Civilization will Collapse

[Greta]

All in all, if people want to survive, whether they choose to remain in urban areas in search of scraps, flee to rural areas or transform suburban areas into rural areas, they're going to have to live a simpler, more subsistence life.

The world will get smaller, industry, commerce, transportation and communications will breakdown.
Modern conveniences will be largely a thing of the past, we'll lose our ability to manufacture, distribute and even repair many of them.
Air and sea travel will be rare, space travel, unthinkable.
Working appliances, automobiles and computers will belong exclusively to the wealthy and/or lucky, or a handful of them will have to be shared by whole villages/entire towns.
People will have to make due with food and things that can be made more locally and greenly.
Few cities will really remain, perhaps important cities like London, Paris and Rome will still be around, able to manufacture and distribute some stuff, maintain some semblance of order, if they haven't succumbed to chaos, violence and the rising sea level that is.
Needless to say the world will be far more dangerous, average life expectancy will plummet 10-20-30 years, but after people get settled, they may actually be healthier and heartier, as modernity has made us all rather sickly.

Fundamentalist Christianity will make a comeback in some regions of North America, the EU and Russia, but it'll have to compete with Muslims, anarchists, and various doomsday and back to nature cults.
Crime will run rampant, war will be commonplace, divergent, rival groups will often be too hateful or suspicious of one another to conduct trade, long distance travel will be perilous.

You are assuming that humanity has a shared fate. Societies everywhere are increasingly splitting between the wealthy technologically enhanced upper class and the masses.

So you will find that the rich and powerful are far less worried about climate change and resource depletion than, say, the people of Tuvalu, who are watching their arable land being salinised by rising ocean levels. Consider Trump's existential situation. What level of global event would need to occur to endanger him? Seemingly only nuclear cataclysm or a "dinosaur killer" asteroid. The billionaires are sitting pretty, as if safely sitting atop the bulk of humanity piled beneath, bearing the brunt of the wealthy's self interest and blunders.

Now consider the common ancestor of humans and other great apes. Only a small percentage went on the be human, and we know what happened from there. History (well, prehistory) is repeating.

[Gloominary]

All in all, if people want to survive, whether they choose to remain in urban areas in search of scraps, flee to rural areas or transform suburban areas into rural areas, they're going to have to live a simpler, more subsistence life.

The world will get smaller, industry, commerce, transportation and communications will breakdown.
Modern conveniences will be largely a thing of the past, we'll lose our ability to manufacture, distribute and even repair many of them.
Air and sea travel will be rare, space travel, unthinkable.
Working appliances, automobiles and computers will belong exclusively to the wealthy and/or lucky, or a handful of them will have to be shared by whole villages/entire towns.
People will have to make due with food and things that can be made more locally and greenly.
Few cities will really remain, perhaps important cities like London, Paris and Rome will still be around, able to manufacture and distribute some stuff, maintain some semblance of order, if they haven't succumbed to chaos, violence and the rising sea level that is.
Needless to say the world will be far more dangerous, average life expectancy will plummet 10-20-30 years, but after people get settled, they may actually be healthier and heartier, as modernity has made us all rather sickly.

Fundamentalist Christianity will make a comeback in some regions of North America, the EU and Russia, but it'll have to compete with Muslims, anarchists, and various doomsday and back to nature cults.
Crime will run rampant, war will be commonplace, divergent, rival groups will often be too hateful or suspicious of one another to conduct trade, long distance travel will be perilous.

You are assuming that humanity has a shared fate. Societies everywhere are increasingly splitting between the wealthy technologically enhanced upper class and the masses.

So you will find that the rich and powerful are far less worried about climate change and resource depletion than, say, the people of Tuvalu, who are watching their arable land being salinised by rising ocean levels. Consider Trump's existential situation. What level of global event would need to occur to endanger him? Seemingly only nuclear cataclysm or a "dinosaur killer" asteroid. The billionaires are sitting pretty, as if safely sitting atop the bulk of humanity piled beneath, bearing the brunt of the wealthy's self interest and blunders.

Now consider the common ancestor of humans and other great apes. Only a small percentage went on the be human, and we know what happened from there. History (well, prehistory) is repeating.

Mhm, the elite are prepping, they have their remote islands, underground bunkers, perhaps even subterranean cities, they're not as worried.
Maybe they're even kind of looking forward to WW3, they can cower underground while we fight the wars they started, and come out when the dust is settled, there'll be less of us to manage that way.
Or perhaps unleashing some chemical weapons or GM viruses they're immune to somehow on the unsuspecting masses will do the trick, leave the infrastructure and what remains of nature after they by/large have been plundering for themselves for centuries it intact.
We'll see how it all plays out, I really hope their plans backfire on them somehow.
Some men somewhere in between the elite and the masses may have it out for them, blow the whistle on them, or their incessant meddling in science, society and tech might finally catch up with them, let's hope so.

[HexHammer]

Agreed, and I'm sure they'll make a better job of it than we did.

No with modern times we have better contingency plans, more backup features to prevent famine, war, natural disasters, riots ...etc etc.

[Gloominary]

Agreed, and I'm sure they'll make a better job of it than we did.

No with modern times we have better contingency plans, more backup features to prevent famine, war, natural disasters, riots ...etc etc.

I seriously doubt that, you know what they say, the bigger they are...WW4 will be fought with sticks and stones, you know what they also said about the Titanic...
Rome probably had more contingency plans than the civilizations that preceded it, but they also had a lot more shit to deal with, a lot more intricacies.
Never have we been more advanced, more sophisticated in known history...and never have we been further on the brink of annihilating ourselves and life as we know it in history, the environmental, political and socioeconomic calamities that await us will be hundreds of fold more dynamic and complex than previous civilizations could ever imagine or dream of.
The bigger the dinosaur, the bigger the turds...the more flies.

[Greta]

We'll see how it all plays out, I really hope their plans backfire on them somehow.

We shall see. It may turn out that they are the future of civilisation. While that may seem a shame because they are so selfish, humanity itself would never have thrived if not for its selfishness. You could say that nature itself, like its spinoffs, politics and economics, is a system that is powered, at least in part, by bastardry.

[HexHammer]

Agreed, and I'm sure they'll make a better job of it than we did.

No with modern times we have better contingency plans, more backup features to prevent famine, war, natural disasters, riots ...etc etc.

I seriously doubt that, you know what they say, the bigger they are...WW4 will be fought with sticks and stones, you know what they also said about the Titanic...
Rome probably had more contingency plans than the civilizations that preceded it, but they also had a lot more shit to deal with, a lot more intricacies.
Never have we been more advanced, more sophisticated in known history...and never have we been further on the brink of annihilating ourselves and life as we know it in history, the environmental, political and socioeconomic calamities that await us will be hundreds of fold more dynamic and complex than previous civilizations could ever imagine or dream of.
The bigger the dinosaur, the bigger the turds...the more flies.

You can easily send 1 billion dollars across the world in 1 sec, but in times without internet or tele wires, radio signals that would have been impossible and would take days.

You can easily move large amounts of supply because of good infrastructures, because of huge production capacity, better planning and logistics.

Einstein was a genius at physics, but a retard at everyday life. You can't make a world war with sticks and stones, that would suggest the infrastructure and logistics would be non existent, so you can't move big armies around and feed them at the same time. Can't communicate between nations to coordinate attacks, defenses and retreats.

[Harbal]

You can easily send 1 billion dollars across the world

How often have you done it?

Einstein was a genius at physics, but a retard at everyday life. You can't make a world war with sticks and stones, that would suggest the infrastructure and logistics would be non existent, so you can't move big armies around and feed them at the same time. Can't communicate between nations to coordinate attacks, defenses and retreats.

Nonsense and babble.

[FlashDangerpants]

I assume when you refer to the fall of Rome in 500BC you mean 500AD. And you mean Western Rome given that the richer half of the Empire remained intact, and even got to enjoy another century or so of war with the Persians before that empire fell in 651 AD to be replaced with a largely sumilar one in most details other than religion.

So what was the equivalent thing in India at these times? And who are the invaders poised to sack all our cities this century?

How do we work out this 1500 year cycle as something which must happen again, given that two historical seasoons are not statistically significant, no causal mechanism is proposed, and the entire cycle is really just something you declared on the basis of cherry picked data points?

The eastern Roman empire AKA the Byzantine empire quickly became a shadow of what Rome was.

It wasn't quick though was it? Certainly not quick enough to fit into the pattern you are asserting. They may have lost Alexandria in 671, and perhaps you can claim that as important, but they lost the battle of Manzikert in 1071. That is where they went into their fatal decline and is way way way outside of your cycle. And in both cases they lost chunks of empire to equivalent empires without any dark age ever descending anywhere so this loss of civilisation you are whittering about doesn't occur irrespective.

So try to consider how your answers to these questions help with the thesis you are presenting.

Capitalism/consumerism is unsustainable, eventually/inevitably it'll lead to (non)renewable resource shortages: coal, gasoline, oil, uranium, food and water.
Rain forests are diminishing, the soil is eroding, ecosystems will collapse and give way to global warming, desertification and climate change.
The sea level will rise and cities, especially coastal ones will be flooded.

All this will probably lead to WW3, [....]

All in all Hundreds of millions if not billions of people will die of famine, pestilence and warfare, and nature will have finally made a comeback.

In all likelihood, nothing humans build is permanent, and humanity itself may either go extinct, or (de)evolve into something else, maybe something better, maybe something worse or just different, for everything that rises sets.
essentially the same conditions that'll lead to the collapse of our civilization were present during the collapse of previous civilizations, on a smaller scale.
Some modern technologies will be preserved, but many more will be lost to us, perhaps forever, or until they can revived at some point in the distant future, centuries or millennia from now, when humanity regains its footing, and attempts to ascend again, scale that steep and perilous mountain of riches and power, science and ingenuity.

That's a lot of speculative stuff you are presenting there. Capitalism is really a very sustainable system and none of those resources are actually running out. WW3 to be fought over something like that is really a massive excercise in wishful thinking.

This cycle takes approximately 1500-2000 years to complete itself.
It has happened at least twice before, thou some speculate civilization in some form or another has been around for a lot longer than we think we know, and so this cycle may have happened many, many times before.
The cycle can be divided like the year into seasons: it has a spring, a renaissance, followed by summer, where civilization peaks, fall and winter or a dark age.

A third instance wouldn't give you statistical significance. Your cycle has to run for tens of thousands of years before it becomes a basis for statistical prediction. Sorry, maths won't help you here, maybe the 97th generation of your man seed will inherit mathematically sound knowledge from this discussion, but you won't live to see it.

Your spring summer autumn and winter theme for civilisation is the sort of thing I expect to read in a Victorian era text book, the empty nonsense that used to be popular because it provided a handy pseudo-explanation for the rise of the various empires that posed as indirect successors to Rome. It's unsophisticated junk food for the soul. If you factor in effeminacy as part of the final decline of a decadent civilisation you are basically Macaulay risen again.

But even if we permit the analogy for a laugh, you've really got no likely grounds to make your claim that we are the fatal winter of our civilisation unless you resort to the doomsday daydream you already tried. If you wanna go that way, then fine, we can cover why water and food are obviously not "(non)renewable resource" and why those others you mentioned are available in qunatities sufficent to last us well past the boundaries of your fictional cycle.

[Gloominary]

No with modern times we have better contingency plans, more backup features to prevent famine, war, natural disasters, riots ...etc etc.

I seriously doubt that, you know what they say, the bigger they are...WW4 will be fought with sticks and stones, you know what they also said about the Titanic...
Rome probably had more contingency plans than the civilizations that preceded it, but they also had a lot more shit to deal with, a lot more intricacies.
Never have we been more advanced, more sophisticated in known history...and never have we been further on the brink of annihilating ourselves and life as we know it in history, the environmental, political and socioeconomic calamities that await us will be hundreds of fold more dynamic and complex than previous civilizations could ever imagine or dream of.
The bigger the dinosaur, the bigger the turds...the more flies.

You can easily send 1 billion dollars across the world in 1 sec, but in times without internet or tele wires, radio signals that would have been impossible and would take days.

You can easily move large amounts of supply because of good infrastructures, because of huge production capacity, better planning and logistics.

Einstein was a genius at physics, but a retard at everyday life. You can't make a world war with sticks and stones, that would suggest the infrastructure and logistics would be non existent, so you can't move big armies around and feed them at the same time. Can't communicate between nations to coordinate attacks, defenses and retreats.

Einstein was joking when he said WW4 would be fought with sticks and stones.
His point was we wouldn't have the means to fight WW4, cause WW3 would blow us back into the stone age.

[Gloominary]

We'll see how it all plays out, I really hope their plans backfire on them somehow.

We shall see. It may turn out that they are the future of civilisation. While that may seem a shame because they are so selfish, humanity itself would never have thrived if not for its selfishness. You could say that nature itself, like its spinoffs, politics and economics, is a system that is powered, at least in part, by bastardry.

I think the elite overestimate themselves.
Not only is their subjugation of the lower classes and other species bad for us, but it's bad for themselves, it's bad for life itself.
The elite are a black hole, a cancer, they'll terminate themselves upon termination of their hosts.
The elite are more driven by their monstrous instincts than by both reason, and what you refer to as 'mindfulness'.
Their materialism, hedonism, and meddling with society and nature, detriments us all.

[Philosophy Explorer]

It's been happening for a while. Just look at the US for a fly-on-the-wall view.

You sure know how to toss out the bullshit. Let's look at your shithole country for a fly-on-the-wall view instead.

PhilX

[PauloL]

You're right indeed.

I have recently read about French's Revolution role in implementation of Capitalism.

In fact, industrialization, first by manufactures and later by machines, created a new class, bourgeoisie, that became powerful enough by the money they accumulated to take power as we see it today.

This could be different, but I think no one can tell what other way we could have left feudal society.

The idea is always destroying bourgeoisie, but then we enter a new order no one prefers to the current one.

The alternative has been creating limits each time bourgeoisie gives a coup from the chest, but then bourgeoisie makes up another coup no one could predict.

After all the measures taken after 1929, they could again give another coup, this times through Financial Engineering by banks (subprime crisis). They won't do that again. No problem. They'll invent a new scheme. Wait and see.

I don't think society will collapse anyway, unless they create such a crisis that world enter war again. You may call it WWIII if you like. No need to count as it will be final, like Einstein said.

After 1929 we faced WWII. After 2008 we escaped WWIII, but it took almost 10 years to recover, at least in Europe (Working class paid recovery, but they would be conscripted anyway in case of war). Next time I don't know.

[HexHammer]

Einstein was joking when he said WW4 would be fought with sticks and stones.
His point was we wouldn't have the means to fight WW4, cause WW3 would blow us back into the stone age.

I believe we are more or less fighting a WW3 right now, much of the world has been involved in the the middle east the past decades.

[Greta]

We'll see how it all plays out, I really hope their plans backfire on them somehow.

We shall see. It may turn out that they are the future of civilisation. While that may seem a shame because they are so selfish, humanity itself would never have thrived if not for its selfishness. You could say that nature itself, like its spinoffs, politics and economics, is a system that is powered, at least in part, by bastardry.

I think the elite overestimate themselves.
Not only is their subjugation of the lower classes and other species bad for us, but it's bad for themselves, it's bad for life itself.
The elite are a black hole, a cancer, they'll terminate themselves upon termination of their hosts.
The elite are more driven by their monstrous instincts than by both reason, and what you refer to as 'mindfulness'.
Their materialism, hedonism, and meddling with society and nature, detriments us all.

Not at all. I say good luck to the rich and I hope they create a brilliant civilisation after the worst of the current environmental upheaval is over.

The rich ARE us, only with money. There is no difference. Not a cancer, not a parasite, rather a predator. Like humans. The rich show us what humans do when they are empowered. Almost everyone would do the same in their situation.

After all, what the rich are doing to the poor is only what humans did to other animals (but the rich are a little less cruel). We regular folk didn't give a damn when other animals were being decimated, so why should anyone worry overly about us? Some would say it's justice or karma, but it's just evolution.

Nothing can ever stay the same and anyone who's been pushed out of their home or lost their job through corporate restructuring knows that change hurts. The next phase of humanity is blended with technology, and thus capable to spreading Earth's stuff out to other worlds. The poor aren't going to continue the Earth's journey after the Sun heats up, only large wealthy institutions can do it.

[Gloominary]

The elite will place life itself in jeopardy just to satisfy their idle curiosities and lusts.
We've been on the brink of nuclear warfare.
They risked igniting the atmosphere by detonating nukes in the sky.
They're smashing atoms at CERN, which could very well conjure a black hole.
Who knows what horrors will be unleashed by genetically modifying organisms.

From my research, if the statistics can be trusted, the rich aren't better off than the middle class by just about any measure, they don't live longer, they're not happier nor healthier.
even from a reproductive standpoint, they're having fewer kids than the poor.
The only advantage they have is they have more money, and this allows them to consume and invest more, but money is, or ought to be a means to an end, not an end of itself.
It's foolhardy to risk consuming the resources we're all dependent on into extinction, especially if it offers you little-no real advantage.

They have financial security for themselves and several generations if they're millionaires, several dozen generations if they're billionaires, but eventually it will have to be divided among hundreds-thousands of individuals, it'll be increasingly spread thin.
Furthermore, there is rivalry between families, like mafia.
And so the elite is always changing, unless they inbreed, which gives you other problems.
That kind of (financial) security probably softens families, weakens them anyway.

If global catastrophes occur, the billionaires can hide in their bunkers and on their islands, wait it out, but they'll probably just end up ruining the planet for everyone in the end, and so there'll be little worth claiming after they emerge.
As resources get scarcer, thanks especially to them, they will look to the military for help, which may turn on them.
I really don't think the elite is the next stage in human or biological evolution, but we'll see, it's an interesting idea.