5 X-Events that Can Collapse the World as You Know It
4) I’m Sick of It: Global Pandemic!
Over the course of human history our species has endured some monumental pandemics. In the 1300s the Bubonic plague killed roughly 100 million people and reduced the population of Europe somewhere between 30% to 60%.
Keep in mind that the population of the earth was probably only somewhere around 450 million back then; so that would be roughly the equivalent of a plague that killed 75 million people in the United States today. The Spanish Flu was even worse. It also killed roughly 100 million people out of a much larger population, but it did it in about six months. If something that severe hit today, it would eradicate roughly 350 million people worldwide over the same timeframe. The scary thing is that it’s entirely possible a new natural plague could hit or, worse yet, an old virus re-engineered as a bioweapon could be loosed. While we have better sanitation than the old days and medical science has advanced considerably, it’s still entirely possible that our own personal Andromeda Strain could cause so much population loss and economic damage that it could take decades to overcome.
Interesting how our culture seems even more obsessed with doomsday scenarios than it was during the Cold War. Back then, we mostly worried about The Bomb. Sometimes we invented other big, destructive forces to destroy ourselves, but the smart people always said those were just metaphors for The Bomb. Now that an earth-annihilating nuclear war appears less likely, everyone seems to be looking for the Apocalypse under every rock – sometimes literally. Some of us are waiting for the mega-volcano that lies beneath Yellowstone National Park to wipe out the wild west. Others are fascinated by the thought of killer asteroids. Of course, the Global Warming panic has a definite, old-school apocalypticist feel about it – its most fanatical devotees actually want it to happen so their beliefs will be confirmed. We have TV shows about what happens to the world after humanity goes extinct. And don’t even mention the damn zombies…
I have no idea why, after avoiding a nuclear holocaust that a lot of people thought was inevitable, we should now be morbidly obsessed with every OTHER scenario in which humanity might cease to exist. Do we have a death wish?
The created universe had a beginning and it will have an end. It probably won’t be Dec 21 this year. I don’t think the collapse of the Internet would be all negative since world governments are using it to gather too much information about our lives and it’s not really a good idea to let that continue to happen. It would suck, don’t get me wrong… Most of these situations listed above are ones that happen periodically so yeah, there probably will be some catastrophic illnesses that will take out quite a few people (google “antibiotic resistant gonorrhea” for example). Again, not fun if you’re on the list. Seems to me there were quite a few other possibilities listed on the Sporcle quiz though: alien invasion, God, volcano (like Uturuncu! It erupts every 300,000 years or so and we’re about due and the ground nearby rises a tiny bit every year down in that corner of Bolivia)
Maybe, but I do not plan on doing any Christmas shopping before Dec 22.
No point in spending all that money if the world is going to end.
No point in saving all that money if the world is going to end.
I don’t think humanity has a death wish.
I have a hypothesis for why we seem to be obsessed with apocalyptic scenarios. For prehistoric man, life was a daily struggle for survival. This is the case for most animals throughout the animal kingdom. Over the past few millennia, humans have adapted and progressed to the point where, for a large majority of us, daily survival isn’t a significant concern. Most of us don’t have to worry about whether we will eat today or whether a predator is getting ready to eat us.
However, we still have this instinct for survival hardwired within us. I think that apocalyptic scenarios are a release for this instinct. Since we don’t struggle to survive in real life, we occasionally escape to this dream where we need to fight to survive. Some escape through movies or books. Others go further and actually prepare for certain scenarios. But the cause remains. We have an innate need to struggle for survival.
Complexity overload: Peak Government!
Indeed, who ever envisioned legislation so complex it could run a thousand pages or more? And that legislation results in regulations even more expansive.
Although a fun read, the argument that complexity inevitably leads to fragility and eventual catastrophic collapse, is simply false. Our biology is the most complex system we know, and yet life on this world is profoundly robust. Organisms have spent the last billion years growing more complex without any sign of complexity induced catastrophe.
I think the terms “fragile” and “robust” are a bit confusing. Even a robust system can have vital components – bits it can’t live without. Alter the function of one of those and the whole thing crashes. A person can live without arms, legs, eyes, tongue, breasts, an appendix, and large portions of certain other organs…but don’t monkey with the brainstem. So does the fact that we can take a lot of damage and keep going make us robust, or does the fact that our lives depend on one little cluster of nerves make us fragile?
Also, it’s pretty obvious what a living system is but I’m not sure what constitutes “the world as I know it.” What are its system boundaries? What are its vital characteristics and functions? How do I know if it’s “collapsed?” And assuming I can define any of that, how do I identify the system’s “brainstem” – the bits it can’t live without? Does it have any? Are we talking about oil, electricity, telecommunications, the Internet, or even “Western culture” and political schemes? I don’t know.
I tend to think that if I have food, shelter, and clothing, then “the world as I know it” hasn’t collapsed. On the other hand, “the world as I knew it” when I was born, back in 1960, collapsed a long time ago. So where does that leave me?
Ever heard of Cancer?
My concern is catastrophic failure of the power grid. So much of our society relies on electricity, if it were to fail for more than a couple days (think weeks or months), that life as we know it would come to an abrupt end.
In my uneducated estimation, civil unrest would break out, local communities would seal themselves off for self defense, and in short time we’d be back in a local community based society.
Of course we’d still have ham radios to communicate, and know how and materials to manufacture biofuel for transporting goods between communities.
It’d be the early 1900′s all over again. Just need to figure out what to do with the millions of people living int he big cities with no ability or desire to take care of themselves.
That last is likely to be a rather ugly, albeit self-correcting problem.
Whoo, the end of communism as we know it.
We actually did have a “robot gone amok” shut down the power grid in the northeast in the 60′s, in the winter yet. It wasn’t even an electronic robot, jsut a series of connections between companies that failed somewhere in Canaday and ended up shutting down much of the US Northeast, including NYC.
Since then, I believe controls were put in place; don’t know how the situation is now.
A catastrophic failure of the power grid would have wide-ranging effects (and none of them good as far as I can see). Of course here we’re talking about a prolonged power failure over a very large region and not something lasting a few hours or affecting a relatively small geographic area.
First, you have all of the effects of the internet going down (there’s no internet if there’s no power). Likewise, TV and radio stations would be out of commission, as would telecommunications. Some of these services no doubt have backup power supplies, but those will only last as long as the fuel they have available (maybe a few days at most). So you’d soon be left without news or communications (unless you have your own ham radio equipment and a power source).
What else runs on electricity? Probably the local water supply is pumped electrically. Your local hospital needs a great deal of electricity. Gas station pumps, grocery store refrigerators, freezers and cash registers, and so on. Again, many of these have backup power supplies, but those are for temporary outtages lasting a few hours to days at most.
So essentially you’d soon lose access to water from public (unless you have a well and an independent source of power for it), food, any goods that require transportation, medical care, communication, etc. You’d also lose your heat if your furnace relies on electricity, as well as air conditioning. My guess is that civilization would keep its collective cool for at least the first few hours while backup generators kept essential services operational and the power outtage was still just a temporary setback. In rural areas and largely self-sufficient communities, order would remain for quite some time. But in large cities, I suspect that society would begin to tear itself apart as hunger set in and people began to panic.
Fortunately, I don’t see this as a likely scenario. I’ve seen power outtages in small geographic areas that lasted weeks, but where outside sources of aid were readily available. I’ve also seen widespread power outtages that didn’t last nearly long enough to make people worry. I think our electric grid is decentralized enough and we have enough skilled workers ready to repair it that widespread, prolonged outtages are unlikely. However, there’s always that possibility. It doesn’t hurt to be prepared with extra food, water and power.
Seems like you are talking about living in remote Alaska where I went in the late 60s. Life was slow and easy and very remote. You killed what you ate or grew it in the summer months. You had your own water supply that you had to take care of and you lived in a very small footprint. You had a survival network with friends within walking distance, and you made contact on a regular basis.
I worked one week on and one week off at Prudhoe Bay and life was what you made it. Need Electricity? Start the generator. Otherwise enjoy the quiet. I stayed eleven years…
If we lose the grid, you’ll wish you were back there in the wilds and isolation of Alaska.
I recall a big electrical outage which hit the northeastern US just a few years ago, maybe 2004. Was there any widespread panic then?
I would call those things “inconvenient events which some of us won’t survive.” Civilization will survive, carried forward in a different form by fewer people.
I believe that a lot of the “unsustainability” rhetoric emanates from the deep-ecology left, who continue to dream of a primitive Eco-Utopia operating at Bronze Age levels, and run on collectivist/feudal principles… by themselves.
If you tell them that the “peak oil” theory has been repeatedly proven wrong, be ready to duck; you may be physically attacked. You certainly will be vilified as a shill for Big Oil, Big Nuclear, and/or anybody else they don’t like. To them, catastrophe is a good thing, if it leads to the sort of societal trainwreck they need to remake the world their way. If said catastrophe won’t occur in reality, they can always frighten people into obedience by constantly claiming it will, the facts be damned.
I find it amusing that most of the people who dream of inflicting a “sustainable”, primitive, agrarian-socialist society on us (or at least those of us who survived the Great Simplification), are utterly lacking in the skills and knowledge necessary to survive in just such a society. (I’m a farm kid, so I have some idea what those skillsets are.)
Their belief is that, like Rameses II, their part will be to sit on a throne, and with a wave of their hand say, “So let it be written; so let it be done”.
If it ever came to pass, they probably wouldn’t live long enough to realize the enormity of their error.
clear ether
eon
I’m with the late Mel Tappan on this. The time to take steps is now. The steps to take are to a)find a community of 10-15,000, this he considered to be large enough to have enough of a variety of skillsets to be self-supporting and small enough to be amenable to direct democracy, b)make sure that YOUR skillset provides value to a community of this sort and c), go there now, establish yourself and show your value before TEOTWAWKI.
(It’d be a bit tougher to find but I’d throw in make sure that it’s at least a half tank of gas away from the nearest interstate. Reduces the likelihood of being an easy target when the locusts decamp from da big city.)
Seems like a good life plan even if the universe continues to muddle through.
All theoretical and probably eventual in their own vacuum, but let’s be honest…the most likely 5-X event in the non-vacuum world that would ‘collapse’ the world as we know it is a Financial one. You know, the kind of event that killed the Roman Empire, The Soviet Union, the old-school Maoist China model, the….well let’s just save time and insert EVERY major Empire in History. Occam’s razor, my friend, occam’s razor.
Did you know that when American scientists were first developing a nuclear bomb, there were genuine concerns that the temperatures created by the explosion of a nuclear weapon might be hot enough to set the earth’s atmosphere on fire? That would have quickly baked all of humankind like a giant pot pie. There was enough worry about this possibility that Robert Oppenheimer called for a study on the matter, which concluded that “a nuclear fireball cools down far too rapidly to set the atmosphere aflame.”
That’s idiotic. The question was not whether the temperature might be high enough to set the atmosphere “on fire,” i.e., rapidly oxidizing. It was whether it was high enough to start a self-sustaining thermonuclear fusion reaction in the atmosphere. If it were a question of fire, it would have been very easy to answer in the negative.
You missed the most obvious cause for world collapse “The re-election Barry HUSSEIN Soetero Kardashian’ by the Black RACISTS and congenitally stupid American voters.
I think the only believable scenario is the same one we’ve always had – natural (non-man-made) climate change and plagues. In the Middle Ages there was a huge famine that wiped out whole towns, follwed the next year by the Black Plague.
Also, Global Thermonuclear War is still a possibility.
Of course, I live in Israel, so we don’t need any of that. All we need to do is lose one war, heaven forbid, and the dead will be the lucky ones. Our enemies can do plenty with just knives, thank you, and they showed it in 1948.
“The Green River Formation—an assemblage of over 1,000 feet of sedimentary rocks that lie beneath parts of Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming—contains the world’s largest deposits of oil shale. USGS estimates that the Green River Formation contains about 3 trillion barrels of oil, and about half of this may be recoverable, depending on available technology and economic conditions. The Rand Corporation, a nonprofit research organization, estimates that 30 to 60 percent of the oil shale in the Green River Formation can be recovered. At the midpoint of this estimate, almost half of the 3 trillion barrels of oil would be recoverable. This is an amount about equal to the entire world’s proven oil reserves.”
That is just one formation. There are a number of other unconventional gas and oil deposits in North America. Then on top of that there is conventional oil and gas. On top of that there are large coal deposits.
China reportedly has similar deposits of oil shale. Even tiny Israel has discovered an estimated 250 barrels worth – roughly equivalent to Saudi Arabia’s proven reserves. The question though is what it will take to extract it. It’ll certainly be more expensive than “drill a hole, pump the oil”, which is what one finds in the Persian Gulf. A pilot drill site is being developed in Israel, but it’s being held up by environmental opposition. But if the technology being developed respectively in the US and Israel can be proven viable, this will be a game changer.
“5) Technology Run Amok: Intelligent Robots Overthrow Humanity!”
I’ve heard about the Pentagon working on unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) that are given a basic mission profile and then are allowed to fly on their own to complete the mission. In short, the UAV, or a flying computer, is told what to do and it decides how to do it and how to defend itself against a possible counterattack from either a missile or some other weapon. You are basically creating a thinking computer that can deflect any countermeasures thrown at it, and THAT is really amazing. All UAVs today basically have a human pilot back in some remote area guiding the machine to its target and telling it what to do, such as the Predator drones. But if we take the pilot out of the equation and allow the UAV to fly on its own, you are creating an independent unit that acts and “thinks” for itself. Here is an example of one such company working on an autonomous UAV: http://www.swiss-uav.com/your_uav_scenario.php
This work is still in its early stages, but is progressing rapidly. It is not inconceivable that we could have independent UAVs thinking for themselves by around 2020. Problem is, what if these computers malfunction in some way and end up attacking the wrong target? When you take people out of the equation, you run the risk of having the computer make all of the decisions for you, whether you like it or not. That is perhaps the scariest thing about this, that a war could be started by accident rather than by design. Is this where we really want to go?
There is an online forum I visit now and then that is dedicated to these things. Every week there is some new ‘Mayan calendar meets Nibiru, OMG we’re all gonna die!” scenario. It’s really quite entertaining.
#0: Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) attacks from freighters.
Simplest extant threat.
Yep. The Russians have already developed a cruise missile that fits into a freight container. Range reportedly about 200 km.
But really, anything that shuts down the power grid would lead to calamity. It could be a solar burst that fries the transformers, a cyber assault that causes multi-million dollar turbines to self-destruct (taking months to replace), or an EMP that fries the circuits.
If we suffered an EMP attack that destroyed the electrical grid, I believe that our society would stabilize and begin rebuilding in about a month. There would be initial panic, and the big, decaying urban areas would descend into chaos. We would probably lose the elderly and the infirm, and all the addicts would cull themselves out of desperation. We might lose perhaps one fifth of the population, but cooler heads will prevail. Most of the healthy children would survive, because children are remarkably resilient and self-reliant in the face of disasters both natural and man-made. And the smaller communities would band together for protection and shared resources.
Efficiency is the enemy of reliability.
Our society will, sooner rather than later, (5-10 years) pay the price
for removing redundancy and reserves from our infrastructure, and then
refusing to maintain the minimal remnant, in order to divert the funds
to other uses, mainly buying votes.
#2 is just plain wrong. While ATMs and POS terminals often use Internet Protocol, they are typically NOT connected to “The Internet.” They are on private networks.
“The crunch comes when we recognize that societies must continually solve problems in order to keep growing. But the solution to these problems requires ever more complex structures… At this point, the society is experiencing a complexity overload; no further degrees of freedom exist for coping with new problems.”
I believe that ominous and vague statements like this can frighten weaker souls.
In “the crunch comes…” it doesn’t specify what kind of problems must be solved, in what kind of societies. Perhaps the speaker is referring to the problem of parking in down-town Manhattan or the financial burden my sister has in finding a suitable handbag. Or both.
It isn’t quite clear what exactly is meant but it sure sounds spooky. And in the tradition of ‘erring on the side of caution’ most would take it up, hook, line and sinker.
Luckily for me I am irresponisible and have no fear of such gloomy words.
Why is PJM publishing this drivel?
A 1 year collapse of the internet would do more for the nations health (physical and mental) than a decade of Obama care. Just imagine if the kids had to go outside to play. If they had to ‘meet’ to exchange Facebook statuses and there was no tweak (i’d love no texting too)
Adults would have to go to the library and the local stores would be a social place again.
Good times.. and I’m a guy that would lose his job if the internet went away..
Actually, if the world farts at the SAME EXACT TIME…..
I’m going to stock up on bath salts. It’s the only way to survive. You can’t beat ” them” unless you join “them”.
On the positive side; when humans become extinct, war, poverty, crime & disease will finally be eliminated.
No Carrington event? As Pelaut pointed out EMP is a threat but that would be relatively local.
Rocky Super-Earth and Gas Giant Are Latest Superstar Couple By Tanya Lewis June 21, 2012
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/06/kepler-36-two-planet-system/
What about the idea that a certain volcanic eruption in the Canary Islands could cause a tsunami which would wipe out most of the US east coast?
Are the doomsday items you selected your own choices or are they from the book? The collapse of society due to increasing complexity and specialization of knowledge is a very real threat, but most of the items you mentioned sound like left-wing anti-tech scare stories.
I take a rather pragmatic view of this issue, preferring to devote most of my time to keep things improving, while taking some time to get governments to preserve less-complex backup systems and prepare for the more likely scenarios that could create a collapse. These include EMP attacks using nukes detonated above the atmosphere, Carrington Events (giant solar storms), etc that could shut down both the grid, the web, and also make all vehicles with electronic parts inoperable. Mechanics would not have replacement parts, and the inoperable food trucks would make the mechanics starve anyway. We also need safety systems for our tranformers (There are thousands of these that could be destroyed in a few hours that would take a decade to replace. With no vehicles, small generators could not be moved to where they are most needed.
Having a food supply and medicine stored to last several months is not a bad idea, but being a survivalist or doomsday prepper should not dominate your life.
There are a lot of good things technology is bringing, such as medical advances, new ways of energy production such as space solar power, etc, so the real world still has a lot of promise and interesting thinks to look forward to.
Mr. Hawkins,
You need to see Science fiction writer John Ringo’s “The Inevitable Zombie Apocalypse” post on Facebook.
It will make you howl with laughter and break out in a cold sweat at the same time.
This is how Ringo starts it:
The Zombie Apocalypse. Is. Inevitable. If you don’t think so, you don’t understand Moore’s Law and nerds.
Moore’s Law (if you really don’t know what it is, look it up) in some variance applies to all emerging technology. In Untold Histories Field Marshall William Slim noted that he liked to gauge the state of industrial technology’s advancement between WWI and WWII by the increase in size and power of London City busses. Milling, steam, internal combustion, while they did not precisely ‘double in power every eighteen months” all folllowed a fairly set trend of improvement and thus reduction in cost and difficulty of manufacture. Building an original Apple computer took the genius of the Great and Powerful Woz. Building one, now, is literaly child’s play. (For values of children.)
The same can be said of biotechnology. I recall a friend who worked in the Tropical and Emerging Diseases Lab, a Class Four Facility (highest contagion) located on the UGA campus and associated with the CDC who’s team was attempting in the early Millenia to build a virus following the prescription of the first person to do so from scratch. They tried time and time again to replicate it and were unable.
In 2005, five years later, a Newsweek reporter, buying materials from EBAy, did the same thing, literally, in his kitchen. (With Spanish Flu no less. He was later fired as was the editor who approved the story since they LAID OUT THE ENTIRE RECIPE!)
That is how fast biotech advances. Moore’s Law, to some extent or another, applies to all emerging technologies. One day it takes a genius, the next day anybody with the right IQ and background finds it to be child’s play.
Second point: A few years ago, at a bio conference in London, a researcher proudly stood up and showed that his lab had proven they could create an infection that would infect a vast swath of population (choose species, genus, phylum or family) but only kill ONE INDIVIDUAL based upon that individual’s DNA.
When he asked for questions one member of the audience stood up and proclaimed:
“We’ve known that in (university research center) for the last five years but we were never STUPID enough to speak about it in PUBLIC!” At which point things became shouty.
It then goes from Nerds with a home RNA Kits gen-engineering women with big boobs to love them straight to Lovecraftian horror.
I have an old Tandy 1000 tucked away in the attic that is smarter than anyone who plans to vote for Obama this go round..
The notion that “increasing complexity of modern life” must lead to collapse is laughable on its face.
Why? Because it fails to account for the fact that the dominant complicating factor by far in”modern life” is government. Statism complicates. Liberty simplifies. Mises explained this well.
Yesterday, my wife and I were at the lab getting blood drawn (she’s a chemo patient). She has been through all kinds of complicated bureaucratic crap, paperwork etc. and today she asked “what the hell? Computers have been able to automate and streamline information management for so many other industries, why not medicine?”
The answer was simple: the waves of government regulation, mandates etc. are overwhelming the health care industry at a rate outstripping Moore’s Law. The computers can’t keep up.
It’s a fun article … and silly.
1. Complexity leads to? Really? Think about it. As the social organization becomes more complex it becomes more flexible.
2. What happens is that the organism of civilization progresses in a unique manner becoming more and more complex. The result is greater prosperity and greater ability of the community to respond.
3. Then as time marches on those who built the community are replaced by those who have an interest in burning the place to the ground. Yes, not all of us would take everyone’s inheritance, and security, chuck it on a bonfire and party like its the sacking of Rome… but there are always enough.
4. The thirst for theft drives the community with Gordian knots, Hobbes choices, and illogical logic, amoral morals, creating a Frankenstein system that simplifies the system..
… look at our economy. Our pol’s are allowed to spend whatever our screaming doesn’t stop … because there’s only a handful of reserve currencies. If there were 4000 currencies on the planet, and you needed a football stadium to hold all the “central bankers” e.g. right there you’d have a wealth of “complexity” creating stability. Under such a scenario, and the attendant changes to make it happen, each govt that tried to squander the wealth of its citizens for its own consumption would collapse.
Before attacking the thought experiment – go back and look at all the great civilizations – they began with the situation of a large group of people able to make an endless number of complex choices without getting permission … passed through a time of prosperity, a decline where the writing was on the wall, and then a long decline where slavery and coercion (and taxes and inflation) were used to sustain a system while most folks (esp the slaves) saw nothing in it. (We are only different in that some of the higher ups seem to want to accelerate the crisis so they can enjoy the pleasure of making the rest of us miserable or worse.)
This also explains why the next cycle usually begins in different geography. The “leadership” refuses to acknowledge its immoral errors; and the populace almost always confuses the crimes committed in the decline with the success of those who built it. Essentially, the dipsticks blame the disaster not on the hijackers but on the jumbo jet builders.
The left does this all the time: you only want to build that jet to be hijacked? And they never see the next network from roads to the internet, they’re just there to take credit after the fact. “You didn’t build that – Al Gore did” – no actually he wants to lead the barbarians to sack the Shire.
how’s that for a mash up?
oh… there is one variant we have seen appear.
1. Chindia.
In this variant the ruling class decides to ape the structures of more successful civilizations borrowing what they want – the power, the means of production, and pocketing the wealth, without bothering with a culture or civilizing influences which spread around the wealth. So the system goes straight from agrarian-collectivist-totalitarianism to the semi-industrial-collectivist-fascism we see in Chindia. Great for the elite, but a hopelessly mind numbing and worthless community for those who want a home, and a family in a community sharing all those cute little things which make life worth living.
What are you going to celebrate? Happy waste decades of millions of people’s lives so those in power can let their drunken wife kill a dozen peasants in a fancy sports car instead of having to drag them to a circus to slaughter? You can’t make this stuff up. The Left would have us become Chindia without the Hindu fertility temples or Chinese news year’s parade. … just plain stupid.