Collapse
Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond examined how and why Western civilizations developed the technologies and immunities that allowed them to dominate much of the world. Now, Diamond probes the other side of the equation: What caused some of the great civilizations of the past to collapse into ruin, and what can we learn from their fates?" "As in Guns, Germs, and Steel, Diamond weaves an all-encompassing global thesis through a series of historical-cultural narratives. Moving from the prehistoric Polynesian culture on Easter Island to the formerly flourishing Native American civilizations of the Anasazi and the Maya, the doomed medieval Viking colony on Greenland, and finally to the modern world, Diamond traces a fundamental pattern of catastrophe, spelling out what happens when we squander our resources, when we ignore the signals our environment gives us, and when we reproduce too fast or cut down too many trees. Environmental damage, climate change, rapid population growth, unstable trade partners, and pressure from enemies were all factors in the demise of the doomed societies, but other societies found solutions to those same problems and persisted."--BOOK JACKET
Stats for nerds
43recommend
120mentions
91people
2008–2026years
43% recommend53% neutral3% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Populations do not tend to grow to equilibrium and then stop. They tend to overgrow their environment, outstrip resources, and then collapse.
The result may not be extinction. But losing 90% of the human population won't feel that different if you're living through it.
A relevant book recommend, https://www.amazon.com/Collapse-Societies-Choose-Succeed-Rev.... It walks through a variety of past examples of human societies that went through this. There is no reason to believe that our current world-wide society will fare better.
- btw, Jared Diamond's "Collapse" begins with a chapter on Montana gold mines. When I first got it I thought "oh no, this is gonna be boring af", but his depth and breadth of knowledge made even that captivating. I also learned later in the book about the Greenland Norse and their ups and downs, and that was also revelatory. Reading that book was one of the top edifying experinces of my life. I highly recommend it.
- Probably best not to get hung up on specific scenarios, though if you want to explore that space, Jared Diamond, Collapse, offers a theory of civilisational collapse and likely mechanisms based on previous history:
<https://archive.org/details/jared-diamond-collapse-how-socie...>
I could see a pathology, one more likely attacking our agricultural base than humans directly, as being one fairly likely precipitating event. A cascade failure, including supply-chain collapse and financial contagion as well as developing political dysfunction and potentially regional or global war as consequential features of a more fundamental failure, and then the problems of local self-sufficiency in a world that's grown all-but-entirely interconnected, might do it.
But the question here is far more how to recover and with what knowledge than "why'd it happen in the first place".
Neal Stephenson's unspecified "agent" from Seveneves is useful here. We know that something destroyed the Moon, what it was specifically isn't really of any narrative importance.
- Have you ever read "Collapse" by Jared Diamond? Understanding and learning from that past is literally crucial to the continued existence of the human race. More crucial than any technology anyone here has ever created.
The book directly pulls on the kind of data on early societies that the scientists studying these caves produce.
- On this topic, I read Collapse[1] by Jared Diamond, which was quite interesting. Main idea being how it's generally a combination of problems that can cause the fall of a society, climate often being one of these.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse:_How_Societies_Choose...
- What do we mean with de-growth here? Human world population? Energy-consumption per human? long-lasting-non-recyclable-waste per human? Mankind GDP? Wealth distribution discrepancy?
On collapse, the only serious book I red was Jared Diamond's "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed".
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