With worrying global trends like climate change, pollution, increasingly divided or radical governments, economic woes, misinformation and disinformation everywhere, dangerous health crises and so on, what do you think - how much time do we have before “it all comes crashing down”? What will end life or our way of life as we know it first?
Or do you think we’ll make it? If so, how?
The “collapse” is a cope. A non denominational version of the rapture. It being “all over” is something people dream of because oblivion also means an end to pain.
Society won’t “collapse”.
Life will just get shittier and shittier in such a slow, gradual manner that most people won’t even realise it is happening. More work for less pay, less rights and freedoms, more repression, more wars, etc.
Societal collapse can happen; it happened to us in the Bronze age, several times in fact. War and famine causing enough chaos to destabilise and destroy cities or empires that took centuries to recover, if they recovered at all.
I don’t know what the Sea People event of the modern era would be. I do know that bombing a handful of factories around the world will set us back a couple of decades when it comes to computers and integrated devices. A second COVID hitting us right now while the world is still recovering would probably do a number on the world as well. Plus, nuclear war would ruin civilisation as we know it pretty quickly.
Unless Putin or Trump start launching nukes, I don’t expect any sudden collapses within one lifetime, but societal collapse is something that can happen eventually.
I think people tend to underestimate human resilience. To use the bronze age collapses as an example, sure, it brought down existing polities, the names drawn on maps changed.
But most of the cities were still there. People still lived in them. Does changing the rulers while keeping a similar paradigm ultimately matter that much? I’m reminded of accounts of the experiences of some Afghanis during the American intervention there. First they paid their taxes to the Taliban, then the govt we set up, then the Taliban again. shrug.
While supply chains could be disrupted, any time that happens it opens the door for another profitable enterprise to rise in its place. People suffer, some die, but life goes on. If the knowledge of how to build those supply chains is still around, it will be done, and swiftly.
To the millions of girls in college in Afghanistan, I do think society has collapsed. They’ve been thrown back into the dark ages. If it weren’t for the extreme brevity of democratic Afghanistan, I would call the takeover by the Taliban societal collapse for sure.
Not all cities are still there. The ones that died out don’t appear in stories and ended up being swallowed up by the ground. Farms were deserted, cities disappeared from maps, entire civilisations vanished.
Just because humans still exist doesn’t mean society didn’t collapse. Humans existed before society did, and humans will continue to exist even if society doesn’t, until new societies will be formed by the survivors.
I think that’s a little sensationalist. For instance, we do find the ruins of ancient cities in archeological digs and can link them to where we do have surviving records of their appearance in stories.
Your point is taken, though. I do, however, remain convinced that people massively overestimate how many people would die in some form of collapse though, unless it somewhat swiftly took down major portions of the Earth’s biosphere.
If a group blew up a hydro dam, or other electrical source plant and also destroyed water stations, you would see local society and ecomony crumble quickly. People aren’t prepared, like they may have been in the 50s for food/water supply, etc. You would have chaos. So an enemy would just need to coordinated that across cities…its why have web/internet enabled infrastructure is a security diaster waiting to happen.
The people would remain though, and begin to rebuild unless the attacks were extremely broad and sustained for a long duration. No power or water stations in Gaza any more, but they are still hanging on in very dire conditions.
People are resilient. And adaptable. Just because we do things one way that works for us does not mean that one way is an absolute requirement.
Not that there wouldn’t be chaos, suffering and casualties. Just that it wouldn’t be the end.
I guess by collapse I am thinking complete devolution, not neccessarily the end of people
I think this is the more accurate take. I think the world at large is more likely headed toward a world in chains or world war 3 disaster scenario more so than anything.
Yes, exactly. I lived in a collapsing society as a child and mostly life goes on, it just gets harder and there are less luxuries.
Eventually that will lead to a shift. Perhaps not an outright collapse, but perhaps balkanization, restructuring, or collapse.
We have exactly 9 years, 3 months, 1 week, 2 days, and a couple hours
Chores can wait till tomorrow then
so is it Monday, 17 October 2033?
just to make sure I’ll mark my calendar. I’ll probably lose my phone’s calendar by that point tho.
Nothing’s going to collapse. Prior generations had their own share of problems and so do we and we will find some way to get through it all just like they did.
Given enough time, everything changes. Society as it is now will go away eventually, but it’s hard to say that society will ‘collapse’. Things can get better or worse, and in either case there will be people who think it they’ve gotten better, and people who think they’ve gotten worse.
It’s hard to stay optimistic with how perception is shaped nowadays. Let me try to slightly change that perspective. I don’t have a link to the study, but a majority of interviewed Americans thought that crime was on the rise, and worse than ever, when in fact it has been decreasing steadily since the early 90s. Public perception was shaped by the broad popularity of televised police, detective, true crime documentaries, and fictional media. A good thing was happening, but that’s not what people thought.
Climate change and pollution are bad, but renewables are on the rise on average, and being pushed hard by the public in general.
Increasingly divided and radical governments are bad, but people are getting sick of it, and governments will have to adapt or be replaced.
Economic woes are definitely a problem, but we’re slowly making baby steps, doing things like banning airbnb here and there, etc. Economic woes have come and gone.
Misinformation and disinformation is everywhere, but we’re more aware of it than ever. We’re suspicious of intent, of sources, etc. Not all of us trust the right sources, but we’re starting to implement fact checking, we’re making platforms that show news on the political spectrum, we have ways to find blind spots, etc.
Dangerous health crises aren’t the end of the world. The black plague and the ‘spanish’ flu killed a lot of people, and neither lead to the breakdown of society. We’ll figure it out, we’re tough SOBs.
Look, I’m not saying these things aren’t happening, I’m just saying that for every bad thing that floods the airways and the internet, there is some degree of reaction. We’re not laying down and taking it. And while it’s certainly depressing and disheartening to see so many bad things happening, they can help to galvanize people against it, and not fall into complacency.
It’s easy to be overwhelmed too, which is why it’s not a bad idea to take the time to limit and filter exposure to this stuff. You know about it, you’ve looked into it, you’ve made a (hopefully educated) decision, you know what you’re going to do. It’s not healthy for you to come back and keep looking at the problem over and over again.
There’s also the issue of being exposed to serious problems that you can’t affect in a meaningful way. I’m not American, what the hell am I supposed to do about their presidential election? No reason for me to look at it all the time. When the time comes, I’ll vote for someone on my end who says they’re going to handle the situation in the way that I think is best.
Take a step back, consider your situation. Which things affect you? Which things affect the people in your life? Which things can you affect? What can you do, that matters? Focus your energy on that. You don’t have to make a big change, you can start by clearing your head.
It’s not going to collapse over night. Instead, things are going to get worse and worse gradually, with each step backward becoming the new normal.
Like the proverbial frog in boiling water, we’ll all just carry on until one day we’re like just chilling in our debris city, hoping we don’t have to sell any teeth for bottle caps in order to buy food today when some ghoul comes storming in and shoots up the place trying to murder a harmless old man with a dog, and then some naive vault dweller tries to intervene, but she only makes the problem worse and we’ll all wonder how the hell we got here.
Which “society?” America, for instance, seems to be on a downward trend as countries in the Global South start pushing against its exploitation, and thus the domestic proletariat is increasingly exploited and pushed further into radicalization. It won’t be a quick process until it is.
We will go for awhile. We will find ways to eek out existance muscling by using up resources at an even greater pace. digging deeper, making small amounts of toxic things pure by making larger amounts more polluted. Its really hard to say how long it will be but its a global system so will get worse and worse particularly the lower you are on the totem.
I’d thought it’d be a while, but the timeline keeps constricting. I don’t have a number for you, but it seems sooner than it did four years ago.
Exactly four years sooner, according to my math.
This was a pretty great response. You got me. Cheers!
While most here are probably not wrong about changes that could well happen and our societies adapting to them, I can’t help but worry about food shortages.
We aren’t very far away from the point where insect populations start to collapse. If we can’t reverse that or even slow it down, food will follow quite quickly.
The implications are horrifying and even if humanity survives, it won’t be pretty.
If by about 2035 the causes aren’t controlled and the problems slowed down enough to prevent insect extinction, the following 10 - 20 years will see food decrease to levels that won’t sustain us.
After that, the decline will be so rapid and so brutal that no one will be making notes.
I hope that doesn’t happen.
Fun thing about large scale food scarcity. If you have a calorie deficit for a few months, you don’t anymore.
On a serious note. Habit destruction, warming, pollution poses a very serious risk to food stability and could very well lead to famine.
Societies may collapse but pockets of humanity will survive. We saw how quickly nature started to rebound when we slowed down during the pandemic. I have hope that we’ll either sort our shit out soon or most of us will die and then the natural world can begin to heal again. This is like the sixth mass extinction event so it’s not the first time this has happened. Life finds a way…
28 days, 6 hours, 42 minutes and 12 seconds.
Define “collapse”
See “Dotard”
Just two more weeks
I’m kinda thinking sooner the better but I’m very fond of games like fallout.
Two failed harvests. That’s what it takes to strip away the thin varnish of civilisation.
Considering the global integration of the world today, in that case much of the effects can be temporarily cushioned by spending lots of money, thereby letting the ones without money starve. Either way, it won’t be pretty.
At some point, even money can’t help anymore, because you can’t eat it. If there is no food, there is no food.
