I’ll take a shot at it. What may collapse is the ability of any significant group of humans (say 100K+) to coordinate and to feel secure enough that they can specialize deeply enough to make digital watches.
Asteroid impact on scale of dinosaur killer. Super volcanic eruption. Regular eruption under Antarctic ice sheets or the middle of Greenland raise water levels by 10m. Total nuclear war between the U.S. and Russia.
I’m all of these cases actual societal collapse would be caused by sudden worldwide famine, not the disaster itself.
I do think you can find examples of societal breakdown in the recent past if you narrow yourself to consider local regions, such as various failed colonies, New Orleans in the days following Katrina, or Somalia or parts of Iraq.
Asteroid impact on scale of dinosaur killer. Super volcanic eruption. Regular eruption under Antarctic ice sheets or the middle of Greenland raise water levels by 10m. Total nuclear war between the U.S. and Russia.
As an aside, one of these is not like the others :-D
But sure, let’s consider an dinosaur killer. So what will happen? A lot of places will lose much of their population, either directly or because of famine. A great deal of land will become nearly empty of humans. But once the nuclear winter is over and the population stabilizes, humans will rebuild.
It might take a while to get back to microprocessor fabs, but the knowledge of e.g. how to make steel and electricity will not be lost. So what if the humanity will be thrown back to the tech level of Victorian England? That was merely a century and a bit ago.
There are lots of potential proximal causes. Root cause likely to be that humans aren’t well-suited for the level of peace and scale of cooperation that we’ve seen for the last few hundred years.
I was trying to get to something less handwavy. “Humans aren’t well-suited” isn’t it.
And anyway, your line of argument leads to the conclusion that we are just living constantly and permanently in the “post-collapse” state. Past the Golden Age, kicked out of the Garden of Eden, etc. etc.
Yeah, I can’t predict more concretely than that—the obvious paths are somewhat preventable/recoverable. My intended argument is that we’re not past the golden age, we’re in a golden age. It may be so golden that it’s the last one, or it may be just one of an very long series.
I’ll take a shot at it. What may collapse is the ability of any significant group of humans (say 100K+) to coordinate and to feel secure enough that they can specialize deeply enough to make digital watches.
That’s a consequence. What is the cause?
Asteroid impact on scale of dinosaur killer. Super volcanic eruption. Regular eruption under Antarctic ice sheets or the middle of Greenland raise water levels by 10m. Total nuclear war between the U.S. and Russia.
I’m all of these cases actual societal collapse would be caused by sudden worldwide famine, not the disaster itself.
I do think you can find examples of societal breakdown in the recent past if you narrow yourself to consider local regions, such as various failed colonies, New Orleans in the days following Katrina, or Somalia or parts of Iraq.
As an aside, one of these is not like the others :-D
But sure, let’s consider an dinosaur killer. So what will happen? A lot of places will lose much of their population, either directly or because of famine. A great deal of land will become nearly empty of humans. But once the nuclear winter is over and the population stabilizes, humans will rebuild.
It might take a while to get back to microprocessor fabs, but the knowledge of e.g. how to make steel and electricity will not be lost. So what if the humanity will be thrown back to the tech level of Victorian England? That was merely a century and a bit ago.
Of course, we’re now in movie-plot land.
There are lots of potential proximal causes. Root cause likely to be that humans aren’t well-suited for the level of peace and scale of cooperation that we’ve seen for the last few hundred years.
I was trying to get to something less handwavy. “Humans aren’t well-suited” isn’t it.
And anyway, your line of argument leads to the conclusion that we are just living constantly and permanently in the “post-collapse” state. Past the Golden Age, kicked out of the Garden of Eden, etc. etc.
Yeah, I can’t predict more concretely than that—the obvious paths are somewhat preventable/recoverable. My intended argument is that we’re not past the golden age, we’re in a golden age. It may be so golden that it’s the last one, or it may be just one of an very long series.
Does that imply a coming collapse? Or can the ages get more and more golden?