Industrial civilisation headed for 'irreversible collapse'? | Hacker News Reader

Industrial civilisation headed for 'irreversible collapse'?

theguardian.com

65 pointscopx67 comments

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

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

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

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

What is that ending?

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-06OO_3r0dVc/Tw0HcAr6R3I/AAAAAAAAAL...

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.

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.

Yeah, those mathematicians have crazy ideas.

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_...

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)

What are the ideological beliefs of Nasa's Goddard Space Flight Center?

I'm pretty sure that the article is incorrect and NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center has very little or nothing to do with this study. The apparent paper[1] describes the funding as:

"This work was partially funded through NASA/GSFC grant NNX12AD03A, known as "Collaborative Earth System Science Research Between NASA/GSFC and UMCP""

I believe the Guardian writer is simply using NASA and Goddard as an appeal to authority to increase the credibility of a highly speculative study written by grad students.

That said I hope you can see that ideology is an important driver of both the reporting and the study.

[1] http://www.atmos.umd.edu/~ekalnay/pubs/handy-paper-for-submi...

Jared Diamond explicitly said that environmental issues aren't always a defining factor in the collapse of human societies.

What kind of ideological beliefs are you talking about ?

Grab this PDF [1] scroll to the end and look at the charts comparing three different scenarios simulated in 1972 with the actual development over 30 years. When you look at them keep in mind that »Standard Run« and »Comprehensive Technology« lead to a collapse, only »Stabilized World« keeps humans happy. So there is definitely something quantifiable to it independent of any ideology.

[1] http://www.csiro.au/~/media/CSIROau/Divisions/CSIRO%20Sustai...

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...

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.

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.

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

Possibly most readers know this but if you want to check the validity of this and all the other predictions, the parameter to look for is climate sensitivity. Notoriously difficult to estimate, key to the whole business, it's the degree of warming expected for a doubling of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Bishophill links to innumerable articles, papers and views (from all sides) on this.

http://bishophill.squarespace.com/display/Search?searchQuery...

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).

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.

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.

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

I was thinking exactly this as I was reading the paper. Their scenario is that the "Elites" will consume everything and lead society into a collapse, but that's nowhere close to current reality. In fact, I'd say some "Elites" under-consume (Warren Buffett comes to mind, he's had the same house and crappy old car for decades, if I remember correctly).

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

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.

They seem to do well on HN too...

Well, it seems to be in human nature to try to extinguish itself. Acid rain, ozone hole, global warming, wars, especially the nuclear arms race, ... seems only a question of time until we succeed by accident.

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.

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...

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.

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

Maybe that's why people are trying to commercialize space/exploration?

They're trying, but a cursory evaluation shows it's a lost cause. Much easier to achieve a sustainable civilization (zero growth), as hard as that is.

What has a higher probability (honestly):

- getting an increasing majority of the population of people who for the most part of their entire lives are taught/live/believe by certain ideals (i.e. are not doing anything different now), to the benefit of the few, to convince themselves of another way.

- convincing the few who benefit now who have the means to try something new (or old) (i.e. who are doing something now)?

Meta: I wonder if people thought exploration of the globe was a lost cause a millennia ago?

I don't understand your choice descriptions. What are you getting at?

"Exploration" is the tying concept but other than that it's apples and oranges. Colonizing / terraforming another planet may be theoretically possible but also possibly require more expendable resources than our planet has to offer to the cause. Unlike Earth exploration.

Colonizing / terraforming another planet may be theoretically possible but also possibly require more expendable resources than our planet has to offer to the cause. Unlike Earth exploration.

It's easy to say that looking back, but there were people who believed the earth was flat. Blasphemy! But not then. Might have just as well been like comparing apples to oranges for them…

Colonizing and terraforming are both processes that can exist on a spectrum, and in that spectrum human beings to this point have proved to some degree that we can survive, not enough to make people believe ("but you can't grow your own food on ISS, it must all be for naught!") but enough progress to build upon by people who work within possibilities and not self imposed binary states that "complex" life forms themselves didn't come into existence as under such simplified states.

I think its more feasible that humans as we exist now, augment our bodies to exist in different places; We already do this on earth depending on the physical ailments that may affect people…

> 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.

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.

I don't really disagree with any of your prescriptions, but from a purely theoretical standpoint the most critical resource for life is energy.

The ultimate source of (almost) all energy on Earth is nuclear fusion in the Sun. From the perspective of humanity, solar resources might as well be infinite.

At least in principle, if we could learn to recycle critical rare-earth elements, and to derive our energy more directly from the Sun (rather from through fossil intermediaries), there's no reason that our economic system would be unsustainable.

> From the perspective of humanity, solar resources might as well be infinite.

They aren't as soon as you continue to expect to have growth. Which the present systems still assume.

You can also have economic growth through more efficient use of the same resources. Again, there's probably some theoretical limit, but it certainly won't be a practical consideration any time soon (we're very inefficient).

Do you mean just printing more money (easy) or reducing the waste during the energy consumption (physical limits exist)?

What we know about the economy today is still mostly extracting natural resources, spending energy from one natural resources to process other, distribute, sell them and finally dump the results in landfills, air and water. We measure growth mostly by the amount of the matter involved in this process.

Printing money isn't growth, it's just inflation.

Reducing pure waste, or increasing output for a given input, results in growth. Yes, there are physical limits, but we're nowhere near them for most processes.

Then as soon as you assume you'd use always more solar energy (growth in energy use), the resources are finite. You have to achieve zero growth of energy use to have a sustainable state. Otherwise there's no infinite resource, not even solar energy.

You could (again, for practical purposes) always use more solar energy.

For reference, "the Sun delivers more energy to Earth in an hour than we use in a year from fossil, nuclear, and all renewable sources combined" [1]

And that's assuming only collecting solar energy incident on the Earth itself. Theoretically, we could also construct large arrays of solar collectors on the moon or in orbit.

[1] http://www.sandia.gov/~jytsao/Solar%20FAQs.pdf

NB: I'm not saying this is likely or even realistic. In all likelihood, we are just plain fucked.

"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.

You forgot the infamous arsenic paper, and the microbe fossils in meteorites from Mars paper.

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

Well... http://retractionwatch.com/2012/04/17/math-paper-retracted-b...

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... ) 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 different 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.

"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.

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.

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

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

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

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.)

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.

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

You can run this world simulation here:

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/...

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

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.sesync.org/users/smotesharrei

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

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?

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 ...

And accomplish what, a reversal of roles?

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Actually, no, many (esp. British) publications style acronyms in initial-caps rather than all-caps, its not styling "Nasa" as a word (i.e., "Nasa" is not styled differently from how other acronyms are styled in those same publications.)

What may mislead some people as to what is going on is that the publications that style acronyms this way still style initialisms in all caps, and many people don't note the difference between acronyms and initialisms (and, particularly, may be more familiar with publications that style both acronyms and initialisms in all caps.) See, e.g., "Abbreviations and acronyms" in the Guardian and Observer style guide [1].

[1] http://www.theguardian.com/guardian-observer-style-guide-a

I don't find the link to that study.

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