On The Collapse of Complex Societies

One of the mailing lists that I'm on had a great short essay about the disastrous decision that societies can make - and their consequences. The author is Jared Diamond, who also wrote Guns, Germs and Steel (First Slashdot book review was that book), and is still one of the most interesting books I've read in a while.

Comments

Re:Chaos theory of human societies?

[IWannaBeAnAC]

Well, there is actually a reason why that could not happen. The weather system doesn't contain that much energy.

Speaking of probabilities, once you get to quantum mechanics, the probability of practically *anything* happening is non-zero, so tiny to be irrelevant. Like, the probability of an object spontaneously jumping a few feet in the air due to a quantum fluctuation is non-zero, but small enough (10^-60 or so?) that the probability of seeing it happen, anywhere in the universe, anytime in the lifetime of the universe, is much much smaller than 1.

Ie, the moral is, knowing whether or not a probability is non-zero doesn't help. You need to actually do the calculation and find out exactly how probable it is.

Re:Chaos theory of human societies?

[Dyolf Knip]

I'm as aware as you the odds against it. Though as I recall, the airspeed of your average gaseous molecule is on the order of 2000 kps. You never notice it because they just keep running into one another and the net motion for a large group is comparatively zero. So, all you need (note the sarcasm) are a few quintillion million-to-one chances occuring in a row and you could have 99.5% of the atmosphere impart all of its kinetic energy to the remaining 0.5%, which would then go flying off at near-c. I think a few million tons of anything at that speed would do tremendous amounts of damage to a star, no?

But you are correct. We could wait quite literally forever and never see it happen.