Should we tell people it's too late to save civilization?

Civilization isn't definitely going to collapse in the near future. And no, we shouldn't tell people it is, even if it were highly probable, for the simple reason that it would likely make the remaining time people have immeasurably worse.

And calling your entire blog 'collapse musings' suggests 100% crankdom.

Frankly, this is dumb.

I see this idea sometimes in the context of climate change. It's fundamentally flawed. Collapse is not binary, it's not collapse or no collapse. If we miss one climate goal, then the next goal comes up. If we cannot limit warming to 2°C (and it doesn't look like we will)... Well, 2.5°C is more than a magnitude worse than that. Those who survive 2°C warming would be glad that it's not 2.5°C. It's not like a test where you can say "screw this, I'm gonna fail anyways."

Is anyone else recently getting the idea that these doomers are wishing for a collapse, same as preppers, only on the other side of the political spectrum? I’m not qualified to speculate on the psychological underpinnings of such behavior, but I do feel there is a sense of yearning in these kinds of “if not climate change, then pollution, or A.I., etc.” articles.

For such a confident article, you’d think they’d make some concrete connections between the processes they describe and the actual outcome of collapsing civilization. Instead they are just gesturing vaguely at bad things and claiming that will collapse civilization. I guess this is written for people who already are convinced civilization will collapse, so they don’t need to be convinced. But then, why spend the first 75% of the article or so listing these processes?

Just to pick one at random:

> Secondly, even if we found an infinite source of clean energy, endless growth would still be impossible. If energy usage were to keep growing at 2.3% per year — as it has for many decades — in 400 years, the oceans would be boiling just from the waste heat. The laws of physics are a bitch.

This is some really weak stuff. Why must energy usage keep growing by 2.3% per year. Will civilization collapse if it doesn’t, is that the link? My conclusion here is that we need to change our growth model to not always need more energy, although this is something I already believed, and putting the problem out at 400 years seems to make it, if anything, less urgent (I think, though, it is still quite urgent).

Let’s go back a bit, maybe the killer problem actually comes from the “first” to this “second,” and this paragraph was just added as frosting on the cake or something (although if that is the case, seems like poor editing). .

> First of all, there is no such thing as a green economy. To create renewables and electric vehicles, we have to destroy ecosystems so we can mine rare-earth metals. And to produce the plastic, steel, cement, and other components that go into solar panels and wind turbines, we need oil. There’s nothing green about any of this.

Nope, guess not. The only claim here is that some ecosystems will have to be destroyed. This is of course bad, and I hope we mitigate it to the fullest extent possible! But we’ve already destroyed lots of ecosystems, we will destroy more. Maybe the green economy has some imperfect parts, but local devastation doesn’t threaten civilization.

I don’t think it is worth it to dissect the article paragraph fully at this point. I think this person is just looking for reasons to be hopeless.

This guy seems to think every problem means civilization is going to collapse. Microplastics cause cancer, therefore civilization is doomed. Meanwhile back in reality, cancer mortality has been decreasing for decades, and the rate of decrease is speeding up.[1]

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/hus/topics/cancer-deaths.htm

This is quite bonkers. Civilization may or may not collapse but stating such a thing as necessary future scenario puts this into the ’crank’ category.

Especially the end ” enjoy the time we have left.” - ending of civilization does not mean end of individual human life. This makes it sound like everyone would die.

Yes, the environment needs to be cherished and repaired. Sophist alarmism and doomerism indeed is not the way to go IMO.

I think this article is, as is often the case, a complete failure of imagination. You would think that by now zero-sum thinking had been forever proven false, if anything the collapse of the Soviet Union should have put this myth to rest forever. But no, the author seem intent always on looking at the world as it currently is, as if it is a snapshot in time, and not instead as a constantly shifting mass of endless feedback loops, self-sustaining and amplifying. Life itself is like that; if one were to look at a body, one might predict imminent death by viewing its obvious maladies. Life is like a gyroscope or atom, staying in balance through its spinning. The world will survive, so will the ecosystem, and so will civilization. What will happen is a reduction in the number of humans the world can support, but even that is in question. There will be winners and losers. Because technology and economics are the innovations that lower resource cost and raise efficiency, we can science our way out of this if our political systems can regain their coherence. The last thing we want to do is to remove hope from the patient. The prognosis is not bleak, the patient requires a care plan and treatment is necessary. Leeches are not advised at this time.

The content you would expect from a domain called "collapse musings".

Life, and civilization, will continue to go on, whether people like it or not.

I'm unclear about what he means by the word "collapse". If by collapse he means a The Road or Waterworld style nuclear- or eco-apocalypse is inevitable, then there is literally nothing I would change about the world today, except that I'd recommend using our resources faster, on the theory that you should smoke 'em if you got 'em. I wouldn't tell anyone to bother learning how blacksmithing or how to grow a three sisters garden in that scenario. If he means a slow apocalypse, a Long Tomorrow style return to a world without electricity, that's a very different conversation. This article feels like a rant to me.

No, we shouldn't, because it isn't true. Civilization will muddle on, as it always has, with periodic ups and downs. The oceans aren't going to boil. The economy will stop growing, almost an inevitability as our populations continue to shrink, and we will find ways to accommodate that.

Doom prophets existed in all ages, telling us the end was nigh. It never was, and it isn't now. Trying to convince people that everything is hopeless and that despair is all that remains to us is not only incorrect, it's downright evil.

From what I've seen, hundreds of millions of deaths are priced in. But that's nowhere close to 8 billion. Humanity will survive. It's just going to be unpleasant.

This is not a well-reasoned essay. If we had 400 years to solve a waste heat issue, could we? I’ll continue to place bets on humanity.

A very weird piece of writing that's trying to rehabilitate 'climate doomers' a bit, which ignores a bit of a key fact that a lot of climate doomers actually tend to be the rich and wealthy individuals that are causing the problems in the first place. Because they can afford to deal with the consequences of their actions, so they go full speed on doing whatever they can. Both doomers and denialists tend to run the show, so to speak.

I don't personally buy it because there's always going to be someone claiming the collapse of civilization is nigh. During the shortages of food during COVID I saw channels I normally respected swerve a bit into prepperism or attempts to grow natural food in case of food chain collapse.

I do believe our climate situation is incredibly dire and we will need to use increasingly extreme measures to stop it. Executives need to start being punished properly for their extreme maleficence and disregard of public health, companies will need to face reckonings for hiding their crimes and everyone involved at the time charged. And we will also need to accept that infinite growth and the way we're growing isn't sustainable. But I think it's a problem that can be solved.

You are going to die and cease to cohere information forward in time. This will happen in a random instant. Imagine suddenly discovering this, how would you choose to live accordingly?

This revelation actually happened to me once, and personally, I now avoid people who affect concern for it as a way to take my stuff.

Admittedly the article is poorly written and presents things in an extreme voice which is alienating to an outside audience. These are easy things to point out and have been used in this thread to dismantle the message of the article. However, I ask anyone with a dissenting opinion to provide an argument against the premise that: "Civilization is facing numerous grave threats with few solutions on the horizon nor substantive international cooperation working towards serious solutions. Furthermore, the graveness of these issues should be communicated to the general public as a call to action.", which is what I believe the article is really about.

Economic value isn't the sum of energy spent.

If increasing efficiency can increase the value of a set amount of energy, it can also increase the value of a decreasing amount of energy.

The OP is infected with what I call the "doom-and-gloom mind-virus." Like all mind-viruses, this one too prevents those infected from seeing reality as it truly is, as complex as it is. I routinely come across people who believe "there is nothing we can do at this point," even in those cases when there is evidence suggesting otherwise.

Yes, greater civilizational complexity is correlated with greater energy flows.[a] But our planet is only a tiny little speck of dust in relation to the size of our galaxy, which has between 100 and 400 billion stars, most significantly larger than our sun.[b] And our galaxy is only a speck of dust in relation to the size of the known universe, which is estimated to have 100 to 200 billion galaxies.[c] We're far from running out of expansion possibilities.

Moreover, it's very difficult, if not impossible, to predict in advance how human ingenuity (and eventually, perhaps, AI ingenuity) might be able to address some of the challenges ahead of us.

Let us not be doomers. Instead, let us be dreamers, problem-solvers, doers.

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[a] https://bhp-public.oerproject.com/

[b] https://www.space.com/25959-how-many-stars-are-in-the-milky-...

[c] https://www.space.com/25303-how-many-galaxies-are-in-the-uni...

The sun is a virtually infinite supply of energy. Solar power is self sustaining at this point, very much so at $0.25/watt.

Those panels should be cheaper to manufacture in zero-G (or lunar-G) and capable of providing 24 hours of output at a much higher level.

Nitrogen fertilizer can be obtained from the air, using this cheap electricity. We have an ancient method of fixating it called the Berkeland Eyde process, but there is room for this to be greatly improved, there just isn’t any incentive to do it. But I wouldn’t be surprised to see it make a comeback in the near future. (In fact, this is a big opportunity.)

Plastics… ah yes. Plastics. I don’t know what the solution to that looks like. They’re useful, no doubt, but I don’t think we need to use so much of them. It’s a useful byproduct of oil that is cheap and plentiful, and perhaps equilibrium is wildly offset by that at the moment. Those cheap synthetic fabrics may be expensive as silk someday.

In summary, I see the path forward and it doesn’t look all that bad to me.

I agree on the sentiment - We live beyond our means and that doesn't even make sense. But I find the prediction that we would perish in the near future neither well founded nor sensible. The motivation behind it is also bizarre: so that we can make our peace. To put it polemically: When will we go down so that I can tell my mom? And if we're certain to perish, then why bother with suffering and morality? If death is so certain, who would want to suffer again before it? Is it a true belief that those who have made peace with life suddenly become 'moral'? I'm saying this, because I think some people need the apocalypse to feel unity and belonging. They seem to have such a strong desire for community and unity that they would summon hell and devils just to bring people together.

things are never as good as people say they are

but things are also never as bad as people say they are

I think even the worst climate change is something we can survive. And there's no question we can survive without fossil fuels - there are more expensive alternatives.

Running out of stuff like copper or sand I don't think we can survive. But like with fossil fuels no serious researcher thinks we are even close to running out of that stuff.

>So obviously, infinite growth on a finite planet is impossible, yet most people deny this basic fact. The idea of modern civilization coming to an end is so unthinkable that they simply refuse to believe it.

Not gonna read the whole thing, but why would you think 'modern civilization' would be limited to one planet?

FWIW, the comparison with the doctor telling a patient of their fatal condition is disingenuous. For all but a tiny fraction of cancers, oncologists have a very large n, to speak with the near-certainty of experience. Vs. our n is zero for the collapse of global technological civilizations.

I do agree that the climate-pessimism side of the Culture Wars seems pretty d*mn oblivious to basic psychology and sociology. Almost as if they're far more interested in scoring juvenile "I'm Right!" points than they are in preventing catastrophe...

(Anybody else notice that the article's "ruins of abandoned & overgrown city" artwork shows all the glass windows intact?)

The "collapse of civilization" has been predicted many times over and we're still here.

Keeping this sort of secret knowledge to yourself is so isolating, but sharing it only makes it worse.

Pretty soon, the only people who find your company enjoyable are malthusians, christian apocalyptics, and emos. I mean the smiths are great, but have you heard....

This extreme pessimism is held with almost religious fervor. It’s terrifying what an unstable person on who holds these beliefs could rationalize in the name of saving the world.

All civilizations collapse. It's a feature, not a bug.

Sure - when you have something specific to tell them. Otherwise, it's causing needless worry.

And you will lessen the impact of the message.

It will be hard, for many places on Earth it will be catastrophic.

Civilization won't end tho.

Some of these estimates are absurd, which only makes the case for fighting climate change harder to make - same as overblown estimates of the COVID epidemic and of the effectiveness of the vaccine made it harder to handle future pandemics effectively.

The most important wrong estimate is the growth of population and associated growth of consumption of everything. Population will start to decline globally if it already hasn't started to go down. This is inconsistent with increasing consumption.

It seems the logic is that if people think all is lost, they won't try to stop it. This seemd to me a rational decision. If all is indeed lost (a binary yesno) then why should people take on hardship, give up dignity and live in poverty?

GPT6 please save us.

> Should We Tell People It's Too Late to Save Civilization?

What civilization ? They are all savages. /s