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?
Just two more weeks
About five years
Which “society?” America, for instance, seems to be on a downward trend as countries in the Global South start pushing against its exploitation, and thus the domestic proletariat is increasingly exploited and pushed further into radicalization. It won’t be a quick process until it is.
We have exactly 9 years, 3 months, 1 week, 2 days, and a couple hours
so is it Monday, 17 October 2033?
just to make sure I’ll mark my calendar. I’ll probably lose my phone’s calendar by that point tho.
Chores can wait till tomorrow then
I’d thought it’d be a while, but the timeline keeps constricting. I don’t have a number for you, but it seems sooner than it did four years ago.
Exactly four years sooner, according to my math.
This was a pretty great response. You got me. Cheers!
We will go for awhile. We will find ways to eek out existance muscling by using up resources at an even greater pace. digging deeper, making small amounts of toxic things pure by making larger amounts more polluted. Its really hard to say how long it will be but its a global system so will get worse and worse particularly the lower you are on the totem.
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.
It’s not going to collapse over night. Instead, things are going to get worse and worse gradually, with each step backward becoming the new normal.
Like the proverbial frog in boiling water, we’ll all just carry on until one day we’re like just chilling in our debris city, hoping we don’t have to sell any teeth for bottle caps in order to buy food today when some ghoul comes storming in and shoots up the place trying to murder a harmless old man with a dog, and then some naive vault dweller tries to intervene, but she only makes the problem worse and we’ll all wonder how the hell we got here.
Amerika? Hopefully soon. I’ve lost my faith that the arc of history will ever bend toward justice; so I just want the oppressors, settlers, and colonists to suffer. If justice isn’t coming, then revenge will be fine too.
We’ll make it. I have high hopes for the future!
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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 this is the more accurate take. I think the world at large is more likely headed toward a world in chains or world war 3 disaster scenario more so than anything.
Eventually that will lead to a shift. Perhaps not an outright collapse, but perhaps balkanization, restructuring, or collapse.
Yes, exactly. I lived in a collapsing society as a child and mostly life goes on, it just gets harder and there are less luxuries.
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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.
The people would remain though, and begin to rebuild unless the attacks were extremely broad and sustained for a long duration. No power or water stations in Gaza any more, but they are still hanging on in very dire conditions.
People are resilient. And adaptable. Just because we do things one way that works for us does not mean that one way is an absolute requirement.
Not that there wouldn’t be chaos, suffering and casualties. Just that it wouldn’t be the end.
I guess by collapse I am thinking complete devolution, not neccessarily the end of people
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I think that’s a little sensationalist. For instance, we do find the ruins of ancient cities in archeological digs and can link them to where we do have surviving records of their appearance in stories.
Your point is taken, though. I do, however, remain convinced that people massively overestimate how many people would die in some form of collapse though, unless it somewhat swiftly took down major portions of the Earth’s biosphere.
It always has.
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.
Damn bro take it easy with the crack
Denial won’t help anyone.
it’ll help Egypt.
China/Russia’s pursuit of empire
You can’t be fucking serious. So what, we only care about the climate when people who AREN’T Amerikan fight back against the West’s imperial ambitions? We’re going to project our own aims on that of your enemies, not ours? You enshrine the reason why I want the West to fall in. Criticizing splinters in ALL your neighbors eyes while never ONCE attending to the whole fucking 2-by-4 in yours.
Two failed harvests. That’s what it takes to strip away the thin varnish of civilisation.
Considering the global integration of the world today, in that case much of the effects can be temporarily cushioned by spending lots of money, thereby letting the ones without money starve. Either way, it won’t be pretty.
At some point, even money can’t help anymore, because you can’t eat it. If there is no food, there is no food.
Yes but also we can stop turning food into fuel or into less efficient luxuries like meat etc
