Doomers

333 readers

1 users here now

Musings and discussion surrounding the end of human civilization

Guidelines:

Anyone can post
Keep discussion civil and be respectful of others
Keep content on-topic
Appropriately label any NSFW content
Do not post bigoted or hateful speech, nor incite violence or encourage criminal behavior
Do not harass others
Do not post extreme or offensive content
Violations of any guideline will be subject to removal of post, public or private admonition, or temporary or permanent user removal at the discretion of any moderator
Spam will be removed

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

AvogadroJones

Climate Change Is But One Civilization-Ending Event (self.doomers)

submitted 2 years ago by AvogadroJones to c/doomers

3 comments fedilink hide all child comments

A mass extinction of life on Earth as a result of willfully generated climate change is certainly one of the most daunting outcomes that civilization currently faces. But it is certainly not the only danger.

Nuclear war, killer asteroids, coronal mass ejections, artificial intelligence, pandemic, super-volcanoes, and many other events of lessening probability have the potential to end civilization as we know it before all of the honeybees die.

Leaving aside the certainty of climate catastrophe, what other events could occur that have the potential to destroy our civilization?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] nocko 3 points 2 years ago (1 children)

The really boring dystopia of unsustainable production. We've been producing a culture tied to unsustainable labour practices, fossil fuels and materials. We're racing down the road toward a dead end and calling it progress.

Unsustainable means "cannot be sustained", rather than the more commonly accepted "not hippy-dippy green enough".

Cheap technology, plastic everything, big box stores full of food and products from overseas, etc. These will all go away, because they cannot be sustained.

With luck, it can be a slow wasting away of the things we've taken for granted. We may have time to pick and choose which technologies to save that could help maintain a similar quality of life (plastics for healthcare, permacomputing, renewable energy infra, advanced agricultural techniques).

Without luck... we could lose a sizable percentage of the population is a very short period of time.

This is inseperable from political collapse, though. It's hard to imagine our societies losing a hundred years of "progress" without a ton of people embracing authoritarian and reactionary politics, civil war, genocide, etc.

[–] AvogadroJones 3 points 2 years ago

This view seems to intersect with complex system failure, whereby it is observed that the more complex a system, the greater likelihood of failure.