NASA-Funded Study Investigates Collapse of Industrial Civilization 401
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.'"
Manners (Score:4, Interesting)
“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
Re:Manners (Score:5, Interesting)
To be fair, Heinlein also wrote that all the moral and ethical problems inherent in transplanting a brain from an old man to the body of a just-deceased young woman - such as how the womans family and loved ones would cope -- could all be resolved by fucking them.
Of course, that novel also speculated that the deceased personality would still inhabit the body, despite the brain transplant too.
I mean, really, the premise was excellent, the opportunity to explore the social and technical ramifications of such a brain transplant would be classic SF material ... the direction Heinlein went with it was pretty weaksauce. And he went "that same direction" in an awful lot of his later work.
Don't get me wrong, I like a lot of Heinlein's work, but nearly everything after Stranger in a Strange Land is a bit off the rails.
To what extent do hormones affect personality? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Manners (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, Heinlein is right, though not in the way he probably intended it.
In totalitarian regimes or anarchies, people have to be polite even if they are wronged because if they don't, they'll get hurt.
If they are lucky, those cultures then develop into wealthy, liberal societies. In those kinds of societies, people have some degree of free speech and personal security, so they feel free to speak up and speak their mind, even if it offends people.
Eventually, wealthy and liberal societies come to an end for other reasons. People like Heinlein are then looking for causes and misattribute the fall to whatever negative social phenomena they observed prior to the fall.
So, a period of "rudeness" usually precedes the fall of a great civilization, but there is no causal relationship: rudeness doesn't cause the fall, and the fall doesn't cause rudeness.
Re:Manners (Score:5, Interesting)
Eventually, wealthy and liberal societies come to an end for other reasons
Those 'other reasons' are pretty simple: Liberal and wealthy societies become complacent due to the ease of their lives, and that makes them neglect the principles and practices that made them powerful and wealthy to begin with.
The default human condition is poverty, misery and violence. Escaping that is rare, and it takes a special society to make wealth, power and security seem normal. Once wealth, power and security are seen as birthrights and not hard-won prizes, the parts of a society that make it special are neglected (because, hey, they're 'mean' and 'hard work'), and rot sets in.
Re:Manners (Score:5, Insightful)
Hmm. I wonder how polite the romans were for 700 years of conquering.
700 years is a pretty good run.
I wonder how polite the old west and the gold rush area were?
I think Mr. Heinlein had on some thick rose colored glasses with regard to government and how people actually behave.
Re:Manners (Score:5, Interesting)
I wonder how polite the old west and the gold rush area were?
Reportedly very polite. They say in the old west, if you didn't get out of your seat when a woman walked in (so she could sit down), someone else would punch you out of your seat. (the gold rush was supposedly good in 48, but the 49ers ruined it all).
Of course, the code of politeness was different than your code, but that doesn't mean it wasn't there. In my experience cultures where fights are more likely to occur (because everyone is carrying a gun or whatever) tend to be more polite, because being rude can get you hurt or killed (think of The Three Musketeers).
Re:Manners (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, the Romans technically held out until the Fall of Constantinople, which was a lot further along than 700 years. ;)
Also, considering the world and its mores at that time, the Romans were rather polite indeed. Usually a conquered people would see all the teen/adult males killed, the women dragged off to slavery (if not killed along with everyone else), and everything of value plundered. See also a huge chunk of Exodus and the conquest of Canaan (the Hebrews weren't exactly choir boys when it was they who had the strength and power, no?)
But, no - the Romans (usually) settled for taking a percent as slaves and then proceeding to absorb their culture, religion, and the better parts of what was left. Then they built roads, utilities, entertainment, and a whole shitload of things that were pretty effing amazing - for the time. Yup - they were brutal as fuck at times (see also Caesar's conquest of Gaul), but if the conquered people submitted, it usually went way the hell easier on them than it would at the hands of any other civilization at the time (save for the Greeks, but then the Romans pretty much absorbed most Greek philosophy, mathematics, religion, laws, etc etc...)
Re: (Score:3)
But, no - the Romans (usually) settled for taking a percent as slaves and then proceeding to absorb their culture, religion, and the better parts of what was left. Then they built roads, utilities, entertainment, and a whole shitload of things that were pretty effing amazing - for the time.
All right, but apart from the sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?
'Collapse' by Jared Diamond (Score:5, Informative)
Read it, MFs!
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It'll happen eventually (Score:2)
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!!!!
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next will be Africa as the new China.
Africa is a little more complex than that, and in some parts (southern Africa mostly - I cannot comment on anything north of Malawi or so...), workers are already fairly expensive and environmental controls can be very strict. Ineffective often, but strict never-the-less.
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After that????
Booom!!!!
After that? Robots. Before that, apparently, since Foxconn is already deploying assembly robots. Africa may not get the opportunity to become the new China since China will very likely do what the US could have done, and fully automate assembly lines for everything from toasters to smartphones, in advance of rising wages and standards of living.
iPhones will still cost $500, but I predict a $25 Android smartphone in less than a generation, with effectively no compromises in hardware or software capabiliti
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I know it is sarcasm, but last time it was tried, the population was not armed with modern weapons. This time around, they are both well armed and adept at guerrilla warfare. South Africa officially is the only country to give up their nuclear program voluntarily, but who knows, there may be a couple of nukes someone forgot to mention somewhere. They were suspected of running a test or two, so they might even work.
In summary, good luck with that - the suggestion isn't particularly amusing.
Must have been written by Captain Obvious (Score:3, Informative)
"... 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.
Re:Must have been written by Captain Obvious (Score:5, Informative)
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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.
Re:Must have been written by Captain Obvious (Score:5, Insightful)
Y'know, the only reason a lot of those "turned out it wasn't a problem" disaster scenarios didn't happen was because of scientific advances, sometimes serendipitous ones.
Relying on our scientists to keep pulling technological miracles out of their asses at a time when we continue to cut their relative funding and bury them in bureaucracy? Might not be a good idea.
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The energy input to produce each calorie of food, must either stop or rise to reflect the scarcity price.
You do realize that the primary energy input for agriculture is the Sun, right?
The primary energy input for almost everything is the sun - if you go back a little ways (though not too far cosmologically). Sure you can plow fields with oxen. You might struggle to keep up with demand (oxen are slower than tractors) and harvesting will also be labour intensive. In America, I suppose you could just use your corn to make bio-diesel, but in other places in the world, this may prove unpractical.
But you are very correct, we have not run out of cheap oil, and can even make more. South Africa
Re:Must have been written by Captain Obvious (Score:4, Funny)
The oil we used today is as cheap as almost any other time in life. Efficiencies in process techniques and new processes have made this so.
This is what I don't understand from all the we are out of oil doom and gloom'ers. They say we need to adapt and change because we are running out of a resource but refuse to accept that the industry harvesting that resource has adapted and changed to cope with decline in the resources.
The US is poised to become the top oil producing nation in 2015.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/... [bloomberg.com]
If you consider all the other resources like Coal and Natural Gas, the doom and gloom will only be a slow transition to other resources over a period of several decades or more. And even the article I linked to is basing it's analysis on current tech. Any advancements or innovation can easily change it's predictions on the future output of oil.
Re:Must have been written by Captain Obvious (Score:4, Informative)
>You do realize that the primary energy input for agriculture is the Sun, right?
Mostly, but he was talking about food, and that in our part of the world needs 10x the Joules for production of the amount it eventually contains.
Re:Must have been written by Captain Obvious (Score:5, Insightful)
The primary energy for food is fossil fuel today. A calorie of food needs about 8 to 10 calories of fossil fuel to make and distribute in the developed nations.
Reminds me of Control Theory (Score:2)
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?
Re:Reminds me of Control Theory (Score:4, Insightful)
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?
And what would you do if the most powerful and affluent had a great deal to lose if we attemped to put such controls in place? Suppose they had powerful PR machines, sharpened through years of product marketing and fierce political campaigns, at their disposal to sew disdain for those who advocate such restraint.
"May you live in interesting times."
Re:Reminds me of Control Theory (Score:4, Insightful)
I suppose the best solution there would be to contrive a solution that appeared to be in their best interests. I would assume that anyone able to do so would be both powerful and affluent or soon to become so.
A control mechanism need not involve only limiting something (showing restraint). It may be active, and add to the process as well.
Re:Reminds me of Control Theory (Score:4, Insightful)
Hahaha the 1%ers' killbots won't spare you for this.
Where? (Score:5, Funny)
Is Hari Seldon when we need him?
Fly me to Mars or even to the Moon. (Score:4, Insightful)
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Yeah, this is why they are turning off the rovers [slashdot.org].
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Re:Fly me to Mars or even to the Moon. (Score:5, Insightful)
This didn't cost much. It's a few mathmatical formulas and a few graphs from tweaking the formulas for different scenarios... Which is exactly what math is for imo. The pay for the authors for a year (and I'm being very generous in time needed) wouldn't touch the cost of a rocket.
Frankly, I think this is useful. This sort of thing is exactly what we pay policy wonks for... to examine our world and present scenarios and recommendations based on science to our representatives. So... quit whining. I think the survivability of our society is worth paying 3 people to hole up and do some math for a few months. Perhaps that's just me.....
Note, I actually read and understood the paper. :D
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Because of course we can just keep doing what we're doing forever...
I don't know what's more pathetic; your belief that the universe can be forestalled by your ideology, or your tacit belief that our civilization is protected from the consequences of its action by magic.
Maybe they're one and the same view.
Re:Fly me to Mars or even to the Moon. (Score:5, Interesting)
The left tends to be more pragmatic and logical about these technical problems (scarce resources, income inequality and the costs/risks that come with it) and look for technical solutions. The right only sees the right and wrong that they've been brainwashed to see. "Everybody knows that".
For example, when I read his comment I knew exactly what he meant and how he arrived at his response. Apparently you didn't. It seems you saw someone "right" being attacked just for being "right".
Put it another way: At least in part, you view communism, capitalism, socialism et al through the prism of morality, as right and wrong. I do not because I realize how meaningless terms like that really are.
I am motivated to do something about income inequality not simplly because it's unfair, but because I am aware of how much it really costs "us". You see the "wrongness" of interfering with the natural order of things (money goes where money is).
The foundations (Score:5, Funny)
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".
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Your obvious parody of the foundation series may not be far off. I am sure there will be a group of highly educated folk who find a place with decent sustainable resources and set up a society based on sustainability and preservation of human knowledge. Then once the chaos consumes existing civilizations it will be able to expand and grow to dominate the world once again...minus the psychologists that lean to use psychic powers of the mind.
Who wrote the report? (Score:3)
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The beauty of crying that the sky is falling is that if you say it long enough, eventually you'll be right.
While I'm a bit skeptical of the study after reading TFA, they avoid that particular pitfall and put their money where their mouth is. They conclude that if things don't change, we're looking at about 15 more years before collapse.
Counting on Surplus (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
You can cut down on food or something instead (Score:2)
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.
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The trick with good times is when they don't last.
The problem is that the good times usually last longer than the short-sightedness of 99% of the population.
Re:Counting on Surplus (Score:4, Interesting)
(there has never existed a more regulated society than the modern West).
They call it Byzantine for a reason......also 1700s Germany gets a special mention, and it wasn't by accident Prague produced Kafka. So your claim is somewhat questionable.
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And after they do, the remaining 70-40% is still enough to cause the obesity epidemic. Percentages are meaningless when comparing two different cakes; it's the final size of your slice that matters.
Re:Counting on Surplus (Score:2)
I don't think that the type of system is important to our standard of living, energy input on the other hand appears crucial however. The type of system develops with the energy input available, I doubt that we could have a much different system from what we have.
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Likewise, it is just as improbable that anyone would choose to risk their time and money opening a pizza restaurant knowing they would not be able to keep the vast majority of the profits generated by the business.
Also, it is highly unlikely anyone would bother to pay ahead of time fo
Re:Counting on Surplus (Score:5, Insightful)
No, he's serious and I agree with him. Capitalism had its run and it was better than feudalism,* but the system is finally breaking and it's time to move on. It's allowed a small percentage of the population to hoard the fruits of everyone's labor. It's inelegant and inherently unstable. We can do better.
*Although it migh have produced even greater inequality and left us with even less leisure time
Re:Counting on Surplus (Score:5, Interesting)
Socialism was tried, and didn't work. The most likely avenue may be a hybrid system - picking out the best parts of capitalism with the required parts of socialism, possibly with some accomodation for new technologies that have shaken things up a bit.
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Jane was thirsty, went to the well to get a drink of water and stepped on other people to get it and destroyed the environment. You are no doubt intelligent, but the people who fed your brain poisoned it with half truths and straight out lies.
Just open your eyes and look at the magnificent world you live in, how damn easy life is for t
Insightful study... (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Interesting article. There's always someone to play the cynic.
I am pessimistic but not that cynical.
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We are becoming more like animals.
This is always how the human race has been right to the myopic malcontents whining about materialism. I would suggest improving yourself rather than improving humanity. It's something you can actually do.
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We are becoming more like animals.
We never weren't like animals. There was no mystical period of high society where abstract thinking dominated all of our affairs. We were elephant seals right down through the millenia. If anything, we're less like seals now than we ever were historically. In medieval Europe, ancient Egypt, ancient China, and in pre-Columbian civilizations, the local elephant dominated everyone around him. They were called nobles. That phenomenon is less pronounced than it once was, but it's still visible everywhere.
"
Just like everything (Score:2)
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.
Dear NASA (Score:2, Insightful)
I hear good things about outer space. Maybe you should check that out sometime when you're not busy.
B-b-b-ut what about American exceptionalism??? (Score:2)
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.
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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!
But we do.
Has the sun stopped shining? Has the wind stopped blowing? Has the rain stopped falling?
No, oil and gas aren't infinite, but energy effectively is, until the sun goes red giant and swallows us all. Likewise water and elements are effectively infinite, because it's all reused. There's less of it lying around doing nothing than there once was, but there's still a helluva lot more that could be put back into circulation before the sheer tonnage of the biosphere equals that of the time of the dino
Re:B-b-b-ut what about American exceptionalism??? (Score:4, Interesting)
Energy is effectively infinite, but not at a rate that's going to effectively substitute for the 160 exajoules per year currently provided by hydrocarbon energy. While I'm a big fan or renewables, even with a full-on effort at conversion, you're just not going to be able to sustain an interdependent, international supply chain based on *cheap* energy, nor will you feed 7 billion+ humans.
The coming population bottleneck can't be avoided. We will, as a species, one day exist on sustainable energy - all of the remaining 300 to 500 million of us, if we're lucky, and we don't throw too many nukes around to celebrate the transition.
When? (Score:2)
If it's 100,000 years from now, I won't lose any sleep over it.
BS, as usual. (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
So you don't think using resources at sustainable levels has merit, or not doing so will eventually lead to depletion and potential collapse?
Re:BS, as usual. (Score:4, Insightful)
You missed my point entirely. My point is that the price mechanism ensures that resource consumption is always sustainable. As resources get scarce and harder to extract, the price rises. The rise in price can be HUGE. Right now we burn coal and oil for instance, for energy because it is cheaper than the alternatives. If demand increases outstripping production sufficient to cause a price rise of only a factor of three, oil and coal will no longer be burned for energy, as the alternatives will be cheaper. This price point would be reached LONG before there is 'no more' coal and oil. The same principle applies to all other resources.
We never get to the point where were run out of things that get scarce. Instead we find alternatives. The price of the alternatives might well be high, but they will be cheaper than the original resource. The higher prices in turn serve as a break on consumption. A free market ensures that the system is sustainable. Only to the degree that states attempt to intervene in the price mechanism, or societies that simply never had such to begin with, can you wind up with a situation in which resources get completely used up.
Re: (Score:3)
You are mostly right Peter, but continue the analysis another step. Because we are very good at finding alternatives, then we approach a point where nearly all resources reach depletion (nearly) simultaneously. The result is not just collapse, but a really devastating collapse. Worse, post collapse recovery will be greatly hindered by a resource starved world.
In terms of mitigatation, it would be better if we were no so adaptive and good at finding alternatives. Instead of a collapse, we might have a
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The collapse results when neither the supply (because all oil fields are already producing all they can) nor the demand (because you must get stuff from place to place somehow) are elastic, and
All eggs in the same basket (Score:2)
political paper? (Score:3)
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.
Unequal Wealth Distribution .... (Score:2)
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.
Re: Unequal Wealth Distribution .... (Score:2)
The days of feudalism and robber barons when there was no wealth redistribution were far better.
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feudalism and robber barons
This is just one form of wealth distribution. And it is less a matter of who receives the proceeds than of who has it taken away.
Collapse or Stagnation (Score:2)
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.
Some Natural Resources Don't Recover! (Score:4, Interesting)
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).
A few criticisms (Score:5, Insightful)
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".
Per NASA: "The Sky Is Falling" (Score:2)
very disappointing (Score:4, Insightful)
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Ours wouldn't be the first (Score:3)
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.
Scene: NASA Budget Conference (Score:3)
"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. "
Re:The difference is scale. (Score:5, Interesting)
Depends on what you call 'local'. Try reading about the Greek Dark Ages [wikipedia.org].
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If resources become scarce, the fuel needed to power travel and to support infrastructure may not be there. Travel may become hard.
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so, what you are saying is there is going to be a market in safe, easy to use wooden sailing ships?
Re: The difference is scale. (Score:3)
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.
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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.
Re:The difference is scale. (Score:4, Insightful)
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....
What the hell (Score:3)
... does any of this have to do with NASA?
Re:What the hell (Score:4, Interesting)
NASA's self-interest is in promoting space ships. If the elites who control government funding see that the best path for future survival is for their children to leave the planet, they'll fund NASA to build more space ships. Forecasting space ship demand is as central to NASA's project as forecasting widget demand is to Widgetronics.
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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.
Re:Article is Short Sighted (Score:4, Insightful)
1. Implement policies that any Econ 101 student can tell will exacerbate income inequality.
2. Tell people that the income inequality you've created will destroy society.
3. Get people to beg you to fix it.
4. PROFIT!!
The government has become a feedback loop unto itself, fooling people into giving it ever more power to fix the disasters it caused when it used the last round of powers people gave it.
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Survival of H. sapiens != survival of civilization
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Survival of H. sapiens != survival of civilization
Yes, and collapse of iPhone sales != collapse of industrial civilization.
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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.
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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 supp
Re:"Collapse" is an overstatement (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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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.
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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 mode
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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?
Re:"Collapse" is an overstatement (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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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.
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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".
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And what to do about it. And how.