Study: Which Countries Will Best Survive a Collapse? (nytimes.com) 191
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: Will civilization as we know it end in the next 100 years? Will there be any functioning places left? These questions might sound like the stuff of dystopian fiction. But if recent headlines about extreme weather, climate change, the ongoing pandemic and faltering global supply chains have you asking them, you're not alone. Now two British academics, Aled Jones, director of the Global Sustainability Institute at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge, England, and his co-author, Nick King, think they have some answers. Their analysis, published in July in the journal Sustainability, aims to identify places that are best positioned to carry on when or if others fall apart. They call these lucky places "nodes of persisting complexity."
The winner, tech billionaires who already own bunkers there will be pleased to know, is New Zealand. The runners-up are Tasmania, Ireland, Iceland, Britain, the United States and Canada. The findings were greeted with skepticism by other academics who study topics like climate change and the collapse of civilization. Some flat-out disagreed with the list, saying it placed too much emphasis on the advantages of islands and failed to properly account for variables like military power. And some said the entire exercise was misguided: If climate change is allowed to disrupt civilization to this degree, no countries will have cause to celebrate. "For his study, he built on the University of Notre Dame's Global Adaptation Initiative, which ranks 181 countries annually on their readiness to successfully adapt to climate change," the NYT adds. "He then added three additional measures: whether the country has enough land to grow food for its people; whether it has the energy capacity to 'keep the lights on,' as he put it in an interview; and whether the country is sufficiently isolated to keep other people from walking across its borders, as its neighbors are collapsing."
"New Zealand comes out on top in Professor Jones's analysis because it appears to be ready for changes in the weather created by climate change. It has plenty of renewable energy capacity, it can produce its own food and it's an island, meaning it scores well on the isolation factor, he said."
The winner, tech billionaires who already own bunkers there will be pleased to know, is New Zealand. The runners-up are Tasmania, Ireland, Iceland, Britain, the United States and Canada. The findings were greeted with skepticism by other academics who study topics like climate change and the collapse of civilization. Some flat-out disagreed with the list, saying it placed too much emphasis on the advantages of islands and failed to properly account for variables like military power. And some said the entire exercise was misguided: If climate change is allowed to disrupt civilization to this degree, no countries will have cause to celebrate. "For his study, he built on the University of Notre Dame's Global Adaptation Initiative, which ranks 181 countries annually on their readiness to successfully adapt to climate change," the NYT adds. "He then added three additional measures: whether the country has enough land to grow food for its people; whether it has the energy capacity to 'keep the lights on,' as he put it in an interview; and whether the country is sufficiently isolated to keep other people from walking across its borders, as its neighbors are collapsing."
"New Zealand comes out on top in Professor Jones's analysis because it appears to be ready for changes in the weather created by climate change. It has plenty of renewable energy capacity, it can produce its own food and it's an island, meaning it scores well on the isolation factor, he said."
Shuffling the chairs on the titanic? (Score:3, Insightful)
and the local sheriff is not let some farm export (Score:2)
and the local sheriff is not let some farm export food to overseas when the local town has no food.
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Unless they show up with hundreds of thousands of troops. Look up the "Holodomor", when the Soviet Union invaded the Ukraine, gave the farms away to the poorest farmers, and took all the food. 6 million died, 6 million grew up deformed from starvation, and only those who ate corpses survived the winters.
Re:Shuffling the chairs on the titanic? (Score:4, Funny)
I doubt it. Imagine, billionaires having to work, because there are no serfs to do it for them!
The idea alone makes me laugh and sweat.
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You can take your family along, and even stay in my bunker... after all, I'll need a butler even then. But you fly me there. Deal?
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Re:Shuffling the chairs on the titanic? (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:Shuffling the chairs on the titanic? (Score:5, Informative)
There is also the fact that the US is what keeps the world from collapsing into a permanent world war. Without the US Navy keeping the PacRim relatively peaceful, old racial feuds will re-ignite, and there will be deaths on a scale that makes WWII look small. Asia has a lot of people, and the PacRim going hot would turn nuclear very quickly because many countries know they would be overrun in hours to days by others.
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Re:Shuffling the chairs on the titanic? (Score:4, Informative)
Why was this downvoted, it is as plausible as any other scenario. You think the japanese/koreans/chinese/vietnamese have a whole lot of love for each other?
It wasn't downmodded. It was posted by an Anonymous Coward. All coward posts begin with score 0. It was modded up once to get where it is as I'm posting this, not down.
And I don't blame them for posting anonymously. Referencing the US global hegemony on Slashdot usually does get you downmodded. A lot of people like to hate on it, even though it quite literally does keep the peace. Trump spent 5 years loudly proclaiming isolationism, to a ready audience weary of the Afghan war if nothing else, but you'll notice that not once did he ever recall America's carrier groups.
The US will, when the USS John F. Kennedy finishes fitting out next year, have a round dozen nuclear powered mobile cities positioned all over the globe, armed to the teeth and inclined to be grouchy if anybody does anything to cause a ruckus. And when I say armed to the teeth, I mean laughably, massively, ludicrously armed. Their Phalanx anti-missile systems alone represent more kg m/s^2 of force than some whole countries can boast, nevermind the sheer tonnage of munitions they can dispense for hundreds of kilometers in any direction using their aircraft.
This is the reality we live in, but Slashdot doesn't like to talk about it.
Re: Shuffling the chairs on the titanic? (Score:4, Insightful)
Carrier groups are not an effective means to carry out modern warfare against a country with a technically modern and capable military like Russia or China. Both of these countries have rocket guided missles on a scale that would easily and effectively dispatch a carrier by overwhelming anti aircraft and anti missle defenses. It is highly probable as well that Russia even has kinetic missle technology that would be able to drop directly on top of a carrier from orbit. Thats quite an expensive military investment for something that is a sitting duck target against a capable military force. So why would the US have 10+ of these groups when other countries barely keep a single one?
The only real reason why is that it is a psychological deterrent against countries that oppose US interests and are incapable of fighting back. Want to pressure a small country to not nationalize US corporate owned resources or put pressure on the countries generals to stage a coup against a democratically elected socialist? How about blockade a countries port city? Send a carrier group about 20 miles from their coast to "keep the peace" and be assured that US interests will be considered.
Keeping the peace basically means bullying small countries into complying with US interests.
Re: Shuffling the chairs on the titanic? (Score:3)
Who comes up with these things? (Score:5, Interesting)
Civilization is not going to collapse just because it's getting hot. World-leading nations will have plenty of resources to support themselves in a modified form, with an exception of the ones that import nearly all their food and energy, but alliances will probably solve that.
New Zealand's military cannot sustain any serious attack by any major country. Island or not, if society starts to collapse, they're gonna end up somebody's bitch.
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More likely it would be human reaction to climate change. When resources get tight, populations war.
The criteria is "survive", not necessarily win wars. Surrendering can be a survival strategy.
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Larger military forces may conclude that their own countries are unsustainable, and that island countries like new zealand would also be unsustainable if they moved their population there. The military commanders may decide that in order to ensure their own survival, it is better to either seize control of a small country, or offer their support to defend a smaller country in exchange for shelter for themselves rather than their whole populations.
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Civilization is not going to collapse just because it's getting hot.
America is already desperately panicked about migrant caravans coming to steal our jobs and rape our daughters. Imagine a world when an actual population with the ability to move to another nation is *properly* displaced not by poverty, but by complete desperation.
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Civilization is not going to collapse just because it's getting hot.
No, it's going to collapse because it's getting seriously hot, and there are lots of follow-on effects like crop failures, and nobody is doing anything useful about the problem.
World-leading nations will have plenty of resources to support themselves in a modified form, with an exception of the ones that import nearly all their food and energy, but alliances will probably solve that.
Crop yields are already falling as crops fail due to climate change. Nations which currently feed the world will decrease exports in order to feed themselves, or rioting will cause them to fail from within as unfed people lose their shit.
New Zealand's military cannot sustain any serious attack by any major country.
Yep, that's a real thing. Death throes are real.
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A nation that has "collapsed" does not have any military left.
Otherwise it had not collapsed.
So the idea that a random nation - that has collapsed - is trying to invade New Zealand: makes no sense.
On top of that: stupid "we can conquer all" ideas usually failed in history: look at Hitler or Napoleon or Japan around WWII.
I certainly would not want to meet a New Zealand ranger retreated uphill into the mountains while I'm supposed to pillage and plunder a remote town.
Same Australia that burned? (Score:5, Insightful)
Australia?! Same one that went up in flames two years ago or so because of global warming?
Here's another guess: nobody is an island. Or everybody is. Eurasia, the Americas... all islands. Just bigger. If life there becomes unsustainable, what in the world makes anybody believe Australia will be any different? It is indeed like shuffling chairs in the Titanic.
You may survive a worls war on a pacific island or something, but when essentially the whole planet becomes hostile to human life, all you get to choose is the island in which you die. The super rich can live 2-3 years than my sorry European ass in New Zealand, if they want to, but "sustainable" and "agriculture" is what goes out the window, and there's no reason to believe that they will do so less just because it's New Zealand jurisdiction all of a sudden.
There's actually only one real question left: How is this not obvious to anyone smart enough to build a shelter in a foreign country?
Re: Same Australia that burned? (Score:2)
2-3 years longer than my sorry ass
I guess it's too early in the morning for Slashdot posts for me.
You can run but you cannot hide (Score:2)
The computes will be able to find you.
And the computers will deal with a hotter earth pretty well when they take over.
Re: You can run but you cannot hide (Score:2)
Well then I'm royally fsck'ed.
Pass the booze, please :-)
Re: Who comes up with these things? (Score:2)
Ha !! We canâ(TM)t even keep out semi-starved migrants arriving on barely floating âoeboatsâoe. We certainly couldnâ(TM)t keep out well resourced middle class people trying to avoid the Apocalypse. We canâ(TM)t police 35,000 kilometres of coastline.
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Only one country can survive a global collapse and that would be Australia.
It probably depends on what type of global collapse. Australia is already pretty arid and global warming will only make it worse. Australia (and New Zealand) are both awful close to both China and India which would have a large population of hungry people if global food supplies are disrupted.
I would put my money on USA/Canada. The USA has plenty of excess food production and as can be seen with the vaccine, like most countries, they are willing to take care of their own first. If we have significant gl
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Really depends on how the weather changes. Currently, a good chunk of Canada's farmland is failing to grow crops due to drought and excessive heat and this is even happening in the far north. Combined with glaciers disappearing, that farmland may well not be productive. Further north there is also the problem of lack of soil.
Haven't been keeping track of America's bread basket too closely but they seem to be having problems with drought and heat too.
Re: Who comes up with these things? (Score:5, Insightful)
For Australians, you get to choose, servant or soldier, you are not the elite.
So, suppose you're a billionaire in your shelter. You have guards, cooks, and maids.
How in the sweet Jesus' name are you going to convince the guys with the gun AND the one with the key to your food stock to take orders from you, and not just dump your body into the ocean?
(Asking for a friend.)
Men have had the answer for thousands of years (Score:2)
So, suppose you're a billionaire in your shelter. You have guards, cooks, and maids.
How in the sweet Jesus' name are you going to convince the guys with the gun AND the one with the key to your food stock to take orders from you, and not just dump your body into the ocean?
You make it sound like a mystery but men (and I think exclusively men) have been able to do this for thousands of years. Great recent examples of people who have been able to do this are Saddam Hussein and the Kim family in North Korea.
The secret is not letting anybody have too much power and ensuring that nobody trusts anybody other than you.
Re: Men have had the answer for thousands of years (Score:3)
That's called an (absolutist) society. While possible, you don't make that overnight. You grow into that across generations. And not everyone is suited to do that - most people fail miserably within a generation or less, and are led to the guillotine. On top comes that we (us peasants, but also today's billionaires) have learned to be allergic to that.
And also we're talking people who suck at this. Because if they were good at it, they'd be in politics, not business. They'd be rich allright, but not billion
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For Australians, you get to choose, servant or soldier, you are not the elite.
So, suppose you're a billionaire in your shelter. You have guards, cooks, and maids.
How in the sweet Jesus' name are you going to convince the guys with the gun AND the one with the key to your food stock to take orders from you, and not just dump your body into the ocean?
(Asking for a friend.)
Well duh,
You keep them so suspicious of each other that they don't even notice you're the real threat.
Kind of like how rich conservatives try to tell people immigrants are stealing their cookie... whilst they steal the persons cookie when he's distracted by the immigrant.
Feudal lords have had hundreds of years to perfect the system.
Re: Who comes up with these things? (Score:2)
Feudal lords had an open society, not a closed bunker, to work with. The gold they paid to spies could be spent outside castle limits, not only within in.
In a way, current billionaires ARE the feudal lords already. What they need is a way to stay feudal when locking down the gates under a never ending siege, and keep their slaves... enslaved. While the slaves have the keys and the spears.
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"You keep them so suspicious of each other that they don't even notice you're the real threat.
Kind of like how rich conservatives try to tell people immigrants are stealing their cookie... whilst they steal the persons cookie when he's distracted by the immigrant.
Feudal lords have had hundreds of years to perfect the system."
Or, in more recent times, they tell people that the Government is stealing their cookie... whilst they steal the people's cookie when they are distracted by the Government circus. And t
Re: Who comes up with these things? (Score:3)
So you have 3 days to empty the chests and leave after you kill the billionaire. Where's the problem?
Also,"security $TECH" is tech in the first place. And given our track record of security in tech lately, that could easily be cracked if incentive is high enough. We crack iPhones within hours for much less than billions in food & medicine. Besides, no tech solution is going to be a fire & forget thing, it will need regular maintenance. In particular in the case of explosives, it can turn rapidly
Re: Who comes up with these things? (Score:3)
Oh, I have an even better idea: how about locking the billionaire up into a prison cell with 3 meals a day, a playstation, and a TV, and get him out every other day to type in his password, or he dies of his own bomb?
He's just a human. He'll choose living in captivity over dying, like anyone else. If he had the (very rarerly encountered, but possible) character to actually put his life where his mouth is he wouldn't have built a bunker in New Zealand with the intent of letting everyone else fry in the deser
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No way around that, no sir. [xkcd.com]
Option two: lock the guy in the structure with the bomb ticking. He will tell you the password within the 3 days to avoid being blown the fuck up.
On the bright side... (Score:3)
Some flat-out disagreed with the list, saying it placed too much emphasis on the advantages of islands and failed to properly account for variables like military power.
Assuming there's a nation that has an intact military, and global melting hasn't rendered islands underwater.
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The whole nation doesn't have to be underwater for the nation to no longer be able to feed, clothe, shelter, and defend itself. That's not likely to be a problem for any developed nation.
Sea levels have been rising quite steadily for as long as we've been recording sea levels, so any future rise is not going to surprise anyone. The rise will be slow enough for any developed nation to build seawalls and enact other methods to survive it.
So, I agree New Zealand will be fine but not for the same reasons.
Countries? (Score:3)
Will there still be a concept of a "country" after a collapse? If things collapse, we need to focus on what type of person or community will survive. The modern nation-state won't survive a low energy future, that is a future with no access to cheap abundant chemical energy and feedstock. With no cheap energy, you disrupt the just-in-time worldwide supply chains that we depend on, and can't build the chips we need to drive them either.
Back to the 18th century.
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Like all the stuff we've already built will suddenly disappear.
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and yet there wasn't a collapse and there was still food for sale. It was nothing much in the end. I trust in the greed of corporations to keep the U.S. supply chain up as it always has been.
There really isn't one civilization, large chunks of the world could disappear and the rest would go on. Most stuff we make is optional, after all.
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One argument that people often forget is the ease of access to resources.
"Surface" resources like easily accessible coal, iron or oil have been mined to hell and back. We now need to go much deeper to have access to the juicy stuff, but going deeper means that the equipment must be much more complex, requires a lot more know-how and, most importantly, it depends on you having access to that same resource in order to get more of it. In other words, you need powered drills to dig deep for oil that will power
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Eventually we'll be heading into the next dark age, where people will look back at these times as some kind of miraculous golden age, the remnants and relics of which they continue using as well as they can, often without understanding them or even abusing them until they break. Much like people did after the fall of the Roman Empire, the achievements of Roman time were in continued use, at least partly, for centuries after, and it took almost 1500 years for mankind to rebuild to a similar level of technolo
Re: Countries? (Score:3)
Of course, that line of succession is vastly oversimplified. For example, the stirrup is arguably the most important invention in military history and probably came from the Asian steppes. Gunpowder (another contender) was introduced by China. Our number system and much of mathematics comes from India. And Arabs are the primary reason Europeans and Africans now have access to much of this technology.
Re:Countries? (Score:5, Interesting)
Lucifer's Hammer is a work of fiction, with a post-apocalyptic setting necessary for the plot. Using fiction as thought experiment is a well-established tradition, don't get me wrong, but it can't be cited as likelihood for the initial background events which drive that universe to its current state. You might as well be citing Discworld in favor of a flat-earth hypothesis.
Kaczynski, meanwhile, was a psycho whose mental illness precluded him from honest self-criticism. His ideas are therefore an inner rant, not an inner dialogue, and he fails at the most critical step of soft science: Sincerely trying to debunk your own hypothesis. He's smart, and absorbed enough from his time in academia to understand the fundamentals of academic writing, but the ideas he writes about are meritless.
Namely, the whole notion of ethanol pretty much destroys both these premises. It can be (and was) manufactured using prehistoric techniques. Ethanol's less efficient than good ol' fashioned oil fuel, but is certainly capable enough to power the machines required to extract the good shit. Cavemen weren't cruising around on ethanol-powered cars for the same reason they weren't pedalling bicycles: It's only recently (relative to the span of the earth and humanity) that we've known about things like internal combustion and chain drives.
It's unfeasible to destroy all the machines (not just break, but completely core-of-the-earth vanish - otherwise it's just a matter of reverse-engineering), all the documentation of how to craft those machines, and wipe out the generation of people with first-hand memories of crafting those machines, while still leaving humanity itself untouched to fuel these goofy post-apoc fantasies.
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The quoted excerpt is the academic essay version of cold reading.
Some [GROUP] may seem to oppose [THING], but they will oppose it only so long as they are outsiders and the [THING] is controlled by [NON GROUP]. If [GROUP] ever becomes dominant in society, so that the [THING] becomes a tool in the hands of [GROUP], they will enthusiastically use it and promote its growth.
Yes, people dislike things which are being used against them, and, strangely, like those same things when used by them. Profound. You can f
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No, but a lot of the stuff we already built will cease to work without power and fuel.
Tasmania will be its own country? (Score:2)
Scomo and Gladys' COVID-19 blunders may end up destroying the federation but when do we on the main island sever ties? :)
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Oddly there's no mention of the effects of volcanoes or earthquakes.
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To be honest we've been trying to sever ties for years, the damn freaks down south just won't let it go.
billionaires better have good servants good pay (Score:2)
billionaires better have good servant with good pay or they may piss and shit into there food in that bunker.
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Now you know what Boston Dynamics is working on. Plus machines don't consume valuable food or water.
he said the nonsense word (Score:2, Informative)
"renewables"? A country still standing after most the rest fall doesn't have to power with "renewables", rather anything that works.
Silly professor.
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What? No, you're going to look silly trying to get high tech materials, fuel assemblies and electronics for your nuke plants during apocalypse. Maybe you don't know what it takes to maintain a nuke plant, but I do, was construction scheduler at plant. Maintenance not happening in doomsday scenarios, the electronics, insulation, solenoid valves, pipes, sensors, advanced welding, pumps all go out the window. No maintained plant for you, no nuclear power.
Meanwhile, coal is readily available at the surface a
Unpredictability = who knows? (Score:3)
I notice the USA is on the list.
The way I understand it, is the further north, in terms of global warming and climate breakdown, the better.
That was a reasonable assumption until... the heat dome happened.
To say this took scientists by surprise is an understatement - they were totally flabbergasted by the event.
It was way of the charts of prediction.
Britain is on the list too, but Britain faces a future of extreme rainfall and periods of high temperature.
It is difficult to grow crops when it rains pretty much non-stop for 2 months, which happened in 2019.
When you get a flip-flop between drought and extreme rain, it isn't possible to farm reliably.
New Zealand may well be "the place" to survive a collapse of civilisation bought about by lack of food, resulting in war etc.
Then again, with the level of unpredictability, there is no way of knowing - and not much we can do about it.
I hold no hope that humanity will solve this crisis in time, we have already locked in decades of climate change, unless we can somehow sequester c02 at scale from the atmosphere.
Some climate scientists believe we have passed the 1.5c mark or are about to - right on the cusp - and that a 2c is inevitable within 20 years or perhaps even less.
The heat dome event has shown us the complexity of what we are dealing with.
Nowhere is safe.
Re:Unpredictability = who knows? (Score:5, Insightful)
The USA do have a few advantages up their sleeves, compared to a lot of other countries:
- Even with extreme weather, the U.S. will still have sufficient land left to grow crops and livestock to feed most if not all of its population.
- The US is pretty hard to reach from the rest of the world, except its direct neighbors.
- The US possesses the largest and most proficient military complex in the world. This cannot only be used to defend the country itself, but also to conquer resources abroad.
The biggest problem in the U.S. is the lack of social infrastructure, so if you don't have money, you'll be poor and die either of starvation or illness, but there is no guarantee other countries with better social infrastructure will be able to keep up theirs in case of a global climate catastrophe.
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The US also has most of the world's gold (physical possession...). And hydrocarbons in the ground.
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I'd bet more on the oil and gas than on the gold. Oil and gas will keep you warm and can be converted in all kinds of other useful stuff. Gold, while having some limited technical applications, can't be cooked, can't be used for cooking and is also pretty heavy... In case of a broken down economy, a carton of cigarettes is a better medium of exchange than gold.
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I agree that hydrocarbon fuels are fundamentally useful.
As far as gold goes, it can (perhaps) be used to purchase things that are needed from other countries after ordinary (dollar based) global commerce breaks down. If things progress that far. I mean, it might not work out that way. But historically, gold has always been somewhat value throughout human history. Sure there were times when its value was much lower than today. But it was always valuable enough that people went to great lengths to keep it if
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Maybe the value of gold will plummet if the global human population collapses. There'll surely be a surplus.
Re:Unpredictability = who knows? (Score:4, Insightful)
They worked best in China, because the government has so much direct control over people. I have lived in China and I can tell you if the government doesn't want you doing something it will be very hard to do. They stopped the spread of Covid by a lock downs where you simply couldn't travel. The government shut down transport systems and blocked roads.
Here in New Zealand we locked down hard and for a long time at the start of things and did not come out of lock down until we zero community cases. That is how we have managed to only have 26 deaths (that is 26, not 26,000) since start of the pandemic till now. The thing is the population here does have a strong sense of community. We sucked it up and did what was needed so our elderly population was safe. There was almost no abuse of lock downs and we did not have people protesting in the streets about the right to have a hair cut. People here were genuinely concerned about others.
I wonder if that attitude would still stand up in the case of a global collapse? Or would we devolve into internal disorder? I suspect it is a case where we would have a better chance than most places but I wouldn't want to put it to the test.
Tasmania???? (Score:2)
Tasmania is not a country
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Not yet.
But I agree, they should have put in a "spoiler alert".
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I mean they won't admit they are a country, and Australia won't admit they are part of Australia, so where does that leave them? Maybe we can re-designate them the 3rd island of New Zealand then everyone is happy.
Fermi's Paradox? (Score:2)
Our galaxy may be the New Zealand of the Virgo cluster. The Copernican principle says we should be located in the denser areas of the cluster, because it has more planets and thus more shots at evolution.
Our unique position thus suggests that our obscurity protected us from something, perhaps conquering Virgonauts. They haven't finished conquering rural galaxies, including ours.
It will depend... (Score:3)
If you think about it, we are - as a planet - moving towards a perfect storm of candidate triggers for the nascent apocalypse. Pick your poison: spiralling military conflict; cliff-edge environmental change; Covid-2x; food crises; the list goes on... So in other words, different countries are going to have different survival capabilities for different disaster scenarios. New Zealand, for example, might place consistently as second best, across the board, for all scenarios... on which basis it might get the best overall score. But that still means, for any given scenario, there will be one country that will "do better".
Of course, for a truly comprehensive doomsday scenario, we might well expect to see several of the high-probability/high-impact candidates merge together into some fatalistic smorgasbord of screw-ups. An environmental collapse could spark both a major food shortage and a major health/pandemic emergency. If that happens, no nation is going to fare particularly well.
But maybe the best single way to consider this is to reflect on the way that individual nations have "learned from" past issues and done their best to avoid repeating mistakes of the past. New Zealand is a good example of a country that "got it right" with respect to the Covid-19 outbreak, in that their very early lock-down, operating at both the national border and within the country, was effective, despite their proximity to the epi-center.
For example, April 4th last year, Axios reported that "nearly 40,000 Americans" [axios.com] were allowed to fly back from China to the United States, after President Trump enacted the flight ban. The following day, the New York Times reported that the total number of people - i.e. not just US citizens - who returned in approximately the same time window was 430,000 [nytimes.com]. I don't know if either or both of these claims are accurate, but we do know that multiple flights were allowed to land, after the imposition of the no-fly order.
My point is not to knock the US administration over this previous approach, but to ask this question: what new rules has the Federal government introduced to stop this happening in future? Some people are referring to the Delta variant of Covid as "Covid-21" given that it is, in effect, a new strain. We know that it's much more infectious. So what are we doing differently this time around? Where is the imposition of flight bans to stop transmission?
Or how about the California Wild-Fires? Recently, every single year there have been a steadily growing number of square miles of land destroyed by fire. We're aware of many causes - stray sparks, faulty power lines. What is being done to address this? What new preventative steps are being taken? What steps to detect the outbreak of a new fire? What resources are being brought on line to respond more quickly and more decisively, to stop a new fire from spreading? This year, the smoke from California left air quality in New York [theguardian.com] among the worst in the world. Where's the comprehensive plan?
Look around the world for nations that are learning from past mistakes and actively trying to avoid making new ones. Those are the countries that will be best placed to survive a collapse, because they are demonstrating that they understand the issue.
I would take (Score:2)
Most of the countries especially the UK and Ireland from the list. The reason simply is that both are heavily dependent on food imports and both given the population would be unable to carry the population through a major crisis.
But in the end with a collapse borders are moot anyway, it probably will end up that some regions might fare better than others.
Not sure about new Zealand though it might be able to carry through a crisis, but in the end a crisis also would end up in a major distribution war and New
"God defend New Zealand" (Score:2)
Fireland & Patagonia (Score:3)
I've been thinking about this ever since growing up. Fireland & Patagonia always have topped my list of places to go when things go south. Here's why:
- diverse climate that's likely to be wet enough even if climate changes in any big way
- remote enough to keep fallout of a nuclear exchange to the possible minimum, with enough weather zones between the place and populated areas for fallout to shrink on its way there
- survivable environment that is rough enough to be uninteresting as a target for larger migration
- an abundance of places to hide, settle, defend and survive if any type of mad max society should find its way there
- likewise rough and remote enough that totalitarian distopian regimes wouldn't have any meaningful grip on the land
- plenty of mountains and plateaus, floods wouldn't be an issue
- so remote that you need to take everything you'd need with you right away so you'd have plenty time to practice for the apocalypse, it wouldn't work any other way
- beautiful landscape and countryside
Predictions are cute. (Score:5, Insightful)
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That required a massive supply of resources and fast-forwarding of red tape, which the USA is very capable of. It wasn't a lack of ability that caused the massive death-toll in the USA, it was the refusal to make the hard decisions, along with the usual bug-bears of US culture; 'evil government', lack of truth-in-advertising, making everything, even misery and disease, as profitable as possible, and a far right-wing culture of 'fuck you, I've got mine'.
The truth is, a centralized, high energy-consumption b
Collapse? That's silly! (Score:2)
When fusion reactors are in production in 20 years, energy will be free and no one will ever have to work again.
World collapse? No way. World party? Here to stay!
--
Let's party all night, All night long, yeah! - Quiet Riot
Re: Collapse? That's silly! (Score:2)
Let's party all night, All night long, yeah! - Quiet Riot I wanna rock and roll all night, and party every day - KISS Tonight we're going party like it's 1999 - Prince You gotta fight for your right to party - Beastie Boys
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The beauty about this text is that it is absolutely timeless. You could have posted that in 1960, 1980, 2000, today and you can still post it in 2040.
There will be war. (Score:2)
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The problem with wars today is MAD. And when losing a war means basically losing access to resources needed for survival... I leave the rest up to you.
The UK? (Score:4, Interesting)
The UK can't stop foreign migrants even when the rest of Europe enjoys a good standard of living. If continental Europe goes down the UK will be flooded by refugees, even if it's only the ones capable of swimming the channel.
Then there's food security. The UK would struggle to sustain its own population, and if existing farming methods lose viability due to weather or reliance on external resources, there will be a food shortage.
The UK has good access to wind and rain, but would those continue in a climate triggered collapse? I guess if not they'd probably be replaced by additional sunshine. But the UK's short on other resouces; kick starting the industrial revolution was expensive and there just isn't much of use left in the ground now. Comically we do have plenty of coal, but production of basic materials like steel and plastic may not be possible at the scales required.
So no, I don't see the UK as terribly survivable. Hell, Ireland would do better!
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You're assuming the UK will continue to respect human rights of non-citizens. If they started sinking the boats coming at them (or the French navy vessels escorting them to British waters), that would pretty quickly stop that. Not many people can swim the 20 odd miles to Dover.
America is screwed (Score:2)
Or is it? Maybe America will be okay because we have a lot of guns and many people who aren't afraid to use them.
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The problem is not the use of guns, the problem is the choice of targets.
Kiwis not so sure (Score:3)
I have some NZ friends who laugh and cry at this idea. Society there is changing so fast and for the worse that they expect full civil collapse, and subsequent civil war, within ten years.
Re:Kiwis not so sure (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Kiwis not so sure (Score:4, Interesting)
The USA isn't the best counter example. Part of Oregon just voted to formally ask for a transfer to Idaho. There is a hopefully overstated feeling that Civil War 2 is imminent. And the feeling on both sides is that splitting up peacefully is preferable to that.
The Blues are tired of trying to drag the benighted hicks into the glorious techno-future. The Reds are tired of being dictated to by a bunch of people who live in totally artificial environments and have no idea how the real world works.
And we have a government that keeps trying to pull ever more power to the center when the way to release the tension is to shuffle power away from the center. So, if the US comes apart at the seams I will not be surprised.
Siberia and Antarctica (Score:2)
The Russians are already making plans to become the breadbasket of the world once global warming thaws out Siberia sufficiently. And after some more ice melts Antarctica--which is the size of the US and Mexico combined--might become nice enough. I might need a new mascot for my Gentoo OS though.
Definition of survival? (Score:2)
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This global economy reliance is going to be our undoing as a planet.
Bullshit (Score:2)
Food won't be a problem (Score:2)
Indoor vertical farming has advanced enough that in a crisis, anyplace with drilling equipment and energy will have no issues planting plentiful supplies of food. Capitalism is currently the only real reason we don't move quicker on this front. There are too many people who would be hurt by government backed industrialized vertical farming. But if global warming is the cause of the apocalypse, there should be no shortage of energy as
Then the
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anyplace with drilling equipment and energy will have no issues planting plentiful supplies of food.
You might see the problem in the bits I highlighted after a collapse of society.
A collapse will be slow (Score:3)
A country collapsing will not happen overnight. It'll be a slow process. Question is: can it sustain it's energy and food requirements. If food requirements can not be met, people are going to be angry. If energy requirements cannot be met, food shortages are going to follow quickly.
Climate change is going to make life more difficult for those who provide us with food. So, initially food prices are going to rise. It does not help that current farming practices are not sustainable and so the ground is going to be exhausted eventually. After a while people are going to go hungry and eventually you'll get food riots.
OMG (Score:2)
"Will civilization as we know it end in the next 100 years? Will there be any functioning places left? These questions might sound like the stuff of dystopian fiction. "
They are fresh out of some prepper's wet dream who just burned the family fortune on dried goods.
Weapons. It's Always Weapons. (Score:2)
Answer to the headline (Score:2)
The USA? (Score:2)
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I think you can safely take island to be short hand for doesn't share a land border with another country.
I often refer to Australia as "an island"... poor Tasmania.
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It's more likely to even break apart into way more than that.