NASA-funded study: industrial civilisation headed for 'irreversible collapse'?

[dipsydoodle]

A new study sponsored by Nasa's Goddard Space Flight Center has highlighted the prospect that global industrial civilisation could collapse in coming decades due to unsustainable resource exploitation and increasingly unequal wealth distribution.

Noting that warnings of 'collapse' are often seen to be fringe or controversial, the study attempts to make sense of compelling historical data showing that "the process of rise-and-collapse is actually a recurrent cycle found throughout history." Cases of severe civilisational disruption due to "precipitous collapse - often lasting centuries - have been quite common."

The research project is based on a new cross-disciplinary 'Human And Nature DYnamical' (HANDY) model, led by applied mathematician Safa Motesharri of the US National Science Foundation-supported National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center, in association with a team of natural and social scientists. The study based on the HANDY model has been accepted for publication in the peer-reviewed Elsevier journal, Ecological Economics.

It finds that according to the historical record even advanced, complex civilisations are susceptible to collapse, raising questions about the sustainability of modern civilisation:

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2014/mar/14/nasa-civilisation-irreversible-collapse-study-scientists

[RKP5637]

1. No surprises here. n/t

[upaloopa]

2. Well I'll be gone. I think I lived during our golden years

the 50's and 60's. Back then people took to the streets and demanded change and got it. I am not saying life was good for everyone. Indeed it was not for minorities but at least there was hope that we could make changes for the better. Today we are impotent in the face of growing income inequality. Hope for better days is gone. We believe that change can only come from governments and that governments are not interested in our well being.

[blkmusclmachine]

3. Well, nobody promised that you'd like the "Change," now, did they?!?!

[boomer55]

4. Yeah except when we collapse this time we kill the planet

Think of all the nuke reactors that will go ksplooie when people stop taking care of them.

[dipsydoodle]

5. The planet is fully capable of looking after itself

in our absence.

[AverageJoe90]

12. Not that we're going to disappear anytime soon.....at least not due to AGW, anyway. nt

[boomer55]

14. I don't agree

http://www.democraticunderground.com/112766358

[dipsydoodle]

17. Earliest forms of life were over 3 billion years ago

and here we are now. No reason to suppose that another 3 billion years shouldn't be sufficient for the planet to restore.

[bemildred]

19. Could be very interesting, really. Pity we won't be there to see it. nt

[dipsydoodle]

20. Maybe whatever replaces us will have more sense.

Hopefully so at least.

[bemildred]

21. One can hope. nt

[cprise]

6. With billions of people, we probably could

...even without the nuclear factor. If billions leave the degraded urban environment to go hunting for bushmeat, plus anything they can find that will make a crude fire, then there's essentially zero hope in such a scenario. Most ecosystems would be shredded to dust and sand.

Romanticizing the old days of people "getting back to the land" is foolish under these circumstances. There are too many of us to do that now.

[4dsc]

7. If I've said it once I've said it a hundred times

We cannot continue on our current economic growth forever and sooner not later we are going to pay the price.

Our future generations are fucked when it come to resources as we just waste them in today's consumer society.

[bananas]

8. Oswald Spengler - The Decline of the West

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oswald_Spengler

Oswald Arnold Gottfried Spengler (29 May 1880 – 8 May 1936) was a German historian and philosopher of history whose interests included mathematics, science, and art. He is best known for his book The Decline of the West (Der Untergang des Abendlandes), published in 1918 and 1922, covering all of world history. He proposed a new theory, according to which the lifespan of civilizations is limited and ultimately they decay.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Decline_of_the_West

According to Spengler, the meaningful units for history are not epochs but whole cultures which evolve as organisms. He recognizes eight high cultures: Babylonian, Egyptian, Chinese, Indian, Mexican (Mayan/Aztec), Classical (Greek/Roman), Arabian, Western or "European-American." Cultures have a lifespan of about a thousand years. The final stage of each culture is, in his word use, a 'civilization'.

<snip>

According to the theory, the Western world is actually ending and we are witnessing the last season — "winter time" — of the Faustian civilization. In Spengler's depiction, Western Man is a proud but tragic figure because, while he strives and creates, he secretly knows the actual goal will never be reached.

<snip>

Test of the theory

Some, such as Amaury de Riencourt in The Coming Caesars, maintain that Spengler's predictions have been borne out as the United States has pushed aside the other powers of the West and established a Pax Americana. De Reincourt's work suggested that the United States of America would enter its Caesarian phase in the 1990s.

[bvar22]

9. I agree,

and that is one of the reasons why My Wife & I sold everything,
left the Big Blue Northern City,
bought property in the Rural South with an Ozark Mountain spring,
moved there in 2006,
and started growing our own food.

...but impending collapse is not the only reason.
In fact, it is not even a primary reason.
We aren't "survivalists", and take care to avoid them.

We are just old Hippies who enjoy the sustainable, green lifestyle.
So far....so good.



---bvar22 & Starkraven
living well on a LOW taxable income,
and stuff we learned in the 60s

[TimeToEvolve]

10. its called exponential growth

a very simple concept

- a lecture about exponential growth by Professor Albert Bartlett
watch it and learn, if you have an hour to spare.

[AverageJoe90]

11. If this is what NASA's putting out these days.....I fear for their future.(Thanks GOP!)

THIS, ladies and gentlemen, is just one more reason why NASA needs better funding.....so they can have a better focus on actually building stuff to get us back into space, and not have to rely on poorly-thought out and excessively attention grabbing stuff like this.

Honestly, this whole study is flawed to a T. No joke. Just the fact that they tried to take the circumstances of ancient Mesopotamia & Rome and apply that to the *modern civilization as a whole*, which is *vastly* different in so many ways is already enough for that.....it's apples and oranges in fact.

This is disappointing in a lot of ways, really. NASA got us to the moon, for Pete's sakes! And now they're a shell of their former self.
But I don't blame them. No, I believe the fault lies squarely with the Republican Party; they're the morons who started this slash-and-burn type Reaganite nonsense in the first place.

[bananas]

15. It's an important part of the Drake Equation

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation

L = the expected lifetime of such a civilization for the period that it can communicate across interstellar space

Michael Shermer estimated L as 420 years, based on the duration of sixty historical Earthly civilizations.[25] Using 28 civilizations more recent than the Roman Empire, he calculates a figure of 304 years for "modern" civilizations. It could also be argued from Michael Shermer's results that the fall of most of these civilizations was followed by later civilizations that carried on the technologies, so it is doubtful that they are separate civilizations in the context of the Drake equation. In the expanded version, including reappearance number, this lack of specificity in defining single civilizations does not matter for the end result, since such a civilization turnover could be described as an increase in the reappearance number rather than increase in L, stating that a civilization reappears in the form of the succeeding cultures. Furthermore, since none could communicate over interstellar space, the method of comparing with historical civilizations could be regarded as invalid.

David Grinspoon has argued that once a civilization has developed enough, it might overcome all threats to its survival. It will then last for an indefinite period of time, making the value for L potentially billions of years. If this is the case, then he proposes that the Milky Way galaxy may have been steadily accumulating advanced civilizations since it formed.[31] He proposes that the last factor L be replaced with fIC*T, where fIC is the fraction of communicating civilizations become "immortal" (in the sense that they simply do not die out), and T representing the length of time during which this process has been going on. This has the advantage that T would be a relatively easy to discover number, as it would simply be some fraction of the age of the universe.

It has also been hypothesized that once a civilization has learned of a more advanced one, its longevity could increase because it can learn from the experiences of the other.[45]

The astronomer Carl Sagan speculated that all of the terms, except for the lifetime of a civilization, are relatively high and the determining factor in whether there are large or small numbers of civilizations in the universe is the civilization lifetime, or in other words, the ability of technological civilizations to avoid self-destruction. In Sagan's case, the Drake equation was a strong motivating factor for his interest in environmental issues and his efforts to warn against the dangers of nuclear warfare.

[AverageJoe90]

18. There was no quantifiable reference to Drake that I could see.

Also, Sagan's efforts against nuclear war were very different from this: his worries were very much based on actual solid research. This, not so much, but more of fear-based conjecture.

[jsr]

13. Recommend

[Judi Lynn]

16. K & R. n/t

[Redfairen]

22. As if anyone gives a shit.

Everybody's too busy trying to get money and get laid. Fuck civilization.