At its height, the Roman Empire was home to about
30% of the world’s population, and in many ways it was the pinnacle of human advancement. Its
citizens enjoyed the benefits of central heating, concrete, double glazing,
banking, international trade, and upward social mobility.
Rome became the first city in history with one million inhabitants
and was a center of technological, legal, and economic progress. An empire impossible
to topple, stable and rich and powerful. Until it wasn’t anymore. First slowly then
suddenly, the most powerful civilization on earth collapsed. By civilization, we mean a complex
society where labor is specialized and social classes emerge and which is ruled by institutions.
Civilisations share a dominant mutual language and culture and domesticate plants and
animals to feed and sustain large cities, where they often construct impressive monuments. Civilization lets us become efficient on large
scales, collect vast amounts of knowledge, and put human ingenuity and the natural resources
of the world to work. Without civilization, most people would never have been born. Which
makes it a bit concerning that collapse is the rule, not the exception. Virtually all
civilizations end, on average after 340 years. Collapse is rarely nice for individuals.
Their shared cultural identity is shattered as institutions lose the power to organize people.
Knowledge is lost, living standards fall, violence increases and often the population declines.
The civilization either completely disappears, is absorbed by stronger neighbors
or something new emerges, sometimes with more primitive
technology than before. If this is how it has been over
the ages, what about us today? Just as Europeans forgot how to build
indoor plumbing and make cement, will we lose our industrial technology,
and with that our greatest achievements, from one dollar pizza to smartphones or
laser eye surgery? Will all this go away too? Today our cities stretch for thousands of
square kilometers, we travel the skies, our communication is instant. Industrial
agriculture with engineered high yield plants, efficient machinery and high potency fertilizer
feeds billions of people. Modern medicine gives us the longest lifespan we’ve ever had, while
Industrial technology gives us an unprecedented level of comfort and abundance – even though
we haven’t yet learned to attain them without destroying our ecosphere. There are arguably
still different civilizations around today that compete and coexist with each other, but together
they also form a singular, global civilization. But this modern, globalized civilization is even
more vulnerable in some ways than past empires, because we are much more deeply interconnected. A collapse of the industrialized world literally
means that the majority of people alive today would perish since without industrial agriculture
we would no longer be able to feed them. And there is an even greater
risk: What if a collapse were so deeply destructive that we were
unable to re-industrialize again? What if it ruined our chances of enjoying a
flourishing future as a multiplanetary species? A global civilizational collapse
could be an existential catastrophe: something that ruins not just the
lives of everyone alive today, but all the future generations that could have
come into being. All the knowledge we might have discovered, the art we might have created, the
joys we might have experienced, would be lost. So, how likely is all of this? Let’s start with some good news. While
civilization collapses have happened regularly, none have ever derailed the course of
global civilization. Rome collapsed, but the Aksumite Empire or the Teotihuacans
and of course the Byzantine Empire, carried on. What about sudden population crashes? So far we have not seen a catastrophe
that has killed much more than 10% of the global population. No pandemic,
no natural disaster, no war. The last clear example of a rapid global
population decrease was the Black Death, a pandemic of the bubonic plague in the fourteenth
century that spread across the Middle East and Europe and killed a third of all Europeans
and about 1/10th of the global population. If any event was going to cause the
collapse of civilization, that should have been it. But even the Black Death demonstrates
humanity's resilience more than its fragility. While the old societies were
massively disrupted in the short term, the intense loss of human lives and suffering
did little to negatively impact European economic and technological development in the long run.
Population size recovered within 2 centuries, and just 2 centuries later, the
Industrial Revolution began.
History is full of incredible recoveries from
horrible tragedies. Take the atomic bombing of Hiroshima during World War 2. 140,000 people were
killed and 90% of the city was at least partially incinerated or reduced to rubble. But against all
odds, they made a remarkable recovery! Hiroshima’s population recovered within a decade, and today
it is a thriving city of 1.2 million people. None of this made these horrible events any
less horrible for those who lived through them. But for us as a species, these
signs of resilience are good news. Why Recovery is Likely Even in the Worst Case One thing that’s different from historic collapses
is that humanity now has unprecedented destructive power: Today’s nuclear arsenals are so powerful
that an all-out global war could cause a nuclear winter and billions of deaths. Our knowledge
of our own biology and how to manipulate it is getting so advanced that it is becoming
possible to engineer viruses as contagious as the coronavirus and as deadly
as ebola. Increasingly the risk of global pandemics is much higher than in the past.
So we may cause a collapse ourselves and it might be much worse than the things nature has thrown
at us, so far. But if, say 99% of the population died, would global civilization collapse
forever? Could we recover from such a tragedy? We have some reasons to be optimistic.
Let’s start with food. There are 1 billion agricultural workers today so, even if the
global population fell to just 80 million, it is virtually guaranteed that many
survivors would know how to produce food. And we don’t need to start at square one because
we could still use modern high-yield crops. Maize is 10 times bigger than its wild ancestor;
ancient tomatoes were the size of today’s peas. After agriculture, the next step towards recovery would be rebuilding industrial capacity,
like power grids and automated manufacturing. A huge problem is that our economies of scale make
it impossible to just pick up where we left off. Many of our high tech industries are
only functional because of huge demand and intensely interconnected supply
chains across different continents. Even if our infrastructure were left unharmed, we
would make huge steps backwards technologically. But then again, we are thinking in larger time
frames. Industrialization originally happened 12,000 years after the agricultural revolution. So
if we need to start over after a massive collapse, it shouldn’t be that hard to re-industrialize,
at least on evolutionary timescales. There’s a hitch, though. The Industrial
Revolution was fuelled, literally, by burning easily-accessible coal and we are still very
much reliant on it. If we use it all up today, aside from making rapid climate change
much worse, we could hinder our ability to recover from a huge crisis. So we
should stop using easy-to-access coal, so it can serve as a civilization
insurance in case something bad happens. Another thing that makes recovery likely is that
we’d probably have most of the information we need to rebuild civilization. We would certainly
lose a lot of crucial institutional knowledge, especially on hard drives that nobody could
read or operate anymore. But a lot of the technological, scientific, and cultural knowledge
stored in the world's 2.6 million libraries, would survive the catastrophe. The post-collapse
survivors would know what used to be possible, and they could reverse engineer some
of the tools and machines they’d find. In conclusion, despite the bleak
prospect of catastrophic threats, natural or created by ourselves,
there is reason for optimism: humankind is remarkably resilient, and even in
the case of a global civilizational collapse, it seems likely that we would be able to recover
– Even if many people were to perish or suffer immense hardship. Even if we lost cultural
and technological achievements in the process. But given the stakes, the risks are still
unnervingly high. Nuclear war and dangerous pandemics threaten the amazing global civilization
we have built. Humanity is like a teenager, speeding around blind corners, drunk, without
a seat belt. The good news is that it is still early enough to prepare for and to mitigate
these risks. We just need to actually do it. We made this video together with Will MacAskill, a Professor of Philosophy at Oxford and one of
the founders of the effective altruism movement, which is about doing the most good
you can with your time and money. Will just published a new book
called What We Owe The Future, which is about how YOU can positively
impact the long-term future of our world. If you like Kurzgesagt videos,
the chances are high you will like it! The book has some pretty
counter intuitive arguments, like that risks from new technology, such
as AI and synthetic biology, are at least as grave as those from climate change. Or that
the world doesn’t contain too many people, but too few. And especially that everyday
actions like recycling or refusing to fly just aren’t that big a deal compared to
where you donate, or what career you pursue. Most importantly, it argues
that, by acting wisely, YOU can help make tomorrow better
than today. And how WE together can build a flourishing world for the thousands or
millions of generations that will come after us. Many things we at Kurzgesagt talk about regularly
are discussed here, in much greater detail. Check out What We Owe The Future wherever
you get your books or audiobooks. Did we manage to unlock a new fear for you? Let’s counter existential dread
with appreciation for humanity. Look how far we’ve come as
a species. What we’ve built and where we’ve gathered. Let this new World
Map Poster be a reminder of what we can achieve.
The following submission statement was provided by /u/Emerald-silence:
Submission statement: Kurzgesagt once again tries to give hopium in the form of saying that even if most of us die, we can magically regrow and rebuild. To do that, we just have to “stop using fossil fuels” with no other alternative other than humans are resourceful. We’re so screwed, the comments are even shilling for them. So good luck, I guess.
Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/wpvodp/is_civilization_on_the_brink_of_collapse_why/ikivff7/
lol just leave emergency easy access fossil fuels in reservoirs for after everyone dies bro
Credit where credit is due- it's genuinely impressive that he managed to spin "Human society could collapse back to pre-agricultural times and industrialise again over 12,000 years but only if we immediately stop using easily accessible fossil fuels" as a positive thing.
He doesn't even discuss the likelihood or timeframe of any collapse happening in the video as the title would suggest, he solely discusses the challenges of rebuilding afterwards. I don't think this is a corporate shill moment- I genuinely think he sees that the writing is on the wall but truly thinks that the right thing to do is prevent panic and maybe motivate people to keep going after collapse.
Wow, what a statement. In the past they were always about "changing course" and preventing bad outcomes.
Now we are at the point where they are saying "Collapse wont be that bad, we can rebuild civilization after the death of 99% of people"? This is even more frightening.
The video doesn't even answer the question it poses. Instead of 'is civilisation on the brink of collapse?', it answers 'could civilisation recover to present-day levels of tech after a collapse?'. Not that I'm surprised with the stupidity of Kurzgesagt after their climate doomerism video. Also, I can't believe that they're trying to spin billions of people dying as a positive. Actually, I can believe it.
So basically, humanity could probably recover from a massive collapse, unless climate change makes the earth uninhabitable, in which case humanity is boned?
I know this was supposed to be a hopeful video, but the fact that the main focus was on how we would rebuild from a 99% population loss is not reassuring, especially with the caveat that we need to stop using fossil fuels just to let us survive if or when something else brings civilization down. Really seems to glide past the whole “99% of population dead” thing which was probably intentional.
Submission statement: Kurzgesagt once again tries to give hopium in the form of saying that even if most of us die, we can magically regrow and rebuild. To do that, we just have to “stop using fossil fuels” with no other alternative other than humans are resourceful. We’re so screwed, the comments are even shilling for them. So good luck, I guess.
Billions of us may die, but some of us may live, so don't worry about collapse! Humanity will live on! Yippee!
Also, one empire collapsing (no matter how large, and globally important) is not the same as all of the world collapsing.
Also, as much damage the Roman Empire did to ecosystems, it was nowhere near what we've done. Certainly we have knowledge on our side, but that doesn't help when forests are cut down, wildlife is dead, biodiversity has been ruined, the oceans have been emptied, and in general everything has been poisoned and polluted.
There is some amount of prepping and preparing oneself, one's community and one's country can do, but it may buy a few years, not lifetimes.
Even so, I live in Canada. Let's say we give up fighting climate change and turn out focuses on adapting, damage mitigation and self-sustaining (and holy shit it's going okay!). Well, our neighbours to the south may not be doing the same. They are much larger, considerably more powerful, and if they're struggling to survive while we are living reasonably well, they may want what we have.
Even peaceful countries will turn against their neighbours if they're starving and their neighbours are not.
There is good purpose in looking at things through a historical lense. It helps us prepare, and have an idea of what's coming. But what it doesn't help us with is knowing the exact details. Ancient Rome did not rely on fossil fuels, it did not have an economy based around the internet, it's people were likely much more capable of being self-reliant and working the land if needed. Ancient Rome did not have the risk of nuclear bombs, airplanes, drone strikes, biological warfare, so on and so on. So no Kurz, humanity might not just "get better", and if it does, if we don't face extinction, we definitely will be facing extirpation.
Time to call BadEmpanada again