I’m not sure if this belongs in CS or MPSIMS, but its a question.
Watching Mad Max 2:The Road Warrior, I was thinking, is it possible at all that our civilization could fall like in the movie? In the 3rd movie, Beyond Thunderdome it was hinted that a nuclear war had taken place, but in the first 2 flicks it seemed that the lack of fuel led to society’s break down. Governments don’t exist or function in that world, its total lawlessness.
If you take nuclear war off of the table is it possible that our world could fall into that kind of barbarism, even if its a remote possibility?
Yes it is possible. If competition for resources gets too tough but how it would happen is pure conjecture.
Take your choice from some of these:
Global Warming causes the loss of coastal cities which disrupts economies and displaces Billions of people.
A Super-volcano puts us into a 2-3 year period of long extra cold winters and causes famine and shortage around the world and sets off a series of wars.
A large meteor strike wipes out a large part of the population but is not up to dinosaur killer destruction.
A war breaks out with biological weapons used and the virus goes too far and too fast and devastates the world.
Lack of fuel is extremely unlikely. When it gets expensive enough we will find alternatives. Hopefully we are getting there soon enough for other reasons.
Read Jared Diamond’s “Collapse”. According to him, it’s not only possible, it’s normal. Civilizations have a finite lifespan, and they start to die when external conditions become more unfavourable (i. e. running out of oil), or when they become too complex internally to function well.
John Michael Greer has also written about this. He also says that internal collapse doesn’t take place instantaneously, but in stages separated by partial regrowth. But each peak is lower and lower, and it takes several centuries, like the fall of the Roman Empire.
Greer has written what that might be like for North America, superimposed onto the scale of a human lifetime. The interesting thing for such long-drawn-out collapses is that everything seems normal most of the time. Change is slow compared to human experience.
Another thing he mentions is that society is much more likely to recover from a short sharp crisis than a long drawn-out decline. This is in part due to the generational transfer of knowledge; in a sharp crisis, people remember what it was like before, and collectively retain the knowledge from that time, but in a longer decline people adapt to new conditions and discard old knowledge and it become unavailable. Consider the Brits during World Ward 2 as an example of a society receiving a short sharp shock, and Somalia, perhaps, as a longer-term decline (though I am not certain of that).
Now, whether a worldwide collapse could occur? I think it possible due to external changes (i. e. that running out of oil). Only a world-wide collapse would lead to long-term barbarism; otherwise, someone would always recolonize the collapsed areas.
Thats an interesting post, sunspace. In the movies its always a devastating event, like nukes falling or a plague of some sort. (I don’t recall what caused the collapse in The Postman, I’ve always thought it was a plague of some kind, but I don’t know) It would have to be something that killed millions fast in that environment.
In Beyond Thunderdome MasterBlaster is the only one that could make fuel from pig shit, but I’d guess that there are a significant number of people right now that know how to do it. If somehow civilization fell apart tomorrow people with skills like that would be in a good position since the knowledge they hold would be sought after. (assuming they aren’t forced into slavery by some crazy warlord…maybe I think tooo much in comic book/movie terms).
Of course it also might have something to do with manufacturing the things needed to make other things run. Civilization collapses and you’re a mechanic. People look to you to keep cars and other things running…even if you have ample fuel stocked up sooner or later you’ll need replacement parts. You can change a tire but can you make one? Can you make lug nuts for it? What if you need other parts? If no one is around that can make them, you’re screwed. Better find a horse.
(and then, how many of us here have any skill at riding a horse? I could probably figure out how to pluck and cook a live chicken, or ride a horse, but I surely can’t build a camera or a generator).
There’re minimum levels of complexity needed for doing various things as well. Imagine all the infrastructure needed to make computer chips, for example. If some external disaster like a meteor strike killed off 95% of people, would there be enough people left over to keep the chip factory running, even if all the knowledge and parts and materials were available?
As a whole, society can only allocate so much of a percentage of its total resources to making chips; we have to do a lot of other things as well, like grow food and build houses. If society was suddenly a lot smaller, would we have the human resources to spare, even if everything else was there for the taking? There may be other priorities than making chips.
There’s a tension between being too small and being too large. Too small, and you simply don’t have the resources to take on certain projects that may be useful. Too large, and your resources are disproportionately used in internal co-ordination (think of an organization bogged down by internal bureaucracy).
Well, the selection of knowledge for transfer goes both ways, so to speak. We may be choosing our knowledge well for current conditions (lots of technical writers, few blacksmiths), but if conditions change and blacksmiths are needed, there may be problems. This is another advantage of a large society: the ability to maintain all sorts of specialized knowledges that are luxuries now, but may come in handy sometime.
Understandable. In the event of collapse my particular talent at art may not be useful in everyday things that are needed, but my years of service in the army and knowledge of military skills and traditions may be (one thing that keeps me alive) and valued in defense, I hope at least if the world collapses tomorrow.
Hmmm…all of those smiths you see aty ren faires…they ,might find themselves in the catbird seat.
First, define “fall”. The Roman Empire didn’t completely fall until 1453, when the Turks stormed Constantinople. The British Empire fell, but the British people didn’t suffer a decline in living standards as a result.
You take nuclear war off the table. But how can a disaster that doesn’t kill off lots and lots of people qualify as a disaster? If nobody is dying of disease or violence or starvation then what’s really happened?
You can’t have a collapse of civilization without lots of people dying because if they’re not dying they’re rebuilding. So what could cause lots of people to start dying? Nuclear war, biological war, a virulent epidemic, a supervolcano, ecological collapse, apes becoming intelligent, something like that.
To answer the question, “What would the fall of civilization look like?” I suppose it would resemble a retreat to a less technologically advanced way of living. For much of the world, this would be no change at all. For the more outdoorsy types in our modern society, they would probably find it easier to adapt. For the garden variety urban blogger, it would probably be a bigger stretch.
In the Mad Max films, the explanation is a civil war caused by energy shortages. The Fallout games followed a similar scenario- nuclear war between China and the US for control of the last remaining sources of oil.
In Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (coincidentally I just mentioned this book in another thread) we see McCarthy’s vision of what might happen if the world was hit by a massive comet. In the book the catastrophe is not actually explained to the reader but McCarthy has said in interviews his general idea was a large comet strike. Basically it was a large enough strike that huge amounts of dust and ash were thrown into the atmosphere, effectively blocking out a huge portion of the sun’s light. This completely destroyed agriculture and after some years the only real food supplies that kept going were canned foods left over from the time before the strike.
There’s a very small amount of scattered natural food that is found (mushrooms in one instance) but it seems most of humanity continues to survive off of outright murder and cannibalization of weaker humans. Roaming bands of murderers basically scout for lone survivors to kill and butcher.
I actually do think humanity could be reduced to that. If something catastrophic happened that wiped out most agriculture I think a lot of people would fight, and fight hard, before they accepted starvation. At first the fighting would be over existing food stores which would probably last for a significant period of time. Since a large portion of the population would starve to death quickly, and a decent portion would die fighting over existing food stores quite quickly the global population would be low and thus pre-comet food stores would last for “awhile.” Eventually though with the sun destroying most agriculture you have to turn to kill the remaining humans and eating them. Because we have existing food stores I do think in that scenario we’d be some of the last surviving of the larger animals. Most others would quickly die off due to lack of food sources and the rest would most certainly be killed by hungry humans. Certain insects and other small animals would probably survive long term.
But what causes that retreat? Take for instance the disasterous two decades of the 30s and 40s. Depression, economic collapse, totalitarian political movements, war, the devastation of Europe and Asia, millions and millions dead, millions and millions more homeless and displaced. Did that result in a retreat to a less technologically advanced way of living? Even in the areas that ended up under Soviet control didn’t revert technologically.
Unless some sort of catastrophe occurs that kills a majority of people on earth we’re not going to regress technologically. Economic dislocation won’t do it, the Great Depression didn’t cause technological regression even though the global economy contracted sharply.
I think you’d soon find your flintlock unpowered as the local sources of potassium nitrate dry up. I suppose you could skip the dog poop aging and go with the Haber–Bosch process, but that’d take chemical engineers and high pressure vessels.
Morris Berman wrote an interesting book along these lines called The Twilight of American Culture. He draws a lot of parallels between our current state and the Roman Empire shortly before it collapsed. He does point out though, that the comparisons are not exact, so we probably wouldn’t see a period similar to the “dark ages”. What exactly will happen is anybody’s guess though.
Along the same lines is a fiction book called A Canticle for Liebowitz, which asks the question: are civilizations doomed to cycle through failure and rebirth, or is there a way to extend things indefinitely.
