I see this idea sometimes in the context of climate change. It's fundamentally flawed. Collapse is not binary, it's not collapse or no collapse. If we miss one climate goal, then the next goal comes up. If we cannot limit warming to 2°C (and it doesn't look like we will)... Well, 2.5°C is more than a magnitude worse than that. Those who survive 2°C warming would be glad that it's not 2.5°C. It's not like a test where you can say "screw this, I'm gonna fail anyways."
By this logic a car crash isn’t binary either, because the car could have always set on fire, or exploded, or fallen into a spontaneous black hole etc.
It’s still a car crash regardless of the magnitude, and a collapse is still a collapse if it’s a small or a large one.
Well… a car crash is absolutely not binary. There’s a huge spectrum between a fender bender at low speed and a deadly multi-vehicle pile up on the motorway. And there’s a huge spectrum of injuries from whiplash, fractures, loss of limbs, and death.
You absolutely can’t treat all car crashes as equal, same way you can’t treat all collapse as equal. The Soviet Union collapsed for instance, and the 90s were absolutely a struggle, but it didn’t mean all Russians regressed to subsistence agriculture and there was eventually a recovery. Its member states are still around, with some doing better than others (the Baltic states for instance).
Uh... yes? Would you rather take a 50mph head on collision driving a 2023 Outback or a 1930 Model A?
The point is that car crashes are indeed dangerous, and we've spent a century of engineering making them significantly (vastly, really) less so. And that's a good thing to be celebrated, and not rejected just because we don't want to get into crashes in the first place. Climate change mitigation follows the same ethical principles.
Then let me be clearer: one is a routine, eminently survivable collisoin that happens dozens of times every day, the other is a certain death sentence. They are different, and they are different because smart people cared to fix a problem they saw instead of just throwing up their hands in despair. To wit: if you genuinely care about this stuff, get off your ass and help instead of whining on the internet.
That deaths in car crashes[1] are not a fait accompli and that their impact may be mitigated by careful engineering and hard work. And by extension, that fatalism regarding other problems[2] is subject to the same kind of solutions. And finally that using car crashes as a metaphor for other such problems[3], as the upthread poster did, is a poor analogy and actually supports the case for action, and not despair.
It is possible that some sort of runaway effect can happen after a tipping point is reached. Many scenarios lead to that. e.g.
- AI could have a singularity.
- Ice reflects heat, so there can be a vicious circle as ice melts.
- Ocean currents could suddenly shift into a different pattern.
- Any sort of stressor, like global food shortage, can lead to instability and thus nuclear world war over resources
- A contagious disease could cause infertility/death globally. Or, say, if the covid vaccine or microplastics had an unexpected delayed effect after a few years
We tempt all these risks more and more as we continue living unsustainably
A very weird piece of writing that's trying to rehabilitate 'climate doomers' a bit, which ignores a bit of a key fact that a lot of climate doomers actually tend to be the rich and wealthy individuals that are causing the problems in the first place. Because they can afford to deal with the consequences of their actions, so they go full speed on doing whatever they can. Both doomers and denialists tend to run the show, so to speak.
I don't personally buy it because there's always going to be someone claiming the collapse of civilization is nigh. During the shortages of food during COVID I saw channels I normally respected swerve a bit into prepperism or attempts to grow natural food in case of food chain collapse.
I do believe our climate situation is incredibly dire and we will need to use increasingly extreme measures to stop it. Executives need to start being punished properly for their extreme maleficence and disregard of public health, companies will need to face reckonings for hiding their crimes and everyone involved at the time charged. And we will also need to accept that infinite growth and the way we're growing isn't sustainable. But I think it's a problem that can be solved.
Businesses, execs, and the wealthy at large, all need to be punished heavily. There is still way too much glad handing and brown nosing happening... and Im sorry but all of the "longevity" and "mars" talk is for the wealthy too. Im pretty sure everyone "at the top" thinks two things:
1. It wont happen in our time.
2. Some rich ass hole will solve the problem for us (the rich).
But, as history shows, yeah right! incoming barbarians at the enclave gates...
It seems the logic is that if people think all is lost, they won't try to stop it.
This seemd to me a rational decision. If all is indeed lost (a binary yesno) then why should people take on hardship, give up dignity and live in poverty?
Well, they are both extreme views, and so end up on the same place, much like extreme left and right philosophies.
The sane answer, of course, is that the situation is not binary.
This is less realistic than a lot of doomerism. I'm not really scared of every last human dying off, I'm worried about a world where nearly everyone would rather be dead because of war and starvation and disease. Life on earth is likely to exist for a very long time, even if we do our worst, but there are known risks and unknown risks that might make life on earth hell, even within the lifetimes of people alive today.
I don’t think “civilization will go on” should be interpreted as a message that everything will be fine and the future is necessarily bright. I mean if you are worried about war, then you aren’t worried about civilization totally collapsing, because some level of civilization is necessary to execute wars, right?
I thought you were going to point out that the world isn’t one singular civilization. Each country has its own unique civilization unto itself (both better and worse). The international stuff somewhat makes this feel redundant, but the differences are clearly there and best off when mutually respected. Suggesting civilization collapse is mistaking complexity for impossibility.
Edit-this feels like the kids on voice chat chanting “turtle! Turtle!!” When a player is having a hard game and the bullies want that player to quit. Except humanity is far too big and far too disparate and far too resourceful to decide on collapse.
It is the first time, to my knowledge, that there is strong evidence that indicates it could actually happen! (The evidence being the rapidly changing climate and our inability to adapt quickly enough)
The Plague of Justinian killed between 40-60% of the eastern Roman Empire in a decade. Pretty sure that disrupted some supply chains and yet humanity and civilization persevered.
TFA is simply a laundry list of early 21st century faddish conceits to describe the eternal brokenness of man. I liked it better when it was called it original sin. “Micro plastics”, “forever chemicals”, etc. aren’t evidence or argument, they’re an incantation repeated as part of a cultural rite.
It assumes 2.3% yearly exponential growth of energy consumption for 400 years while we know our population already passed peak growth and peak children number and will start to decrease in this century.
From what I've seen, hundreds of millions of deaths are priced in. But that's nowhere close to 8 billion. Humanity will survive. It's just going to be unpleasant.
This guy seems to think every problem means civilization is going to collapse. Microplastics cause cancer, therefore civilization is doomed. Meanwhile back in reality, cancer mortality has been decreasing for decades, and the rate of decrease is speeding up.[1]
The concern about microplastics is that they are literally everywhere and we're not really sure what their effect will be, but so far, they seem to disrupt living organisms. It's best to not think of societal collapse just in terms of things that directly affect humans, but also all the biological systems (e.g. agriculture) that we rely on.
And we've had these microplastics in the system in the 1950s. If there was some civilization threatening content in microplastics, we'd know having several generations born and raised in that environment.
This is quite bonkers. Civilization may or may not collapse but stating such a thing as necessary future scenario puts this into the ’crank’ category.
Especially the end ” enjoy the time we have left.” - ending of civilization does not mean end of individual human life. This makes it sound like everyone would die.
Yes, the environment needs to be cherished and repaired. Sophist alarmism and doomerism indeed is not the way to go IMO.
Is anyone else recently getting the idea that these doomers are wishing for a collapse, same as preppers, only on the other side of the political spectrum? I’m not qualified to speculate on the psychological underpinnings of such behavior, but I do feel there is a sense of yearning in these kinds of “if not climate change, then pollution, or A.I., etc.” articles.
They want to smugly prove their others that I’m right.
Seems a commonality among any kind of end-of-times cultists, they’ll try to befriend you and woo you into being on their side. That their bunker was a sane investment, that you should sell all your assets and invest in silver or sheep or small arms. That their calculations are a bit off, that it’ll actually be next Fall not this Spring.
But, above all else, that I’m right and you can be too if you just believe like I do. Except I don’t believe, I know.
Oh, you won’t know like I know? You’re just another sheep, another one of them.
The bunker may not pay out like call options but still a reasonable investment, especially if it has a bowling alley. Yes they’re probably trying to sell you gold bars for a 20% cut. But they’re no less guilty than the realtor trying to sell you a high rise condo with a cold bath.
Deathwish politics is at least as old as the mid 1950's when impending
nuclear Armageddon was on the cards.
Out of that came a sect of American evangelical fundamentalists who
believe in "The Rapture". Many prominent US political figures were and
remain associated with it.
Right now many of these types are rubbing their hands with glee over
the middle-East conflict, hoping it will escalate as prophesied.
I’d lump that group in with preppers, given their conservative political leanings. These seem to hew closer to New Age cults that rose to prominence in the ‘60s and ‘70, except with a more secular bent.
> Who's having deathwish? Status quo politicians or those who realize the problems we're facing
A subset of the latter. There are those who begin with the premise that the world is going to hell and then seek out (and amplify) any evidence they find that resonates with their bias. Doomers, if you will. It's not even that difficult to identify these folks, but as soon as one does the retort is invariably some form of "you have your head in the sand".
What do you mean by "begin with the premise that the world is going to hell"? Can you name a person who does that? In the context of this particular blog post I think the authors argue quite coherently in favor of their perspective, whether you think it right or not, it's hardly "beginning from the premise".
I accept financial collapse, nuclear war and other practical doomerism hypotheses to be concerned about, but I’m putting “sustainability” arguments in with supervolcano. Alien invasion is up right now.
And yeah I can attest that there is a certain appeal. Psychologically it’s that post apocalypse survival brings purpose to an otherwise easy, almost pointless existence, I think this is widely understood no?
I will also say that post apocalypse survival is a simple game to play, dig a hole and live in it, I could buy an entire lifetime of gaseous oxygen and bury it in the ground with me at current prices. The level up is to ensure the survival of one’s local community. Master level is Elon Musk style interplanetary insurance.
Absolutely. They hate technology and modernity and want to live as subsistence farmers, a lifestyle they romanticize endlessly (see the part about "growing your own food," "learning to fix things," etc).
So many people fantasize about moving to a farm in the country. Collapse-advocates want events to force them (and everyone) to make that change. A collapse is ideal because they will be forced to do something they fantasize about and not miss out on anything new that modernity creates (because modernity will be gone).
> They hate technology and modernity and want to live as subsistence farmers, a lifestyle they romanticize endlessly
"They"? You are overgeneralizing a group you are not a member of.
What you're describing covers exactly zero of the "doomers" I know - most are just depressed PhD biologists or polymath economists modeling a tragic collapse.
Look up the revised World3 models, IPCC's BAU scenarios, go review Hot Topic and the critiques since then, check out the Existential Climate Risks survey of experts... talking about the risks of collapse, and fearing it happening, is quite rational.
Casting the group as expecting some absurd "population collapse without civilization collapse", or cheering on a massive societal regression, is a clear signal your sample set is biased.
I'm responding to the linked article and the broad "collapse community" not to your claimed "depressed friends with PhDs".
Anyway, the vast majority of climate scientists and economists don't think that civilization will collapse. Maybe they aren't "polymathic" enough for you. Even if they entertain the possiblity of collapse, they aren't certain about it (again, compare to the linked article).
At any rate, the idea that scientists can model the collapse of civilization is silly. We can't model the market and civilization is much more complex.
> Casting the group as expecting some absurd "population collapse without civilization collapse", or cheering on a massive societal regression, is a clear signal your sample set is biased.
I don't know what the first part of this means. There absolutely is a "collapse community," well represented by the linked article and elsewhere on the internet, and I think it's very clear that they eagerly await the collapse for transparent psychological reasons.
> Anyway, the vast majority of climate scientists and economists don't think that civilization will collapse.
Do we really know what they think? I suppose we know what they say. To the question of the article, let's say that one or more of them are actually fairly certain that collapse is coming within a few decades - what would be the point of telling anyone that?
I think being hailed forever as the genius who predicted some cataclysm before it happens is a pretty big reward, especially for an academic.
But anyway, the whole idea that scientists can predict the collapse of civilization is wrong. At some level this is a question of optimism vs. pessimism. That's not a question of models, it's a question of taste or, as the kids say, "vibes".
If civilization collapsed, it seems reasonable that anyone predicting it wasn't wouldn't be remembered. Anyone left standing after a collapse would have bigger things to worry about, and the medium in which predictions where published could very likely be lost in the collapse.
If someone were of the honest opinion that broad scale collapse was imminent I can only expect they would also not expect fame afterwards. Anyone sharing this opinion disingenuous is more likely to be sharing it for gain before the collapse that may never come, via book sales or speaking engagements for example.
I think some, maybe even many or even most doomers just want to believe we're all doomed because it gives them an out for never trying to fully self-actualize or try to become the most successful version of themselves, whatever it may be. I never met a doomer with high self-esteem.
Yes, I secretly have such a wish. I think humanity has reached a point where everything seems to be falling apart. I would rather see the phoenix burn down and a new one rise from its ashes.
A line in a Kurzgesagt video ( https://youtu.be/LEENEFaVUzU ) a while back caught my attention. “Every generation assumes they’re important enough to witness the apocalypse.” I don’t think that’s the only factor in people wishing for collapse, but I think it’s one of them.
Well if you call them doomers, it does feel like you have a small bias... but I agree many people that state the world will end within their expected lifespan actually like it.
On the other end you have zero proof that you are not the one in denial right now.
I personally am probably a doomer as you call it, I really think it will go downhill for at least a century, probably more. Not sure if we'll go back to middle age or stone age. The planet will survive, humans will survive, but it won't be pretty.
I don't think we can manage to achieve real net zero CO2 before a very long while (many decades). It would simply require humans to trust each other and sacrifice in a scale that has never happened before. I have little reasons to believe this can happen, definitely not fast enough.
For such a confident article, you’d think they’d make some concrete connections between the processes they describe and the actual outcome of collapsing civilization. Instead they are just gesturing vaguely at bad things and claiming that will collapse civilization. I guess this is written for people who already are convinced civilization will collapse, so they don’t need to be convinced. But then, why spend the first 75% of the article or so listing these processes?
Just to pick one at random:
> Secondly, even if we found an infinite source of clean energy, endless growth would still be impossible. If energy usage were to keep growing at 2.3% per year — as it has for many decades — in 400 years, the oceans would be boiling just from the waste heat. The laws of physics are a bitch.
This is some really weak stuff. Why must energy usage keep growing by 2.3% per year. Will civilization collapse if it doesn’t, is that the link? My conclusion here is that we need to change our growth model to not always need more energy, although this is something I already believed, and putting the problem out at 400 years seems to make it, if anything, less urgent (I think, though, it is still quite urgent).
Let’s go back a bit, maybe the killer problem actually comes from the “first” to this “second,” and this paragraph was just added as frosting on the cake or something (although if that is the case, seems like poor editing). .
> First of all, there is no such thing as a green economy. To create renewables and electric vehicles, we have to destroy ecosystems so we can mine rare-earth metals. And to produce the plastic, steel, cement, and other components that go into solar panels and wind turbines, we need oil. There’s nothing green about any of this.
Nope, guess not. The only claim here is that some ecosystems will have to be destroyed. This is of course bad, and I hope we mitigate it to the fullest extent possible! But we’ve already destroyed lots of ecosystems, we will destroy more. Maybe the green economy has some imperfect parts, but local devastation doesn’t threaten civilization.
I don’t think it is worth it to dissect the article paragraph fully at this point. I think this person is just looking for reasons to be hopeless.
Seems to me waste heat won’t be as big of a problem as waste cooling. The sun is almost pure heat for us right now. By capturing more of that energy with photovoltaics and converting it to, say, plastic, we are cooling the planet.
Neither one is a problem IMO because the earth isn’t a fragile place, it operates at temperature swings of over a hundred degrees F, at least 30 degrees in a nice temperature zone where various plant species thrive.
I want to quibble about the idea that “the world isn’t a fragile place,” in the sense that I’m very open to the idea that the conditions for humans to thrive happily might be pretty fragile and we need to keep protect them. It’s just—the bar of “civilization is doomed” is incredibly high.
I mean medieval Europe had civilization, it wasn’t a very pleasant one for lots of the people in it, but it was a civilization. There are lots of outcomes we’d like to prevent before we get to “civilization is doomed.”
Civilization isn't definitely going to collapse in the near future. And no, we shouldn't tell people it is, even if it were highly probable, for the simple reason that it would likely make the remaining time people have immeasurably worse.
And calling your entire blog 'collapse musings' suggests 100% crankdom.
Are you going to just issue a proclamation without so much as corroborate it with 1/20th the amount of legitimate facts that article supports its case with?
And we should take you at your word because youre more pedigreed? or enjoy more clout in the HN-sphere?
Is that it? Is that what this site has come down to? Ha!
I think that people should have the right to express themselves subjectively about something without having to submit a paper. Facts aren't the only thing people talk about, and the feeling that the article might suggest cannot be forced or denied by them.
They should have the right to express themselves freely but people need to understand that the bar to do so is so much lower than “submitting a paper” as you say.
Therefore any uninformed, emotional crackpot can submit a rant with no proof, no evidence, no citations, with no credentials so it’s not even an appeal to authority, at best it’s an appeal to emotion and or intellectual laziness.
I grant you the freedom to express yourself freely, and in return you grant me the freedom to call your low-effort rant garbage. Its a two way street.
But "no proof, no evidence, no citations, low-effort, rants, etc." do not mean 'no sense'. And the posting is clearly making sense. The claim "that civilization will collapse" is not an evident truth, so the contrary might be said, without further support. Apparently, the article did not have the necessary persuasive power.
Yes, but no one is interested in talking about the author's feelings. The response is to the authors conclusions, which are wrong. Just as it's eminently appropriate for the author to be able to express themselves sujectively, it's equally so for us to call it bullshit.
I really have to admit - I don't feel threatened by the author or by criticism of the author. I believe, like many others here, that this text actually doesn't deserve much attention. It's clearly apocalyptic. But it's interesting how the internet medium can compel you to engage in debate.
Yeah, so I don't have a problem with a personal blog where a person posts about what interest them. I just don't see a good reason for it to be at the top of HN.
Yes, I see that there are certain demands here. I'm new here and I thought this site was actually free. But I guess I need to adjust my expectations.
I think that if you want to expect a certain standard of conversation, then you either have to make the page private or have discussions with real people in person, ideally with your friends.
But as soon as you go public and demand that people adapt to your own content standards, then you distort the discourse on a very deep and fundamental level. You can neither educate people to be elitists, nor does the desire for it justify the karma evaluations that you automatically have to subject yourself to.
I think you could view HN as a fishing pond and fish selected voices privately to another private platform if you are really serious about high quality content.
The conversation in the blog post presumes a certain shared understanding of the facts. When you push a conversation out of a context of shared assumptions or understandings, then you are going to have to expect push back. I don't think that says anything bad about HN here. All you are getting is feedback on what a large segment of people think. In some alternative world they may have agreed with those background beliefs, and then the pushback would not have occurred (or it might have pointed in another direction).
If the article had approached its central question--whether to tell people or not--by first saying something like "suppose that we knew the civilization is going to collapse in the next ten years, the question arises: should we tell people?", it could have avoided more of the pushback it received.
> The response is to the authors conclusions, which are wrong.
How have you come to the conclusion that the author's conclusions are wrong?
Many in this thread have rightly pointed out that the author is speaking of the future which can't be know with certainty. Are you telling issue with the level of certainty the author seems to have, or do you fished with the argument of impending doom?
It's the future the great thing about it is that we don't know what will happen. You can either dig a bunker but it won't help you with the general anxiety you feel. You will just have the anxiety in the bunker.
I think the blog post is written quite oddly, in a way that makes it hard to engage with in good faith. The central question is: “Should we tell people that civilization is doomed.” It is on a page called collapsemusings, the audience apparently believes that civilization is doomed already, this doesn’t seem to be a point in contention for the intended audience.
Despite this, it runs through a big list of supposedly civilization-killing effects. These are’t really linked together, it is just problem after problem, joined by phrases along the lines of “if that doesn’t get us, this next thing will.” This makes it very hard to respond to. The author also doesn’t make a concrete link between many of these bad things and the end of civilization. I can show an example, but it is just one in a list.
> Pollution and habitat destruction are mutilating the tree of life. Once the insects are mostly gone and the topsoil is mostly dead, we will no longer have the ability to grow food on a mass scale, and it will be game over for modern civilization. But it gets even worse…
> Amid growing concerns about topsoil loss, no-till and cover crops are becoming more popular, according to the 2017 US Census of Agriculture. Forty per cent of US cropland is grown on no-till farms, up from 32% in 2012.
> Though still not widely adopted, cover crops are becoming more popular with farmers, too, particularly in the country’s corn belt. Nationwide, farmers planted cover crops on 15m acres, a 50% increase from five years earlier.
Oh wait no, actually the article says this is a problem but solutions are starting to emerge on the market (already, as of 4 years ago). And, would this actually threaten civilization itself? We have a lot of extra food in the Americas, and lots of food waste…
But that’s just one suggestion of many. Maybe one is actually compelling. The list is too long for a mildly interested outsider to research each one in detail. This is a failure on the part of the blog post, assuming the intended audience is people who don’t buy into the premise already—and if not, why list the possible causes in the first place?. Just start with “assume for the sake of argument that civilization is doomed.”
The Dust Bowl of the 1930s (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dust_Bowl) was pretty apocalyptic, and caused by a combination of drought and bad farming practices. It's clear things can go badly. On the other hand, we've adapted and learned since then. I'm enthusiastic about the potential for AI and robotics to make farming more humane and less environmentally destructive while still keeping yields high (e.g. no till, with targeted use of pesticides and fertilizers).
The modern world is built on an impressive rube goldberg machine of supply chain dependencies and cheap oil. Yes green energy appears to be able to beat natural gas turbine, but we're careening towards 9 billion people.
In particular, we don't warehouse anything anymore. Everything is just-in-time production, and a minor disruption like COVID (which on the scale of 20th century historical events like world war I+II, or earlier pandemics like the black death, is chump change) caused major supply chain disruptions.
I wouldn't dismiss the problems outlined in the blog, just the certainty of the presentation and the binary thinking.
There are two real dangers: first is the combination of species extinctions and rapid climate change collapsing the entire biosphere. The second is an old and forgotten one: nuclear armageddon.
There are lots of non-extinction level events that could cause high-level collapse via knock on effects. E.g., long term water issues in the American west, or if the Glen Canyon Dam were ever attacked, you would likely see the largest east ever mass migration in America away from the American Southwest in a week or two, followed by a catastrophic famine.
A more positive take here is that we are likely to see a transformation of industrial civilization. And that transformation must necessarily involve an expansion off the earth toward space-based industrial development. As Gerard O’Neill said, the surface of the earth is not a suitable environment for an expanding industrial civilization.
Some of our descendants will live in closed-loop habitats with around 50 gigatons of biosphere per occupant. But this will only happen if we prepare for the transition and engage in some long-term thinking.
Unless you have a science-backed point by point refutation of the many challenges to come, your comment is simply an empty assertion.
I would suggest just looking in detail at a couple of the proposed ends of civilization. If the author had one really good one, they should have presented that one fully to make a compelling argument. Of the ones I looked at, I wasn’t convinced.
A long list of vague gestures toward the end of the world is only convincing to people who are already on the author’s side.
I am of the opinion that it will not be the end of the world, but a transformation. Read literally ANY scientific literature on climate change and you will see that there is reason to believe major changes are afoot.
>So obviously, infinite growth on a finite planet is impossible, yet most people deny this basic fact. The idea of modern civilization coming to an end is so unthinkable that they simply refuse to believe it.
Not gonna read the whole thing, but why would you think 'modern civilization' would be limited to one planet?
> why would you think 'modern civilization' would be limited to one planet?
Because we're nowhere near ready to live outside earth! Approximately no human lives in a desert, on a glacier, or below the ocean surface, even though that's easy compared to living anywhere else in the solar system. Humans are not made for space.
My prediction: By the time we have sufficiently advanced tech to keep humans alive in space, the humans won't be necessary anymore. Why ship delicate bags of water between planets? It's sheer hubris to think humans will play a role in space. It'll be machines that don't suffocate or freeze at the slightest inconvenience.
Well, we haven't begun to populate any other planet yet and time does appear to be running out in terms of us seeing the effects of such a huge mass of humans. Getting a population started on another planet is going to require a LOT of investment of both money and natural resources and also it'll involve a mind-boggling amount of energy to get enough equipment out of our gravity well.
Keeping this sort of secret knowledge to yourself is so isolating, but sharing it only makes it worse.
Pretty soon, the only people who find your company enjoyable are malthusians, christian apocalyptics, and emos. I mean the smiths are great, but have you heard....
No, we shouldn't, because it isn't true. Civilization will muddle on, as it always has, with periodic ups and downs. The oceans aren't going to boil. The economy will stop growing, almost an inevitability as our populations continue to shrink, and we will find ways to accommodate that.
Doom prophets existed in all ages, telling us the end was nigh. It never was, and it isn't now. Trying to convince people that everything is hopeless and that despair is all that remains to us is not only incorrect, it's downright evil.
Typically, the periodic "downs" are usually referred to as that particular civilisation collapsing (e.g. fall of Rome).
Our current civilisation is far more brittle than previous ones due to its unusual size and reliance on technologies. Previous civilisations could revert to simpler agrarian based ones without involving the death of a significant percentage of the world's population, but I'm having difficulty seeing how we would manage a simple failure such as pollinators dying out (e.g. by toxic microparticles).
Periodic downs are mostly minor things, and even during major things like the fall of Rome, there weren't gangs in chariots roaming the country side looking for the last barrel of gasoline, like some demented pre-industrial Mad Maximus.
And I don't buy the "but NOW it's all different" excuse. People haven't suddenly lost the ability to come up with solutions to problems. We aren't far more brittle either; if anything, our ability to ship in goods from other continents makes us far more resilient for anything less than a sudden planetary-scale event. And no, a rise in global temperatures of 0.01 degrees does not qualify as such.
This desperate desire for civilization to end is the logical consequence of all the horrifying propaganda that has been blasted into our heads over the last decades. People like the author of this article lost the will to live, and just wish for it to be over. And not just by taking the easy way out either; they feel betrayed by civilization in general and want to take it out with them. We have been brought to a very dark and dangerous place, and it is going to kill a lot of people that are no longer able to tell truth from fiction.
But civilization? That will be fine; it will continue, and the children of those who weren't demoralized will thrive.
Oh, and the problem with honeybees is that we have too many now. Look it up. There was a problem, people jumped to solve it, and did too well, so now we have too many of the critters...
> We aren't far more brittle either; if anything, our ability to ship in goods from other continents makes us far more resilient for anything less than a sudden planetary-scale event.
We are pretty much totally reliant on our current ability to ship food across the world which does make our current situation unprecedented. If we have a couple of years of various crop failures (e.g. due to weather patterns changing), then there will be a significant number of people dying. We don't have the necessary stockpiles to sustain the world's population for the amount of time required to drastically change how we do things.
Actually we do: we grow a lot of food to feed cattle, which we can switch to human consumption (and we get to eat the cattle too). We produce a huge surplus of food.
And the potential of disaster does not imply the sky is falling. The potential for disaster is always there. That's still no reason to sit down and give up.
FWIW, the comparison with the doctor telling a patient of their fatal condition is disingenuous. For all but a tiny fraction of cancers, oncologists have a very large n, to speak with the near-certainty of experience. Vs. our n is zero for the collapse of global technological civilizations.
I do agree that the climate-pessimism side of the Culture Wars seems pretty d*mn oblivious to basic psychology and sociology. Almost as if they're far more interested in scoring juvenile "I'm Right!" points than they are in preventing catastrophe...
(Anybody else notice that the article's "ruins of abandoned & overgrown city" artwork shows all the glass windows intact?)
I agree on the sentiment - We live beyond our means and that doesn't even make sense. But I find the prediction that we would perish in the near future neither well founded nor sensible. The motivation behind it is also bizarre: so that we can make our peace.
To put it polemically: When will we go down so that I can tell my mom? And if we're certain to perish, then why bother with suffering and morality? If death is so certain, who would want to suffer again before it?
Is it a true belief that those who have made peace with life suddenly become 'moral'?
I'm saying this, because I think some people need the apocalypse to feel unity and belonging. They seem to have such a strong desire for community and unity that they would summon hell and devils just to bring people together.
It will be hard, for many places on Earth it will be catastrophic.
Civilization won't end tho.
Some of these estimates are absurd, which only makes the case for fighting climate change harder to make - same as overblown estimates of the COVID epidemic and of the effectiveness of the vaccine made it harder to handle future pandemics effectively.
The most important wrong estimate is the growth of population and associated growth of consumption of everything. Population will start to decline globally if it already hasn't started to go down. This is inconsistent with increasing consumption.
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[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 233 ms ] threadYou can't produce energy without energy. And you can't produce food without energy and soil.
It’s still a car crash regardless of the magnitude, and a collapse is still a collapse if it’s a small or a large one.
You absolutely can’t treat all car crashes as equal, same way you can’t treat all collapse as equal. The Soviet Union collapsed for instance, and the 90s were absolutely a struggle, but it didn’t mean all Russians regressed to subsistence agriculture and there was eventually a recovery. Its member states are still around, with some doing better than others (the Baltic states for instance).
Uh... yes? Would you rather take a 50mph head on collision driving a 2023 Outback or a 1930 Model A?
The point is that car crashes are indeed dangerous, and we've spent a century of engineering making them significantly (vastly, really) less so. And that's a good thing to be celebrated, and not rejected just because we don't want to get into crashes in the first place. Climate change mitigation follows the same ethical principles.
[1] Actually climate change. It's a metaphor.
[2] Climate change, again.
[3] Yup.
- AI could have a singularity.
- Ice reflects heat, so there can be a vicious circle as ice melts.
- Ocean currents could suddenly shift into a different pattern.
- Any sort of stressor, like global food shortage, can lead to instability and thus nuclear world war over resources
- A contagious disease could cause infertility/death globally. Or, say, if the covid vaccine or microplastics had an unexpected delayed effect after a few years
We tempt all these risks more and more as we continue living unsustainably
I don't personally buy it because there's always going to be someone claiming the collapse of civilization is nigh. During the shortages of food during COVID I saw channels I normally respected swerve a bit into prepperism or attempts to grow natural food in case of food chain collapse.
I do believe our climate situation is incredibly dire and we will need to use increasingly extreme measures to stop it. Executives need to start being punished properly for their extreme maleficence and disregard of public health, companies will need to face reckonings for hiding their crimes and everyone involved at the time charged. And we will also need to accept that infinite growth and the way we're growing isn't sustainable. But I think it's a problem that can be solved.
1. It wont happen in our time. 2. Some rich ass hole will solve the problem for us (the rich).
But, as history shows, yeah right! incoming barbarians at the enclave gates...
When the public demands clean tech, or the clean option becomes the cheaper one, you’ll see lightning-quick change.
but things are also never as bad as people say they are
They are both philosophies that say nothing can change for the better.
Sanity is a quuckly depleting resource.
Life, and civilization, will continue to go on, whether people like it or not.
This is less realistic than a lot of doomerism. I'm not really scared of every last human dying off, I'm worried about a world where nearly everyone would rather be dead because of war and starvation and disease. Life on earth is likely to exist for a very long time, even if we do our worst, but there are known risks and unknown risks that might make life on earth hell, even within the lifetimes of people alive today.
What civilization ? They are all savages. /s
Edit-this feels like the kids on voice chat chanting “turtle! Turtle!!” When a player is having a hard game and the bullies want that player to quit. Except humanity is far too big and far too disparate and far too resourceful to decide on collapse.
TFA is simply a laundry list of early 21st century faddish conceits to describe the eternal brokenness of man. I liked it better when it was called it original sin. “Micro plastics”, “forever chemicals”, etc. aren’t evidence or argument, they’re an incantation repeated as part of a cultural rite.
It's just dumb.
If increasing efficiency can increase the value of a set amount of energy, it can also increase the value of a decreasing amount of energy.
And you will lessen the impact of the message.
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/hus/topics/cancer-deaths.htm
Especially the end ” enjoy the time we have left.” - ending of civilization does not mean end of individual human life. This makes it sound like everyone would die.
Yes, the environment needs to be cherished and repaired. Sophist alarmism and doomerism indeed is not the way to go IMO.
Seems a commonality among any kind of end-of-times cultists, they’ll try to befriend you and woo you into being on their side. That their bunker was a sane investment, that you should sell all your assets and invest in silver or sheep or small arms. That their calculations are a bit off, that it’ll actually be next Fall not this Spring.
But, above all else, that I’m right and you can be too if you just believe like I do. Except I don’t believe, I know.
Oh, you won’t know like I know? You’re just another sheep, another one of them.
Deathwish politics is at least as old as the mid 1950's when impending nuclear Armageddon was on the cards.
Out of that came a sect of American evangelical fundamentalists who believe in "The Rapture". Many prominent US political figures were and remain associated with it.
Right now many of these types are rubbing their hands with glee over the middle-East conflict, hoping it will escalate as prophesied.
A subset of the latter. There are those who begin with the premise that the world is going to hell and then seek out (and amplify) any evidence they find that resonates with their bias. Doomers, if you will. It's not even that difficult to identify these folks, but as soon as one does the retort is invariably some form of "you have your head in the sand".
And yeah I can attest that there is a certain appeal. Psychologically it’s that post apocalypse survival brings purpose to an otherwise easy, almost pointless existence, I think this is widely understood no?
I will also say that post apocalypse survival is a simple game to play, dig a hole and live in it, I could buy an entire lifetime of gaseous oxygen and bury it in the ground with me at current prices. The level up is to ensure the survival of one’s local community. Master level is Elon Musk style interplanetary insurance.
So many people fantasize about moving to a farm in the country. Collapse-advocates want events to force them (and everyone) to make that change. A collapse is ideal because they will be forced to do something they fantasize about and not miss out on anything new that modernity creates (because modernity will be gone).
"They"? You are overgeneralizing a group you are not a member of.
What you're describing covers exactly zero of the "doomers" I know - most are just depressed PhD biologists or polymath economists modeling a tragic collapse.
Look up the revised World3 models, IPCC's BAU scenarios, go review Hot Topic and the critiques since then, check out the Existential Climate Risks survey of experts... talking about the risks of collapse, and fearing it happening, is quite rational.
Casting the group as expecting some absurd "population collapse without civilization collapse", or cheering on a massive societal regression, is a clear signal your sample set is biased.
Anyway, the vast majority of climate scientists and economists don't think that civilization will collapse. Maybe they aren't "polymathic" enough for you. Even if they entertain the possiblity of collapse, they aren't certain about it (again, compare to the linked article).
At any rate, the idea that scientists can model the collapse of civilization is silly. We can't model the market and civilization is much more complex.
> Casting the group as expecting some absurd "population collapse without civilization collapse", or cheering on a massive societal regression, is a clear signal your sample set is biased.
I don't know what the first part of this means. There absolutely is a "collapse community," well represented by the linked article and elsewhere on the internet, and I think it's very clear that they eagerly await the collapse for transparent psychological reasons.
Do we really know what they think? I suppose we know what they say. To the question of the article, let's say that one or more of them are actually fairly certain that collapse is coming within a few decades - what would be the point of telling anyone that?
But anyway, the whole idea that scientists can predict the collapse of civilization is wrong. At some level this is a question of optimism vs. pessimism. That's not a question of models, it's a question of taste or, as the kids say, "vibes".
If someone were of the honest opinion that broad scale collapse was imminent I can only expect they would also not expect fame afterwards. Anyone sharing this opinion disingenuous is more likely to be sharing it for gain before the collapse that may never come, via book sales or speaking engagements for example.
On the other end you have zero proof that you are not the one in denial right now.
I personally am probably a doomer as you call it, I really think it will go downhill for at least a century, probably more. Not sure if we'll go back to middle age or stone age. The planet will survive, humans will survive, but it won't be pretty.
I don't think we can manage to achieve real net zero CO2 before a very long while (many decades). It would simply require humans to trust each other and sacrifice in a scale that has never happened before. I have little reasons to believe this can happen, definitely not fast enough.
And co2 is just one problem.
Just to pick one at random:
> Secondly, even if we found an infinite source of clean energy, endless growth would still be impossible. If energy usage were to keep growing at 2.3% per year — as it has for many decades — in 400 years, the oceans would be boiling just from the waste heat. The laws of physics are a bitch.
This is some really weak stuff. Why must energy usage keep growing by 2.3% per year. Will civilization collapse if it doesn’t, is that the link? My conclusion here is that we need to change our growth model to not always need more energy, although this is something I already believed, and putting the problem out at 400 years seems to make it, if anything, less urgent (I think, though, it is still quite urgent).
Let’s go back a bit, maybe the killer problem actually comes from the “first” to this “second,” and this paragraph was just added as frosting on the cake or something (although if that is the case, seems like poor editing). .
> First of all, there is no such thing as a green economy. To create renewables and electric vehicles, we have to destroy ecosystems so we can mine rare-earth metals. And to produce the plastic, steel, cement, and other components that go into solar panels and wind turbines, we need oil. There’s nothing green about any of this.
Nope, guess not. The only claim here is that some ecosystems will have to be destroyed. This is of course bad, and I hope we mitigate it to the fullest extent possible! But we’ve already destroyed lots of ecosystems, we will destroy more. Maybe the green economy has some imperfect parts, but local devastation doesn’t threaten civilization.
I don’t think it is worth it to dissect the article paragraph fully at this point. I think this person is just looking for reasons to be hopeless.
Neither one is a problem IMO because the earth isn’t a fragile place, it operates at temperature swings of over a hundred degrees F, at least 30 degrees in a nice temperature zone where various plant species thrive.
I mean medieval Europe had civilization, it wasn’t a very pleasant one for lots of the people in it, but it was a civilization. There are lots of outcomes we’d like to prevent before we get to “civilization is doomed.”
And calling your entire blog 'collapse musings' suggests 100% crankdom.
Frankly, this is dumb.
And we should take you at your word because youre more pedigreed? or enjoy more clout in the HN-sphere?
Is that it? Is that what this site has come down to? Ha!
Therefore any uninformed, emotional crackpot can submit a rant with no proof, no evidence, no citations, with no credentials so it’s not even an appeal to authority, at best it’s an appeal to emotion and or intellectual laziness.
I grant you the freedom to express yourself freely, and in return you grant me the freedom to call your low-effort rant garbage. Its a two way street.
I think you could view HN as a fishing pond and fish selected voices privately to another private platform if you are really serious about high quality content.
If the article had approached its central question--whether to tell people or not--by first saying something like "suppose that we knew the civilization is going to collapse in the next ten years, the question arises: should we tell people?", it could have avoided more of the pushback it received.
How have you come to the conclusion that the author's conclusions are wrong?
Many in this thread have rightly pointed out that the author is speaking of the future which can't be know with certainty. Are you telling issue with the level of certainty the author seems to have, or do you fished with the argument of impending doom?
It's the future the great thing about it is that we don't know what will happen. You can either dig a bunker but it won't help you with the general anxiety you feel. You will just have the anxiety in the bunker.
Despite this, it runs through a big list of supposedly civilization-killing effects. These are’t really linked together, it is just problem after problem, joined by phrases along the lines of “if that doesn’t get us, this next thing will.” This makes it very hard to respond to. The author also doesn’t make a concrete link between many of these bad things and the end of civilization. I can show an example, but it is just one in a list.
> Pollution and habitat destruction are mutilating the tree of life. Once the insects are mostly gone and the topsoil is mostly dead, we will no longer have the ability to grow food on a mass scale, and it will be game over for modern civilization. But it gets even worse…
The article linked the “mostly dead” claim is:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/may/30/topsoil-farm...
It includes dire news like:
> Amid growing concerns about topsoil loss, no-till and cover crops are becoming more popular, according to the 2017 US Census of Agriculture. Forty per cent of US cropland is grown on no-till farms, up from 32% in 2012.
> Though still not widely adopted, cover crops are becoming more popular with farmers, too, particularly in the country’s corn belt. Nationwide, farmers planted cover crops on 15m acres, a 50% increase from five years earlier.
Oh wait no, actually the article says this is a problem but solutions are starting to emerge on the market (already, as of 4 years ago). And, would this actually threaten civilization itself? We have a lot of extra food in the Americas, and lots of food waste…
But that’s just one suggestion of many. Maybe one is actually compelling. The list is too long for a mildly interested outsider to research each one in detail. This is a failure on the part of the blog post, assuming the intended audience is people who don’t buy into the premise already—and if not, why list the possible causes in the first place?. Just start with “assume for the sake of argument that civilization is doomed.”
The Dust Bowl of the 1930s (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dust_Bowl) was pretty apocalyptic, and caused by a combination of drought and bad farming practices. It's clear things can go badly. On the other hand, we've adapted and learned since then. I'm enthusiastic about the potential for AI and robotics to make farming more humane and less environmentally destructive while still keeping yields high (e.g. no till, with targeted use of pesticides and fertilizers).
The modern world is built on an impressive rube goldberg machine of supply chain dependencies and cheap oil. Yes green energy appears to be able to beat natural gas turbine, but we're careening towards 9 billion people.
In particular, we don't warehouse anything anymore. Everything is just-in-time production, and a minor disruption like COVID (which on the scale of 20th century historical events like world war I+II, or earlier pandemics like the black death, is chump change) caused major supply chain disruptions.
I wouldn't dismiss the problems outlined in the blog, just the certainty of the presentation and the binary thinking.
There are two real dangers: first is the combination of species extinctions and rapid climate change collapsing the entire biosphere. The second is an old and forgotten one: nuclear armageddon.
Some of our descendants will live in closed-loop habitats with around 50 gigatons of biosphere per occupant. But this will only happen if we prepare for the transition and engage in some long-term thinking.
Unless you have a science-backed point by point refutation of the many challenges to come, your comment is simply an empty assertion.
A long list of vague gestures toward the end of the world is only convincing to people who are already on the author’s side.
I would suggest watching this video as opposite opinion/thinking material.
Is Dr. Peterson Hopeful for the Future?
https://youtu.be/G9Ojo_n5-VQ
About Cynicism, see Jordan Peterson - How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs (4K)
https://youtu.be/WEP5ubPMGDU?t=180
Not gonna read the whole thing, but why would you think 'modern civilization' would be limited to one planet?
Because we're nowhere near ready to live outside earth! Approximately no human lives in a desert, on a glacier, or below the ocean surface, even though that's easy compared to living anywhere else in the solar system. Humans are not made for space.
My prediction: By the time we have sufficiently advanced tech to keep humans alive in space, the humans won't be necessary anymore. Why ship delicate bags of water between planets? It's sheer hubris to think humans will play a role in space. It'll be machines that don't suffocate or freeze at the slightest inconvenience.
Pretty soon, the only people who find your company enjoyable are malthusians, christian apocalyptics, and emos. I mean the smiths are great, but have you heard....
Doom prophets existed in all ages, telling us the end was nigh. It never was, and it isn't now. Trying to convince people that everything is hopeless and that despair is all that remains to us is not only incorrect, it's downright evil.
Our current civilisation is far more brittle than previous ones due to its unusual size and reliance on technologies. Previous civilisations could revert to simpler agrarian based ones without involving the death of a significant percentage of the world's population, but I'm having difficulty seeing how we would manage a simple failure such as pollinators dying out (e.g. by toxic microparticles).
And I don't buy the "but NOW it's all different" excuse. People haven't suddenly lost the ability to come up with solutions to problems. We aren't far more brittle either; if anything, our ability to ship in goods from other continents makes us far more resilient for anything less than a sudden planetary-scale event. And no, a rise in global temperatures of 0.01 degrees does not qualify as such.
This desperate desire for civilization to end is the logical consequence of all the horrifying propaganda that has been blasted into our heads over the last decades. People like the author of this article lost the will to live, and just wish for it to be over. And not just by taking the easy way out either; they feel betrayed by civilization in general and want to take it out with them. We have been brought to a very dark and dangerous place, and it is going to kill a lot of people that are no longer able to tell truth from fiction.
But civilization? That will be fine; it will continue, and the children of those who weren't demoralized will thrive.
Oh, and the problem with honeybees is that we have too many now. Look it up. There was a problem, people jumped to solve it, and did too well, so now we have too many of the critters...
We are pretty much totally reliant on our current ability to ship food across the world which does make our current situation unprecedented. If we have a couple of years of various crop failures (e.g. due to weather patterns changing), then there will be a significant number of people dying. We don't have the necessary stockpiles to sustain the world's population for the amount of time required to drastically change how we do things.
And the potential of disaster does not imply the sky is falling. The potential for disaster is always there. That's still no reason to sit down and give up.
I do agree that the climate-pessimism side of the Culture Wars seems pretty d*mn oblivious to basic psychology and sociology. Almost as if they're far more interested in scoring juvenile "I'm Right!" points than they are in preventing catastrophe...
(Anybody else notice that the article's "ruins of abandoned & overgrown city" artwork shows all the glass windows intact?)
Civilization won't end tho.
Some of these estimates are absurd, which only makes the case for fighting climate change harder to make - same as overblown estimates of the COVID epidemic and of the effectiveness of the vaccine made it harder to handle future pandemics effectively.
The most important wrong estimate is the growth of population and associated growth of consumption of everything. Population will start to decline globally if it already hasn't started to go down. This is inconsistent with increasing consumption.