Huh? There’s quite a few of them. Especially since for most people destroying civilization, rendering humanity extinct or destroying the biosphere would qualify. If a rogue planet disturbs Earth’s orbit and casts it off into deep space or lethally close to the Sun, the fact that Earth technically still exists won’t matter. Same for a major asteroid impact.
As for man made disasters being unable to render humanity extinct, it wouldn’t need to. As with many extinctions it would likely be a one-two punch; such as, a manmade disaster killing off most of humanity, then one or more natural disasters finishing off the survivors.
This is a common strawman that I see from climate deniers. “Don’t worry about the climate earth will be fine”. Yes, nobody’s saying that the physical rock we sit on will be destroyed. That’s not the point. The point is that the biosphere we depend on is a lot more fragile than that.
Apart from that, this thread is about the collapse of society, not the extinction of humanity. Those are separate topics.
What I think is underappreciated is the fragility of modern civilization. All of your food comes from truck, train, ship, and/or aeroplane. Even if we lose just the oil refining infrastructure, then most of humanity will be dead of starvation in 6-12 months, full stop. Modern farms are factories that need inputs in the form of energy, fertilizer, seed, medicine, mechanical parts, and high-tech electronics. The exception is those people in (for example) Africa who are already doing self-sustaining subsistence farming with no technical assistance. They live on the land and they know what to do, so they should be fine, unless others come to interfere with them.
I’d say it was a very mild stress test and it failed completely. A handful of factories (on the other side of the world) shut down temporarily, the transport infrastructure and farms all stayed open. And the supply chain in the US and Europe had a very bad time indeed.
While the basic skills for sustenance level survival have certainly eroded among the population as a whole, there are certainly groups of people who still live in this fashion. Barring completely ecological collapse or a rapid emergence of ‘Road Warrior’ apocalyptic landscape of mutant bikers ranging the countryside people will form communities around the those with skills and resources. Advanced technological knowledge may be lost or go fallow but all of the basic skills of pre-industrial societies will come back into common use, either though people who have retained these skills or from experimentation as they were originally developed. For certain, life at a sustenance level could not sustain eight billion people on the planet but successful societies would re-emerge around places rich in natural resources and scavenging for materials that those societies don’t have the skills or available energy to produce would provide a lot of advantages over societies that originally developed from the Bronze Age material availability and techniques, and the notion of returning to a Neolithic-like level of development basically assumes that all advanced materials and knowledge have been completely eradicated, which seems highly unlikely. That being said, an initial era of collapse would be brutal, and the billionaires hiding in their bunkers with MREs and guns aren’t really going to enjoy much in the way of long term advantages unless they’ve also developed some pretty good society-building and leadership skills. I’m pretty sure Mark Zuckerberg is cooked the first time he opens his mouth and speaks.
Although the USSR dissolved, Russia didn’t really collapse per se; there was a continuity of government, and the dire economic circumstances and lack of government providing basic services were due to already endemic corruption being completely unchecked. I suppose you can call that a kind of collapse of civil society but it was mostly intentional. Most of the Warsaw Pact nations benefited economically almost immediately from the collapse of the Soviet Union although you can argue that the abruptness of the transition resulted in some pretty severe social dislocations.
The SARS-CoV-2 virus with an estimated infection fatality rate (IFR) of 0.1%-0.2% (with a lot of infections so mild or asymptomatic that they weren’t even referred as cases, so the case facility rate isn’t really reflective of true mortality) was comparatively benign compared to what would have happened if something with the virulence of SARS-CoV(-1) (from the 2002-4 SARS outbreak) with a case fatality rate of ~15% (outside of China where mortality data was likely suppressed) had not been controlled, and the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic was a love tap even compared with something like a particularly virulent novel influenza strain.
That being said, humanity has regularly faced pandemic-level threats and persistent outbreaks of endemic pathogens until very recently; the Black Plague, smallpox, cholera, tuberculosis, tetanus, et cetera. This has frequently had massive impacts on societies but except in cases of completely immunologically naive cultures (such as the natives of North America and Australia being exposed to smallpox and measles) has rarely resulting in completely collapse, and in some cases contributed to the advancement of societies that were otherwise mired in a lack of technological and social innovation. A truly novel or engineered pathogen with very high mortality might cause social collapse but it would have to have the right balance of infectiousness and virulence, as well as persistence in the environment to create a long term threat to society at large.
Yeah, and the US in particular would potentially be more resistant to it than many other countries, because we’re (AFAIK) unusually decentralized in governmental decision-making.
I mean, it might be tough to communicate with Washington, but it’s a lot easier to communicate with Topeka, Augusta, Austin, Santa Fe, Sacramento, etc… And we’ve got sub-units from there; if you’re in Houston County, Crockett is even closer than Austin.
Of course, we’d have to undo/ignore decades of centralization of power and control, but it could be done.
What is more likely to happen is that standards of living and public health are going to absolutely crater; those are things that depend very much on our modern interconnected society. But even if we’re living at early 19th century level of technology, we’ll still have towns, governments, etc… and probably in the same form we already do, just with a lot more stuff pushed locally, like having the State district courts try capital cases, and the local counties doing the executions, like they did in the 19th century.
Or be something that renders the planet largely uninhabitable. An example I’ve seen brought up elsewhere is a hypothetical photosynthetic organism that produces chlorine as well as oxygen as a byproduct, basically re-creating the Great Oxygenation Event and rendering the atmosphere unbreathable to all existing life. Or basically anything else that alters the environment worldwide that we have no way to stop.* Or for that matter the will to stop; look at our non-reaction to global warming, it it’ll take a hundred years to reach “apocalypse” at this point I expect we’ll basically do nothing until maybe year 90.
Especially if it’s part of a “one-two punch” scenario like I mentioned above; if we had something like a global nuclear war and in the process an organism like that got released, we’d have far less ability to detect it before it got firmly entrenched across the world, and less ability to do anything about it. If we’re knocked back to pre-industrial technology we won’t be stopping any bio-engineered catastrophes anytime soon.
As with all these threads on “end of the world” or “end of civilization”, the devil is in, not the details, but the definitions.
For this thread, what constitutes “societal collapse”, and what are the proposed mechanisms that lead to that type of situation?
Someone who means a global disaster that does major abrupt damage to the biosphere is looking at it differently than someone who thinks of the slow corruption of our political system until the Constitution is actually dead, elections are meaningless and compulsory, and the oligarchs/ aristocracy rule by fear and oppression. Or a political upheaval that sends the US into a new revolution (assuming the military fractures) that ultimately divide the nation into lots of little local governments.
Some people might measure “societal collapse” to mean a transformation where our lifestyle is drastically different at a lower standard of living. Others mean collapse of the current government.
So it’s difficult to pin down one list of misconceptions when the conditions are not agreed.
For me, I think the main misconception is people underestimate how resilient society is. Civilization survived the black plague, where half of Europe died (I don’t know a ton about history outside of Europe).
Native American civilization was wiped out by a bunch of diseases they had no immunity to. But you had to kill something like 90%+ to wipe out their civilization. Despite that, there are still native Americans.
Take Russia from the period of roughly 1900 to the 1950s. They had a civil war, WW1, the spanish flu, another civil war, the stalinist purges, stalinist famines, WW2. Despite it, Russian civilization still survived.
People act like everyone not having enough gasoline to drive across the state anytime they want is the same thing as civilization collapsing. Its not, we can survive with a far far lower standard of living than what we have now. Keeping humans alive is not that hard if you have basic science.
Another assumption is that all our knowledge would die. But it’s been stored on things like microfilm, microfiche, etc which can last centuries.
Also people assume we will run out of food. I don’t see that happening. With modern technology we can produce 15-20 million calories per acre of corn, sugar beets, potatoes. You can feed 20 people on one acre of food if you quit using agricultural land to grow fruits/vegetables, if you stop growing meat, if you stop creating biofuels and industrial products, etc with staple crops.
In a situation like this, things like growing food would take a very high priority. Agricultural equipment would be prioritized for manufacture and repair, and farms would have armed guards.
I think society is much more resilient than people give it credit for. Society has survived far worse and society had far less people, science and technology back then.
The great oxygenation event took hundreds of millions of years to happen though. Why wouldn’t humans be able to invent insecticides to kill off a photosynthetic organism that produced chlorine? Or engineer a pathogen (like a bacteriophage) that attacks this particular organism?
We’ve known about climate change for maybe a century. Yeah we don’t take it as seriously as we should, but the price of renewable energy has dropped about 95-99% in the last 50 years (solar panels used to cost $100 a watt, now they are $0.35 a watt). Within another 50 years solar energy will probably be dirt cheap and ever present.
That is dependent on the heavy usage on non-renewable resources, like petroleum and fossil water reserves. And having modern technology in general.
There is also speculation that agriculture may no longer be possible at all in the coming, come-energetic post-global-warming climate. No one really knows one way or the other however, since humanity has never existed under such conditions. But if that’s true then humanity will be permanently thrown back to the Stone Age.
All of these people were well-positioned to bounce back because their means of production was all local and autonomous. That’s not the case in the modern day. Most of your food comes from quite far away and depend on a complex logistical chain wh ich itself depends on complex logistical chains.
If your local grocery stores close forever, you will assuredly be dead in less than a year, starving to death while trying to learn to grow potatoes in your back yard. You won’t even grow one adult’s monthly caloric needs because you don’t know how and you don’t have materials. All of the developed world and much of the less-developed world is in the same boat.
There’s a distinct difference in the extent of the problem between your version and others’ stated versions.
A reduction in access to fuel for personal vehicles to prioritize mass transportation and industrial needs is one thing. That means a change in lifestyle, but not necessarily a distinct of civilization.
But others are proposing the loss of access to fossil fuels in toto (or effectively so).
No fuel for trucks or trains or ships, no fuel for tractors or combines, no petrochemicals for fertilizer or for packaging and handling.
It doesn’t even take the complete loss of fossil fuels. It just takes a large-scale disruption of the transportation infrastructure.
Even if the food is grown and harvested and collected and ready for transport, if the transportation network is sufficiently hampered, that food isn’t getting from the farms to the grocery stores.
Then it’s not a case of “I can’t drive anywhere,” it’s “there’s no food available.” Massive population dying from violence to acquire anything to eat. More from starvation and disease. Law and order breaks down when there’s just a little bit and a lot of people who need it to live.
I’d go back to the OP and ask which disaster / collapse scenario are they interested in discussing?
As others have pointed out, I’ll also discount the impact and recovery of any historical events prior to about 1900; I see them as being irrelevant to today. The world today, and especially the rich industrialized countries in that world, are very different places than in e.g. 1880 or 1500.
No suburbanite, nor most rural people, are going to be set up to meet their caloric needs for a family of 4 with a residential garden if they face sudden food security unless they already have it up and running. Even then it’ll be dicey. We’re not talking about some bonus fresh veggies, we’re talking about meeting a family’s entire caloric needs year-round, completely replacing store-bought food.
Maybe if you already have everything you need, maybe if you already have land, maybe if you already have a little know-how, and if you have enough forewarning to start planting in the spring, you might get something the first year. But if widespread food security starts in mid-summer then that’s not happening, you’re simply going to die.
The problem is, different kinds of collapses have different sorts of problems.
Nuclear war would destroy huge amounts of infrastructure, and radiation after-effects would make rebuilding a much greater challenge. A disease like Captain Trips might kill as many people, but the infrastructure would remain largely intact (at least in the first few years), and depending on how fast it kills people we might be able to plan for downsizing to more sustainable levels.
And then there’s things like a Civil War. There would be local collapses, in the areas where their is a lot of fighting, but other places would be better off. But shipping goods becomes more difficult. Iowa would be awash with cheap corn, and the coasts would still see at least some trade still coming in on ships, but they’d be less able to ship it to the middle of the country.
I think that’s overly optimistic. Even if a civil war didn’t go nuclear (which I think it would), overseas shipping would be nonexistent. The distances are too great and ships are too easy to track these days; it’d be suicide for a cargo vessel to try to cross a whole ocean.
As for farming regions that’s up in the air. Given how we’ve historically fought wars I expect their fields would be bombed with various poisons to destroy the crops and render them unusable.
The part I don’t agree with is that we all have to go back to subsistence farming. In the 18th century I think farmers were growing about 20-30 bushels per acre of corn. With modern technology its more like 200 bushels per acre.
Growing food would be one of our top priorities. Devoting resources and raw material to industrial scale farming would be one of our top priorities. Farmers would be growing crops with the highest calories per acre, the food would be processed and put into storage (staple crops like potatoes, corn, wheat, rice, etc can last for decades when stored properly) so that people have enough food to focus on rebuilding.
Humans have known how to make butter out of coal for about a century. Why would that technology disappear? The world isn’t going to run out of coal anytime soon.
But again, how would we lose access to them?
There are about 1 trillion tons of coal on earth. About 2 trillion barrels of oil. 200 trillion cubic meters of natural gas.
Even if you took all that away, why would solar, wind, geothermal, nuclear, hydro power all go away? Even if we can’t build solarvoltaic panels we can use solar power to boil water, move pistons, etc to generate energy.
Electricity wasn’t widespread until about the end of the 19th century. Humanity survived. If people have to make agricultural equipment run on renewable energy, they would look for ways to do so. Also a ton of cargo moved by barge requires less fossil fuel input than a ton of cargo moved by train, which requires less fossil fuel input than a ton of cargo moved by semi. So humans could move to slower moving, but more fuel efficient, methods of travel.
Agriculture will always take top priority in the event of a civilization collapse. Agriculture, security and basic health care is all you need for a good health span and a life expectancy to go to about 75 years. Life expectancy won’t be 82, but people will have decades of productive life with the basics met.
We may live in a police state and live a spartan lifestyle for a while, but I don’t grasp the idea that people will voluntarily choose to try to grow potatoes in their yards rather than make agriculture the top priority of a new civilization. People will come together and accept martial law and a draconian police state if it means resources are allocated properly and that agriculture is one of the top priorities so that people have the security and nourishment to work on rebuilding.