Nut Nut's Attempt At A Book About Politics & Society

"But dad, he called me names first." Man, just self-moderate and don't respond in kind.

So .... how would one go about making the case that civilization collapse is likely by 2050 ?

I acknowledge that's tricky.

I would separate the potential causative factors into two categories ...... Chronic Factors & Event Factors. I'll list some examples below.

Chronic Factors

Increasingly Levels of GHG's (currently rising by ~ 0.7% annually)
Increasing Warming
Sea Level Rise
Replacement of Human Labor With AI
Arctic Amplification
Altered Hydrological Cycles
Microplastic Pollution
Other Environmental Toxins
Altered Global Wind & Ocean Circulation
Financial Markets (such as insurability of assets and decline in credit ratings)
Inflation
Topsoil Degradation
Global Supply Chain Dependency
Natural Resource Depletion
Shrinking Fresh Water Supplies

Event Factors

Extreme Weather
Drought
Extreme Precipitation
Wildfire
Heatwaves

AMOC Collapse
Financial System Collapse
War
Other Natural Disasters
Governmental Crises

It's important to understand that most of these factors are correlated.

AI is something of an independent threat until you step back and realize how much water and carbon emissions the industry is responsible for.

remember it has to be exceptionally worse than the great depression, because we weathered that with no civilization collapse (authoritarian gvmnts coming up isn't collapse) with far worse technology and 25% unemployment and -20 or worse actual production.

civilization collapse means the entire world is like Gaza today right? not that we get authoritarian gvmnts and we still have electricity and classical music and normal clothes and we can eat meat and read and teach the classics

So .... maybe you should follow your own advice and remain silent ?

so the world got one Celsius warmer in the last 30 years, and quality of life worldwide is dramatically better, like exceptionally better than 30 years ago.

and we have to believe than in the next 30 years, not only we destroy the exceptional and unprecedented improvements of the last 30 years, rather that we go into a situation that is dramatically worse worldwide than the 50s were, in terms of human ability to generate resources, because it is a tad hotter.

you need to be demented, utterly ******ed to believe that, or on complete bad faith.

tertium non datur

During the Great Depression, CO2 levels had scarcely budged over the 2.6 million year norm of the Pleistocene. There was no plastic in our brains. There were no nuclear weapons or nuclear power plants or biological weapons that needed managing. The degree of dependency on global supply chains was minimal. There was no AI to replace human labor. No oligarchic control of social media. The planet's resources had not been depleted to nearly the degree that they have been today.

The distance that civilization fell from the 1920's to the 1930's was miniscule compared to the distance we have to fall today. We are starting from a much higher altitude with much more destructive power at our disposal.

The Great Depression led to a war in which 60 million died. We'll probably top that with plenty of room to spare.

2 billions can die tomorrow without civilization collapsing. for civilization to collapse it has to collapse everywhere at the same time.

if 3 or 5 or 10 countries of sizeable proportions keep existing like today that's more than enough to counterfeit your prediction.

hell even if just Australia survives as it is today that's more than enough.

in the great depression living conditions were X. you need a prediction where per Capita GDP decreases everywhere at least 90% to be back to that *and we still endured that fine*.

if we get to a point where 100m indians and 200m subsaharians die, that's not civilization collapse. people in Tokyo would still eat their sushi and go on with their normal modern lives in their skyscrapers and with their modern bathrooms.

civilization collapse is when in Tokyo and in every other single first world city normal people don't have enough calories to go by.

which never happened with the great depression and only happened for a few years in specific places on Europe and japan in WW2.

in WW2 upper middle class people in Buenos Aires and Sidney lived very well.

you cannot even get out what you actually predict because even the direst predictions aren't of actual civilization collapse. are of a need to cull half a billion, a billion tops people in the third world.

which could do in the blink of an eye and get back to our normal lives

You have to be utterly demented to believe that humans can generate resources.

Humans don't generate resources. They take the resources that were generated for them in nature and deploy them into something useful.

We alter resources. We deplete resources. We generate nothing.

I have a small research project for you Lucifer. Go back and research the 5 mass extinctions of the last 450 million years or the Paleocene Eocene Thermal Maximum and explain to the readers on the forum why they occurred. Explain how the current crop of humans is immune.

I need to add Biodiversity Loss and Ocean Acidification to the list of Chronic Factors.

Hey Lucifer,

Maybe you can explain to the forum the importance of ocean pH (degree of acidity) ?

lol we make the same speck of land generate an order of magnitude calories viable for humans or more than before , and then another 10x, and then we extract energy from actual atoms that was previously trapped there and non viable for all other living beings, but sure.

One of the things which this entire discussion arouses is a reflection on the state of our consciousness.

It's apparent to me that the common view of the world is through the lens of the self.

Humans are excessively oriented around a visual spectrum which shows us each as being a separate package of meat, muscle and bone with a boundary layer of skin. We don't see that most of the cells in our body are bacterial and "we" are in fact an integrated part of our ecosystem.

A different type of consciousness which wasn't focused on the visual would understand the complex web of integration and interdependency of life on Earth. We are all part of an integrated whole.

It is this former type of thinking which emphasizes the self and separation from others which leads to thinking such as Lucifer's in which we can take a scalpel and remove 2 billion people from the planet and everything else will proceed as normal.

We're all related. All part of the same thing. United we stand, divided we fall.

We didn't generate the energy inside the atom. We extracted what nature put there.

We are certainly exceptionally clever creatures when it comes to extraction.

It is absolutely true that we have done a phenomenal job of expanding our calorie production.

But we haven't evolved anything which differentiates ourselves from bacteria in that we are going to maximize our population until we reach peak food and then see our population decline.

yes worldwide population can decline involuntarily (ie mass starvation/genocide, not just because of under 2 fertility) at some point.

that isn't the same as claiming civilization would collapse though.

the population of Rome did -95% from peak (imperial Rome) to bottom (prob 1200 AD give or take), civilization never disappeared there.

I didn't claim that civilization would disappear.

I said that it would likely collapse.

I think we define collapse differently .....

In my opinion, losing a few hundred million people involuntarily would be a sign of societal collapse.

We can agree to disagree about that. I don't believe it's possible for something like that to occur in isolation.

ah ok if losing 5 or 10% of the world population, almost all in the less valuable places, and going back to the worldwide population of ... 2015 is collapse, then yes that could happen.

you think subsaharian Africa and a few other places couldn't lose 500m people with the rest of the world not giving much of a **** about it?

I mean would the world be dramatically worse off if the population of Egypt was 50m like in 1980 instead of 120m like it is today? who the **** cares outside Egypt?

tell me how the life of someone in Oslo is going to be dramatically worse (=collapse) of we wake up tomorrow and the ENTIRE population of Indonesia is dead? like every single one , 280m people.

the Norway sovereign fund would lose perhaps 0.5 or 1% because of investments related to Indonesia and... soon people would organize to go and re colonize those areas and keep extracting the valuable resources there?

do you realize we can manage very very very well (maybe better than we do today) if a couple billion people drop dead in the third world?

do you realize the best quality of life europeans had in a millennium was after the black plague came and made some room? survivors lived far better than the predecessors.

btw that is an uncontroversial statement just check any economic history book on the period. per Capita GDP obviously skyrockets when fewer people have access to the same quantity of land, in an agricultural economy

Your thinking is similar to the thinking at Versailles in 1919. The French and the English didn't give a damn about the Germans. They were content to let them starve.

Your line of thinking implies that the people's who would die en masse are just going to roll over and play dead.

You seem to have a world view where only the people in poor countries are vulnerable and people in rich countries are safe.

I have a worldview where I know that's a fact, IF people in rich countries decide not to suicide themselves ofc.

btw maybe not all people on rich countries, but the middle class + there , especially if native.

Historically people that would die en masse did (mostly) just die en masse and, for the members that could, emigrate and/or become part of other “peoples.”

See Jewish population in Germany after WW2.