Comment by Swizec | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Swizec | Hacker News Reader

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We are almost certainly plummeting towards the next collapse of the roman empire. This time "western civilization".

But it's not that bad!

Rome's collapse took around 100 years, from 376 - 476[1]. If you consider Byzantine as a continuation of Rome, the final collapse didn't happen until 1453 [2]. So it took a full 1077 years for Rome to fall.

Plenty of time for our lifetimes to pass in relative comfort. We're, what, 10 years, maybe 20 years, into the process of our civilization collapsing?

I think what we're mostly seeing that's giving us the fear of collapse is a slowing of rapid growth after WW2 [3]. We've lived our whole lives in a time of rapid economic growth. Just because that's regressing to the mean doesn't mean the ride's over.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall_of_the_Western_Roman_Empi...

[2] https://www.history.com/topics/ancient-middle-east/byzantine...

[3] slowing growth after "catching up" from WW2 is the core thesis of Capital in the 21st Century

Well rome didnt see a meteoric rise of technology in 100 or so years before collapse. also modern weaponry could make collapse a lot more interesting than we imagine. I dont agree with a lot of r/collapse but have to accommodate that post ww2 prosperity has brought in a lot of 'global optimizations'. take that away and access to cheap plentiful energy & things could get bad fast.

Rome didn't collapse overnight, it took literally hundreds of years. It was a "collapse" in the sense that the standard of living and technology fell from the previous peak in some regions, but even then, not much of one because Constantinople endured and other empires were untouched (e.g. China).

The only sudden collapse that's possible is the result of a full-scale nuclear exchange that kills most of the major cities on Earth - but the risk of that has steadily decreased sine it's peak around the 60s-70s.

A long, slow multi-generational decline however is quite possible for a place like the US though: the US has an ideological bent that allows it to decide to sacrifice it's own citizens, and that's been growing stronger. Increasing rates of crises due to climate change could definitely lead to some new generational poverty, but that's the point: that's a "collapse" in the true Roman sense, and definitely not in the "I'm going to survive it in my fortified bunker" sense. It's more Americans losing their houses and discovering what it's like to be poor when the bailout money is "efficiently" managed.

No nuclear weapons either, which, if countries are suffering from major drought and famine, may tip the scales in favor of using them.

Casual 'almost certainly'...

I don't think so.

Anyone know the name of the longstanding psychological phenomenon where people tend to believe they're living through an inordinately pivotal inflection point in history, when in reality: they're 'almost certainly' incorrect?

I edited to add more context.

> we're mostly seeing that's giving us the fear of collapse is a slowing of rapid growth after WW2

We grow more in a few days than the world did at the height of Rome's power. We're also richer almost everywhere on the planet than we were at the peak of the post-WWII boom.

These ghost stories are a cheap way of defending complacency. If everything is going to shit in 2040, why bother acting now to better yourself, your community, your country or the world?

> If everything is going to shit in 2040, why bother acting now to better yourself, your community, your country or the world?

If you might get hit by a car tomorrow, why bother with anything at all?

We assume the best and keep going. Make contingency plans.

It seems to me that a certain amount of growth comes from further specialization. At one end of the scale, you have a few people in the clan or tribe specialize in turning rocks into spear points, and others specialize in hunting, and the whole group eats better. At the other end of the scale, you have a globally-integrated supply chain.

At the other end of the scale. That is, there's no further to go. All the benefits that can be reaped from this process, we've already reaped. There is no further growth to gain from this approach.

(Or not much. It is possible for the supply chain to further globalize and specialize, but not orders of magnitude more. And, as we regard China as an enemy, and look at what happened with Covid, we may even pull back from the amount that we already have.)

Civilizational collapse is not a change of borders. It’s when knowledge becomes lost, social networks get disrupted and people’s welfare goes down.

That is supposedly what happened with Rome. A very modern society (by our standards) was replaced by barbarians (by our standards). Those barbarians eventually developed a lot of the same social and political structures as Rome.

It was a regression from a unified pan-continent society to isolated tribes. How advanced those tribes were is hard to say because most didn’t write things down.

As far as I know what followed Rome was a period of unrest and lessened commerce. From that aspect at least it was “worse”.

And it took over a thousand years for a city larger than Rome to appear again anywhere in the world. Sometimes things just crash and nothing replaces it.

Unless things happen faster nowadays...

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