
Industrial civilisation headed for 'irreversible collapse'? - copx
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2014/mar/14/nasa-civilisation-irreversible-collapse-study-scientists
======
danbruc
The Club of Rome [1] did the same thing in 1972 with its famous study »The
Limits to Growth« [2] and came to similar conclusions. An updated version
»Beyond the Limit« [3] has been published after 20 years in 1993. The model
they developed is called World3 [4].

After 30 years they validated their model and published »Limits to Growth: The
30-Year Update« in 2004. The actual development of our world over this 30
years period is frighteningly close to one of their scenarios without happy
end.

It is unfortunately a real possibility that we are already doomed, i.e. have
crossed the point of no return even assuming perfect future developments, and
are just not aware of our approaching downfall.

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Club_of_Rome](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Club_of_Rome)

[2]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_to_Growth](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_to_Growth)

[3]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beyond_the_Limits](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beyond_the_Limits)

[4] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World3](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World3)

~~~
thirsteh
What _is_ that ending?

~~~
danbruc
[http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-06OO_3r0dVc/Tw0HcAr6R3I/AAAAAAAAAL...](http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-06OO_3r0dVc/Tw0HcAr6R3I/AAAAAAAAALM/pdt88yv3N6w/s1600/World3.jpg)

------
DanielBMarkham
Correct me if I'm wrong, but are we not now, reading this, sitting in a
civilization with greater capacity for resource production and allocation,
longer average lives, and better systems of healthcare than all of the
previous cultures this study brings up?

Are we not also aware that any mathematical model of consumption for any
growing civilization at any period -- easily predicts resources running out
and impending catastrophe? Do we not note that priests and others have been
predicting the end of mankind for as far back as we have written history? Can
we not observe that all cellular-based automata modeling systems default to
runaway conditions? Is any of this some kind of mystery?

There may be real danger on the horizon -- creating some kind of human super-
organism on the planet creates a single point of failure, and that's
_extremely_ bad -- but I remain convinced that when the world does end,
there's going to be a lot of disappointed people out there that it did not end
the way they thought it would.

"Scientists" are folks who tell us the likelihood of causality. You do A, B is
likely to happen. They do this through falsifiable theories and reproducible
science. They do not spend time and money with broad speculations about the
ills of human nature, and how those ills will conspire bring about our
punishment. I don't know what that is, sounds like religion to me, but it sure
ain't science.

------
narrator
The problem with studies about the future is that they tend to too easily
reconfirm the ideological beliefs of the writers. For example, the Romans
didn't collapse because of environmental reasons. This makes them a tough
jigsaw piece to squeeze into a deep environmentalist collapse puzzle. This is
probably why Jared Diamond ignores them and instead focuses on small tribes in
the arctic and easter island.

The only collapse theorist that I know of who's developed a collapse theory
that avoids ideology is Joseph Taintor. Probably because he is not an
economist but a professor of archeology.

~~~
graeme
The Roman's did exhaust their environment though. Soil depleted, habours
silted up, and forests disappeared. In North Africa this led to
desertification that persists today.

Tainter specifically mentions Roman soil depletion in his book.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deforestation_during_the_Roman_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deforestation_during_the_Roman_period#Consequences_of_deforestation)

~~~
narrator
Tainter's explanation for their collapse was the diminishing marginal utility
of the "conquer and collect tribute" mechanism that had served them so well in
previous centuries. I'm not saying that they did not deforest the land or
change the environment but that's like saying the cause of the decline of the
new world civilizations in the 15th century was because of their expansive
agricultural modifications of the land in the preceding centuries.

Maintaining territory and tribute generated negative marginal returns after a
while. It was only the eastern roman empire's deconstruction of their military
institutions into the theme based system[1] of distributed farmer's security
collectives that let the Eastern Roman Empire (A.K.A Byzantium) last another
1000 years after the western roman empire had collapsed.

1\.
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theme_(Byzantine_district)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theme_\(Byzantine_district\))

------
arcadeparade
Guy McPherson has a disturbingly well sourced and pessimistic summary of how
climate change will affect humanity in the next few decades. In his view it's
too late to stop it and we're finished:

[http://guymcpherson.com/2013/01/climate-change-summary-
and-u...](http://guymcpherson.com/2013/01/climate-change-summary-and-update/)

~~~
heydenberk
An interesting thought experiment I like to entertain is the case in which
climate change is mitigated by the same kind of factors that cause and
exacerbate it. It's not outrageous to imagine 21st century materials
technology making it profitable to extract carbon dioxide from the atmosphere,
or low-power, ubiquitous computing/surveillance/logistics technology that can
extract heat energy from the atmosphere and convert it to usable work.

~~~
acqq
I hope you understand that converting CO2 to anything else requires _energy_.
CO2 is the "lower energy" state. Either you win the energy by burning
something or you have to spend the energy to produce organic matter out of the
CO2. The nature did the later during the last hundreds of millions of years.
The humanity burned half of the oil so produced in a mere 100 years -- an
order of million times faster, and growing.

~~~
heydenberk
My optimistic idea of the future (not the only scenario I entertain by any
means) assumes that renewable, carbon-neutral energy will be pervasive.

------
fauigerzigerk
I agree that inequality is a growing problem for our economic and democratic
models, but I think we need to keep two things seperate: Inequality of
resource usage and inequality of resource ownership.

The super rich may be thousands or hundereds of thousands of times as wealthy
as the average person, but they do not eat thousands of times as much and they
do not personally use thousands of times as much energy as the rest of us.

The 0.1% and not even the 1% can ever eat enough for the rest of us to go
hungry. There isn't going to be famine due to resource scarcity in developed
countries. At least not because the rich have used all the resources.

This hasn't always been the case. I believe (correct me if I'm wrong as I'm
not a historian) that hundereds or thousands of years ago the elites could
actually use not just own so much of the available resources that there wasn't
enough left for the masses.

Inequality of asset ownership is to a large degree inequality of power. Mr.
Brin can wake up tomorrow and say ha!, today I'm going to set up a lab staffed
with top scientists that are going to figure out how to build a space
elevator. Or he can buy himself a senator or two. I can't do that. He can. But
we can both eat and the food won't be that different (I believe).

~~~
danbruc
If you don't compare the rich and the poor within countries but on a global
scale the situation looks a bit different. I have no source at hand to prove
my point but if I remember correctly the first world wastes enough food that
we could almost feed every human on earth if we would stop that and
redistribute the food instead.

~~~
fauigerzigerk
They are not going hungry because we are eating too much. That causality
doesn't exist. Famine is the result of wars, corruption and generally bad
policy.

~~~
danbruc
I did not want to imply that, I wanted to say that the rich are capable of
wasting a LOT of resources.

------
spikels
This is obviously sensationalist bullshit. The Guardian writer, Nafeez Ahmed,
has produced a string of highly exaggerated articles in the past[1]. Very
surprised that the Guardian publishes this crap but it seems that highly
politicized subjects like climate change and income inequality have different
standards.

[1] [http://www.theguardian.com/profile/nafeez-
ahmed](http://www.theguardian.com/profile/nafeez-ahmed)

~~~
ssully
While I am not saying this is some universal truth or anything like that, but
I have found these kind of articles to be wildly popular amongst cynical
students at my college.

There is something about the idea of "The world is fucked, and I will be here
to watch it burn!" that seems to really click with these people.

~~~
colomon
They seem to do well on HN too...

------
dasil003
There is some interesting insight to be gained from the elites vs masses
psychology here. However I'm very skeptical of looking at history to try to
predict the future of our civilization. Population and resource utilization as
a percentage of total available on our planet have never been anywhere near
what they are today. If civilization is to survive we somehow need to
transition work environmental and total resource externalities into our
capitalist model—in other words we need deeply embrace sustainability as a
fundamental cultural value. Currently no one is thinking beyond the length of
a human lifetime; that coupled with an axiomatic need for infinite economic
growth is guaranteed to fuck ourselves over sooner than later.

~~~
arcadeparade
Is capitalism compatible with human survival? You can't have infinite growth
on a planet with finite resources.

>Report for the UN into the activities of the world's 3,000 biggest companies
estimates one-third of profits would be lost if firms were forced to pay for
use, loss and damage of environment

[http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2010/feb/18/worlds-
to...](http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2010/feb/18/worlds-top-firms-
environmental-damage)

It's true that massive regulation to account for all the externalities of the
market is vital, but with 200 species a day going extinct already, and serious
crises on the horizon, it should have happened a long time ago.

~~~
fargolime
> You can't have infinite growth on a planet with finite resources.

Blasphemy! I bet less than half of the otherwise smart people acknowledge
this. Or they think we'll just terraform Mars some other planet light years
away, soon enough.

~~~
Zigurd
You didn't have to wait long for the Mars immigrants, did you?

The problem is that accumulating enough energy to leave Earth will be very
difficult. Oil still is tightly coupled to wealth. And if we survive long
enough to decouple it, and are lucky enough that that is a smooth transition
and don't end up way too poor to go to Mars, getting to Mars is still going to
be a trip for wealthy masochists with no impact on human survival. (Wait,
maybe Elon Musk is playing some Vonnegut-esque Marxist long con on the
1%'ers.)

I would find the Pollyannas more believable if we had a production line for
thorium reactors cranking them out like the Chinese build coal powerplants.

------
danielweber
"NASA-funded study" implies a lot more relevance than people should find.

NASA funds lots of things, including warp drives. That doesn't make it true.

~~~
phest
What about "accepted for publication in the peer-reviewed Elsevier journal,
Ecological Economics"?

~~~
T-A
Well... [http://retractionwatch.com/2012/04/17/math-paper-
retracted-b...](http://retractionwatch.com/2012/04/17/math-paper-retracted-
because-it-contains-no-scientific-content/)

------
codeulike
The way this is written up in the Guardian makes it sound like NASA's all
seeing eye has evaluated everything that is happening in the world and made a
prediction. The actual paper (early draft here apparently
[http://metosrv2.umd.edu/~ekalnay/pubs/handy-paper-for-
submis...](http://metosrv2.umd.edu/~ekalnay/pubs/handy-paper-for-
submission-2.pdf) ) is all about a fairly simple model which has been run
through a bunch of scenarios as a way of studying civilisation collapse in
general:

 _Based on the long history of collapse of civilizations discussed in the
introduction, we separated the population into 'Elites' and 'Commoners', and
introduced a variable for accumulated wealth ... We have also added a di
fferent dimension of predation whereby Elites 'prey' on the production of
wealth by Commoners. As a result, HANDY consists of just four prediction
equations: two for the two classes of population, Elites and Commoners,
denoted by xE and xC, respectively, one for the natural resources or Nature,
y, and one for the accumulated Wealth, w, referred to hereafter as 'Wealth'.
This minimal set of four equation seems to capture essential features of the
human-nature interaction and is capable of producing major potential scenarios
of collapse or transition to steady state._

This definitely has some uses but is being misreported. A four equation model
that splits people into two polarised classes doesn't really tell us much
about the real world. There are lots of reasons to feel gloomy about the
future for sure, but this little model isn't really adding to the evidence in
any substantial way.

------
coin
"and increasingly unequal wealth distribution". I don't know about this. If
anything we have more wealth available to commoners today compared to
centuries ago. Just look at how things were a 1000 or 2000 years ago, most
everyone was poor, with the wealth held by kings a lords.

~~~
iamthepieman
Just because everyone has more wealth(very disputable especially regionally in
certain areas) doesn't mean the distribution is increasing at the same rate
for all classes of society.

------
phreeza
Reminds me a bit of the psychohistorians in Asimov's Foundation series.

------
tunap
Where's the Nasa.gov link? TFA doesn't provide one, Google isn't seeing it.
Anyone?

~~~
phreeza
NASA funding doesn't mean much here. see danielweber's comment.

------
dan_bk
The fact that inequal distribution of wealth is still a reality we accept in
our time is really mind-boggling. Even more so given the fact that it's 1 of
the main reasons for a likely future collapse of our civilization. (We still
don't use the full potential of our collective intelligence; we know exactly
what's wrong, but behave like hypnotized rabbits, instead of starting to
coordinate for a collaborative culture/future.)

~~~
ahomescu1
How would you realistically fix "inequal distribution of wealth"? Let's say
you run a company, and it makes $1mil per year in revenue. Would you split
that amount equally to all employees? Not everyone contributed equally, maybe
one guy worked for 60hrs/week while another left at 4pm every day. Would you
give the same amount of money to the janitor as to the CEO or engineers?

Also, what about people outside that company? Should they also get some money,
even though some of them contributed exactly zero? You could argue that some
government services did contribute, like cops and roads, but that still
wouldn't include the majority of the population.

In short, I think there are no easy solutions to "inequal distribution of
wealth". Whatever you pick is going to come with its own serious downsides.

------
Maro
World3 is a famous simulation done in the 70s of our world/civilization that
broadly predicts how our interaction with the environment will lead to a
breakdown (decrease) of population.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World3](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World3)

You can run this world simulation here:

[http://insightmaker.com/insight/1954](http://insightmaker.com/insight/1954)

(Click on the green run simulation on the upper left.)

The lady who is responsible for this is called Donella Meadows, she is a
famous systems thinker, I read one of her books titled 'Thinking in Systems'.
It's about how to think about such systems (without actually modelling them).

[http://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Systems-Donella-H-
Meadows/dp/...](http://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Systems-Donella-H-
Meadows/dp/1603580557)

------
runn1ng
Is there an actual link to the study? I couldn't find it.

~~~
spikels
Couldn't find anything on the study's author, Safa Motesharri, other than a
bunch of reposts of this Guardian article.

Edit: Study author's name was misspelled in the Guardian: Safa Motesharrei not
Safa Motesharri. He's a math grad student at Univ. Of Maryland. Found a paper
too...

[http://www.atmos.umd.edu/~ekalnay/pubs/handy-paper-for-
submi...](http://www.atmos.umd.edu/~ekalnay/pubs/handy-paper-for-
submission-2.pdf)

[http://www.sesync.org/users/smotesharrei](http://www.sesync.org/users/smotesharrei)

------
Nanzikambe
WARNING: Doom n' Gloom post :P

I'm not arguing against the need for such studies, however I find it amazing
that this is debatable at all.

Expecting that we as a species or society aren't subject to the most
fundamental laws of the universe isn't rational. Even in the negligible
timescale of our own species we've seen repeated cycles of collapse, the
planet is littered with the remains of failed species. The only reason this
needs study is because we're so arrogant as to believe there's an exemption
clause in the fine print of the immutable laws of the universe, just for us.
Scarier still is that we don't even have to be all godded up to believe that,
it's how we're born. (Tangent: watch "Through The Wormhole" the episode "Does
Belief in God Cause More Self Control?")

A collapse is coming, it's just a question of when. 10 years? 100 years? 1000
years? a million?

Personally I'd lean toward the lower end of the scale. Whilst a substantial
percentage of the world subscribes philosophies that essentially reinforce our
innate belief that the earth "belongs" to man. Her resources perhaps put there
for us to consume by some higher being. We're pretty fucked. Ecological
responsibility can't be discussed with any creature that ultimately believes
that a a higher being provides for them. Heck you can't even begin to discuss
the timescales involved rationally with the vast majority of faiths around,
and those that you can engage in dialogue are numerically so insignificant as
to not matter.

Then there's the question of reproduction. Whilst first world populations are
shrinking, the third world is growing, and we in the first world can't even
agree that it would be in our own long term interests to pay for the education
and food of every last man, woman and child amongst them that needs it. The
reasons are purely selfish: it's the only humane way we can have even the
slightest chance of avoiding a world with 10 + billion people on it. If the
thought of that doesn't terrify you, it should. Assuming we agree that
societal patterns observed in the past hold true of the future, then trouble
and strife breeds conflict, breeds fascism, breeds violence. Picture a world a
few decades from now where the poorest two thirds, armed with today's most
horrific weapons use the model set by the past as their compass for the
future. I'd wager the odds are heavily stacked in favour of things getting
very bloody at some point. Believing that, whilst some may play with
cataclysmic weapons, the genie will stay in the bottle for the rest, is naive
at best. If you still can't picture what I mean, drop everything and go visit
India, Bangladesh, Mexico or almost anywhere in sub-saharan Africa, spend a
year or two outside the city, then picture what happens when that thin veneer
if government and society is stripped away.

It's a fact that as a species and as individuals we're incredibly bad at
forward looking decision making. We evolved geared to favour today and next
week over next month or next year. Few plan and act for long term benefit even
on a human scale, and collectively that's going to bite us in the ass. I don't
imagine this is something that sits well with the entrepreneurial spirit of HN
readers, but before you stand up and shout "Hey! I plan! I save! I recycle!"
or whatever, remember this is about us in aggregate, each of us individually
are quite irrelevant.

Ok, I'm done, I can't begin to address this subject properly.

    
    
      “I'm gonna share with you a vision that I had, cause I love you. And you feel it. You know all
      that money we spend on nuclear weapons and defense each year, trillions of dollars, correct? 
      Instead -- just play with this -- if we spent that money feeding and clothing the poor of the 
      world -- and it would pay for it many times over, not one human being excluded -- we can 
      explore space together, both inner and outer, forever in peace.”  - Bill Hicks

~~~
phest
_I don 't imagine this is something that sits well with the entrepreneurial
spirit of HN readers_

Would that explain why this post moved from number 3 on HN to bottom of page 3
in a matter of minutes?

~~~
krato
Please, not this thing about defense spending again ... you could feed and
clothe them many times over, for many generations, with all the entitlement
spending ...

~~~
Nanzikambe
And accomplish what, a reversal of roles?

I'm ravished by the sheer implausibility of that. Carry on.

------
coin
NASA is an acronym, yet most British publications stylize it as a word - Nasa.

~~~
mitchty
They seem to do that when its pronounced versus spelled I've noticed.

aka:

    
    
        NASA = Nasa
        BBC = b b c
    

I could be wrong though so whatever.

~~~
ForHackernews
That's what makes it an acronym. Technically, an "acronym" is an abbreviation
that can be pronounced as a word (e.g. Radar, Nasa).

In contrast, things like BBC or FBI are "initialisms" but not acronyms.

~~~
mitchty
That explains it, but I thought NASA was originally spelled out as well. Take
for example the world wide web and the early 2000's and people constantly
trying to make www dub dub dub.

I think the only thing stopping the BBC getting in the same boat is lack of
vowels.

------
yiedyie
I don't find the link to that study.

