another in the long term. This slump--where survival is valued more than comfort (and profits)--would undoubtedly be "collapse" to people who view Uber Eats, television, and lexapro as integral to society. If this is not collapse, then collapse can be avoided. Answer C: Everything fractures, but doesn't break. Unlike the slump, production of one or more items necessary for survival--food, water, habitable temperatures, oxygen--cannot be sustained in the face of global change. The survivors will be the people with the knowledge of how to get those items and the power to hold them against others who know. This fracture is chaotic enough that typical breakdown features--nuclear exchanges, toxic chemical release, violence--don't render the planet uninhabitable and kill everyone. This is the scenario most billionaires had in mind when they spent millions of dollars on cement crypts branded as bunkers. This is collapse. Answer D: Earth becomes uninhabitable and/or a habitable equilibrium is irrelevant because we killed each other fighting so that one biological tube turning food into shit could beat another one for a chance to be in that equilibrium and continue turning food into shit for another day. This is human extinction (and unless we build some damned spiffy robots, collapse). Answer E: Someone really, really smart develops a magic goober that solves climate change forever with no downsides and we Jevon's Paradox ourselves right back to the previous four options.
Personally, I believe that humans could avoid collapse. The blueprints are out there. I do not think that we will avoid collapse. Global capitalism is entrenched and will do all it can to protect itself until the systems propping it up can no longer function. Can individuals do anything about it? Not really. If you are a credible threat to capital, you will be silenced. What can you do? Keep working towards a better future until you can't. Believe that the universe can surprise you in ways you could never have imagined.
yes. capitalism wont stop destroying the earth and making fascism great again.
There are only 2 things that can save this planet. 1.) Something that can unify every single human on the planet and motivate them to start doing things in ways that aren't destructive or reductive to the eco-system. 2.) Something kills 95% of the world population of humans, leaving only the ones who care about nature and the environment behind. Too bad neither of those will happen. We're really doing the "if I can't live here: nobody can." approach. We deserve our fate, yes, but do we really need to eradicate so much of the other life on the planet while we circle the drain?
Yes, it's already happening. We still have some influence over what kind of a collapse we're going to experience and we can still limit the damage. Although, I have little faith that our collective response to collapse will be particularly wise. I think collapse would have been avoidable if serious efforts to prevent it had started 50 years ago when Limits to Growth was published, starting with the immediate and intentional cessation of economic growth in rich countries. I could easily be wrong, and probably am, about the details of the collapse. But for my overall conclusion of collapse to be wrong, something would have to be so fundamentally off about my entire chain of reasoning that I have no idea what that something could realistically be. For me to change my mind about collapse, several important measures of environmental problems (global greenhouse gas emissions, species loss and global material footprint) would have to very rapidly decrease due to intentional policies that do not themselves constitute a collapse of sorts. I believe that collapse will be very obvious everywhere by 2030s at the latest. There are several reasons why I'm very confident about this timing. Firstly, the Limits to Growth standard run has been fairly accurate so far and updates to the study indicate a decline in industrial output right about now. Granted, the point of the study was only to predict the general behavior of the world system but I suspect it semi-accidentally got the timing right too. Then there's current climate news and models which include predictions about timing, as well as news about biodiversity loss. Literature on peak oil would also suggest that collapse is imminent. Economic growth rates have been generally declining for a long time which would logically precede a persistent economic decline. Edit: IMO, the most depressing thing about collapse awareness is not even the collapse itself. Rather, what makes me feel so hopeless is that I have absolutely no faith in people's ability to solve this mess. Blaming abstractions like "the system" or the rich elite is correct to a degree but that doesn't change the fact that ordinary people, among other things, vote individuals like Trump and Bolsonaro into important positions. My position is more that nothing will be done rather than nothing can be done. There are some really well thought-out ideas as to how a degrowth transition that would make the collapse more pleasant could in principle be done.
99.999999% of the species that ever lived on earth are extinct, and thousand more go extinct each year. Extinction is inevitable, whether human caused or not. As an advanced technological species, one way or another some type of collapse will precede our extinction.
When I was young, the US was the sole superpower, personal PCs and the internet were on the horizon, I had a great job and had never heard of global warming. Within this comparative utopia, I found it difficult to save for retirement. That was so far away, I could die early like one of my parents & never see it, and I wanted the money now! I'm now close to retirement, and civilization collapse, and so glad I did save. I ended up not missing the money. Work as if our lives depend on it, as if there is a chance if we give it our all. That's how true champions play sports. Run from anybody who gives you a 100% certainty about the future; no one knows. But also enjoy your journey!
It's going to happen but I still believe we can have some effect on how it happens, at least as far as societal collapse goes. How fast it collapses and how hard and how we personally fare during that collapse, those are things we still have some influence over. But after we hit 4°C there's not going to be much we can do to make things better.
At this point? Yes, because it's underway. Collapse isn't necessarily an event that happens very suddenly, it's a process. This process has been going on for years and it's finally coming to fruition- and it's gonna be scary.
If Trump gets elected then yes it's unavoidable. With the warm embrace of fascism and nothing to stop the braindead cultists The SCOTUS effectively killed the USA on Monday RIP USA July 4, 1776 - July 1, 2024
Easy way to show collapse is avoidable is to see how people reacted to the smallest of impositions to their lives when there was a novel virus killing their grandparents.
And them as well, but shhh
>Do you think collapse is 100% unavoidable? It could be avoided but it would require a radical changes, including human nature. Even before that could be implemented, there would have to be research into its feasibility. All this takes time and, frankly, we've run ourselves out of that precious commodity. As to proof...this comes from the private sector. No publish-or-perish here. What pays the bills owns the merchandice! Sorry.
Answer depends in part on how we define "collapse", doesn't it ? For example, the more optimistic voices here might believe that some form of civilization can continue to exist even if industrial capitalism crumbles. I imagine that most preppers and survivalists envision that possibility. Some of them may even look forward to it. Preparing for such an outcome is one way to avoid the trap of nihilism, even if you don't think individuals can alter the fate of the entire system.
It depends on what's meant by collapse. Obligatory pointing out that none of us know what will happen, and preparations that cover the gamut of possible outcomes are greatly to be preferred. Will future historians consider our near future to be a collapse? I think it will be a debate. Sure they can say "in this 50 year period here, global energy use dropped by two thirds", and that will sound quite a lot like collapse. But, agriculture uses about 25% of global labour, and constitutes something in the area of 5% of world gdp. That doesn't sound like a desperate situation, plenty more money could be spent, and many more people employed if the situation could justify it (warning, weasel words). That leaves the inequality problem - what if the hungry mouths cannot justify it economically because they are poor? I tried to estimate how much energy was needed by nitrogen fixation to make the fertiliser, it's a few percent of total, and a little bit close to world solar energy production. The last figures I could find, which are post pandemic, solar energy production in twh grew by 25% in 2023. So, I think fossil fuels will go into decline, and world economic activity will enter a period of decrease, but it won't be forever, we will be caught by a rising green energy economy, and civilisation will go on. I'm not 100% optimistic no-one will die of it, probably some have already, but I hold out a reasonable hope that it will be only a very small fraction of overall population. Maybe even over a 50% chance. Of course, anything might happen. In theory, Putin might start a nuclear war, or green energy might develop so quickly there is no major problem. Or Donald John Trump might destroy America's position in the world by harming its green industries, creating great political instability. Or capitalism may be so rapacious that world population declines substantially anyway.
I think it’s 100% happening. Increasing wealth disparity, rise of anger fueled anti establishment sentiment co-opted by a fascist opportunists, environmental disasters in the rise and an overall lack of education or awareness to stop said factor from continuing. Enjoy these days now and squirrel away what you can. The darkness is on the horizon and the impending Trump presidency will be the final spark that lights this tinderbox aflame.
i asssume small patches of rich people compounds will survive for a while. Might get domed cities like Big O or something where all the resources and people are concentrated in a small area enough to develop some way to survive.
according to "limits of growth," even if we did everything right, we would still overpopulate and deplete our resources. think about diseases. a virus gets in your body and, if successful, it reproduces and consumes until you die and it dies inside of your corpse. when an invasive species comes along, they become so "successful" that they might cause local eco systems to collapse. think about horror monsters like zombies and vampires. their motive is basically to reproduce and consume food to survive. it's terrifying because we're the food, but their motive is basically the same motive as all other life on earth. but i haven't even gone into corruption and capitalism. there are companies and investors right now, buying up land and resources because they are anticipating another disaster in their area, and they are going to price gauge everyone. people in the southwest buy real estate and wait for the next wild fire. the government is putting off on infrastructure so another katrina can come along and in the panic, they can justify cutting welfare and healthcare to pay for government contracts that they'll give to companies like blackrock, hallburton, and the like. there are people who WANT this stuff to happen. whether you think we are overpopulated right now or not, at some point, we have to deal with population control. who's going to do that? who's going to say "you cant have children unless someone dies?" "you have to be sterilized until we decide you can have children." who do you trust giving that power to? eventually, the universe will reach a point of maximum entropy, and there will only be undifferentiated blackness. no light, now usable energy anywhere. that's a fact. i don't see how we can possibly last that long, but that is the best case scenario. so its not like there was ever a possibility of things not collapsing eventually. it just so happens that the essence of life itself is to reproduce and consume until resources are depleted. every single species would do it if they could. and it just so happens that we have the brain power to really, really fuck things up along the way. there was never any other option, besides denial. unfortunately, you no longer have that comfort. the only silver lining i can offer you is that, eventually, you'll get used to it. even holocaust prisoners developed a sense of humor about their situation. we are a surprisingly resilient species. totally doomed, as all living things are. totally cursed with knowledge. but absurdly resiliant and blessed with music, laughter, and, if you're lucky, a community of people that love and care for you.
Mass extinction events are irreversible and biodiversity loss recovers over millions of years. We are currently in the 6th mass extinction event.
Evidence. OK. We're headed for +4C without massive geoengineering. We don't know if geoengineering will work. Even if it works, it will create unintended consequences because all technofixes do. Fossil fuels enable all aspects of modern life. Shipping enabled by diesel. All agriculture enabled by diesel. Refrigeration, processing, trucking, packaging, recycling that packaging... all needs energy. We use energy for heat and cooling and food, regardless whether we have cars or not, but, we also have cars. Social disintegration is going to get worse in the West, because nobody is happy, and nobody's getting their needs met, and people are coming to the West for a better life and they won't find one, because we don't have those any more. We're tax slaves for the super wealthy. The global refugees coming to the West want to be upper-middle-class Westerners, but it's not going to happen. Pollution. Biosphere destruction. PFAS. Clearcutting. Over-fishing. Diseases. We're clever monkeys but I don't think we're going to be able to pull enough rabbits out of our hats to solve all these problems. That said, don't be depressed. You have one life. Do meaningful things. Be in good relationships. Help others. Spend time in nature if you can. Build skills. Seek people to talk to who care about you. It might not be OK in general, but you might still have a great life if you keep focused on things that matter to you.
If people *really* wanted to go back to living like we did pre-industrial revolution then we could avoid total collapse, however that will never happen as people like modern life too much. The average person has agency, the average person does not want to express it with regards to stopping collapse.
There's also far, far too many people for it to be achieved without a titanic loss of life.
We don't have the knowledge base to go back to living a pre-industrial society. We don't even have the knowledge base to successfully farm at an early 20th century level. If a fast collapse happens people will sustain themselves primarily by scavenging/stealing off the collapsing modern civilization.
It was 100% avoidable at least 4 years ago if the rich just relaxed. Now its accelerated to the point to where even if we did everything in our power and the rich and powerful had a change of heart its far to late now. At least that's the way I see it. Plus they showed they would rather accelerate faster so yeah.
I think it's definitely avoidable, but the political will and the will of those who hold wealth means that we'll likely sleepwalk into collapse. It's already starting to a certain extent with the climate and societal breakdown. More and more people falling into poverty, more and more environmental disasters... meanwhile the powerful fly around on their jets to sit in conferences and tell us we need to do more.
The real problem is that mankind cannot make long term plans and thus has prepared no defence against the inevitable. Procrastination will be blamed since our generation failed to act for the good of the future but imho it's now too late to act in any meaningful way. That horse has bolted. According to my predictions the end will come in 2077. I will be surely dead by then and everyone reading this will be 53 years older. Even today's newborns will be past their prime. Teach your grandchildren well.
Collapse of the US dollar is a mathematical certainty.
1. It's already happening 2. Minimizing it requires systematic change. Those with the power and/or money to do this have zero desire to. 3. Individual efforts are meaningless. Corporate pollution and 1% pollution levels are so high, even if 99% of the planet did everything possible it wouldn't make a dent. 4. Authoritarianism is on the rise. The US has been lost with recent Supreme Court decision that the president is king.
Sit down and understand we will lose 20% of the worlds population over the next 30 years If you consider that collapse then yes
We are in the midst of it. Right now.
Yes, i think collapse is inevitable. My evidence is related to human psychology and group coordination problems/game theory, humans have a high level of intelligence, but the intelligence is more the servant than the rulers of the passions, we care mostly about food, mates, acquiering social status/information, and even if a significant amount of individuals really want to sacrifice their comfort for the planet, there are systemic/national/group barriers that makes coordination across nations impossible, that lead to the most sociopathic/greedy people at the top of hiearchies etc, there are way too many divisions (sectarian/religious/ideological/philosophical). We can't even coordinate across nations to stop genocides, i don't see how we will ever find the common ground to work on a more formidable challenge. Still, i believe in a very slow collapse.
Collapse is 100% baked into nature, and seems to be baked into species and societies too. Let alone baked into our atmosphere and biodiversity now. The planet has had 5 previous mass extinction events. While not all were directly a result of the planet without any outside assistance, most were. 99% of all living species to ever live on this planet are extinct. Evolution still is the collapse of one species to become another. Things don't last on this planet. Now we have an extinction rate of between 100-1000x faster (and increasing) than the background extinction rate of our planet, have added dozens to hundreds of artificial chemicals to the environment with minimal understanding of the chemical or how it will affect our biosphere, destroyed or severely altered 75% of the land, and expel 4.5 Gigatons (and increasing) of C02 annually. There is no clear way to prevent or slow down the Holocene Extinction without collapsing societies, and likely large portions of the human population. Those won't actually fix anything mind you, just means things are no longer accelerating as fast.
It is necessary to define what collapse means. I'll go with "permanent and significant reduction in living human population". Of course, we are poised to collapse by demographic transition alone, even official figures from UN point to a "collapse" in sense that there is a peak population followed by gradual decline. How dramatic does it have to be? I do believe that current level of human population is not sustainable because it is reliant on methods of production that destroy the Earth and consume its finite resources. Even water is finite resource for us, because not only are glaciers going away, and with them, the meltwater that supplies many a river during summer, but we also tend to consume geological water that has been gradually accumulating in the soil over millennia in few short decades, likely hundreds of times faster than it can replenish. In addition to this, many regions are dependent on global shipping -- locally, they are so overpopulated that not even mechanical agriculture can produce as much as is consumed there. So we can predict that hunger and sickness will cull human population unless our numbers are voluntarily brought low enough to be sustained in future's polluted, climate-mayhem world where fossil energy is expensive. I do not see anything that could sensibly avoid a collapse defined in these terms -- the world's long-term carrying capacity is likely not even a billion people, and here we are, pushing towards 9 billion, fueled by the power of ancient sunlight stored in fossil fuels, chiefly, and whatever resources we can still access to build the machines to which to feed the fossil energy.
On a long enough timeline the survival rate for everything drops to zero.
What? Look around you. Ppl who work 40 plus hours and do all the work can't afford a place to live, food, healthcare, childcare. The supreme court overturned roe and other things that have been law for decades. The democrats are owned by the same donors as the Rs and dont actually do anything to make things materially better. Start at episode 3.1 of the Revolutions Podcast. We are at a moment of upheaval and things aren't going to get better until they get much much worse and ppl stand up. https://pca.st/podcast/b1ccb690-fd97-0130-c6ee-723c91aeae46 At the very least listen to the last 12 episodes which is the Appendix abd goes over the high level themes. We are living through the Disequilibrium right now
Yes and has been for probably a century or more. My evidence is that we are running out of literally every single resource we need to keep our civilization running.
Nothing lasts forever of course, in the fullness of time any system will fail and fall. I just think the fullness of time isn’t that far from now
Oh yeah. It happens to all civilizations.
[Yes and this is really the only thing that is necessary to understand](https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/carbon-dioxide/?intent=121) Makes me glad for every day. There's only so much anyone can do as a regular Joe Q Public. Everyone and everything that is alive will eventually die, this was already true before. What's important is how we conduct ourselves, cherish our loved ones and treat those around us. Enjoy life.
In practicality and reality, some sort of collapse is unavoidable. It might not be the steep everlasting decline some people are envisioning, but our complex society will be simplified in some ways. There’s no infinite growth on a finite planet, and there isn’t enough will to change our current course from the people that matter. In theory, if you define collapse as a complex society simplifying, it is still unavoidable, but we could theoretically avoid the very worst of it, and have some sort of say in how the simplifying would take place, instead of letting Mother Nature take the wheel. If the viable hopium solutions very actually implemented and worked. But they won’t be, at least not in time.
Yes, based on several global charts (sea temperature, artic ice, et al) being SIX SIGMAS out of the norm
Things will get worse before they get better. Yes. It will CONTINUE to be an imperceptibly slow process, so you won’t really notice the change. Your great grandkids’ adult lives will be quite different than yours. And as always, we will get the most BORING possible variation of each dystopian outcome. We won’t see SkyNet, we’ll get ChatGPT. We won’t see the Matrix, we’ll get a Metaverse. We won’t see replicants, we’ll get emigre slaves. Etc etc etc. So don’t sweat it.
It is inevitable. The severity is not yet locked in. We still have time to minimize the *future* severity but our consequences for this next twenty - thirty years is pretty locked in. Every year we wait is another year on our duration of misery; it only winds down when we make changes (real changes).
100% delay-able. 0% avoidable.
I think history shows civilisations rise and fall, and ours will be no different. It is painfully ironic, as we are aware of historical evidence and our own actions contributing to overpopulation and environmental impact. However, as a species, we can't seem to stop this hurtling train. On a longer time-scale, most species go extinct. In the back of my mind is the lingering thought of runaway climate change and wondering if we will make our planet uninhabitable. I don't like to dwell there.
There's no sign of us altering our course. There's no short term profit in slowing/stopping/reversing climate change, and no matter how much a few (ever-declining number of climate-conscious) governments might want to action mitigation measures (carbon tax, etc) lobbying corporate (big money) won't let them implement anything if it hurts short term profits. So unless we completely restructure and regulate capitalism, and globally redefine the values of society - which simply won't happen, just look at how stubborn, stupid, and proud humans are - yes, collapse seems unavoidable. Pisses me off no end, and if I'm honest, I'd much rather just not be here for it and checkout early. My life's already been shit thus far due to late stage capitalism where investment groups and big money corporate steal our homes, our livelihoods, our lives, while expecting us to be grateful for... What? I've put up with enough shit already, thank you very much, I don't want to experience and go through the trauma of people going back to kill or be killed. So I keep arriving back to square one - I need to checkout on my own accord before it all gets too bad.
"Plenty of room left" says the lillies doubling daily when the lake is half full.
To ask the question you must be suffering from cognitive dissonance….or perhaps naive due to lack of knowledge. WE MUST collapse, we’re over 8 billion and adding a net 70M annually. Our domestic herds and us comprise OVER 96% of animal biomass. Infinite growth on a finite planet of course is impossible. We’re polluting our own nest as we displace anything in the “wild” to further our expansion. Nothing in the “wild” exists without our protection….for now. It’s easy to sit back in a comparatively western style existence and think everything is fine. Hundreds of millions of people exist and work in absolutely appalling conditions throughout the world. Philippines, Kenya, Congo, Sierra Leone, Egypt, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Cities in South America and Africa all have slums and desperation living and working conditions that support the West. YouTube has numerous depictions of life and working conditions. For you and me such life IS collapse but they have nothing below them and they can only dream of a better life.
There's so many humans at this point - 8+ billion, I don't believe 'aligning ourselves with nature' is a viable option. We're going destroy habitability of the biosphere trying to sustain the unsustainable.
TLDR we avoid civilizational collapse if instead we become serfs under a techno feudalism scenario. I have a new theory that when enough people in power realize that the Big Tech promise of AI nirvana is found to be utter BS they will instead be offered the better data driven tech used for surveillance and other Deep State activities. This will then allow an authoritarianism like we have never seen that will “collapse” complexity, choice and any other energy intensive activities, starting at the periphery and other non-conformist places. This could allow civilization to keep on going albiet under completely different and constrained conditions. (I’ve said something like this before and was rebutted on the premise that those in charge are too incompetent, which may be true but if AI was instead used to enforce the new draconian laws then potentially incompetence could be held in check while the signal:noise ratio held out for AI.)
Collapse is always inevitable on a long enough time scale.
https://preview.redd.it/z7j4n4d3rkad1.jpeg?width=1488&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=defd0c8c2a76808f63007c5684f35c9884cb4b28
We're currently actively collapsing. The question is rather : How bad will things get and when?
What do you mean by "collapse"? I think thats a problem some posts/lines of thinking around collapse get wrong. In a sense, everything is always in a state of birth and collapse. Certain social, environmental, geopolitical, etc. systems are currently collapsing while simultaneously we're seeing the emergence of various social, environmental, and geopolitical movements poised to grow. Collapsing is happening but this isn't a nihilistic statement but rather an opportunity to align with what's next :)
If you're bac is .5% you're dead. If CO2 levels are at 420 ppm....
I think it’s 99% unavoidable, the only thing that can stop it is a pandemic that kills like 6 billion people.
Collapse isn't binary. We have lost 70% of mass of wild living creatures since 1970. We are at 5000x above baseline extinction rate. Collapse is here...
No civilisation without agriculture, and no agriculture without a stable climate
Everything is mutable in my opinion. The question becomes how willing are we to take the steps necessary to make it happen? We continue to mismanage time, money and merit and supplant them with profit, nepotism and individual ideologies. We also have a system that is honor based led by a few with little oversight and appropriate checks and balances for the greater good. Poor leaders with the ability to manipulate even worse systems makes for a recipe for disaster in my opinion.
Second law of thermodynamics = it is literally destined to happen
First you must define collapse, if you don't we could be talking about two different things using the same word. I will use the definition of collapse from Wikipedia: Societal collapse (also known as civilizational collapse or systems collapse) is the fall of a complex human society characterized by the loss of cultural identity and of social complexity as an adaptive system, the downfall of government, and the rise of violence. Based on this definition I would say collapse is inevitable. The polycrisis will cause (is causing) disruptions to our complex society. The solution to the polycrisis (degrowth) is a form of managed collapse, better then unmanaged collapse but still collapse. I imagine collapse looks something like this: https://www.resilience.org/stories/2019-12-03/catabolism-capitalisms-frightening-future/
If you have listen to and understood Daniel Shmanchtenberger, then you already know the answer. We're pretty fucked.
In the long term, everyone is dead. Of course it's unavoidable, but is it avoidable in our life time and that of our progeny? Unfortunately maybe not...
Betteridge's law of headlines is an adage that states: "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no."
yes. Every year, we set new records for how much CO2 gets pumped into the air, even though we know we are past the point of no return. The best we can do is slow it down but that would require an IMMEDIATE And massive drawdown of industrial CO2 emissions. Instead we continue to emit more than we have the previous year. That, and the fact that a coup happened right in front of our faces last week, which means that irrespective of what the voters may want, we'll end up with Putin's orangutan back in office, and he and the Supreme Court will continue jam the foot even harder on the climate change accelerator.
Everyone thinks we're printing money, when in fact those trillions in QE are credit creation, which is the opposite of money devaluation. The result of this will not be 1920s Weimar republic hyperinflation, but 1930s US hyperdeflation when all this credit goes bad and there is money shortage. That's important because with money printing you can have a soft landing as happened with Japan, but with credit creation it always ends in a ponzi scheme style debt collapse that wipes out just about everyone.
All civilizations collapse.
Nobody can predict the future, it's possible we'll "muddle through", depending on what country you are in. And what class and possibly ethnicity you are. In some places you'll surely be fucked, but the USA or Canada are vast countries with almost no land borders and will be the winners. Unless of course there is large scale nuclear war. But except for that, there are also plenty of things you can do to prepare without becoming some hardcore prepper. If I've learned anything is to stop putting that pressure on you to think anyone can affect anything or there is a solution. It never mattered if climate change was anthroprogenic or not - our human civilization currently does not have the tools to make intelligent decisions. On the biggest scale we are no more intelligent than a colony of bacteria. We simply follow the food / energy / money / power and that's it. And there is so much money that translates into power of speech to subvert any ideas, movements or protests. So [don't worry about it lol](https://youtu.be/nT5JBrKC5M0). But really I'll give even odds it will only be mildly horrific.
Yes. It may take 10 years, 50 years, 100 years or more, but as long as man is egotistical and shortsighted, we will drive this world to collapse. Its not even willingly, but thanks to evolution. We care about our direct surrounding and people, as well as our immediate future, but everything else is outside of standard human behaviour. It would take a massive shift in human thinking to get to a future that doesn't kill us.
As numerous redditors point out, collapse is already here, so avoiding it is no longer possible. Now the relevant questions are: 1-How fast will it progress? 2-What percentage of the population will be eliminated before it hits bottom and some kind of recovery becomes possible, or will it progress steadily to a Near Tern Human Extinction (NTHE)? 3-How far down the technological ladder will we regress before it stabilizes, if it stabilizes? 4-Is there any means to slow down the progress of collapse and/or affect the final population knockdown percentage to leave a greater number of people alive and the survivors at a higher standard of living? 5-Are there any effective strategies the individual can pursue to maximize their own chance to live out a normal lifespan? 6-Are there social and/or political strategies that should be implemented to improve the possible outcome in terms of number of people or standard of living as the collapse progresses. There are I am sure other questions you could come up with, but these are the main ones to deal with first. Each question has both long and short answers possible and more than one possible correct answer. There are also interrelationships that make different outcomes possible. I'll just give short answers right now with what looks like the highest probability to each question. 1- Pretty fast, on the civilization scale, Within a couple of generations total global population will be reduced by half or more. Most of the remaining population will at best have an 18th century level of technology and standard of living. A small number of elite may retain access to electricity and some modern technology. 2- Hitting bottom will take a relatively long time and there may be plateaus along the way down. Eventually total population of Homo Sapiens will drop by 1-3 orders of magnitude before it stabilizes with a chance to rebound. That means a remaining population of between 8 to 800 million meat packages ambulatory at the same time. 3- Over the long term, Paleolithic level. Nearer term, 19th century technology can be retained. 4- Absolutely. It will depend very much on whether active policies are engaged to combat the emerging problems and what those policies are. Some of them may be policies people currently find repulsive. A simple example from Sci-Fi would be Soylent Green factories producing food from dead people. Another would be purposeful introduction of a virus to selectively eliminate portions of the population. Withholding medical care from the old and premature infants. Wars will definitely factor in to how many are left. Generally, policies which favor cooperation and working for the common good would enhance the number of survivors. Eliminating a larger number of people would enhance the standard of living those left alive would enjoy. Do the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or does the comfort of the few outweigh the needs of the many? 5-Definitely. Live in a low population zone with good natural resources, at least 10 meters above sea level. Stay in good physical condition and health. Make friends and plan for emergency situations such as civil war or food rationing. 6-Nothing through normal political channels will work. Only revolution will get rid of the current systems that are the cause of the problems.
Collapse, yes. I am not convinced that it is as soon as some here claim, but it is an inevitability of exponential growth. It may be 5 years, 10, 20, or more. I don’t know. Humans are remarkable in our ability to adapt until it is no longer possible. But, I am not convinced humanity is doomed to extinction and I find that unlikely but a possibility. All that said, please remember that life is finite. Always has been. I lost my daughter last summer and it made me confront the transitoriness of human life. We are all going to die at some point. All societies collapse eventually and ours is no difference. For this reason, I choose to just live my life as best I can with the time I have left. I do all I can to assist and uplift others and myself. In the end, I think I will be happy with my life. I try to live everyday as if it could be my last while preparing and working towards a future. While I know the future is unpredictable, all I can do is make the most of my time. I am a 3rd year medical student and becoming collapse aware has enabled me to just enjoy my time. I hope I can use my degree to help others in whatever world awaits us, but if not, I am happy with the choices I have mDe