10 ms·

What makes collapse inevitable and imminent

32 points by gpvos 5y ago

_3u10 5y ago
There’s 50 years of proven reserves alone. Production might be declining but it’s not because we are running out. 50 years is easily enough time to switch to electric cars. With cars being replaced about every 11 years and ICE being phased about by 2030 to 2035 the entire fleet should be electric by 2045.
- JumpCrisscross 5y ago
  > Production might be declining but it’s not because we are running out More pointedly, it's declining because we're swapping it out. American oil companies are returning cash to shareholders. Not investing in new wells. OPEC, similarly, sees the writing on the wall, preferring to cash in now even if it means cannibalising future demand through sustained high prices.
dfasdfasdfas 5y ago
I saw this in 2020 and I had the same problem with it then that I do now: if you are so certain that civilization is going to collapse, why are you making an OS about it? Certainly there's prepping that makes more sense..
- forgotmypw17 5y ago
  I'm quite optimistic about the future, and most scenarios I'm preparing for, both including and not including collapse, involve me owning my own hardware, software, and data as much as possible, because I've been burned by version creep, planned obsolescence, and hastily retired services, etc. way too many times to count. So, as much as possible, my "CollapseOS" involves only languages with stable runtimes, data formats readable for many years already, and hardware which lets me access the filesystem, leveraging the Lindy Effect as much as possible.
- lampshades 5y ago
  > Spends years working on OS so that computation can continue after civilizational collapse > Dies one week into collapse due to lack of water and food
- jvanderbot 5y ago
  Silly take. Maybe he's doing both? How do you know he's not fully prepared for food shortages, and is now concerned with electronics shortages? Also, this is +50 years. Likely author might be dead by then, but hopes his software lives on. It's right there in the article.
mikeholler 5y ago
This "we are doomed" attitude is unhelpful towards positive change. It forces us towards selfishness and away from empathy and mutual-support. In some ways, it is a self-fulfilling perception of the world. It is an excuse for personal inaction. I was deeply depressed with this attitude a year ago, and I wouldn't wish it on anyone. What helped, was helping. Specifically volunteering and volunteerism. Realizing that the world doesn't revolve around my experience, and that I can make a positive affect on people's lives. If you're worried about climate change (like I was, like I am), join a cause to address it like Citizens' Climate Lobby, the Environmental Voter Project, or something local. If you're worried about food insecurity, help at a food bank, at your local urban farming project. If you do this, you'll quickly realize that we are not alone in our feelings, and through that togetherness we are powerful.
- HelloMcFly 5y ago
  I'm in an odd state with this. I refuse to let myself slide into apathy and not have some level of action. I register voters, I support climate activities (financially, letters to representatives, and lifestyle changes) and look for opportunities for local action. I do this despite truly believing it won't matter and things will just keep getting worse. I'm smart enough to know I'm not smart enough to be confident in that assessment, but it is what I believe and feel. I simply can't face myself in the mirror if I allow myself to be inactive or uncaring because of my own forecasts for the future.
  - giraffe_lady 5y ago
    The conclusion I drew is that socially acceptable forms of resistance like voting and writing letters are socially acceptable because they are ineffective. Just get more radical it's more effective and you'll feel better too.
    - lazide 5y ago
      Until you get arrested anyway, can’t get a normal job again, lose your kids because of it, etc. Large scale social unrest happens because increasingly large portions of society have nothing left to lose. As an individual, that’s not great. It does eventually result in change though!
camillomiller 5y ago
This kind of discourse doesn't make depressed because of its content, but because of how BORING it can quickly become. It's a mix of oversimplification and self-entitlement that I can't do but find irrelevant. The more recent updates also prove how little this person actually knows about key topics like the economics of the energy market. Why is it so high up on Hackernews?
- 01100011 5y ago
  Doom sells. Always has. It seems to be all the rage these days too. Maybe it's our continually declining testosterone changing our attitude towards monumental but surmountable problems like climate change, resource conflicts, culture wars, wealth gaps, etc. I don't know. It's really sad to see young people so hopeless when right now their biggest enemies are their minds. The system won't have to kill us if it convinces us to kill ourselves first. Hopelessness and small mindedness will doom us all if we're not careful.
  - defterGoose 5y ago
    It's on everyone. Young people are largely depressed because the older people in power are basically saying [incoming oversimplification] "you're wrong about the science and even if you're right about the science there's nothing for us to gain from radically forced change to the economy". The old people are correct that doom and gloom aren't the best motivator, and the young people are correct that we're destroying their birthright.
  - NoGravitas 5y ago
    Note: I'm old. All of those monumental-but-surmountable problems can be surmounted with massive, unprofitable collective effort. All the evidence of my lifetime and my parents' says that our society as it exists now can only coordinate collective effort if it is profitable. ∴ those problems will not be solved.
endisneigh 5y ago
These sort of articles are so boring. Give me a date, or a year. Otherwise Doomers will continue to be vague and when something does happen, maybe, they’ll all come out of the woodwork saying I told you so. Until then I’ll enjoy the unprecedented prosperity we’re enjoying here on earth. It’s the same with stock market doomers, housing doomers, etc etc. no one ever gives a specific date. People just make unfalsifiable claims.
- FeepingCreature 5y ago
  Wasn't on your list, but personally: Singularity 50/50 by 2025. Past 2028 you get to say "I told you so."
  - germinalphrase 5y ago
    Three years? That’s a stunningly optimistic (pessimistic?) timeline…
    - FeepingCreature 5y ago
      What can I say, PaLM is scary.
      - NoGravitas 5y ago
        The hand-picked examples are pretty scary, but I'm also reasonably sure that AGI is not going to come (directly) from LLMs no matter how big they get. Reasoning: https://medium.com/@emilymenonbender/on-nyt-magazine-on-ai-resist-the-urge-to-be-impressed-3d92fd9a0edd https://medium.com/@emilymenonbender/on-nyt-magazine-on-ai-r...
        FeepingCreature 5y ago
        Seems too focused on the NYT article? I don't think this because the NYT said so, I think this because PaLM's chains-of-thought approach seems to match how my own brain works. I think LMs have huge intelligence overhang atm that is hidden by the way they are forced to respond. If we figure out how to train LMs with propagation through hidden chains of thought, we'll see a huge jump in capability, and also this is the obvious next step that the industry will aim for.
imchillyb 5y ago
History repeats; always. Our nation is currently on the downward slope of the bell-curve for civilizations.
- fullshark 5y ago
  Our nation (USA right?) has had many decades in its history where it seemed like things were falling apart as well, with much much greater turmoil than what we are currently experiencing.
- Mikeb85 5y ago
  > Our nation is currently on the downward slope of the bell-curve for civilizations. A "civilisation" is more than the modern notion of a nation-state. Ancient Egypt lasted ~3000 years. Ancient Sumeria/Babylon (the Akkadians were the inheritors of that culture) lasted ~4000 years. Sumeria itself ~2000 years. Greece lasted ~3000 years (I'm counting from the Myceneans to fall of Constantinople). China is still going (~5000 years). And so on. Recognisable "European" civilisation is only around ~1500 years old. If you go by history, we've got at least another 1500 years.
temp8964 5y ago
I believe in price signals and market adjustments more than any of those doomsday projections. Unless for unknown reasons, all oil reserves suddenly disappear overnight, I am not concerned.
KevinGlass 5y ago
I believe we've avoided a civilization ending, peak oil disaster. Currently ~35-50% of global energy consumption (including shipping, automobiles, etc) comes from petroleum. You might say, that's a lot!, and you would be right. But the percentage of total energy consumption petroleum takes up is going down. Over the next 50 years petroleum will get more and more expensive and renewables will continue to get cheaper and cheaper. If another energy source is cheaper, it will win. If one of the many "super battery breakthroughs" we've all read about in the last 15 years comes to fruition in the next 15 then consider the oil crisis solved. Yes, converting everything to electricity will be expensive but that's cheaper then relying on oil. The trend lines look promising. Of course this is all speculation based on the Western world being able to keep it's shit together.
- Scarblac 5y ago
  Relying on price mechanisms alone probably still means we will use almost all fossil fuel that is in proven reserves though, and that means civilization ending levels of climate change. We need a way to keep lots of oil in the ground even if it is profitable to get out.
  - germinalphrase 5y ago
    Isn’t that the premise behind the “carbon coin”?
  - adra 5y ago
    Their point is that oil will only continue to have value if it's kept scarce, and that because there are viable and growing affordable options away from petroleum where there wasn't 10-20 years ago, we will have both a tug of war between producers keeping it in the ground to keeps prices high while their net market shrinks consistently until we're really only left with oil utility where the economy of the resource makes sense (if any). The energy sector will have moved on to the most exploitable sources of power in whatever shape that looks like due to innovation.
  - JumpCrisscross 5y ago
    > price mechanisms alone probably still means we will use almost all fossil fuel that is in proven reserves Unlikely. Exploration and production is capital intensive because there are minimum scales many projects require to be profitable, e.g. pipelines. High prices amid falling volumes can obscure the production destruction inherent to infrastructure first ceasing to be developed and then being actively shut down. Whale oil prices went up amidst depletion and decommissioning [1]. [1] https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.389.9270&rep=rep1&type=pdf https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.38...
causi 5y ago
Big oil expects 2019 to be peak oil year because they know that all easy fracking spots are spent. The easy fracking is gone and can only survive through heavy subsidies. This is an infantile understanding of shale oil. From needing ever-shorter bores to the move to non-toxic frack fluid, fracking technology is improving at a breakneck pace. Global shale reserves are over three times the size of traditional oil reserves. This has and will radically transform global energy economics. For example, the full-cycle breakeven oil production cost for the United States just dropped below the OPEC average.
- caeril 5y ago
  Maybe. This is largely a "we don't know" situation. Everything you say is correct, but it's also correct that the "Sweet Spot" effect is real, that well spacing parasitism hasn't been solved, and that the well decline rates haven't really changed with advancing technology. We really don't know anything about reserve recoverability ten years from today. I do think it's certain the author is wrong that we won't beat 2019 production. It's inevitable that we do, but I'm not sure for how long. Guess we'll find out.
- NoGravitas 5y ago
  Shale oil reserves are huge, but also very expensive to exploit. At best, they can never compete with renewables, but most likely they can't even be profitable without subsidies (and worst case, they won't even be energy-positive).
- 2snakes 5y ago
  Would you please share sources? I need to discuss with a doomer.
cosmiccatnap 5y ago
There is an often quoted rebuttal to this which goes "this isn't helpful" ...I would say to those people, neither is being optimistic (i.e. unrealistic) This person is not the best writer I'll grant you that...and an OS in forth isn't exactly the best way to prepare either but that's irrelevant to the central argument that we are...on a not particularly long timeline, doomed if we continue a pattern of behaviour that we have done now for 300 years. It isn't being pesimistic to say we are in trouble here, nor is it "unhelpful" to be that way. Positivity and individualism were the two stick that we used to beat the world into the state it is in and the first step to fixing any problem is acknowledging it. So you don't think it's helpful to point out the gun pointed at your kids? Ok let's do helpful stuff then. We need to stop buying phones every year that are synthetically slowed down, we need to invest in public transportation that runs on renewable energy and reduce the number of gas and deisel engines in use significantly. We need to find ways to recycle the precious metal we painstakingly extract from the ground and we need to reduce our reliance on travel in a world where we can talk to anyone at anytime with virtually no delay. But none of those things happen until you can get people to understand the inconvenient truth that this is not going to last and that requires you to put aside your feelings on the matter. Responding to the truth with "this is not helpful" is...not helpful
bambax 5y ago
> Bandwidth Restricted > The page you have tried to access is not available because the owner of the file you are trying to access has exceeded our short term bandwidth limits. Please try again shortly. TFA has indeed collapsed already.
- karmakaze 5y ago
  I also can't read the page. Why exactly is this page for imminent collapse about an OS?
tbm57 5y ago
Interesting that today I've also seen the headline that California is almost capable of 100% renewable energy. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2022/05/02/california-renewable-energy-100/9612901002/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2022/05/02/califo... It doesn't seem that the 'total collapse of civilization' would be so strongly tied to the oil industry as the writer suggests. If there truly is a reducing EROI in oil, it feels more likely that that industry would start losing resources to other renewable energy sectors. If things were as dire as he puts it, I would assume a bigger push for nuclear energy as existential fears start to outweigh NIMBYism. "Unlike the climate changes challenge, the energy challenge is imminent: peak oil is now. However, it is important to note that the effects of climate changes and peak oil are cumulative: raging forest fires, "once in a century" yearly floods, bomb cyclones..." How are those events tied to 'peak oil' specifically?
- NoGravitas 5y ago
  Now if only they were also sustainable in terms of water supply.
MrStonedOne 5y ago
jmnicolas 5y ago
The way I see it, history works in cycles. We're at the end of a cycle now, it's going to be painful until the new one starts. I don't think there will be a USA (in its current borders) in 2030-2035. The EU won't make it either, it's just too dysfunctional.
- shrimpx 5y ago
  How, specifically, do you believe the USA will change its borders?
  - defterGoose 5y ago
    Sea level rise? \s
- 2000UltraDeluxe 5y ago
  The European Union will have some pretty extensive reforming to do once the Ukraine war has ended. I doubt the EU will dissolve, but I'm pretty sure it be quite different from how it is now. If we assume the current (relative) unity will last for a decade or so while Ukraine is rebuilt and we get waned of fossil fuels, then we'd have to start preparing for internal political shitstorms '32, as there'll be a lot of elections '33 and '34. If we make it past the EU parlaiment elections in '34 I'd say we're good for a while after that. Edit: But yeah, things definitely go up and down in cycles. No doubt about it. No single nation state will remain forever, but the entire latin-anglo-slavic-germanic-fenno-ugric clusterf*k we call European civilization won't just go away within such a short timeframe. An eventual decline will take many decades, if not centuries.
nowahe 5y ago
For those hitting the 451 Bandwidth Restricted : https://web.archive.org/web/20220504141057/http://collapseos.org/civ.html https://web.archive.org/web/20220504141057/http://collapseos...
golergka 5y ago
The author has ideological assumptions that he doesn't even think to question, which undermines his whole analysis. > With our hyper-individualistic culture, how can we possibly hope to achieve what greater civilizations couldn't? What if our civilization is the greater one exactly because it is hyper-individualistic?
pohl 5y ago
The April update's focus on the word "genocide" is odd, given that systematic mass killing is actually happening in Ukraine.
ianai 5y ago
This isn’t about building tech, flagged: “”” now, it's fashionable to be outraged about those poor civilians. You were overreacting when Rwanda was happening, but now you're heartless for not tearing your shirt and not shouting "war!" to the top of your lungs. They're caucasian, those poor children, haven't you seen? Did you see that study that says that an all out nuclear war wouldn't actually mean the end of the human race? Pretty uplifting eh? Look! she was pregnant! One word keeps coming back. Genocide. It keeps being thrown out like nobody ever opened a dictionary, never even stopped at what this word means, shrinking past horrors, erasing memories so that today's two minutes of hate can be more effective. Eerie. Update April 12: Oh, even Biden dropped the G word now. How quaint! “””
sireat 5y ago
"Also, please note that I don't consider it unreasonable to not believe that collapse is likely to happen by 2030, so please, don't feel attacked by my beliefs." - why write like this? Parsing this I felt like Bighedd when questioned by the attorneys in Silicon Valley. The author is convinced by this article: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/oureconomy/deep-adaptation-opens-necessary-conversation-about-breakdown-civilisation/ https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/oureconomy/deep-adaptation-... However the article is mostly talking about recognizing the threat and adapting not that "Big collapse" is imminent.
Tade0 5y ago
> for example, the fact that lithium mines are an environmental disaster Are they though? I mean, sure they are - all mining is to an extent, but not only are they relatively benign considering lithium is nowadays obtained from brines, not solid material, we don't need a lot of lithium in the first place - global resources excluding seawater are estimated to be around 80mln tonnes, meanwhile annual iron ore production is over one billion tonnes.
- soco 5y ago
  The local communities losing their ground water and the toxic chemicals leaked by those brines might paint a less benign image though.
cols 5y ago
sigh I've lived with family members who have hand-wavy opinions like this. I also have the unique-ish experience of having been part of a charismatic Christian cult in my earlier life that was constantly hand wringing about the end of the world. There were weekly "prophecies" about Armageddon due to gay rights, peak oil, financial system collapse, abortion, anything-we-don't-like-understand-or-are-uncomfortable-with, etc. One thing that was burned into my mind from this experience is that human beings' ability to divine the future is significantly limited as the time horizon moves to the right. You might be able to predict what is going to happen tomorrow, next week or even next year with some accuracy, but as soon as the timeline extends beyond that, there are simply too many variables to predict what will happen with too much accuracy. My father has been predicting/prophesying global collapse of the financial system "next year" for 20 years now. It may happen due to climate change or nuclear war or pandemic or asteroid impact or or or or....but it sure as hell won't be because he prophesied it. Climate change is a serious risk and it needs to be addressed but being fatalistic about it is a completely self-destructive and incorrect approach. In the meantime, because my father has refused to save for retirement, take care of his physical health, or pay off his mortgage due to "the world collapsing next year", he is now living in near destitution with a life-threatening illness, and no retirement money. This is a man who used to make a million dollars a year as an HP consultant in the 90s/00s. It can happen to anyone. Mindset matters. Don't ignore risk but fatalism helps no one, least of all, yourself.
incomingpain 5y ago
>I believe that the collapse of our global civilization is both inevitable and imminent. Climate changes make it inevitable. Peak oil and cultural bankruptcy make it imminent. Climate change isn't making it inevitable. In fact, climate change and a shift in society will make the collapse impossible. The economic boost of needing to adjust society to handle the migration away from oil regardless to climate change will employ many people and should reduce scarcity greatly. Crisis situations are what bring economies to bare. It's the idea of the war economy, but really any crisis economy operates the same. We have even see the moon race economy, the entire 'crisis' can be entirely artificial. Peak oil? No, we are artificially depressing the oil industry with carbon taxes and other similar efforts. We aren't at peak oil. Not to mention, we haven't even hit the price scarcity threshold to push synthetics to the forefront of production, and so synth peak oil hasn't even started rising. Cultural bankruptcy? I'm not sure what that even means? Reading the footnote and the rest of the article never explains this to any satisfaction. >What I'm more interested in is that regardless of its timeline, we're going to get there, we're going to reach the threshold where civilization collapses. So, you can make the point that civilization still stands at 3C. When does it fall? 4C? 6C? 8C? None of these. These are all lies. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representative_Concentration_Pathway#RCP_8.5 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representative_Concentration_P... Read exactly what 8.5 actually says. It's an unscientific, 'we magic coal out of thin air' to pollute more than the fossil fuel reserves could possible do and it's still only 3.7c by 2100. There is no 4C, 6C, or 8C. >We're going to reach it because we've already failed. 1.5C was the limit, we busted it. The goalpost has moved to 2C, but we're going to bust it too. The feedback loops have begun and are out of our control now. Says you? That's not the limit at all. >It's official, we've passed peak oil in 2019. Big oil now officially admits it itself: even in their more optimist predictions, they are not expecting production to reach 2019's level again. Lol no. Tons of governments are actively working against 'big oil' and artificially created peak oil and that isn't even official like you said. In fact, your peak oil assertion was disproven only months ago post-ukraine. >The underlying cause of this is that for 200 years, we've been on an energy binge. We're at the end of it, we're looking for our next fix, but there isn't going to be one. We just need to drastically reduce our energy consumption. China and India is literally building Gigawatts of coal power plants right now with amortization periods of 20+ years. We are VERY far from reducing energy consumption. This binge just started. You know what's collapsing right now. The political viewpoint that is behind this article. You can definitely tell.
akhmatova 5y ago
I believe that the collapse of our global civilization is both inevitable and imminent. Climate changes make it inevitable. Peak oil and cultural bankruptcy make it imminent. The beauty of this position is that it's structurally unfalsifiable.
alfor 5y ago
I don’t think so. Climate change is not going to be that big deal. Look into Tony Seba work to see how fast we are moving away from fossil fuels. If it get too critic we are going to move to geoengineering and buy us more time. We have and will continue to have problems of abondance. To much food, too much free time, too much netflix, not enough physical exhaustion, etc.

32 points by gpvos 5y ago

There’s 50 years of proven reserves alone. Production might be declining but it’s not because we are running out. 50 years is easily enough time to switch to electric cars. With cars being replaced about every 11 years and ICE being phased about by 2030 to 2035 the entire fleet should be electric by 2045.

JumpCrisscross 5y ago
> Production might be declining but it’s not because we are running out More pointedly, it's declining because we're swapping it out. American oil companies are returning cash to shareholders. Not investing in new wells. OPEC, similarly, sees the writing on the wall, preferring to cash in now even if it means cannibalising future demand through sustained high prices.

dfasdfasdfas 5y ago

I saw this in 2020 and I had the same problem with it then that I do now: if you are so certain that civilization is going to collapse, why are you making an OS about it? Certainly there's prepping that makes more sense..

forgotmypw17 5y ago
I'm quite optimistic about the future, and most scenarios I'm preparing for, both including and not including collapse, involve me owning my own hardware, software, and data as much as possible, because I've been burned by version creep, planned obsolescence, and hastily retired services, etc. way too many times to count. So, as much as possible, my "CollapseOS" involves only languages with stable runtimes, data formats readable for many years already, and hardware which lets me access the filesystem, leveraging the Lindy Effect as much as possible.
lampshades 5y ago
> Spends years working on OS so that computation can continue after civilizational collapse > Dies one week into collapse due to lack of water and food
jvanderbot 5y ago
Silly take. Maybe he's doing both? How do you know he's not fully prepared for food shortages, and is now concerned with electronics shortages? Also, this is +50 years. Likely author might be dead by then, but hopes his software lives on. It's right there in the article.

mikeholler 5y ago

This "we are doomed" attitude is unhelpful towards positive change. It forces us towards selfishness and away from empathy and mutual-support. In some ways, it is a self-fulfilling perception of the world. It is an excuse for personal inaction. I was deeply depressed with this attitude a year ago, and I wouldn't wish it on anyone. What helped, was helping. Specifically volunteering and volunteerism. Realizing that the world doesn't revolve around my experience, and that I can make a positive affect on people's lives. If you're worried about climate change (like I was, like I am), join a cause to address it like Citizens' Climate Lobby, the Environmental Voter Project, or something local. If you're worried about food insecurity, help at a food bank, at your local urban farming project. If you do this, you'll quickly realize that we are not alone in our feelings, and through that togetherness we are powerful.

HelloMcFly 5y ago
I'm in an odd state with this. I refuse to let myself slide into apathy and not have some level of action. I register voters, I support climate activities (financially, letters to representatives, and lifestyle changes) and look for opportunities for local action. I do this despite truly believing it won't matter and things will just keep getting worse. I'm smart enough to know I'm not smart enough to be confident in that assessment, but it is what I believe and feel. I simply can't face myself in the mirror if I allow myself to be inactive or uncaring because of my own forecasts for the future.
- giraffe_lady 5y ago
  The conclusion I drew is that socially acceptable forms of resistance like voting and writing letters are socially acceptable because they are ineffective. Just get more radical it's more effective and you'll feel better too.
  - lazide 5y ago
    Until you get arrested anyway, can’t get a normal job again, lose your kids because of it, etc. Large scale social unrest happens because increasingly large portions of society have nothing left to lose. As an individual, that’s not great. It does eventually result in change though!

camillomiller 5y ago

This kind of discourse doesn't make depressed because of its content, but because of how BORING it can quickly become. It's a mix of oversimplification and self-entitlement that I can't do but find irrelevant. The more recent updates also prove how little this person actually knows about key topics like the economics of the energy market. Why is it so high up on Hackernews?

01100011 5y ago
Doom sells. Always has. It seems to be all the rage these days too. Maybe it's our continually declining testosterone changing our attitude towards monumental but surmountable problems like climate change, resource conflicts, culture wars, wealth gaps, etc. I don't know. It's really sad to see young people so hopeless when right now their biggest enemies are their minds. The system won't have to kill us if it convinces us to kill ourselves first. Hopelessness and small mindedness will doom us all if we're not careful.
- defterGoose 5y ago
  It's on everyone. Young people are largely depressed because the older people in power are basically saying [incoming oversimplification] "you're wrong about the science and even if you're right about the science there's nothing for us to gain from radically forced change to the economy". The old people are correct that doom and gloom aren't the best motivator, and the young people are correct that we're destroying their birthright.
- NoGravitas 5y ago
  Note: I'm old. All of those monumental-but-surmountable problems can be surmounted with massive, unprofitable collective effort. All the evidence of my lifetime and my parents' says that our society as it exists now can only coordinate collective effort if it is profitable. ∴ those problems will not be solved.

endisneigh 5y ago

These sort of articles are so boring. Give me a date, or a year. Otherwise Doomers will continue to be vague and when something does happen, maybe, they’ll all come out of the woodwork saying I told you so. Until then I’ll enjoy the unprecedented prosperity we’re enjoying here on earth. It’s the same with stock market doomers, housing doomers, etc etc. no one ever gives a specific date. People just make unfalsifiable claims.

FeepingCreature 5y ago
Wasn't on your list, but personally: Singularity 50/50 by 2025. Past 2028 you get to say "I told you so."
- germinalphrase 5y ago
  Three years? That’s a stunningly optimistic (pessimistic?) timeline…
  - FeepingCreature 5y ago
    What can I say, PaLM is scary.
    - NoGravitas 5y ago
      The hand-picked examples are pretty scary, but I'm also reasonably sure that AGI is not going to come (directly) from LLMs no matter how big they get. Reasoning: https://medium.com/@emilymenonbender/on-nyt-magazine-on-ai-resist-the-urge-to-be-impressed-3d92fd9a0edd https://medium.com/@emilymenonbender/on-nyt-magazine-on-ai-r...
      - FeepingCreature 5y ago
        Seems too focused on the NYT article? I don't think this because the NYT said so, I think this because PaLM's chains-of-thought approach seems to match how my own brain works. I think LMs have huge intelligence overhang atm that is hidden by the way they are forced to respond. If we figure out how to train LMs with propagation through hidden chains of thought, we'll see a huge jump in capability, and also this is the obvious next step that the industry will aim for.

imchillyb 5y ago

History repeats; always. Our nation is currently on the downward slope of the bell-curve for civilizations.

fullshark 5y ago
Our nation (USA right?) has had many decades in its history where it seemed like things were falling apart as well, with much much greater turmoil than what we are currently experiencing.
Mikeb85 5y ago
> Our nation is currently on the downward slope of the bell-curve for civilizations. A "civilisation" is more than the modern notion of a nation-state. Ancient Egypt lasted ~3000 years. Ancient Sumeria/Babylon (the Akkadians were the inheritors of that culture) lasted ~4000 years. Sumeria itself ~2000 years. Greece lasted ~3000 years (I'm counting from the Myceneans to fall of Constantinople). China is still going (~5000 years). And so on. Recognisable "European" civilisation is only around ~1500 years old. If you go by history, we've got at least another 1500 years.

temp8964 5y ago

I believe in price signals and market adjustments more than any of those doomsday projections. Unless for unknown reasons, all oil reserves suddenly disappear overnight, I am not concerned.

KevinGlass 5y ago

I believe we've avoided a civilization ending, peak oil disaster. Currently ~35-50% of global energy consumption (including shipping, automobiles, etc) comes from petroleum. You might say, that's a lot!, and you would be right. But the percentage of total energy consumption petroleum takes up is going down. Over the next 50 years petroleum will get more and more expensive and renewables will continue to get cheaper and cheaper. If another energy source is cheaper, it will win. If one of the many "super battery breakthroughs" we've all read about in the last 15 years comes to fruition in the next 15 then consider the oil crisis solved. Yes, converting everything to electricity will be expensive but that's cheaper then relying on oil. The trend lines look promising. Of course this is all speculation based on the Western world being able to keep it's shit together.

Scarblac 5y ago
Relying on price mechanisms alone probably still means we will use almost all fossil fuel that is in proven reserves though, and that means civilization ending levels of climate change. We need a way to keep lots of oil in the ground even if it is profitable to get out.
- germinalphrase 5y ago
  Isn’t that the premise behind the “carbon coin”?
- adra 5y ago
  Their point is that oil will only continue to have value if it's kept scarce, and that because there are viable and growing affordable options away from petroleum where there wasn't 10-20 years ago, we will have both a tug of war between producers keeping it in the ground to keeps prices high while their net market shrinks consistently until we're really only left with oil utility where the economy of the resource makes sense (if any). The energy sector will have moved on to the most exploitable sources of power in whatever shape that looks like due to innovation.
- JumpCrisscross 5y ago
  > price mechanisms alone probably still means we will use almost all fossil fuel that is in proven reserves Unlikely. Exploration and production is capital intensive because there are minimum scales many projects require to be profitable, e.g. pipelines. High prices amid falling volumes can obscure the production destruction inherent to infrastructure first ceasing to be developed and then being actively shut down. Whale oil prices went up amidst depletion and decommissioning [1]. [1] https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.389.9270&rep=rep1&type=pdf https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.38...

causi 5y ago

Big oil expects 2019 to be peak oil year because they know that all easy fracking spots are spent. The easy fracking is gone and can only survive through heavy subsidies. This is an infantile understanding of shale oil. From needing ever-shorter bores to the move to non-toxic frack fluid, fracking technology is improving at a breakneck pace. Global shale reserves are over three times the size of traditional oil reserves. This has and will radically transform global energy economics. For example, the full-cycle breakeven oil production cost for the United States just dropped below the OPEC average.

caeril 5y ago
Maybe. This is largely a "we don't know" situation. Everything you say is correct, but it's also correct that the "Sweet Spot" effect is real, that well spacing parasitism hasn't been solved, and that the well decline rates haven't really changed with advancing technology. We really don't know anything about reserve recoverability ten years from today. I do think it's certain the author is wrong that we won't beat 2019 production. It's inevitable that we do, but I'm not sure for how long. Guess we'll find out.
NoGravitas 5y ago
Shale oil reserves are huge, but also very expensive to exploit. At best, they can never compete with renewables, but most likely they can't even be profitable without subsidies (and worst case, they won't even be energy-positive).
2snakes 5y ago
Would you please share sources? I need to discuss with a doomer.

cosmiccatnap 5y ago

There is an often quoted rebuttal to this which goes "this isn't helpful" ...I would say to those people, neither is being optimistic (i.e. unrealistic) This person is not the best writer I'll grant you that...and an OS in forth isn't exactly the best way to prepare either but that's irrelevant to the central argument that we are...on a not particularly long timeline, doomed if we continue a pattern of behaviour that we have done now for 300 years. It isn't being pesimistic to say we are in trouble here, nor is it "unhelpful" to be that way. Positivity and individualism were the two stick that we used to beat the world into the state it is in and the first step to fixing any problem is acknowledging it. So you don't think it's helpful to point out the gun pointed at your kids? Ok let's do helpful stuff then. We need to stop buying phones every year that are synthetically slowed down, we need to invest in public transportation that runs on renewable energy and reduce the number of gas and deisel engines in use significantly. We need to find ways to recycle the precious metal we painstakingly extract from the ground and we need to reduce our reliance on travel in a world where we can talk to anyone at anytime with virtually no delay. But none of those things happen until you can get people to understand the inconvenient truth that this is not going to last and that requires you to put aside your feelings on the matter. Responding to the truth with "this is not helpful" is...not helpful

bambax 5y ago

> Bandwidth Restricted > The page you have tried to access is not available because the owner of the file you are trying to access has exceeded our short term bandwidth limits. Please try again shortly. TFA has indeed collapsed already.

karmakaze 5y ago
I also can't read the page. Why exactly is this page for imminent collapse about an OS?

tbm57 5y ago

Interesting that today I've also seen the headline that California is almost capable of 100% renewable energy. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2022/05/02/california-renewable-energy-100/9612901002/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2022/05/02/califo... It doesn't seem that the 'total collapse of civilization' would be so strongly tied to the oil industry as the writer suggests. If there truly is a reducing EROI in oil, it feels more likely that that industry would start losing resources to other renewable energy sectors. If things were as dire as he puts it, I would assume a bigger push for nuclear energy as existential fears start to outweigh NIMBYism. "Unlike the climate changes challenge, the energy challenge is imminent: peak oil is now. However, it is important to note that the effects of climate changes and peak oil are cumulative: raging forest fires, "once in a century" yearly floods, bomb cyclones..." How are those events tied to 'peak oil' specifically?

NoGravitas 5y ago
Now if only they were also sustainable in terms of water supply.

MrStonedOne 5y ago

jmnicolas 5y ago

The way I see it, history works in cycles. We're at the end of a cycle now, it's going to be painful until the new one starts. I don't think there will be a USA (in its current borders) in 2030-2035. The EU won't make it either, it's just too dysfunctional.

shrimpx 5y ago
How, specifically, do you believe the USA will change its borders?
- defterGoose 5y ago
  Sea level rise? \s
2000UltraDeluxe 5y ago
The European Union will have some pretty extensive reforming to do once the Ukraine war has ended. I doubt the EU will dissolve, but I'm pretty sure it be quite different from how it is now. If we assume the current (relative) unity will last for a decade or so while Ukraine is rebuilt and we get waned of fossil fuels, then we'd have to start preparing for internal political shitstorms '32, as there'll be a lot of elections '33 and '34. If we make it past the EU parlaiment elections in '34 I'd say we're good for a while after that. Edit: But yeah, things definitely go up and down in cycles. No doubt about it. No single nation state will remain forever, but the entire latin-anglo-slavic-germanic-fenno-ugric clusterf*k we call European civilization won't just go away within such a short timeframe. An eventual decline will take many decades, if not centuries.

nowahe 5y ago

For those hitting the 451 Bandwidth Restricted : https://web.archive.org/web/20220504141057/http://collapseos.org/civ.html https://web.archive.org/web/20220504141057/http://collapseos...

golergka 5y ago

The author has ideological assumptions that he doesn't even think to question, which undermines his whole analysis. > With our hyper-individualistic culture, how can we possibly hope to achieve what greater civilizations couldn't? What if our civilization is the greater one exactly because it is hyper-individualistic?

pohl 5y ago

The April update's focus on the word "genocide" is odd, given that systematic mass killing is actually happening in Ukraine.

ianai 5y ago

This isn’t about building tech, flagged: “”” now, it's fashionable to be outraged about those poor civilians. You were overreacting when Rwanda was happening, but now you're heartless for not tearing your shirt and not shouting "war!" to the top of your lungs. They're caucasian, those poor children, haven't you seen? Did you see that study that says that an all out nuclear war wouldn't actually mean the end of the human race? Pretty uplifting eh? Look! she was pregnant! One word keeps coming back. Genocide. It keeps being thrown out like nobody ever opened a dictionary, never even stopped at what this word means, shrinking past horrors, erasing memories so that today's two minutes of hate can be more effective. Eerie. Update April 12: Oh, even Biden dropped the G word now. How quaint! “””

sireat 5y ago

"Also, please note that I don't consider it unreasonable to not believe that collapse is likely to happen by 2030, so please, don't feel attacked by my beliefs." - why write like this? Parsing this I felt like Bighedd when questioned by the attorneys in Silicon Valley. The author is convinced by this article: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/oureconomy/deep-adaptation-opens-necessary-conversation-about-breakdown-civilisation/ https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/oureconomy/deep-adaptation-... However the article is mostly talking about recognizing the threat and adapting not that "Big collapse" is imminent.

Tade0 5y ago

> for example, the fact that lithium mines are an environmental disaster Are they though? I mean, sure they are - all mining is to an extent, but not only are they relatively benign considering lithium is nowadays obtained from brines, not solid material, we don't need a lot of lithium in the first place - global resources excluding seawater are estimated to be around 80mln tonnes, meanwhile annual iron ore production is over one billion tonnes.

soco 5y ago
The local communities losing their ground water and the toxic chemicals leaked by those brines might paint a less benign image though.

cols 5y ago

sigh I've lived with family members who have hand-wavy opinions like this. I also have the unique-ish experience of having been part of a charismatic Christian cult in my earlier life that was constantly hand wringing about the end of the world. There were weekly "prophecies" about Armageddon due to gay rights, peak oil, financial system collapse, abortion, anything-we-don't-like-understand-or-are-uncomfortable-with, etc. One thing that was burned into my mind from this experience is that human beings' ability to divine the future is significantly limited as the time horizon moves to the right. You might be able to predict what is going to happen tomorrow, next week or even next year with some accuracy, but as soon as the timeline extends beyond that, there are simply too many variables to predict what will happen with too much accuracy. My father has been predicting/prophesying global collapse of the financial system "next year" for 20 years now. It may happen due to climate change or nuclear war or pandemic or asteroid impact or or or or....but it sure as hell won't be because he prophesied it. Climate change is a serious risk and it needs to be addressed but being fatalistic about it is a completely self-destructive and incorrect approach. In the meantime, because my father has refused to save for retirement, take care of his physical health, or pay off his mortgage due to "the world collapsing next year", he is now living in near destitution with a life-threatening illness, and no retirement money. This is a man who used to make a million dollars a year as an HP consultant in the 90s/00s. It can happen to anyone. Mindset matters. Don't ignore risk but fatalism helps no one, least of all, yourself.

incomingpain 5y ago

>I believe that the collapse of our global civilization is both inevitable and imminent. Climate changes make it inevitable. Peak oil and cultural bankruptcy make it imminent. Climate change isn't making it inevitable. In fact, climate change and a shift in society will make the collapse impossible. The economic boost of needing to adjust society to handle the migration away from oil regardless to climate change will employ many people and should reduce scarcity greatly. Crisis situations are what bring economies to bare. It's the idea of the war economy, but really any crisis economy operates the same. We have even see the moon race economy, the entire 'crisis' can be entirely artificial. Peak oil? No, we are artificially depressing the oil industry with carbon taxes and other similar efforts. We aren't at peak oil. Not to mention, we haven't even hit the price scarcity threshold to push synthetics to the forefront of production, and so synth peak oil hasn't even started rising. Cultural bankruptcy? I'm not sure what that even means? Reading the footnote and the rest of the article never explains this to any satisfaction. >What I'm more interested in is that regardless of its timeline, we're going to get there, we're going to reach the threshold where civilization collapses. So, you can make the point that civilization still stands at 3C. When does it fall? 4C? 6C? 8C? None of these. These are all lies. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representative_Concentration_Pathway#RCP_8.5 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representative_Concentration_P... Read exactly what 8.5 actually says. It's an unscientific, 'we magic coal out of thin air' to pollute more than the fossil fuel reserves could possible do and it's still only 3.7c by 2100. There is no 4C, 6C, or 8C. >We're going to reach it because we've already failed. 1.5C was the limit, we busted it. The goalpost has moved to 2C, but we're going to bust it too. The feedback loops have begun and are out of our control now. Says you? That's not the limit at all. >It's official, we've passed peak oil in 2019. Big oil now officially admits it itself: even in their more optimist predictions, they are not expecting production to reach 2019's level again. Lol no. Tons of governments are actively working against 'big oil' and artificially created peak oil and that isn't even official like you said. In fact, your peak oil assertion was disproven only months ago post-ukraine. >The underlying cause of this is that for 200 years, we've been on an energy binge. We're at the end of it, we're looking for our next fix, but there isn't going to be one. We just need to drastically reduce our energy consumption. China and India is literally building Gigawatts of coal power plants right now with amortization periods of 20+ years. We are VERY far from reducing energy consumption. This binge just started. You know what's collapsing right now. The political viewpoint that is behind this article. You can definitely tell.

akhmatova 5y ago

I believe that the collapse of our global civilization is both inevitable and imminent. Climate changes make it inevitable. Peak oil and cultural bankruptcy make it imminent. The beauty of this position is that it's structurally unfalsifiable.

alfor 5y ago

I don’t think so. Climate change is not going to be that big deal. Look into Tony Seba work to see how fast we are moving away from fossil fuels. If it get too critic we are going to move to geoengineering and buy us more time. We have and will continue to have problems of abondance. To much food, too much free time, too much netflix, not enough physical exhaustion, etc.