Slashdot Mirror
NASA-Funded Study Investigates Collapse of Industrial Civilization
Snirt writes "A new study (PDF) sponsored by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center has highlighted the prospect that global industrial civilization could collapse in coming decades due to unsustainable resource exploitation and increasingly unequal wealth distribution. Noting that warnings of 'collapse' are often seen to be fringe or controversial, the study attempts to make sense of compelling historical data showing that 'the process of rise-and-collapse is actually a recurrent cycle found throughout history.' Cases of severe civilizational disruption due to 'precipitous collapse — often lasting centuries — have been quite common.' They say, 'Technological change can raise the efficiency of resource use, but it also tends to raise both per capita resource consumption and the scale of resource extraction, so that, absent policy effects, the increases in consumption often compensate for the increased efficiency of resource use.' After running simulations on the survivability of various types of civilizations, the researchers found that for the type most resembling ours, 'collapse is difficult to avoid.'"
“A dying culture invariably exhibits personal rudeness. Bad manners. Lack of consideration for others in minor matters. A loss of politeness, of gentle manners, is more significant than is a riot.”
Robert A. Heinlein, Friday
Read it, MFs!
I have plenty of common sense, I just choose to ignore it. -- Calvin
Depends on what you call 'local'. Try reading about the Greek Dark Ages.
Reinstate Bernanke, and he will print us out of it. Don't worry.
ATM we enjoy cheap stuff because of China's cheap labour and lax environmental laws. Once the Chinese workers and people start earning higher wages and standards of living closes in to that of the western world next will be Africa as the new China.
After that????
Booom!!!!
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
However, the other big difference is travel. Today, almost any one can go any place in the world quite quickly. This gives governmental competition, and creates a safety valve of sorts. Anyone doing something different (Like Icland and the banking crisis) has the ability to attract productive people. And countries that try to hard to distribute income have the ability to lose them.
"... the prospect that global industrial civilization could collapse in coming decades due to unsustainable resource exploitation and increasingly unequal wealth distribution"
No kidding. The depletion of cheap and plentiful supplies of petroleum alone will cause the global marketplace to seize up like a 55-yr-old American's heart after decades of being a couch potato. Too many people today are eating food produced by a highly-mechanized, energy-densified agriculture system. Too much of it runs on cheap petroleum. And cheap petroleum has arguably already run out. The energy input to produce each calorie of food, must either stop or rise to reflect the scarcity price. In too many instances, the former option will be chosen.
are unsustainable. Who would have thunk it?
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
Any decent engineer could probably put together a PID loop or two (possibly cascaded) to keep stability in the system, but what would you use as a control mechanism?
I have determined that my sig is indeterminate.
Is Hari Seldon when we need him?
I don't want NASA using their funds for Social/Political Simulations. Not their job and a complete waste of NASA money. Fire the writers and buy another Rocket, or a fuel tank, or something that has something to do with Aeronautics and Space, not make believe liberal arts studies. Let some other organization waste their money. NASA is for Space Engineering/Science Research, not for some third rate Social Pseudo Science study.
I foresee the imminent fall of the American Empire, which encompasses the entire world, and a dark age lasting 30 thousand years before a second great empire arises. I also foresee an alternative where the intermittent period will last only one thousand years. To ensure my vision of a second great empire comes to fruition, we should create two foundationsâ"small, secluded havens of all human knowledgeâ"at "opposite ends of the internet".
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
If resources become scarce, the fuel needed to power travel and to support infrastructure may not be there. Travel may become hard.
Someone named Cassandra?. Jared Diamond wrote a whole book called Collapse about it. Greenland colonization attempt, anasazi Indians etc. When the collapse avoidance is still possible, the new course requires sacrifices from the current top dogs of the system. Not being sure whether the top-dogginess will persist in the new course, they stay on original course to disaster.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
The trick with good times is when they don't last. What we see, more so in this cycle that most, is centralization of power and responsibility/regulation (there has never existed a more regulated society than the modern West).
The cost of this is extreme - by some estimates, most people pay 30-60% of their earnings for the year to support such a structure (if you don't understand the average 22% cost of goods as embedded income taxes, google for the Harvard economics study). When we have an extreme downturn, like now (we need 350,000 jobs per month added for 10 straight years just to get back to "Bush era" employment numbers), people can't afford it. Just this week we have the example of Obama saying that people should cancel their phone service to pay for his healthcare scheme, but that's just a glaring example of a pervasive problem.
Only so many people will allow their homes to be confiscated to pay for the ostentatious lifestyle in DC and on Wall Street, while they're having trouble putting food on the table for their families. If trends continue, the USD will lose its place as the national reserve currency (debt-to-gdp is over 100% now; Bretton Woods was agreed upon when the USD was still backed by gold) which will cause a rapid loss of buying power. And the more the US outsources, the less will be there when the USD loses its value. At some point, they can crank up the printing presses to fund poverty programs, but when people stop accepting dollars, there's nothing else to do but to implement wage and price controls and/or seize the means of production. The odds of a revolt go up with each step along the way.
The shame of it is, we can see this coming, and we can recognize that we need decentralization and de-escalation of power, but the political system does not allow for it to back itself down. Even the very name, "lawmakers" is telling - "law-removers" isn't in the lexicon.
Jefferson himself predicted the situation, and even recommended revolution as the solution. I'd rather see a peaceful and economic one.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
I found these two quotes most interesting:
"While some members of society might raise the alarm that the system is moving towards an impending collapse and therefore advocate structural changes to society in order to avoid it, Elites and their supporters, who opposed making these changes, could point to the long sustainable trajectory 'so far' in support of doing nothing."
"Collapse can be avoided and population can reach equilibrium if the per capita rate of depletion of nature is reduced to a sustainable level, and if resources are distributed in a reasonably equitable fashion."
I think we can see that we are already in an early state of collapse. Environmental change is a strong driving force to destabilize society. We can see that the elites have their heads firmly stuck in the sand on the issues of over-consumption of resources and unequal distribution. Jared Diamond has covered these issues well (particularly in "Collapse").
I personally am pessimistic that we will be able to avoid collapse due to the political and economic power of the elite.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
Our hard drives get bigger, the programs grow fatter. Everything grows as big as it can, and will use all the space and time has.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
These people could at least be a little less predictable.
'I don't know what it's called. I just know the sound it makes, when it takes a man's life.' ~ Four Leaf Tayback
lucky 4 me i won't be around that long;-}
http://www.theguardian.com/the...
Nonsense!
NASA lives on, reaching out to Muslims to make them feel better about themselves, and doing pseudo social science research!
We can't have NASA be the bastion of national pride and accomplishment that it once was. It's now just another government jobs program intended to promote the government.
I hear good things about outer space. Maybe you should check that out sometime when you're not busy.
so, what you are saying is there is going to be a market in safe, easy to use wooden sailing ships?
We'll have resources forever.!Jesus and Santa Clause and the EIA said so! There's infinite oil and gas! We find more every year RIGHT HERE IN THE USA, don't we?! And we have infinite water! Infinite phosphates! Infinite free money! Golly gosh-a-rootie, the whole ding dang show will just go on *forever* because we have God and TECHNOLOGY on our side!
Whoo, that was too much sarcasm. I have to lie down now.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
If it's 100,000 years from now, I won't lose any sleep over it.
Interesting article. There's always someone to play the cynic.
I am pessimistic but not that cynical.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
The evolutionary economists compare us to seals. The biggest seal gets to mate with all the females. So, the lion seals kept getting bigger and they developed heart and other problems as well as the tendency to crush the females under their weight.
We do the same thing. How many people do you see go into serious debt to buy BMWs, Mercedes or some other luxury car to look "bigger" - more important? Even if you have the cash, buying a luxury car is a terrible waste of capital.
The same goes for the McMansions. People rationalize it was "moving up" or it's an "investment" or what have you, but it boils down to looking "bigger."
iPhones are/were the same - and now smart phones have become the norm; when for most, a $35 pos would be more than adequate (Do you REALLY need to check email every 10 minutes?).
Bigger cars, jewelry, bigger, bigger and more and more energy and resource use.
Basically, our consumptive economy is to prove that we're a little better than the next guy.
When you look back about 100 years ago, what were the popular books? Books on character and how to get it.
Now, it's how to get rich quick.
We are becoming more like animals. You look at the primate studies and the only difference is we can talk and they have more hair.
What's obvious has been obvious for a very long time. The only disagreement is when.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
So how many people are capable of building a transistor? Where will those computer things come from after a couple of generations?
The 1600's sent a letter, they want their ships back
If you gave me a choice between a printer and a giraffe with explosive diarrhoea, i'll get my ladder and my raincoat
A climatologist, likely with a political agenda, a math grad student, and a political science BA, put together a model that shows that if growth trends continue in a finite system, the system breaks. No shit sherlock! Except that such growth trends do NOT continue. Any increase in resource consumption results in an increase in price. Any increase in production results in a reduction of price. If the system gets to a point where consumption outpaces production then the price rises, and it can rise a lot! This results in people using less of the resource and finding alternatives.
Any such models that are built without the input of an economist should be automatically discarded as being total BS.
Peter
This is one of those scenarios in which it would be better to not have all of our eggs in the same basket. For instance, it might be possible to avoid a complete catastrophe if, in advance, we managed to set up a self-sustaining colony on the Moon or on Mars. However, unless we're very careful, that could easily be such an expensive endeavor that attempting to achieve it would only hasten the collapse of our own civilization. Ho-hum.
Survival of H. sapiens != survival of civilization
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
It is an interesting idea, to model sustainability, but the paper isn't particularly convincing in the way it models things. They start by admitting it's not clear why various societies have collapsed, then create a model which may or may not be related to reality, but matches their political viewpoints.
They chose only a few different variables to look at. If all you do is look at inequality and resource use, the answer you get is going to be in terms of inequality and resource use. This is similar to if you have a rocket flying through space carrying a flea; and the only variable you examine is the flea jumping, you are going to find a huge correlation between the jumps of the flea and the trajectory of the rocket. In other words, they might be right or they might not, but this way of studying it won't give you any good conclusions.
To understand my point, (if you've read the paper), consider if they had been Ayn Rand disciples instead of modern democrats. It would have been just as easy to create the model in terms 'producers' and 'leaches,' and deriving whatever conclusion you want from that.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Survival of H. sapiens != survival of civilization
Yes, and collapse of iPhone sales != collapse of industrial civilization.
Equality is really only seen in hunter-gatherer tribes small enough not to require some sort of hierarchical governance or specialization in various crafts. What disrupts societies (wealth-wise) is actively inhibiting its members from receiving the compensation that their particular skill sets command. And one of the prime methods of interference is wealth redistribution.
Have gnu, will travel.
Just this week we have the example of Obama saying that people should cancel their phone service to pay for his healthcare scheme, but that's just a glaring example of a pervasive problem.
So not what he meant. If you like your phone service, you can keep your phone service.
How inappropriate to call this planet Earth, when clearly it is Ocean.
Even in the most catastrophic scenarios like a nuclear war or a dinosaur-scale meteor hit, enough people should survive to gradually rebuild it to the current level.
That's pretty much what they're talking about. Some hit that breaks down society and then requires a rebuild.
Sooner or later we're getting one of the above, at some point economic growth will become at best neutral and the top scientists will spend their entire careers simply understanding the work of their predecessors. The question is whether our massive interconnectedness means we'll have more redundancy and be able to withstand inevitable setbacks, or if we'll just have more links in the chain that we don't know how to repair and be at risk of a fairly sudden and drastic collapse.
I stole this Sig
You lack imagination, as well as the ability to understand sentences in the English language.
'Collapse of civilization' does not mean that the human population goes to zero. While that has happened (as on Easter Island and the Viking colonies on Greenland), the more likely outcome is that the population is severely reduced, as well as the quality of life of those survivors is also severely reduced. As I see it, the most likely result would be many centuries of society organized on medieval lines with many small fiefdoms (along with a few short-lived larger kingdoms and empires) based on subsistence farming with very limited travel or commerce. I think that most scientific and medical knowledge would be lost, and slow to be re-acquired. This would be especially true if the collapse occurs more than a couple of decades from now, when most paper books will not be common any more. And since we will have already consumed most of the earth's richest mineral deposits, the richest source of metals will be the carcasses of today's cities (although that might be a benefit in rebuilding).
There is a huge number of novels that have been written describing life in a pre- or post-civilization society. None of it is very pretty, and certainly not anything that I would wish on anybody.
So how many people are capable of building a transistor? Where will those computer things come from after a couple of generations?
You might be surprised. Nothing has to be reinvented from scratch. The earliest versions of modern chip-making processes are now public domain, as the patents have expired. The patents themselves are less than useful as descriptions of what to actually do to make a chip, but they are legitimately a place to start for anybody bootstrapping a foundry. Those patents are old enough that many copies of them exist in printed form, so having a functional computer connected to a functional Internet is not a prerequisite for access.
But I don't see how it's possible to collapse that far any longer. Maybe before the ascendance of ARM chips, you had a good point. There were only two companies in the world making fully capable CPUs (I discount microcontrollers here because they're usually too specialized). Nowadays there's an ARM foundry around every corner. ARM cores may not be cutting edge in performance, but they can do all the scalar operations you need and enough of the vector operations. And they're dirt cheap and a lot of people all around the world know how to make them. The process is cheap and easy and can work in suprisingly primitive conditions. (Where "primitive" is a relative term, of course.) More to the point, there are ARM systems all over the world now. We're not quite to the point where there's a functional ARM system for every human on Earth, but we're very rapidly approaching that point. That kind of ubiquity is hard to lose once it's established. It would take a world wide religious pogrom to do away with sufficient numbers of those pocket computers to actually put a dent in their availability.
And as long as we have those pocket computers, we can hold things together. We have functional processors and data storage so vast that somebody, somewhere, has access to anything you need to know to keep civilization running, right down to how to produce ad hoc power solutions to keep it all working. Making a solar panel in your garage isn't really feasible, but making a multi-kilowatt wind turbine is astonishingly easy, especially when salvaging parts, and you could store complete plans for how to do so in a tiny fraction of your phone's storage device, available for the rest of your life.
Civilization is a lot more robust than many people imagine. Some of that robustness happens specifically because people imagine it isn't, and so they take steps to improve an already remarkably resilient system. If it bothers you, join the crowd. Storage for detailed plans and procedures for making every kind of machine required for at least a modicum of civilization costs less than $100, with room not just for blueprints, but for How To instructional videos for every piece of it. Leave out the video and depend on just detailed textual instructions and that storage can be solid state for the same price.
Once the resources are gone,which resources are you going to use to rebuild the society?
Oh wait, you're an economist right?
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
How many people and links in the supply chain to you need to repair an iPhone, or to make a replacement part for a car (I assume some of those parts are non-trivial for a single machinist to make).
A few years of negative economic growth might be all you need, suppliers start going out of business and the shocks travel up and down the supply chain. Also consider political stability, you're not going to make a major investment if guys with guns can walk up and simply take it. It hasn't really happened in modern memory, since the industrial revolution tech has been simple enough and growth potential high enough that little shocks don't really last. But go to the modern world where stable growth might be 1-2%, add some major political upheaval and I'm not sure how fast things fall.
Look how much things fell after the collapse of the Roman Empire, I'm not sure why we're fundamentally immune to that.
I stole this Sig
They may well be talking about a real problem, but they use inappropriate words.
"Collapse" means suddenly crumble, cease to exist.
"Industrial civilization" is a civilization that has an organized industry (as opposed to just individual craftsmen and unique items production).
Can you really imagine the ecological / economical limits described here to eliminate every sort of organized production on Earth? Or even set it back more than a decade?
They also overlook the adaptability of demand when the supply shortens, and the number of disruptive technologies appearing every day, rendering moot any such "if the trend continues" analysis.
First, such a major setback is not very likely.
Second, when the knowledge is available, the whole bootstrapping process can be worked through much faster than the historical R&D scale.
And last, a lot of industrial production is possible without computers. Logarithmic rulers were still in wide usage during the Apollo project. And there was at least 100 years of industrial civilization before that.
I argue that it would take very close to zero population to destroy the industrial civilization. Any declines possible from the factors described in TFA do not come anywhere close.
No, I'm not an economist, but even I can understand that as resources get more scarce, the demand will gradually shift to more sustainable sources, because they will become price competitive.
And I also understand that both the demand and supply trends change on a qualitative level with introduction of disruptive technology like internet, electric cars, space-based solar power or asteroid mining. You cannot simply draw two lines and say "when these lines cross, civilization collapses".
The model is nice in that it seems to catch the trends for a agrarian or hunter-gather dependence on natural resources that can be replenished (animal and plant species). Probably a decent model for human history prior to the 1850s.
The problem is that the natural resources that we are consuming now are NOT renewable (fossil fuels, minerals, metals). Once they are gone, they are gone, and there will be no recovery. And there is no incentive to conserve as as these resources become more rare, they become more valuable. Who can afford to stockpile them? The elite, of course.
In the end we're all screwed, but the elite will be insulated from the consequences for a while and will be wondering why the commoners are raising such a ruckus at the gates with their torches and pitchforks.
Whoever survives this crash will be back living on an Earth with a carrying capacity limited by renewable resources (hint: think of world populations of (maybe) a few hundred million, not 7-10 billion).
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
I won't cry for iPhone; if it gets to that, this won't be my biggest problem. It's okay if we use something simpler for a while, even switch back to wired in the worst case.
How much did things fall after the fall of the Roman Empire? Did the civilization collapse? Did people switch back to hunting and gathering?
I think the model wrongly assumes that elites draw down essential resources faster than commoners. In pre-modern society, that appears to have been incorrect. In pre-modern civilizations, it was over-farming and the reduction in soil fertility which was subject to draw-down, and not "resources" more generally. (For example, there is reasonably good evidence that soil degradation contributed to the collapse of the western roman empire). Elites do not consume much more food than commoners. As a result, I'm not sure it would make any different how stratified society is. Take the chateaux of the Loire Valley as an example: they're extravagant, but they're not built out of materials (such as stone) which became exhausted anywhere or threatened civilization.
In pre-modern societies, elites subsisted off the surplus labor which was left over after commoners had provided for their own subsistence. According to best estimates, this "surplus" labor available for exploitation by elites was never more than 20% of the total commoner labor available. Most labor in pre-modern societies was used in simply providing enough food for everyone to survive. In ancient Egypt, more than 90% of the population spent all their working time devoted to agriculture or household work, and similar ratios existed in other civilizations. As a result, the total consumption of elites in pre-modern society was never a large fraction of the total production of society. Some elites may have had extremely extravagant lifestyles compared to commoners, but that is because such elites' numbers were extremely small, generally much less than 1% of the population.
Another important consideration here is the difference between reduction of population, and the collapse of some political order. Insofar as I can tell, soil degradation often leads to a gradual reduction in population over centuries until some political order suddenly cannot be sustained. Often, ancient civilizations were empires in which some center had a large army and long transportation networks. The empire dominated a group of subject peoples on the periphery, and extracted the products of their surplus labor beyond subsistence and transported those surplus products to the center. Usually, the subject peoples disliked being so dominated. It seems possible to me that soil degradation could lead to a reduction in the size of the surplus, and thus the size and power of the army of the empire, until the arrangement suddenly could not be maintained. Take the western roman empire as an example: soil degradation and population decline had been happening for centuries, until the army weakened and a barbarian tribe invaded and suddenly overran and destroyed the empire.
Of course, the main criticism of the paper is that it's wildly speculative. There is no data whatsoever in the paper. This is excusable because there is very little "data" in the modern sense left over from pre-modern civilizations. Pre-modern peoples were extremely good at telling stories and writing epics, but poor at keeping records and statistics of commoners' well-being. For this reason, and other reasons, the causes of the collapses of many civilizations (such as the meso-American civilizations) are not well understood, and the explanations are highly speculative and different from each other. Many researchers speculate that the American civilizations collapsed because of long-lasting mega-droughts, which obviously would not fit this model of resource draw-down.
Usually, when constructing a model, it's at least necessary to verify that the model agrees with past evidence. Even then, the model may not be predictive at all; however, constructing a model which agrees with past evidence is often a first step. Unfortunately, the model in this case is just wildly speculative. There are virtually no examples of egalitarian civilizations prior to the 18th century, and so no data on how egalitarian civilizations would have fared. There is no data on soil fertility, consumption by elites, resource draw-down, total populations of civilizations, etc, which this model refers to. Instead, the model is along the lines of "this seems plausible".
Some irony there somewhere.
Gently reply
Of course, that novel also speculated that the deceased personality would still inhabit the body, despite the brain transplant too.
That depends on how much of the personality comes from the endocrine system.
When the patents expire, expect a candybar smartphone to be as trivially cheap and as trivially available as a simple 12 button corded handset once was.
I don't see how patents will ever expire on cell phones so long as carriers continue to mandate migration to new air interfaces. Analog and D-AMPS have already disappeared in favor of GSM, UMTS, and now LTE, and once LTE Advanced begins deployment, I expect carriers to sunset GSM as well.
Sailing is practically free transportation. The adjustment of the sails can be automated so a single human operator can run the whole ship.
Failing to exploit this is simply stupid.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
Your argument doesn't follow. $34k per year goes a lot further in some parts of the world. Example.
Power isn't so much of an issue. It's actually not that hard to generate and store even in a low-tech setting, if you have the knowledge. Lead-acid batteries are made from chemicals any high-school chemistry teacher can produce. Generators can be hand-crafted. The only thing required to generate power that I couldn't personally make using 1700's instruments and enough time would be the rectifier diodes - and those things have a shelf life of centuries, with every appliance holding a small pile of them. Regulators are common and long-lasting too. Your small town is going to include a few 'engineer-improvisers' who, for a sufficiently large pile of money, can install and maintain functional lighting, telegraph, running water and sanitation systems. The price would get higher though, so electric lights may become once again an upper-class status symbol.
Even if all manufacturing capacity vanished overnight, parts could be scavenged for many decades. Every car contains a battery, alternator, rectifier, gearbox... just add paddle-wheel and you've a hydroelectric power system. Those aren't delicate parts - they are made to last a long time, and don't contain any nanoscale manufacturing so can be repaired with hand tools.
And poor people, after the global economic collapse, are going to buy that automated sailing ship how again?
Most people don't see the flaw in thinking that they're going to weather the coming social breakdown because they have a high limit on their Visa card.
You are welcome on my lawn.
What if you needed a power drill, for a short time. So you went to your backyard, with a bucket and shovel and got some dirt. Then you went to your Mr. 3D Printer and emptied the dirt into its input material hopper. You then pressed a button that has an image of the power drill you need. Ya, it will only last a few times, but that's all you need it for.
but how to grow your own food? That's a big one if industrial civilization were to collapse. Food from comes from farms, not supermarkets. And you'd be surprised how many people don't know that.
mfwright@batnet.com
When one serious problem in FFWD occurs, the other 3 can fall fast.
Just because we are technologically adept and "powerful", does NOT mean there are not more powerful forces that just tip the boat enough to put the gunnel under.
Down the power system, have a 20-30 year drought or a major epidemic and suddenly "systems" fall apart.
Well that should make anarchists like Kevin O'Leary happy.
Twinstiq, game news
... does any of this have to do with NASA?
Lets take about the scenario 'nuclear annihilation': Tell me what you think will happen if the nukes vaporize a significant fraction of civilian nuclear power plants and their inventory.
Also, what happens to the already depleted oil resources? They magically reset, 'start at level 1' again?
Back from the dead, maybe. But not as National Aeronautics and Space Administration... Damn it...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
> but how to grow your own food?
People would move back to the country if cities become unsustainable. What method to produce food depends how far civilization collapsed. Steam powered farm tractors are pretty low tech, and abandoned cities would be an abundant supply of steel to make them out of.
But this time, we'll know enough to call the cargo "interns."
And poor people, after the global economic collapse, are going to buy that automated sailing ship how again?
Most people don't see the flaw in thinking that they're going to weather the coming social breakdown because they have a high limit on their Visa card.
If nothing else, I'll eventually get around to designing it myself and I'll teach them how.
Not right now though, I'm otherwise occupied.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
I don't think we're on the brink of hitting a wall but political stability is always a concern. There's American's who support the Tea Party, Torontonians who support Rob Ford, Russians and Crimeans who support Putin. People make bizarre political decisions and it's not hard to imagine a few bad events in sequence leading a developed nation into major instability.
This could happen and derail things at any time but my concern is the negative growth period. Once people realize the pie is no longer growing and they're now fighting over slices I'd expect things to go downhill quickly, I could see a fairly nice society breaking down badly within a couple decades.
I stole this Sig
I am always disappointed by the comments of otherwise intelligent people on slashdot in response to these articles, as this point was first brought up by the club of rome and more recently Jared Diamond - the response I see here makes it clear we will have a collapse - everyone is in denial, nobody wants to change a thing, everyone is going to use up non-renewable resources as fast as they can to get some perceived short term advantage over some other group - I want my car, I want my house in the middle of nowhere, I want to have as many children as I can - blah blah blah Exponential growth is impossible on a finite planet, space travel will not save us nor will any breakthrough technology - at best genetic engineering can buy us a bit of time - we need birth control, we need people to live in cities and share resources and we can't have a handful of people allocating a civilization's resources for their own self interest - and I will be cursed on /. for saying this.
I thought they are into space exploration...
Our civilizatin wouldn't be the first to collapse, and disappear. Roman civilization rose and fell. Chinese same. Several civilizations in the Middle East. So, no, I wouldn't be surprised if our civilization would go to hell, and be replaced by another in a few centuries. And as every new civilization in history took civilization further than the previous one, the next guys will be wiser than us, richer, smarter, and better off. Until they go too.
no, I don't have a sig
Sailing is practically free transportation. The adjustment of the sails can be automated so a single human operator can run the whole ship.
Failing to exploit this is simply stupid.
States someone who obviously has never set foot on a sailboat.
Sailing is akin to standing in a cold shower and ripping up hundred dollar bills.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Roman roads were not equaled until the 19th century. Aqueducts were built to a tolerance that was not achieved again until modern times. Indoor plumbing was lost for over 1000 years. 2000 year old breakwaters made of Roman concrete surpass anything we have today. Current Portland cement lasts about 50 years in salt water. The Greeks had nearly built a steam engine before their civilization collapsed and their knowledge wasn't surpassed until the 17th century.
With a decay in current infrastructure we would lose technological knowledge at a rapid rate. There are scientific advances today that perhaps a few dozen people in the world understand. The level of specialization in modern society is such that most of the technology that people use is not understood. Most people can't fix their own bicycles. If modern day support, money, and infrastructure is removed, we would lose a vast amount of knowledge within only a generation. I dunno, I think the perpetuation of knowledge is much more than figuring out how to power a solid state hard drive.
"Collapse" means suddenly crumble, cease to exist.
Well, it means the former not the latter. A collapsed building is still a building.
Can you really imagine the ecological / economical limits described here to eliminate every sort of organized production on Earth?
It doesn't have to eliminate every bit of production. We had a pretty substantial mess just from a recent real estate crisis.
And if you look at the historical examples given in the story, they didn't actually collapse suddenly. The scenario given is that things got progressively worse with the people in charge not doing enough or often making things worse.
For example, the Roman empire was in deep trouble in the third century. One of its effects was to severely damage various bits of infrastructure both physical and legal. For example, the trade network that the Romans had set up never became as safe as it had been. Also, the mess had created considerable inflation and the previously mentioned shift to concentration of wealth to large land owners.
They also overlook the adaptability of demand when the supply shortens, and the number of disruptive technologies appearing every day, rendering moot any such "if the trend continues" analysis.
The problem here is that the markets and other infrastructure which enables transactions between demand and supply is what can fail.
For example, I've heard it predicted that once Obamacare gets fully implemented it'll stop future drug development over our lifetimes. I guess the idea is that somehow all drug development throughout the world only happens in the US due to companies or something. Obviously, the prediction is a bit overwrought, but that sort of thing is what leads to long term disruptions between supply and demand.
"Alright so the budget this year is somewhat bleak. Regardless of the fact we privatized spaceflight (contrary to our projected economic model) we have no budget to conduct any space missions. We need an excuse to perpetuate our funding people! "
"How about a worthless and biased economic study that has nothing to do with space and doesn't require Federal Economic experts, you know, like the Federal Reserve, or the Treasury? "
"Genius! Just make sure you somehow game the system to be the opposite of Civilization IV's governmental hiarchy so people don't get bored and fail to realize career government work is the farthest thing from Capitalism. I want absolute monarchy, anarchy, depotism, communism, and facsism to somehow be safer than Capitalism. "
Only Rich People can travel quite quickly and easily.
Try getting citizenship in Iceland, or getting past the immigrant holding-camps in Australia, or over the border separating Mexico from the North, or moving from Africa to most of the European countries.
It's a curiosity of the corporate-libertarian economic model that capitol is multinational, but labour is stuck with the economy their dealt. That's part of the problem that this study seems to address. The elite do not have to care about the majority, because they and their offspring will be able to run from the worst of the problems for the longest – probably. But unless the elite are forced to see themselves at risk, and lose some of the benefits of their elite status, they will oppose change, and with their concentration of power that will cause problems for everybody.
Pretty creepy stuff. Maybe some elitists will read this study and save us! Or some other plan....
"Ruthlessly pursuing the idea that the accordion is just another instrument."
Yep, and it was crap the last time. For those of us old enough: overpopulation, environmental crisis, the collapse of capitalist societies and others are just boring memes that we've heard before.
Predictions of Global Malthusian Collapse have been proven wrong repeatedly, but only because many intelligent and hardworking humans have labored to prevent it. We defer a certain amount of gratification now, to invest in technologies, infrastructure, and institutions; we use our foresight to plan and avoid inauspicious outcomes.
My fear is that at some point, society as a whole will come to take all these things for granted. We'll pat ourselves on the back and say, "Malthus was and always is wrong because, uhh -- reasons", and we'll stop investing in the future. Because hey, I really need more shinies right now, and my voters are going to the polls right now, and the boss wants better numbers right now. And that's when tomorrow gets Fucked.
Malthusianism is only wrong because we work hard to make it wrong.
LOL - go talk to someone who owns a boat. I've heard them referred to as a hole in the sea to fill with money.
More seriously look at some history of major sailing era naval powers to get some idea of the amount of resources they expended even to get one large ship. There's a good reason why some pirates became nobility - stealing a few ships from another country saved a shitload.
Currently fuel oil is pretty damn close to free transportation. When that changes the extra time etc of sailing will become more economic, but for now the capital and time costs squeeze it out.
Kinda proves what AC was saying in a way; I only skimmed it, but it not hit not only the Greek cities, but slammed everyone who depended on them... along, well, trade routes.
I could see, say, a Chinese civil war causing massive shockwaves along logistic lines that pretty much slam the EU and US almost instantly, Russia shortly after, and everyone else in turn after that. If there are no redundancies in place, the whole house collapses globally.
And yeah - we're fast becoming that interconnected, if we're not already.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
States someone who obviously has never set foot on a sailboat.
Sailing is akin to standing in a cold shower and ripping up hundred dollar bills.
Many of us who have owned boats know that BOAT = "Break Out Another Thousand [dollars]"
On the other hand, commercial shipping companies know this too, and diesel/electric ships ain't cheap either (let one sit still for more than a couple hours, and it's like standing in a 'septic tank while ripping up million-dollar bills' (the latter part almost literally).
Sail is tougher not necessarily because of expense, but because winds are gonna be a bitch to predict reliably enough for commerce and timetables.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
However being resource rich doesn't matter much when all the manufacturing jobs are being done by people in other places.
Even ancient empires, once cut-off from trade from across the world, tended to wither. x*D
Intelligent idiots are we. | Evil men do not understand justice.
Sailing is practically free transportation. The adjustment of the sails can be automated so a single human operator can run the whole ship.
Failing to exploit this is simply stupid.
States someone who obviously has never set foot on a sailboat.
Sailing is akin to standing in a cold shower and ripping up hundred dollar bills.
I was born and raised next to the ocean. I grew up jigging for cod with my grandfather. My father taught sailing to the sea cadets. I've been on sailboats, worked on freighter ships. Numerous members of my family have owned boats of their own. I personally never had enough interest to actually buy one of my own, but I expect that will change over the coming decades.
But thanks for implying I don't know anything about what I'm talking about, asshole.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
It's not that simple. In the Americas civilizations failed without being cut off from trade with other countries (that they had ever traded with). This is believed to have been due to problems with climate change causing massive crop failures over a period of a decade or so. And it happened more than once.
This, of course, only proves that there is more than one mode of failure. But, AFAIK, there's no proof that there's any way that's proof against failure. (OTOH, given what we know I'm not sure there's any possibility of such a proof.)
All we really know is that every previous civilization has collapsed.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
The problem is one of the continued and rampant upward flow of monetary wealth and the specious notion that everybody has to earn a living - read: "everybody who is not moneyed should be employed in drudgery for drudgery's sake". One day those exploited workers who are still alive will down tools and give the fat lazy cunts the biggest finger the world has ever seen.
I look forward to that day.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
It's not that simple.
xD Wasn't saying that it's the only factor. x)~ And the intention wasn't to say it is cut-off that brings collapse, either; if you can be cut-off, then perhaps you're cutivation of a given set of skills, and mores and beliefs underneath them (that is, as drive, direction, etc.), are together simply less effective to animate and spur you in the face of another set of ideas. Or perhaps you're just small; perhaps your mores are alright but in a week generation autokrats, kleptocrats, or some other crushing/corrupting/taking regime rises and ruins you for the impending onslaught. BUT...a commonality is that whether because these take over an area or because you're cut-off despite not being like these...you fall. So I think it may be a significant, though by no means the only, factor. xD
Intelligent idiots are we. | Evil men do not understand justice.
I wish the authors of studies like these and those at NASA who commission them would read Popper's The Poverty of Historicism. It would save them a lot of time, effort and the possibility they'll make gigantic fools of themselves.
15 years from now is 2029. In 2043, we are supposed to encounter Ray Kurzweil's Singularity. Those dates are awfully close from a historical perspective. If we reach The Singularity, presumably we will become smart enough to surmount problems.
Boy, what a great theme for a SF novel. A great race. Will we reach collapse or singularity first? Photo finish.
The government should be studying civilization, but if this is where NASA decides to spend money, we need private businessmen funding any space related science. Maybe we can get the USDA to fund the next Mars mission.
Where do you think they got the local labor, and how much do you think they payed them. Yeah, Rome may have sent in the engineers to design stuff, but the holes still needed to get dug. And the locals probably didn't get a lot of choice about who had to dig them.
The victors write the history books. And they never ever admit they were murdering, raping, lying, conniving monsters.
No doubt study will generate more grant money, delay forced entry into a tough employment environment for grad students. We are all becoming France.
Civilization is a lot more robust than many people imagine.
No it isn't. For a civilization to thrive you need resources. You need the capability and energy to acquire and refine those resources. And you need to do it in a way that can be sustained, or at least have enough resources that you won't run out in a short period of time.
Take away easy and cheap energy and civilization as we know it would collapse. Take away easy access to water and arable land and civilization as we know it would collapse. Both of these are quite likely to happen to some degree over the next century or so.
Civilization is always 3 meals away from collapse.
~X~
This is s thought provoking paper featuring a theoretical model that pre-sages a breakage in industrialization. Like all such models, this should be looked at as theoretical. Theory is simply a good educated guess until tested. This theory will take a while to test empirically, because the period is so long. After all, we are still unsure of the Kondratieff long wave economic theory that is only 55 to 60 years long because the theory's period is longer than a generation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kondratiev_wave). The article hits all the political hot buttons of our age: environmental sustainability, income in/equality, and population. Is this model really a theory, or a sales job for a particular political agenda?
The concern over resources is real, as the world population is exploding, and the amount of resoures per capita continues to rise. Which will arrive first: A collapse over resources, or the Singularity?
Take away easy and cheap energy and civilization as we know it would collapse. Take away easy access to water and arable land and civilization as we know it would collapse. Both of these are quite likely to happen to some degree over the next century or so.
Both of these things are likely to happen? Where, exactly, is all the land going to go? Where exactly is all the water going to go? I live next to the Mississippi River. I and 2 million of my closest friends couldn't use all the water that flows past my house even if we tried, and the river's bottom lands remain spectacularly fertile. We would have to go nuts with 1960s-style pollution before the potability of that water or the fertility of that land could be degraded, and even Republicans aren't that stupid.
Cheap energy is a little more complicated, but even if we do literally nothing to change anything about our habits, there's enough coal available to power our current consumption for at least 4 centuries. Approximately 480 years, actually. We have that long to figure something else out. Do you really think we can't?
I'm planting the seeds right now. your ship should be ready (well, the trees will be ready to be cut and go into seasoning for 5-8 years) in about 3 centuries. If you send your shipwrights around with the detail designs in about 60 years, we can get the main joints marked up and get them growing.
No, seriously.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Only_the_Super-Rich_Can_Save_Us!"
http://onlythesuperrich.org/
"Just as Atlas Shrugged portrayed self-interested successful capitalists working to create a "Utopia of Greed" that is free from government, Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us! portrays an altruistic group of super-rich individuals working to "re-make government" and where "the rebellious rich take on the reigning rich."[4] The novel's protagonist is inspired by Warren Buffett. On August 14, 2011, Warren Buffett wrote an influential op-ed entitled, "Stop Coddling the Super-rich",[5] which argues that the super-rich should bear more responsibility and pay their "fair share" of taxes."
Daniel Quinn wrote about such cycles of collapse: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B...
Other ideas: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
Jane Jacobs suggested alternatives: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...
On self-renewal: http://books.google.com/books/...
Zinn on "The Coming Revolt of the Guards": http://www.historyisaweapon.co...
To do before collapse (1999 proposal to NASA): http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/...
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
AC wrote: " Thank god for people like Julian Simon. http://www.wired.com/wired/arc... "
See also: http://www.juliansimon.com/wri...
Still, markets can fail due to unpriced externalities (like pollution or military costs of defending oil supply lines) or unaccounted-for systemic risks (like derivatives or programmed trading leading to market collapse). Example, from Greenspan:
"Greenspan Destroys Deregulation in 16 Seconds"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
So, there are limits to what unregulated markets alone can do.
The gift economy, the subsistence economy, and them democratically planned economy can all provide alternatives for times when the exchange economy fails.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Depends on what you call 'local'. Try reading about the Greek Dark Ages.
Seeing as how it's NASA (not NSA though why should it be them? but they just want to do the unexpected anyways), the focus should be extraterrestrial rather than local. Local or human shouldn't even be considered.
Know your pads. One time pad: good for cryptography. Two timing pad: where to take your mistress.
Did they just remove the PDF from their servers ? Did anyone make a copy of it I could read ?