by meemoe_uk » Fri 20 Apr 2012, 05:48:59
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('rangerone314', 'R')ead "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed" by Jared Diamond or "Collapse of Complex Societies" by Joseph Tainter and get back to me about how unlikely it is for civilization to suddenly hit a tipping point and go off the edge into collapse.
The thing to keep in mind, is that to most people, everything seems fine, until suddenly it is not.
I read both those books when I was a peaker from 2006 to 2008. Diamond's book is a cooked up load of falsehoods ( the demise of Easter island was due to Westerner raids, not some self induced collapse ), Tainter's book is an extremely boring, over technical yarn over 1 little fanciful graph of diminishing returns.
They are both next to useless, 'cept are good fodder for doomers.
So here I am getting back to you.
- It's 0% chance that modern civilization will hit some self induced tipping point from over explotation of resources. Any percieved crisis will be planned and self imposed, like the rwandan civil war and genocide - which was artifically setup to happen.
These mass murder events are forever present. We'll definately continue to have them. World population can't rise indefinately, which is one of the reasons TPTB decide to cull parts of the population from time to time long before any real resource limit is reached, and they are sometimes dressed up as overpopulation hitting the bounds sustainability.