With worrying global trends like climate change, pollution, increasingly divided or radical governments, economic woes, misinformation and disinformation everywhere, dangerous health crises and so on, what do you think - how much time do we have before “it all comes crashing down”? What will end life or our way of life as we know it first?
Or do you think we’ll make it? If so, how?
Nothing’s going to collapse. Prior generations had their own share of problems and so do we and we will find some way to get through it all just like they did.
Some time this century most likely. Climate change along with China/Russia’s pursuit of empire along with their global campaign to seed and normalize autocracy will result in collapse eventually.
The “collapse” is a cope. A non denominational version of the rapture. It being “all over” is something people dream of because oblivion also means an end to pain.
Society won’t “collapse”.
Life will just get shittier and shittier in such a slow, gradual manner that most people won’t even realise it is happening. More work for less pay, less rights and freedoms, more repression, more wars, etc.
I think people tend to underestimate human resilience. To use the bronze age collapses as an example, sure, it brought down existing polities, the names drawn on maps changed.
But most of the cities were still there. People still lived in them. Does changing the rulers while keeping a similar paradigm ultimately matter that much? I’m reminded of accounts of the experiences of some Afghanis during the American intervention there. First they paid their taxes to the Taliban, then the govt we set up, then the Taliban again. shrug.
While supply chains could be disrupted, any time that happens it opens the door for another profitable enterprise to rise in its place. People suffer, some die, but life goes on. If the knowledge of how to build those supply chains is still around, it will be done, and swiftly.
If a group blew up a hydro dam, or other electrical source plant and also destroyed water stations, you would see local society and ecomony crumble quickly. People aren’t prepared, like they may have been in the 50s for food/water supply, etc. You would have chaos. So an enemy would just need to coordinated that across cities…its why have web/internet enabled infrastructure is a security diaster waiting to happen.
It always has.
