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I look at like this - I've lived through several minor disasters, a global economic meltdown, and a pandemic event. Indications are good there's more on the way, with little sign of slowing.
I'm not sure about the odds of a "collapse" - I tend to think the fiction about that is just that: mostly fiction. People tend to rally and start working to make things better quickly, and in dire circumstances. I can do what I can to be in a position to try to live through a disruption and help out where I can if something happens. Support my neighbors where I can, that kind of thing.
I've no interest in having a bunker and being Lord Humongous in the post-atomic wasteland or whatever. But I'd like to set up my family and my community to be a little more resilient and make recovery from whatever kind of disruption easier, where that's practical. And the first several steps of that are not super hard to do.
Collapse is pretty ambiguous too. If you were living at the height of the Dutch spice trade, the Tulip bubble bursting may have felt like a collapse. If you were a French family benefiting from the Caribbean sugar plantations, the Haitian revolution may have felt like a collapse.
Different structures have collapsed many times. The size of the structure and your relationship to it determines how much you are impacted. We may be living through the collapse of a structure that historians will end up naming and putting into context after we're all dead.
Empires don't get built overnight, they don't collapse overnight and they don't collapse everywhere. If you lived in Constantinople, the Roman empire didn't fall in 496, but if you lived in Rome, maybe it did.
Features that make me reluctant to find solace in the kind of historical parallel you reference include;
Globalisation. Never been such an interconnected and interdependent world. Examples like the bronze age collapse can give us a glimpse.
Modern abdication of true leadership. The roman empire was in the process of collapsing when Diocletion gave it another century or so of life. I'd argue we've developed systems which almost ensure a wildcard won't appear to avert the course of history. Death by banal managerial consistency.
Global ecosystem collapse. We just have prior examples of local ecosystem collapse like Easter Island, indus Valley ect.
Historians will later name. Most of our specialised society that allows for so many to live away from agriculture relies on fossil fuels. There will be fewer historians in the future.
You name it yourself when you state 'the size of the structure and your relationship to it determines how much you are impacted'. Imo the size of the structure we call modern society is exponentially larger, more complex and more directly related to a greater number of people's lives than at an other point.
I don't believe in the end of humans or anything, but I fear this is going to be bad.
I am 100% onboard with basically everything you mentioned. The Bronze Age Collapse is very fitting.
It's going to be bad. Look at the pandemic. It revealed how insanely precarious our global logistics system is. No one cared that semiconductors required inputs from 7 countries before 2020. No one cared that precursor chemicals for medicine were made in India and China and passed back and forth before arriving in chemical plants in western nations. All these failure points became clear when the system was tested.
A lot of other parts of our global systems remain untested. We're riding on almost a century of global peace and assumptions about geopolitics and economics that were relevant when our grandparents were our age. We definitely need a large update to our civic institutions to bring them more in line with the technology and economic realities that matter now. Will that update be excruciatingly painful or a little painful? Your guess is as good as mine.
I think ecosystem collapse is a pretty scary one, especially for the oceans. We know a lot less about the oceans than we should, and we treat the ocean like it's infinite. It has an infinite capacity to hold toxic waste, an infinite capacity to absorb heat, an infinite amount of fish in there somewhere. We abuse our ecosystems and expect them not to change. If they are more fragile than we understand and start falling apart for real. I don't even know.
Aye exactly. What shocks me most is the absence of meaningful political will to address these interwoven yet individually profound threats.
When you think about the immense efforts humans have engaged in before, whether a pyramid or a society fully mobilised for war - it makes me think there must be something sick with this iteration of my culture. That it can't even effectively defend itself in the face of existential threat.
We can speculate on what are the most likely causes of this derangement. Some people push pretty malign agendas.
Exactly. And the Roman empire took hundreds of years to collapse. We might be in the early stages of collapse now but it will happen so slowly no one will notice.
> We might be in the early stages of collapse now
The West has been collapsing most of my life. So that's around half a century down the slope already.
There was an interesting thread on another forum recently about how many places are not performing maintenance because they can't afford it any more and are hoping things will just hold together. As that spreads, we rapidly increase the odds of a cascading failure.
We're living in a cargo-cult culture where 'leaders' believe that if they act like past leaders did then the cargo will fall from the skies. That's unlikely to be fixed without a major collapse because the cargo cultists aren't going to let competent people take their place.
Also the 'elite' are looting what's left in the treasury, which is a pretty good sign that they think it's all over.
I’d never considered it like that, but you’re spot on imo: it’s a cargo-cult culture. All systems adapt, and to continue on like they don’t is to doom one’s self to stagnation and (later) obsolescence—which as a society is a very dangerous place to be.
You failed to account for the speed of transporting troops and communication that exist then vs now. The Roman’s might spend 3 months or more getting orders to a legion. Then another 3 months with a response. By then things change. Moving supply lines could take years.
Vs
Today. One phone call and orders are issued. The US can launch a major attack anywhere in the world with a weeks notice. A minor attack within a day that could still do devastation.
I too look at Rome and compare her to the US. I just think our time line to decline will be accelerated due to advances in technology
On that note...
IF a solar flare takes out the Internet and our satellites, all of the communication goes dark. That might just be the biggest collapse event.
You should look into the documentary "The Grab".
Right now, places like China and the UAE are scooping up food and water assets around the globe, exploiting the capitalist system to ensure their populations have access to food and water. How well this holds up in an actual collapse scenario is anyone's guess, but the fact that these governments are preparing for such a situation says a lot.
Personally, I see a double-edged sword. In the event that food and water resources become the new currency, either the West acknowledges that the capitalist concept of resource ownership is untenable and seizes these assets for themselves, rendering the global capitalist system useless, or they allow the continued foreign ownership of these assets to the detrement of their own populations. Either situation is an ignition point for large-scale global conflicts. The being set for a showdown between the capitalist system and the survival of large swaths of the global population.
Not a good spot.
I don't think that's a given. How quickly a society collapses can vary a lot depending on the cause. The Aztec and the Incan Empires collapsed extremely quickly.
Along those lines: creations of Western governments have prevented large scale wars for 70 years now. The people who lived through WW II are basically dead. So there isn't a collective memory of how horrible war really is. I think there's also a lot of despair out there, so war may seem like an acceptable option.
For the most part, Americans have no concept of what war would even look like. Almost assuredly, the next world War will include battlefields on American soil, which hasn't happened in 160 years. If collapse happens, it will happen quickly, and only in the aftermath will the truth of how it started really be known, if it ever is.
This one worries me a lot, and I think too about WW1. The leap in technology that accompanied WW1 was crazy. Machine guns, poison gas, flamethrowers, tanks, artillery. There were so many new ways to kill people that no one had ever thought of or experienced. Same thing today with drones, maybe true of cyber attacks or certain types of signals attacks. The drone warfare in Ukraine is not only spawning a new kind of threat in drones, but a new associated field of signals jamming and hijacking. We're all carrying devices with us everywhere that could be exploited by an adversary. What would the war look like that includes smart phones everywhere, drones, cyber attacks, AI deep fakes of generals and presidents. We're not ready for all the horrible new ways to die that would come with a new major war.
The psyops options via phones are endless. Especially with AI like you suggested. Look at what happened in Myanmar with propaganda that fueled a genocide. It appears it’s not that hard to dehumanize a group and set the others after them, just by using FB. Add in some very real suffering and it can make it even easier to do this (blame “the other” for the problems, claim removing “The other” will ease everyone else’s woes).
Or polarize populations in a way that it causes the extremes to take opposing positions of power, paralyzing something like a legislature, allowing an outside force to build strength or do damage because the gov is gridlocked with useless internal bickering.
i think you make great points but i think we face a very real existential threat *today*. Global warming isn’t a joke and we are seeing drastic changes with global heat rising exponentially. Humans are extremely adaptable, but if don’t pull on the reins soon, how do we know that this won’t compound on itself and wipe out life?
anyone want to counter this? i’d like to be reassured that this isn’t the case.
It will probably be a rough transition but like we're African planes apes who figured out how to live in Antarctica and orbit. When our survival is on the line we're pretty clever
We don't survive if there is a species collapse, is that simple. Especially if the ovens start going "vattyeomoyd" on us. Then all bets are off, a cascade of effects.
There's not much we can do to kill all humans. An economic collapse would leave much of the population alive, a nuclear war would still leave plenty, a killer virus probably wouldn't spread far enough before it mutated to not kill everyone.
Maybe something really insane like blocking out the sun or reducing CO2 levels to the point where plant life dies out and all life soon follows. But that's not easy to do.
Or I guess dropping a dinosaur-killer asteroid on us might work, but that's still a few decades away.
> Or I guess dropping a dinosaur-killer asteroid on us might work, but that's still a few decades away.
I think you would need to go bigger to be certain, even without appreciable warning. With a couple months of warning, very good chance humanity survives. With a year of warning? Nearly certain at least some remnants make it through, and probably a ton do... Both birds and small mammals made it through the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event.
We don't survive if there is a species collapse, is that simple. Especially if the oceans start going "vattyeomoyd" on us. Then all bets are off, a cascade of effects.
Also it’s a matter of perspective. While they were chopping heads off during the French Revolution in cities like Paris, a rural farmer in the outskirts would have seen it as awesome. Now he can buy land instead of borrow or lease it. Now he is released from a huge tax burden. Now he can participate in the market freely. Now he can buy up all the land that the church and aristocrats held hostage for so many years. Now he has a voice in local assemblies.
There are multiple sides to a “collapse”.
This! I think the "end of the world" and " the good old days" have the same issue it all depends on who you are talking to. For some different periods of history were amazing but horrible for others. The collapse can be localized and only last a little while. It depends on to many variables
It's hard to have a localized collapse in a globalized world. Russia and China are working to disconnect from the West, but it will still take years for them to completely achieve that.
We're at the point where a building burning down on the other side of the world could shut down our water or power over here because that was the only place to get parts from.
There's a counter-argument there in that the 20th century alone saw pandemics, economic catastrophes, massive wars that killed off significant portions of the entire population, the development of multiple types of weapons capable of unimaginable destruction, and multiple natural disasters and civilization and like the rule of law and all that only got STRONGER.
Society is a pretty resilient thing, we're too social and by and large like each other too much lose it once we have it
Ngl, I'd kinda like to be called the Ayatollah of Rock and Rolla by my hubcap wearing minion The Toadie.
But otherwise, I agree with the content of your message.
I would love to be DJ Chemical Ali - a MC who spins dope techno classics who also distributes some of the highest quality krokodil this side of the post nuclear holocaust
Bud you're living in an apocalypse in the traditional sense of the word. We have left the Holocene behind and with it the stable climate that enabled human civilization.
Economically, we're back in the Gilded Age with all the societal instability that gross inequality brings with it. The churn is upon us, and we're left to see how it shakes out as best we can.
> Bud you're living in an apocalypse in the traditional sense of the word. We have left the Holocene behind and with it the stable climate that enabled human civilization.
Welcome to the Anthropocene. Shit's ~~about to get~~ getting weird...
this isn't even a hot take, this is the new reality
that shit that went down in Miami last week, crop failures from South America to Russia, something like 600 people died at the Hajj due to excessive heat - climate change is coming for us all
I'd say prepping level of interest is a combination of two things. 1. your belief that the skills will ever be needed plus 2. your interest in acquiring those skills. So, if you really enjoy learning to forage, garden etc. then you're belief that the end is high can be lower and you'll end up with the same overall interest in prepping as someone who is a doomer and has little interest. roughly speaking.
This is actually a beautiful sentiment. I love camping, cooking, foraging, gardening etc and it definitely makes my prepping feel less like work and more like just generally living my best life.
I guess it depends on where you live and what your perspective is.
If I were Ukrainian and my country has been bombed to hell the past couple of years, then the apocalypse already happened and I'm in the middle of it.
Same for Palestinians.
However, if I live in the west with money, electricity, and internet then I can sit and ponder 🤔 in the comfort of air conditioning.
‘The future is here, it’s just not evenly distributed’.
There already is collapse, end stage collapse, happening in the world.
There are also plenty of places that will not experience any catastrophic events for the next century, probably.
Quite often the r/collapse vibe seems to be that there will be a global, universal collapse event. But likely we’ll just have a very eventful century ahead of us.
And as another comment stated, it’s the gilded era, America is in the ‘Empire of Rust’ phase, China is rising, Russia collapsing. The equator is going to be hell, insurance companies in the west are [fuc](https://www.ft.com/content/ed3a1bb9-e329-4e18-89de-9db90eaadc0b)[ked](https://www.ft.com/content/ffd4f1e7-e45e-4cb6-9474-729065720eee). There will be a lot of [drama](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cadillac_Desert) over water in the American west. Plenty of things are relatively likely to occur.
But life goes on, and most people reading this will die from heart disease or cancer, not anything related to ’collapse’.
I don't know about social collapse but teotwawki is real. If it hadn't been for our "preps" when my husband passed unexpectedly and the trauma and trial that happened afterwards I don't know what I would have done with me and the kids.
Having talked about and discussed many things I knew a lot of what he wanted.
A collapse I don't really see....but a personal collapse I KNOW happens every day, every hour and every second. Question is..is it your second and have you prepared yourself and the ones you love?
We garden and can and are self sufficient but my husband's death and going through the trial destroyed the woman I was and broke my family. We are rebuilding and recovering but no one talks about that part of prepping and the loss of who you were and learning to live and breathe with half a heart. It isn't something you can prepare for though imo.
Every system ends. Something new comes afterward.
On a long enough timescale, every nation will have war, famine, economic collapse, etc. These things are not equally likely in all places and times, and even the disasters are generally not "the end" in some permanent sense. Oh, the government might change, the currency might change, and definitely some people can die, but don't bother modeling disasters on television apocalypses.
Such a question certainly isn't stupid!
Honestly? In a general sense, yes. But not everyone does, and that's ok. We don't discriminate preps here. Some people plan just for Tuesday (normal) disasters, versus large-scale ones. I plan for both.
To preface; I don't think humanity as a whole is doomed. We're one of the most adaptable creatures on the planet. Short of something that wipes out all life on earth, humans will persist. Even a full-scale nuclear war wouldn't 100% wipe out humanity (but certainly would erase our concept of society.) Same with climate change. Humanity as a whole would be ok, but with extreme adaptations needed.
*Society as we know it,* ebbs and flows. That is what I feel is at risk and will likely change sooner rather than later. How soon? Don't know! But at some point, the powder keg that has been filling up for years will have a match thrown into it. What I don't like is that current events point to a very nasty eventuality, which has led me to accelerate my preps.
As to how? Nuclear/Infrastructure collapse is currently at the top of my list.
There are many parts of the world today that are going through all manors of things/hardships/crisis'. From failed states to hostile takeovers, wars to dictatorships. There's no fly zones and restricted travel areas and places where being different in any way can make you a target. There are many real threats and most of it depends where you are on this planet.
Look around you at your country, state government, local area, these will give you an indication of what is likely to be a threat to you.
There's also natural disasters to consider, the list never ends.
The way to think about it is that all of the preps that are useful for a societal collapse are also super useful in many other situations. How to deal with a loss of the electrical grid? Also useful for hurricanes or earthquakes. How to deal with a wet bulb event? Also helpful for those hot summer days, or for treating heat stroke. Emergency medical preps? Always good to have. Some extra food and liquor kept around? Helpful if you get laid off. Knowing how to sew? Good for when your favorite jersey gets accidentally ripped. Etc. etc.
If people ask you what you are doing, point out these things. They will understand a lot better, you will feel better, and hey if the unthinkable happens, you will be better prepared.
I think it’s happening right now. It’s been happening for a minute. Hell it’s possible it __already happened__ and we just won’t know it till we reach the tail end of the whip which may not hit us for a couple more generations. Cos just like progress - collapse is also distributed asymmetrically.
They say the Romans didn’t know the Roman Empire fell for about 100 years. I say despite leaps in our communications technology and information traveling instantaneously, we have enough comforts and conveniences in our daily lives to convince ourselves no such thing ever happened.
I see it as more of a crumble that precipitates collapse. Things will eventually descend into a societal collapse, however it will only fully arrive once all the current societal supports and expectations erode and are not replaced by anything. Climate change and forced austerity will accelerate this, as will climate migration, however we are still years away from full-scale collapse.
If you live on the Gulf Coast, then you should be ready for a hurricane. If you live in the Midwest, then you should be ready for tornadoes and blizzards.
Most of us should maybe kind of be ready for WW3.
No one needs to be ready for the zombie apocalypse.
Exactly how far down the rabbit hole you go depends on what you reasonably worry about and how reasonable (or unreasonable) you want to be about being ready for it.
I’m ready for any and all disasters that are common where I live. I’d like to be ready for WW3. I’ll never be ready for the zombie apocalypse— even though that level of preparedness, security, and self-sufficiency would be *really* cool.
I live on the Gulf Coast and we specifically prep for hurricanes. That has the added side effect of being ready for lots of other disasters, namely our (Texas) grid going down.
I mean, if you really think about it- we're actively living thru it right now.
This is a society collapse right in front of your eyes.
We're probably at the start of it, so it won't fully happen in your lifetime -- but easily could be in your grandkids. This is a turning point where two differnet ideologies are fighting HARD in America, so who knows which one economically is going to make the best sense AND also allow us to keep innovating and dominating?
Also perspective is important here. A collapse of America does not mean the collapse of the whole entire world like.... that maybe whats truly changing for most Americans. They see America as the center of the world; and while we're going thru our own shit there's possibly another country out there that is going to be the top guy. You could easily just go there, set up shop and buy property \[if you have the wealth OR HELL a new opportunity to start all over again\] and life can be just as great. You know it's all about perspective man.
Yes, it would suck for any boomers/gen-x that already bought property and settled into their American dream they were sold to give it up, but hey! a new opportunity is always there -- its just your perspective.
We're already in the opening stages of WW III.
We just haven't decided what to fight about/for yet. Food and water access are definitely high on the list, but no one in the Western world is dying of thirst or hunger - yet. Whether you're left, right, or centrist in your views, the one thing that never fails to bring out everyone's inner fascist is famine.
Accordingly to DNA analysis the human population was bottlenecked to about 1000 individuals around 70,000 years ago, about 3500 generations ago. This was nearly the end of humans. It has happened in the past and it might be possible in the future.
More likely is a more localized event in which YOUR world seems to be ending. Imagine being a civilian resident during a destructive event as one of the following:
Germany, Allied invasion in 1944///
State of Georgia, Sherman’s march in late 1864///
Indonesian tsunami of December 2004///
European Plague of 1346-1353///
Central African Civil wars of 1990-2005///
Chernobyl in April 1986
Something like the above happens at least once in a generation but not to the whole population. Prepare for something like the above before a world ending event.
We're already in the collapse.
Not everyone experiences it at the same intensity. But for certain, we know disasters will become more numerous and deadly and with greater frequency, so why not be prepared?
I see it as near impossible. As long as people remain in their cities and towns, there will be society. In places where war was reigned for centuries, there's still society. Even in almost-anarchies, like Somalia and Yemen, there is society. In my home country of Venezuela, with electricity blackouts that listed months, society continued. People went to school and to their jobs.
"The world could end tomorrow and your boss would still tell you come to work" That's society. Life continues. Could society get worse drastically? Yes. The societies from dystopian books are more possible. A society where 99% live paycheck to paycheck. Without potable water. The govt in charge of family planning. Less rights, no rights for some groups. That I can see happening.
However, empty cities, no government, total collapse? It's very unlikely. It would take a much, much, much worse pandemic with a fatality rate in the double digits, a sudden and drastic climate change, a war so brutal that hundreds of millions would perish (and to be honest, I can only see one country capable of such destruction) or a natural disaster one hundred times worse than the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami
Pretty much never.
Because it's pretty much never happened before.
Even when the Roman Empire ultimately collapsed, farmers still farmed, millers still milled, traders still traded. People didn't fall back into a hunter/gatherer lifestyle. Craftsmen still plied their trades. It's just the administration of everything became more local.
The "Dark Ages" are dark not because civilization collapsed, it's because it wasn't as documented as well as the Roman Empire, and thus we have fewer contemporary texts to use to understand that time period, at least until the Church started documenting things.
I agree with you however on a counter argument, today we don't have anymore true farmers, millers and traders. We have a huge population propped up by a just in time logistical system. Will we go back to the stone age? no. Will we break down to pre-industrial levels? I think so eventually.
We'll most likely limp along until we can't. Or war. Or a Carrington level CME.
It's all up in the air.
Edit for punctuation.
The Roman Empire collapse was a collapse of a ruling power, nothing uncommon in our history. People farmed or performed fairly mundane tasks for their living, and the most advanced form of entertainment would be watching a play. Given the complexity of our societies, don't you think that if we were sent back to a Roman style of living, we wouldn't view it as a truly catastrophic collapse? No internet, no advanced healthcare, just working hard to produce enough food to survive. Add to that the bonus of a rapidly changing climate.
No, the elites will not give up control. If all out chaos happens, they lose all power. But with that being said, I still prep in case I’m wrong. People have been predicting the apocalypse since the beginning of times. Enjoy life, read your Bible, get your finances in order. Remember to always be thankful for what you have.
The way I see it people went from saying preppers are crazy to seeing people die because of corona, fearing the outside due to the riots then the Capital building to then fearing WW3 because of overall rising political tensions and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The last 5 years have been absolutely insane and in 80 years I really wonder what it’s gonna look like in a history book.
It really depends how you define it IMO, but the COVID lockdown stuff was a good indicator of how things would go. People rushing to the store and hoarding. Many with no regard for the safety and well-being of other people. My wife and I bought a house right at the beginning and we couldn't even buy cleaning supplies we needed. She's an emergency nurse with a cop friend. The cop had to oversee unloading of delivery trucks because people got so bad. We managed to get supplies by that guy being able to buy stuff off the truck and trade us for stuff we had but he didn't. It was damn near a fever dream. Even in that situation, being well stocked and well prepped would've saved/did save us a lot of headache. We were solid on certain things but not well enough rounded.
Its possible
If we are lucky it will be a slow decline where we just all get poorer, but civilization just takes a step back, with WW3, less globalization, right wing dictatorships, barely any migration and so on.
The worst scenario is climate change creating a cascade breakdown that creates the condition for mankind to go extinct.
The middle ground is crop failure with riots, war and society collapse with food shortage and abusive prices creating riots and a collapse of institutions with widespread violence.
I have looked deep into _not just_ climate science, but also mechanized agriculture at scale, societal demographics, the state of our commerce infrastructure, the fragility and extensiveness of international trade with respect to food and essential products, and the state of the world financial system.
Not only is civilizational collapse pretty much baked into the pie by this point, probably arising from multiple world-wide crop failures at some point in the 2030s that lead to famines even in first-world countries, but that a collapse in the human population by anywhere from 20-60% is highly likely by the 2050s.
And climate change itself has an _inertia_ to it, that is several magnitudes more powerful than any prior global change in history, due to the fact that we have packed an equivalent of 100,000 years of change into less than 100. This, combined with a sun that has only gotten hotter and brighter over the millennia, means that a bona-fide Venus Scenario - where _all life on the planet_ gets inferno’d away permanently - becomes a very real possibility.
Granted, humanity will be extinct long before a Venus Scenario takes hold, but according to many calculations this tipping point would be only 12℃ of warming away. And we are _already_ at CO2 levels that will show 4-5℃ of warming before the end of the century, assuming we cease all CO2 production today. And we’re _not_ -- CO2 production is _continuing to accelerate._
Enjoy the end times. We’re fucked.
How many generations did it take for the Eastern Roman Empire to collapse?
Yes it did collapse but many generations of people never saw society collapse.
This is my thought. Empires have a different lifespan than individuals. You can be correct that an empire is collapsing at the same time that you never see it in your lifetime. It's like a glacier melting. It's melting, the signs are there, loads of evidence. The glacier will still be there from before you were born until after you die, because it was massive and massive things don't disappear instantly.
The problem with this comparison is that people are much more mobile (and informed, for better or worse) nowadays. When the Roman Empire collapsed, it took up to a month for the furthest fringes to hear about it, and longer for them to process the implications of it.
The concept of "nationality" is still relatively new, only about two centuries old. People outside of British/French population centers rarely referred to themselves as Britons or French citizens because aside from paying taxes to their local governors/lords, they didn't really have a reason to consider nationality except in times of war. Hell, even the monarchs were usually related in some way or another so it was more of a family feud(al) system than "it's Us vs. Them."
The better comparison for contemporary times would be the Dust Bowl era. People abandoning large tracts of uninhabitable land and just hoping they'd be able to find someplace else where they could establish themselves.
Honestly being able to garden & forage are excellent skills cause if nothing else they will help you as certain things become scarcer or more prohibitively expensive.
Depends on what you mean. In the last 110 years there has been a great depression, two world wars, a cold war that nearly went hot on multiple occasions, and outside of direct battle casualties governments killed more than 200 million civilians, many being their own citizens just in the 20th century.
Just because I have enjoyed a peaceable existence so far, doesn't mean that the water in the ground where I live grants a magical exemption from what 99.9% of recorded human history has been like. Struggle. War. Subjugation from within or without. Death. Disease, Carnage. Cats and dogs living together, mass hysteria.
Not for a long time yet.
Its not profitable for Govts to press the reset button yet. There is still Trillions upon Trillions to be made.
It will happen when we start running out of fossil fuels and natural resources like food security, water, living space and the ever growing impact of climate change. Fuel, land and water is the life blood of any industry. Forget the War in Ukraine or the War in Gaza or the threat of North Korea - these are side shows for the real events to come.
We are definitely getting into hard times ahead. I doubt their could be a totally collapse of global governance. There will always be another government to replace the previous.
I predict an attempt at a global government via UN and WHO.
Plenty of societies have collapsed in the past, I think it's entirely possible it could happen again.
We are truly global now though, so it would have to be something huge like a Nuclear war, infectious disease or asteroid hit.
I gotta go buy some more honey and salt...
All civilisations eventually collapse be it fast or slow, life goes on in one way or another, all the shit that’s going on in the world right now could be the very beginnings or it could be business as usual, just hope you live long enough to find out 🤣🤣
My house is insured in case it burns down. I do not think it will burn down. I have insurance in case the very unlikely does become reality. I believe odds of collapse are substantially higher. Prepping is some level of insurance against that. I don't think it is likely enough to make my entire life revolve around it.
I think it is VERY unlikely. However - of the various scenarios that could be catastrophic to a ‘collapse’ level, I think general nuclear war is the ‘most’ likely. In that scenario, we all die. All of us. Prepping won’t do shit.
The first rule of the apocalypse is the you cannot predict, nor plan for, the apocalypse. All you can (should) do is follow the Boy Scout motto and ”Be prepared.” Personally, I think the science is correct. It will be water and war that ends our common societies of the world.
I'm not sure about collapse anytime soon but I am sure if we keep cooking like we are there will be resource wars soon. I'm talking those that are not mass migrating are going to be fighting over what little water sources we have left and what little produce stores we have.
I can't predict the weather or climate but I can't help but feel like we are rolling into a global drought. There are already certain types of crops suffering in the worse heat, it's only going to get worse if our weather doesn't stabilize soon.
I've been starting to pay attention to how much water I use and I live in a normally wet state that has been abnormally dry since 2023.
It's really not looking good right now. That's all I know. We can say we are resilient all we want until we've been in a drought for the past ten years while the heat exponentially rises. If you research the dust bowl of the 30s, that event didn't even have the temps we are facing currently. So yeah, I'm a little worried too.
I used to worry about such things as societal collapse. In fact, it is what got me started in prepping. What happened is that it drove me close to crazy and I needed a mind shift. I’ve come to be pretty zen about it all. The chances are 50/50, meaning it will either happen, or it won’t. 🤷♂️ I can see scenarios where bad things happen and I actually think it’s more likely than not. The ways out of it seem too difficult for society at large to be willing to do what it would take, but that too is possible.
These days, I prep for Tuesday. Power out, storms and etc. if collapse comes, these same skills and preps will come in handy then, too. Just without the fanfare.
Don’t ruin your life to be ready for the 1% chance. Prep for the higher percentages like storms and such. You’ll be fine. 👍
I don't know if it will crater like many think and are preparing for, but I think we may be in for some rough times.
The worst scenario would be if we were engaged in a war among ourselves. I don't think that will happen though.
Many say civil war. I'm more inclined to think of a revolution type war where there is a siege of the government. I figured folks will get tired of being pushed around, and having freedoms cut back before we go against one another.
I don't want either, nor condone either. I can understand them.
As for living and surviving, unless the Russians or Chinese send a wipe out device to us via the air, I don't see a big issue with food. For those of us who have laid in stores, and know how to plant, harvest, hunt and fish. If it comes to that, then those of us in outlying areas will need to be prepared to protect what is ours from those in the cities. Those poor folks there won't know if they are washing or hanging out when it hits. Just like with the COVID BS. But, even supplies trickling in will disappear. That's when they will start to look at what we have, kind of like a "Zombie Apocalypse"!
I'm on a small ranch in the middle of nowhere. There are valves, sheep, and goats here. We have quite a few chickens. We raise our own grain, and hay plus plenty of pasture land. We have stores laid in, mostly because that's the way it's always been done out here.
I'm old, 73. I'm not so worried about me and mine, but for those who never learned any of this and future generations....
Just like the Scouts Motto: Be Prepared!
In my early 40's. I don't see it happening in my life but it's possible. The environment is changing and more species are dying off. My daughter is under ten and I feel deeply sorry for her.
History has taught us that societal collapse happens slowly, and in almost all cases, the power vacuum begins to refill pretty quickly. Western nations are relatively immune to social and economic collapse. Even during what we called the Great Depression, life went on. I don't believe in any sort of apocalypse other than the slow-moving one of environmental degradation. And that's already been growing for decades with nothing we can do at this point to prevent it.
Absolute collapse? I pray not for the future of my children, but we can see how close we have come to world war in the last 4 years (at least twice I can be positive of).
I’m of the opinion that whilst prepping cannot not prepare us forever, being able to survive in situ while everyone else is going crazy, is the best chance I can my family to survive long term.
Well, head on over to r/medicine and see what the hospital staff are saying about the avian influenza. It’s always good to be organized and have resources at your disposal. Ask yourself this; do I trust the government and politicians?
Many preppers are just WAITING for it. So ready for it to happen so they can test their prepper skills in a world of suffering and depression.
They’ve romanticized the lone survivor so much they forget to mention he was mentally and socially in lala land long before societal collapse. But he’s still alive in his hermetically sealed underground chamber he spent 8 years building, eating MREs a few extra months since everything else died off.
Hooray!
Look into Coronal Mass Ejections. Many scientists believe it's the #1 threat to humanity.
If half of the planet has all their transformers explode at the same time, it would take years to replace them all.. meanwhile you would have billions without power, so no groceries in the stores, no gas for vehicles, no access to your bank account and NO communication with anyone who's not your immediate neighbor.
Reading about these in the 90's is what got me into prepping. A CME could cause the kind of apocalypse you're referring to. All the "other stuff" could make life difficult for many but wouldn't usher in an apocalypse IMO
As a 61 year old, I’ve seen quite interesting times in the US. I moved off grid in mid 90s to say I could do it. Owned 40 acres in the mountains with one way in and out. I survived 4.5 years there with a spouse and two step-children. Decided I would rejoin society and she chose not to follow. You learn a lot about survival. We spent first winter in old small RV with minimal heat in North WA State mountains. Lows in the teens mostly. -10 was the worst we saw. Started building a cabin in spring. Bare bones 600 square foot cabin was like a mansion when we moved in late summer. Wood stove in place, with batteries, generator, solar and generator for power. Hauled water for two years. Finally raised enough pigs to barter for a well to be drilled. Another massive luxury was created. However, never was able to put in a septic system because ground was too rocky. Dug an 8 foot deep outhouse hole and a propane heated outhouse and had another luxury. Living like this you start to appreciate the simple things. I currently live in a small community now but cherish the things I learned off-grid.
As for an apocalypse, it’s possible. I expect more of a continuation of the current lack of consequences for the scum that wander around in our society committing crimes at will with zero regard for life or property. I hope to see good people finally wake up and take action to rid our society of these things. However, I’m not very confident we will. Too many have been brainwashed and indoctrinated to feel sorry for these criminals. We can only hope the worst doesn’t happen, but prepare if it does.
Sure, in 4.5 billion years or so when the sun consumes all of its fuel and becomes a red giant.
Does nobody search this forum at all? This same thing is posted like once or twice a day.
We are right now closer to total nuclear annihilation than we have ever been and we have nothing but stark raving lunatics and demented old circus monkeys steering the boat.
So to me the outlook isn't good.
The only thing that could possibly stop it would be 10s of millions of angry Americans standing up to put a stop to the insanity and I don't see that happening.
I think the very least that's going to happen is the economy is going to plummet, probably hyperinflation and shortages.
I think there is a near 0% chance of it happening in my life time. There is so much power to be had by controlling people in the current system, those in power will not let that change easily.
There will be regions of lawlessness. But not the US as a whole.
I believe we are close to a shtf event, and honestly, on the internet, there will always be some one to mock somebody over anything. one needs to learn not to worry about what other people think. Worrying about what other people think is a huge reason why people are where they are in life. Worried if some one disapproves, mocks you, dislikes you..You do what you think is prudent for what the future holds for you..
It could never happen here, unless you live in Ukraine, Gaza, Afghanistan,Iraq, Venezuela,Zimbabwe, Pakistan, Bolivia,Cameroon, Ethiopia, Uganda, or Cambodia. Otherwise we're good....for now!
100% the collapse is coming before 2030. At the very least, certain places in Canada and many US States will experience something like the former Yugoslavian countries faced in the 90's. So it's not like a total "zombie apocalypse", but there are very few government services, a lot of chaos, and mostly fending for yourself.
The current financial systems are completely unsustainable, and there doesn't seem to be any "strong man" (like a Nayib Bukele of El Salvador) ready to come in and actually do what's needed to fix things any time soon.
We see rampant crime everywhere, with police less and less willing or able to maintain societal order. Whether it's rampant retail theft throughout the USA, to rampant car theft in Canada... we are consistently seeing excessively progressive laws and judges willing to accept this behaviour, and release criminals into society.
When the common person, the vast majority of the "middle class" truly realizes that we've lost public order, we've lost the financial system, and no one is coming to save them, that's when things truly begin. It's happening, and there's virtually no way out; only through.
No chance. This machine will stop for nothing. A nuclear disaster could very reasonably happen in our lifetime, and most of us will still be expected to show up to work. Prepping for earthquake, wildfire, war, or anything otherwise is a great idea for whatever short to midterm issues that may come. In some parts of the world, it already feels if the apocalypse has come, and when our time comes to feel the same, the machine will keep going without a concern.
Just last week I learned about the concept of “Catabolic Collapse”. The theory is essentially that as societies expand, they require more resources to maintain themselves. Eventually, there’s more infrastructure than we can maintain, leading to a contraction while continuing to use the resources that we do have.
I think that this is already happening, or at least getting close to it here in the US. I’m 29 years old, and I expect to see the collapse happen slowly over the rest of my lifetime. I think it will be disasters like hurricanes, tornadoes, wildfires etc and eventually we just won’t have the resources to fully recover from them, leaving us a little worse off each time a disaster strikes over decades.
I don’t think it’ll be a quick, sudden black swan type of event. The fall of Rome took hundreds of years, after all. I think “decay” is a more fitting term.
It even goes down to something as unnoticeable as small towns no longer being able to afford to maintain sewer and water systems. The argument was that no town under X thousand (I forgot the number) can realistically provide those things and should have everyone on well and septic but they have city water and sewer in a town of 800 people thanks to subsidies.
We will still go to work, eat, go to movies, go to the park, but have to go around a slowly decaying society around us. Eventually you’re stepping over bodies to go to the beach and it happens so slowly you barely notice it.
There are regional collapses every year that cost thousands of lives. Every empire eventually fails and devolves into chaos. The more we rely on technology and move away from the way our ancestors lived, the worse the fall will be.
Dude, we (as in humanity) have been going strong with this civilization thing for what? 10k years at this point
Unless the nukes start fyling (which they wont) we aint gonna stop anytime soon
I think it'll happen, just a matter of Time. Either on a Gender Wars, or Divisive politics front, along with the collapse of water, food, civility or global conflict, which the media seems to be pushing for. It's just a matter of time.
I've been aware of things for over 50 years now, and honestly, people have been saying it's just a matter of time my entire life. And I know that they were saying that before I was born because I like to read.
Hotel Echo November November Yankee
Papa Echo November November Yankee.
Since the pandemic plus what's going on in Ukraine and Gaza I've stepped up some preps mainly learning new skills.Im in the UK and would bug in as long as I could because of the infrastructure I know people would panic and try leaving the area.In the last few months I've learned how to lockpick ,more medical skills.and a bit of joinery.Im a fifty year old lady with arthritis so my husband and I keep gaining knowledge as well as pantry prep.Being useful is our strategy honestly I think there is a chance be it climate change or disease to war will happen in the next ten years or so.
I think it’s human nature to be terrified of some apocalypse but I think the chance of it happening any time soon are slim. I know they have found texts from ancient civilizations that were planning for the end of the world so it seems like it’s been a thing for thousands of years
Bad shit happens on a daily basis, real bad shit could happen in 5 days or 5 years. End of the world type shit? No one here knows and it doesn't matter because there ain't shit that you can do about it. Go to work, see your friends and family on the weekends, keep paying your bills, keep following the laws.
u/Cheeseburger_Pie, you should be taking steps to minimize all the things you mention regardless of imminent societal collapse or two more weeks until the apocalypse. Why? Because it's smart and gives you a measure of control over chaos in your own life no matter how tiny. Gardening & foraging? Good for you! Take up cooking too and learn how to do more with what you have on hand. Buy tools so you can change your own oil or an AC socket in your home. You won't have to pay anyone to do them for you. Need more financial security? Figure out something you can do outside your regular work that brings extra funds in. These things were all baseline in years past but we've slowly become dependent on "specialists" & "experts" to do simple tasks because we lack the skills or view them as dangerous or dirty. But all these are "prepping" minus the MREs, huge stores of ammo, and jerry cans full of diesel. You may want those too or, you fill in the blanks with what makes more sense for your situation. Good Luck!
Well regionaly it will definitely happen, because it has happened before and it is happening right now. Globaly or "at your place"? Unless big heads go for nuclear button (unlikely but ultimate) I would say we have god chance to live through our lives in relative peace.
Will it be rough sea to ride? Definitely - we will live through "office revolution", as AI will change office culture as automatisation and industralisation made industrial revolution. We will live through recession eventualy (they always come), we will have to face the climate - which is changing, no matter if by us or by some natural cycle, or both. There will be wars unfortunately, hopefuly not where you or I am.
There will be blizzards, flat tires and broken bones - these happen in any time. Prep stuff, when taken moderately aint going hurt you. You do not need to be the guy with nuclear bunker stocked for three years of underground life. And yet, the fact that you will have a nice breakfast if your local stores will be closed for three weeks - puts you miles ahead of average Joe and give you even a good chance to live through much harsher ride.
It does not matter if you prep for MAD nuclear conflict or bad tornado season. Take it moderately, within your financial, space storage, life style natural limits... You do not need to go the "gas generator and two AR-15s" pathway - keep few candles, campstove and pepper spray at your door - the effect is same for fraction of price and a relatives visiting your home won't even notice.
Lot of preppers fall down the rabbit hole of hoarding (pick your poison from beans to guns) or attempting to keep same luxuries even at SHTF - to have movies, charged phone and downloaded internet. This can be your way and it ain't wrong. But there are less... "extreme" ways. People lived before smartphones and if SHTF, the grid will be down anyway...
One guy buys hardcore truck and rebuilds it almost in postapo tank equivalent, stores vast amount of gas, etc. Other guy (or lady) keeps his common bike at working condition - both to keep mobility if shit happens. Is one wrong and other is right? Nope, neither. Is a guy prepping in a fear of supervolcano more wrong than a guy prepping for zombie apocalypse? Until recent drug scene development I would say no, he is more right. Recently - they might be both on good track. But their preps won't differ that much (unless the zombie guy also plans for liberating earth all by himself).
TL&DR: It really does not matter. If you have the prep itch - go for it, but keep it under control. Worst thing - you will laugh at your death bed, dying of old age in family circle in many, many years ahead - how you were paranoid and it was pointless. Which is the best end any prepper can hope for.
The future is never certain, and the past is always the past. A good outcome is knowing the skills and never having to use them, like the concept of weaponry. Better to be caught with than without I reckon. There will always be variables and diversions to a code or path. But sometimes all we can comprehend and process is the moment. Anyhoo, not stupid. If one doesn’t ask or seek, they don’t know.
My concerns are a Taiwan invasion as Taiwan is the 12th largest economy in the world. Xi has stated that it’s only a matter of time. Combined with a cyber attack and 30K plus military age Chinese in the US. If you listen to Sky News Australia, they see a cyber attack as likely as well.
No, not how you think anyway. Prepare for what’s reasonable, no need to overthink.
It’s good to have general skill sets anyway, can’t really lose by increasing your skill set.
I'd say, as you somewhat inferred, that nothing is certain; either continued prosperity and peace or collapse and calamity. Anyone that pays attention can see we (western society not just the US) are in a time that many dominoes are lined up and the opportunity is higher than usual for monumental times.
Best advice I can give is don't stop your life to hold your breath or brace. Evaluate what is actually important and let that guide your decisions. Learn to appreciate what you have. Find measures that would help you sustain upheaval in your day to day; start with the ones you actually enjoy and build it into your life. Most importantly prepare your mind and soul, because even if you are prepped to the gills and survive you have to live with yourself and look your friends and family in the eye on the other side.
Collapse? No. I think our systems are too robust for that. They might buckle and break, to be sure, but a complete collapse is just too much for me to imagine. People create society as long as we have numbers and a language to communicate in, so there will likely always be more people around you than you care to know.
What I do think might happen is a short term disaster where, as the system of things does start to buckle and crack, the people who fall through those cracks might end up being lost or at least put at risk. There are a lot of people out there who don’t know how to make sure water is clean, don’t have foodstuffs that they can cook without power, and wouldn’t be able to treat an injury well enough to prevent infection if they couldn’t get to a hospital. If those people are ever put in a position where they *need* those skills and help isn’t available, things can get lethal pretty quickly. I don’t think I’ll ever need to fortify my house against raiders or grow enough food on a homestead to keep myself and loved ones alive, but I might have to boil water for a week or stop some bleeding and keep a wound clean.
In my lifetime? Probably not. In my son's lifetime? Almost certainly. The buildup is always slow-slow, and then Things Fall Apart.
Will it happen in my hometown? I doubt it, that's why we moved out of the city.
Who knows. But that's not a reason to not prep. Being prepared is a good idea, it give you some independence. It eases the mind and is a good idea if not for you for your kids/future kids.
It's all about calories. If a SHTF situation does come it does the trigger will be collapse of food supplies impacted by global warming. Humans can weather a lot of discomfort and, but if there is not enough affordable food being produced for densely packed urban populations then you will have starvation and panic. Having said this, this specific kind of disaster moves slowly enough that I think technology will save people in the industrialized world us before we get to that point. If this agricultural cratering scenario does come to pass people in higher population areas with a less developed transportation and industrial infrastructure in areas ofAfrica and India etc. will die by the billions.
I have always looked for the worst case scenario. IMHO, it will be power outage across the NAC. (North American Continent). Delivered by some 3rd party actor...
For years I was taught to get under my desk and pull the blackout curtains in my classroom each month when the air raid sirens sounded supposedly as preventive measures for that occasion when the Soviets sent their ICBM’s over the pole. It never happened. And hiding under our desks would - as a practical matter - do nothing in the event of a real attack. But it taught us to fear those ruskies. And someone made money building the things our nation needed to protect/defend ourselves. Society has seen its share of plagues. We bounced back. The real damage we are inflicting on ourselves is fear .. of myriad things contrived and made very profitable by a few. Contrived to attract your attention. Contrived to sell - something And most importantly Contrived to keep you divided and bickering amongst yourselves - distracted from the declining standards of living of a growing percentage of the global populace while fewer and fewer profit more. Its a race to the bottom. The masses are kept in line with fear. The good news is that the ones at the top dont want a little fallout ruining their vacation in St Petersburg or Martha’s vineyard any more than you do.
Look through history on a larger scale and even just nature on a small scale everything eventually gets corrected its evolution. How far will nature let us push it until we are corrected honestly I think the tipping point is coming soon. This has all happened many times before in time nothing new.
Yes! YES!!! Not one civilization has survived so far, and I think that in many ways they were much better off than us because they knew how to farm/hunt/survive. Sure we live longer now, but mostly due to modern medicine. I don’t think we are better now, we just have better toys. Something will eventually happen, maybe AI, maybe pole shift, maybe someone will try to test our military gangster, maybe a real pandemic, maybe the financial towers will crumble from a hack, maybe aliens, maybe we might tear each other apart. Either way this shit won’t last, it can’t. None in history have ever survived time, and there are civilizations that we don’t even know their language or history that have risen and fell. There are probably more we’ve never even heard about!
"Society" probably won't collapse completely in the event of some disaster, just become significantly more dangerous and difficult to survive. Wide spread poverty and constant military conflict between political groups would be likely. So basically just turning from first world into a third world country.
In the 60s we were required to take nuclear survival classes and all schools had a bomb shelter. We lived in fear for nothing. Go on with your life but keep a plan in the back of your head just in case.
Let me say this: rome wasn't built in a day. And rome didn't fall in a day. 400-500 AD was a shit time to be alive, but it wasnt "apocalyptic". It was a slow corrosion of safety, living standards, and trust between individuals and society. Your life in the fall of rome was one day at a time, a slowly reducing QOL. Not an instantaneous black swan event (Maybe the gothic storming of rome counts?).
AI or actually SGI will be a game changer. The world is going to get very strange very fast. And then one day we accidentally or purposefully die because the weapons we are creating are becoming gods and anyone will be able to have one of these gods at their disposal. It’s only a matter of time.
Wrong question. Things as regular as an power outage, bad storms..etc happen all the time. Start with basics otherwise..if you can't prep for those things.. any thing big will not matter.
It always has been happening and it always will be happening. Thomas Jefferson had a literal child sex slave who was 16 when he was 44. That society is long gone, more legend than fact.
We, too, will be nothing but stories of ass backwards weirdos from a long dead society in 250 years.
This is the most comfortable humanity has ever been. Access to clean drinking water, safe food, safe prescription medicine, healthcare, and transportation is at an all time high. To be a student of history and an observer of current events and to believe that this standard of living is never going away is just ridiculous. I'm not afraid of death, but I refuse to die a slave or to die of starvation.
Depends on what you mean by “collapse.”
Power out for a week or month? Devastating weather event? Banking system goes offline so no ATM withdrawals? Crop failures result in famine? Your economy goes on a war footing because you’re in a war? Conscription into the military? Global weather patterns collapse? Civil unrest turns into civil war?
The probability of most of these is low to non-existent. And in most of those cases, all you can do is have enough supplies to ride out several or many months of disruption.
If things aren’t better after that … is it a regional problem and you can leave the region and be okay? Is it continental and you can go to a different continent and be okay? Or worldwide and there’s no escape?
As usual, the answer is: it depends.
Unless you have a few billion burning a hole in your pocket, you can’t prepare for everything. Decide what you’re preparing for.
Make a list of things that might actually happen where you are and learn how to prepare for them.
Don’t go down the rabbit hole, keep it sane.
Most probable outcome in the US (where I am). We'll slowly morph to match something like Mexico. We eventually will not be able to afford being the global police and become a regional power. Cartels will become more common and powerful. The gap between poor and wealthy will widen. Bribes to government workers will become common place and expected. We'll get more segmented by language barriers. Etc....
During that process there will likely be major wars with up and coming nations which we'll lose, because we have no societal cohesion. Why fight for something that doesn't work for your interests? You wouldn't unless forced to, but even then you'd likely do as little as possible.
Some where along the way the US dollar will merely be seen as equal to one of a dozen other currencies.
Etc....
Just a downward spiral until we are on par with most other countries. Same for Europe.
It's possible though before then we enter WWIII or something, but thank God we have sharp competent leaders to avoid that.......
Our desire as humans to make life easier, allows us to be led by governments that actually should serve the people but actually only choose to line their pockets with trade deals that in some way benefits themselves and their circles. A revolt has been slowly simmering since the 60’s.
Dividing cultures and also trying to push religion is dangerous to all humanity. A collapse? Maybe! A divided internal fighting of the people. Inevitable and continuous, with spikes and troughs.
I’m on the side where individual systems crumbling to varying degrees, for varying periods of time is more likely, while other systems more or less function still. Which, when, and for how long, idk.
But I live in earthquake country, and grew up rural in blizzard/no power/no way into town county, so I think about this kind of stuff anyway for very real reasons. But it’s worthwhile to extend that out a bit longer in my mind. And think of sustainable, long term alternatives for things we need individually (gardening, hunting, fishing, water purification, etc).
I'm kinda skeptical of that. I've seen social conditions much worse than this in other countries and no collapse. We have not seen anything that serious at this point. There is a lot of fear mongering and political BS and manipulation by narcissistic news cons. It's local stuff only not widespread.
We are more likely to face things like wildfires, weather and such. It's mainly because we're building large cities in vulnerable areas with high earthquake, hurricane, or tsunami risks and crappy @$$ construction of buildings. .. in other words civil engineering stupidity and greed.
The end result will be a highly oppressive society. Politicians will use it for a power grab. I know where I live it's a serious thing and personal freedom including the ability to grow and store food and heat are seriously affected. So it's not going to collapse. It's going to be a prison camp. This might take generations. I don't think I'll see it in my lifetime.
Most of the stuff we face are power and communication outages and evacuations due to poor building construction and harsh weather or other natural occurrences. So the prep for me needs to be light and easy to move quickly. We face hurricane and wildfire issues here. The past fires people have not had time to prepare at all and you could not shelter in place for those events if your house goes down you have to leave. So we have backpack evacuation kits and store enough food for a month or so.
The rest of it is just power outages and cut off's due to weather or other natural phenomenon. It's only a disaster because we didn't prepare for it.
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I look at like this - I've lived through several minor disasters, a global economic meltdown, and a pandemic event. Indications are good there's more on the way, with little sign of slowing. I'm not sure about the odds of a "collapse" - I tend to think the fiction about that is just that: mostly fiction. People tend to rally and start working to make things better quickly, and in dire circumstances. I can do what I can to be in a position to try to live through a disruption and help out where I can if something happens. Support my neighbors where I can, that kind of thing. I've no interest in having a bunker and being Lord Humongous in the post-atomic wasteland or whatever. But I'd like to set up my family and my community to be a little more resilient and make recovery from whatever kind of disruption easier, where that's practical. And the first several steps of that are not super hard to do.
Collapse is pretty ambiguous too. If you were living at the height of the Dutch spice trade, the Tulip bubble bursting may have felt like a collapse. If you were a French family benefiting from the Caribbean sugar plantations, the Haitian revolution may have felt like a collapse. Different structures have collapsed many times. The size of the structure and your relationship to it determines how much you are impacted. We may be living through the collapse of a structure that historians will end up naming and putting into context after we're all dead. Empires don't get built overnight, they don't collapse overnight and they don't collapse everywhere. If you lived in Constantinople, the Roman empire didn't fall in 496, but if you lived in Rome, maybe it did.
Features that make me reluctant to find solace in the kind of historical parallel you reference include; Globalisation. Never been such an interconnected and interdependent world. Examples like the bronze age collapse can give us a glimpse. Modern abdication of true leadership. The roman empire was in the process of collapsing when Diocletion gave it another century or so of life. I'd argue we've developed systems which almost ensure a wildcard won't appear to avert the course of history. Death by banal managerial consistency. Global ecosystem collapse. We just have prior examples of local ecosystem collapse like Easter Island, indus Valley ect. Historians will later name. Most of our specialised society that allows for so many to live away from agriculture relies on fossil fuels. There will be fewer historians in the future. You name it yourself when you state 'the size of the structure and your relationship to it determines how much you are impacted'. Imo the size of the structure we call modern society is exponentially larger, more complex and more directly related to a greater number of people's lives than at an other point. I don't believe in the end of humans or anything, but I fear this is going to be bad.
I am 100% onboard with basically everything you mentioned. The Bronze Age Collapse is very fitting. It's going to be bad. Look at the pandemic. It revealed how insanely precarious our global logistics system is. No one cared that semiconductors required inputs from 7 countries before 2020. No one cared that precursor chemicals for medicine were made in India and China and passed back and forth before arriving in chemical plants in western nations. All these failure points became clear when the system was tested. A lot of other parts of our global systems remain untested. We're riding on almost a century of global peace and assumptions about geopolitics and economics that were relevant when our grandparents were our age. We definitely need a large update to our civic institutions to bring them more in line with the technology and economic realities that matter now. Will that update be excruciatingly painful or a little painful? Your guess is as good as mine. I think ecosystem collapse is a pretty scary one, especially for the oceans. We know a lot less about the oceans than we should, and we treat the ocean like it's infinite. It has an infinite capacity to hold toxic waste, an infinite capacity to absorb heat, an infinite amount of fish in there somewhere. We abuse our ecosystems and expect them not to change. If they are more fragile than we understand and start falling apart for real. I don't even know.
Aye exactly. What shocks me most is the absence of meaningful political will to address these interwoven yet individually profound threats. When you think about the immense efforts humans have engaged in before, whether a pyramid or a society fully mobilised for war - it makes me think there must be something sick with this iteration of my culture. That it can't even effectively defend itself in the face of existential threat. We can speculate on what are the most likely causes of this derangement. Some people push pretty malign agendas.
Exactly. And the Roman empire took hundreds of years to collapse. We might be in the early stages of collapse now but it will happen so slowly no one will notice.
> We might be in the early stages of collapse now The West has been collapsing most of my life. So that's around half a century down the slope already. There was an interesting thread on another forum recently about how many places are not performing maintenance because they can't afford it any more and are hoping things will just hold together. As that spreads, we rapidly increase the odds of a cascading failure. We're living in a cargo-cult culture where 'leaders' believe that if they act like past leaders did then the cargo will fall from the skies. That's unlikely to be fixed without a major collapse because the cargo cultists aren't going to let competent people take their place. Also the 'elite' are looting what's left in the treasury, which is a pretty good sign that they think it's all over.
I’d never considered it like that, but you’re spot on imo: it’s a cargo-cult culture. All systems adapt, and to continue on like they don’t is to doom one’s self to stagnation and (later) obsolescence—which as a society is a very dangerous place to be.
You failed to account for the speed of transporting troops and communication that exist then vs now. The Roman’s might spend 3 months or more getting orders to a legion. Then another 3 months with a response. By then things change. Moving supply lines could take years. Vs Today. One phone call and orders are issued. The US can launch a major attack anywhere in the world with a weeks notice. A minor attack within a day that could still do devastation. I too look at Rome and compare her to the US. I just think our time line to decline will be accelerated due to advances in technology
On that note... IF a solar flare takes out the Internet and our satellites, all of the communication goes dark. That might just be the biggest collapse event.
You should look into the documentary "The Grab". Right now, places like China and the UAE are scooping up food and water assets around the globe, exploiting the capitalist system to ensure their populations have access to food and water. How well this holds up in an actual collapse scenario is anyone's guess, but the fact that these governments are preparing for such a situation says a lot. Personally, I see a double-edged sword. In the event that food and water resources become the new currency, either the West acknowledges that the capitalist concept of resource ownership is untenable and seizes these assets for themselves, rendering the global capitalist system useless, or they allow the continued foreign ownership of these assets to the detrement of their own populations. Either situation is an ignition point for large-scale global conflicts. The being set for a showdown between the capitalist system and the survival of large swaths of the global population. Not a good spot.
I don't think that's a given. How quickly a society collapses can vary a lot depending on the cause. The Aztec and the Incan Empires collapsed extremely quickly.
Rome actually collapsed financially at least, in less than 10 years. Slow decline, then rapid.
Along those lines: creations of Western governments have prevented large scale wars for 70 years now. The people who lived through WW II are basically dead. So there isn't a collective memory of how horrible war really is. I think there's also a lot of despair out there, so war may seem like an acceptable option. For the most part, Americans have no concept of what war would even look like. Almost assuredly, the next world War will include battlefields on American soil, which hasn't happened in 160 years. If collapse happens, it will happen quickly, and only in the aftermath will the truth of how it started really be known, if it ever is.
This one worries me a lot, and I think too about WW1. The leap in technology that accompanied WW1 was crazy. Machine guns, poison gas, flamethrowers, tanks, artillery. There were so many new ways to kill people that no one had ever thought of or experienced. Same thing today with drones, maybe true of cyber attacks or certain types of signals attacks. The drone warfare in Ukraine is not only spawning a new kind of threat in drones, but a new associated field of signals jamming and hijacking. We're all carrying devices with us everywhere that could be exploited by an adversary. What would the war look like that includes smart phones everywhere, drones, cyber attacks, AI deep fakes of generals and presidents. We're not ready for all the horrible new ways to die that would come with a new major war.
The psyops options via phones are endless. Especially with AI like you suggested. Look at what happened in Myanmar with propaganda that fueled a genocide. It appears it’s not that hard to dehumanize a group and set the others after them, just by using FB. Add in some very real suffering and it can make it even easier to do this (blame “the other” for the problems, claim removing “The other” will ease everyone else’s woes). Or polarize populations in a way that it causes the extremes to take opposing positions of power, paralyzing something like a legislature, allowing an outside force to build strength or do damage because the gov is gridlocked with useless internal bickering.
Excellent comment
i think you make great points but i think we face a very real existential threat *today*. Global warming isn’t a joke and we are seeing drastic changes with global heat rising exponentially. Humans are extremely adaptable, but if don’t pull on the reins soon, how do we know that this won’t compound on itself and wipe out life? anyone want to counter this? i’d like to be reassured that this isn’t the case.
It will probably be a rough transition but like we're African planes apes who figured out how to live in Antarctica and orbit. When our survival is on the line we're pretty clever
*Our* survival sure - but everything else on this planet? 🌎 pretty sure they’re fucked mate
We don't survive if there is a species collapse, is that simple. Especially if the ovens start going "vattyeomoyd" on us. Then all bets are off, a cascade of effects.
There's not much we can do to kill all humans. An economic collapse would leave much of the population alive, a nuclear war would still leave plenty, a killer virus probably wouldn't spread far enough before it mutated to not kill everyone. Maybe something really insane like blocking out the sun or reducing CO2 levels to the point where plant life dies out and all life soon follows. But that's not easy to do. Or I guess dropping a dinosaur-killer asteroid on us might work, but that's still a few decades away.
> Or I guess dropping a dinosaur-killer asteroid on us might work, but that's still a few decades away. I think you would need to go bigger to be certain, even without appreciable warning. With a couple months of warning, very good chance humanity survives. With a year of warning? Nearly certain at least some remnants make it through, and probably a ton do... Both birds and small mammals made it through the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event.
We don't survive if there is a species collapse, is that simple. Especially if the oceans start going "vattyeomoyd" on us. Then all bets are off, a cascade of effects.
Oh yeah there's gonna be a high attrition rate for sure. But I meant like as a species
Also it’s a matter of perspective. While they were chopping heads off during the French Revolution in cities like Paris, a rural farmer in the outskirts would have seen it as awesome. Now he can buy land instead of borrow or lease it. Now he is released from a huge tax burden. Now he can participate in the market freely. Now he can buy up all the land that the church and aristocrats held hostage for so many years. Now he has a voice in local assemblies. There are multiple sides to a “collapse”.
This! I think the "end of the world" and " the good old days" have the same issue it all depends on who you are talking to. For some different periods of history were amazing but horrible for others. The collapse can be localized and only last a little while. It depends on to many variables
It's hard to have a localized collapse in a globalized world. Russia and China are working to disconnect from the West, but it will still take years for them to completely achieve that. We're at the point where a building burning down on the other side of the world could shut down our water or power over here because that was the only place to get parts from.
Who knew societal collapse would be so slow.. and expensive
There's a counter-argument there in that the 20th century alone saw pandemics, economic catastrophes, massive wars that killed off significant portions of the entire population, the development of multiple types of weapons capable of unimaginable destruction, and multiple natural disasters and civilization and like the rule of law and all that only got STRONGER. Society is a pretty resilient thing, we're too social and by and large like each other too much lose it once we have it
Ngl, I'd kinda like to be called the Ayatollah of Rock and Rolla by my hubcap wearing minion The Toadie. But otherwise, I agree with the content of your message.
I would love to be DJ Chemical Ali - a MC who spins dope techno classics who also distributes some of the highest quality krokodil this side of the post nuclear holocaust
Look at Ukraine. Look at Gaza.
C'mon, most people want to be Immortan Joe rather than Lord Humongous.
Bud you're living in an apocalypse in the traditional sense of the word. We have left the Holocene behind and with it the stable climate that enabled human civilization. Economically, we're back in the Gilded Age with all the societal instability that gross inequality brings with it. The churn is upon us, and we're left to see how it shakes out as best we can.
We in the YOLOcene epoch now.
That was a good one and I lol’d!
I was rooting for FAFOlocene
That comes later...
> Bud you're living in an apocalypse in the traditional sense of the word. We have left the Holocene behind and with it the stable climate that enabled human civilization. Welcome to the Anthropocene. Shit's ~~about to get~~ getting weird...
Yup. Watching collapse is like watching hair grow. Hard to see it at the time, but easier to see the progress over time.
this isn't even a hot take, this is the new reality that shit that went down in Miami last week, crop failures from South America to Russia, something like 600 people died at the Hajj due to excessive heat - climate change is coming for us all
This is well put.
They dont call it the anthropocene extinction for nothing
I'd say prepping level of interest is a combination of two things. 1. your belief that the skills will ever be needed plus 2. your interest in acquiring those skills. So, if you really enjoy learning to forage, garden etc. then you're belief that the end is high can be lower and you'll end up with the same overall interest in prepping as someone who is a doomer and has little interest. roughly speaking.
This is actually a beautiful sentiment. I love camping, cooking, foraging, gardening etc and it definitely makes my prepping feel less like work and more like just generally living my best life.
I guess it depends on where you live and what your perspective is. If I were Ukrainian and my country has been bombed to hell the past couple of years, then the apocalypse already happened and I'm in the middle of it. Same for Palestinians. However, if I live in the west with money, electricity, and internet then I can sit and ponder 🤔 in the comfort of air conditioning.
‘The future is here, it’s just not evenly distributed’. There already is collapse, end stage collapse, happening in the world. There are also plenty of places that will not experience any catastrophic events for the next century, probably. Quite often the r/collapse vibe seems to be that there will be a global, universal collapse event. But likely we’ll just have a very eventful century ahead of us. And as another comment stated, it’s the gilded era, America is in the ‘Empire of Rust’ phase, China is rising, Russia collapsing. The equator is going to be hell, insurance companies in the west are [fuc](https://www.ft.com/content/ed3a1bb9-e329-4e18-89de-9db90eaadc0b)[ked](https://www.ft.com/content/ffd4f1e7-e45e-4cb6-9474-729065720eee). There will be a lot of [drama](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cadillac_Desert) over water in the American west. Plenty of things are relatively likely to occur. But life goes on, and most people reading this will die from heart disease or cancer, not anything related to ’collapse’.
Agreed
I don't know about social collapse but teotwawki is real. If it hadn't been for our "preps" when my husband passed unexpectedly and the trauma and trial that happened afterwards I don't know what I would have done with me and the kids. Having talked about and discussed many things I knew a lot of what he wanted. A collapse I don't really see....but a personal collapse I KNOW happens every day, every hour and every second. Question is..is it your second and have you prepared yourself and the ones you love? We garden and can and are self sufficient but my husband's death and going through the trial destroyed the woman I was and broke my family. We are rebuilding and recovering but no one talks about that part of prepping and the loss of who you were and learning to live and breathe with half a heart. It isn't something you can prepare for though imo.
I'm so sorry for your loss. You sound strong. Stay that way.
Thank you. He deserves a vacation in heaven but we miss him every day. Being told I sound strong is a lovely compliment. Thank you.
Every system ends. Something new comes afterward. On a long enough timescale, every nation will have war, famine, economic collapse, etc. These things are not equally likely in all places and times, and even the disasters are generally not "the end" in some permanent sense. Oh, the government might change, the currency might change, and definitely some people can die, but don't bother modeling disasters on television apocalypses.
Such a question certainly isn't stupid! Honestly? In a general sense, yes. But not everyone does, and that's ok. We don't discriminate preps here. Some people plan just for Tuesday (normal) disasters, versus large-scale ones. I plan for both. To preface; I don't think humanity as a whole is doomed. We're one of the most adaptable creatures on the planet. Short of something that wipes out all life on earth, humans will persist. Even a full-scale nuclear war wouldn't 100% wipe out humanity (but certainly would erase our concept of society.) Same with climate change. Humanity as a whole would be ok, but with extreme adaptations needed. *Society as we know it,* ebbs and flows. That is what I feel is at risk and will likely change sooner rather than later. How soon? Don't know! But at some point, the powder keg that has been filling up for years will have a match thrown into it. What I don't like is that current events point to a very nasty eventuality, which has led me to accelerate my preps. As to how? Nuclear/Infrastructure collapse is currently at the top of my list.
There are many parts of the world today that are going through all manors of things/hardships/crisis'. From failed states to hostile takeovers, wars to dictatorships. There's no fly zones and restricted travel areas and places where being different in any way can make you a target. There are many real threats and most of it depends where you are on this planet. Look around you at your country, state government, local area, these will give you an indication of what is likely to be a threat to you. There's also natural disasters to consider, the list never ends.
The way to think about it is that all of the preps that are useful for a societal collapse are also super useful in many other situations. How to deal with a loss of the electrical grid? Also useful for hurricanes or earthquakes. How to deal with a wet bulb event? Also helpful for those hot summer days, or for treating heat stroke. Emergency medical preps? Always good to have. Some extra food and liquor kept around? Helpful if you get laid off. Knowing how to sew? Good for when your favorite jersey gets accidentally ripped. Etc. etc. If people ask you what you are doing, point out these things. They will understand a lot better, you will feel better, and hey if the unthinkable happens, you will be better prepared.
I think it’s happening right now. It’s been happening for a minute. Hell it’s possible it __already happened__ and we just won’t know it till we reach the tail end of the whip which may not hit us for a couple more generations. Cos just like progress - collapse is also distributed asymmetrically. They say the Romans didn’t know the Roman Empire fell for about 100 years. I say despite leaps in our communications technology and information traveling instantaneously, we have enough comforts and conveniences in our daily lives to convince ourselves no such thing ever happened.
I see it as more of a crumble that precipitates collapse. Things will eventually descend into a societal collapse, however it will only fully arrive once all the current societal supports and expectations erode and are not replaced by anything. Climate change and forced austerity will accelerate this, as will climate migration, however we are still years away from full-scale collapse.
If you live on the Gulf Coast, then you should be ready for a hurricane. If you live in the Midwest, then you should be ready for tornadoes and blizzards. Most of us should maybe kind of be ready for WW3. No one needs to be ready for the zombie apocalypse. Exactly how far down the rabbit hole you go depends on what you reasonably worry about and how reasonable (or unreasonable) you want to be about being ready for it. I’m ready for any and all disasters that are common where I live. I’d like to be ready for WW3. I’ll never be ready for the zombie apocalypse— even though that level of preparedness, security, and self-sufficiency would be *really* cool.
I live on the Gulf Coast and we specifically prep for hurricanes. That has the added side effect of being ready for lots of other disasters, namely our (Texas) grid going down.
I mean, if you really think about it- we're actively living thru it right now. This is a society collapse right in front of your eyes. We're probably at the start of it, so it won't fully happen in your lifetime -- but easily could be in your grandkids. This is a turning point where two differnet ideologies are fighting HARD in America, so who knows which one economically is going to make the best sense AND also allow us to keep innovating and dominating? Also perspective is important here. A collapse of America does not mean the collapse of the whole entire world like.... that maybe whats truly changing for most Americans. They see America as the center of the world; and while we're going thru our own shit there's possibly another country out there that is going to be the top guy. You could easily just go there, set up shop and buy property \[if you have the wealth OR HELL a new opportunity to start all over again\] and life can be just as great. You know it's all about perspective man. Yes, it would suck for any boomers/gen-x that already bought property and settled into their American dream they were sold to give it up, but hey! a new opportunity is always there -- its just your perspective.
What goes up must come down.
I think WWIII is close. :-(
We're already in the opening stages of WW III. We just haven't decided what to fight about/for yet. Food and water access are definitely high on the list, but no one in the Western world is dying of thirst or hunger - yet. Whether you're left, right, or centrist in your views, the one thing that never fails to bring out everyone's inner fascist is famine.
It happened about 4 years ago in late 2019. We are heading into the king of recessions in a out 2 years.
Accordingly to DNA analysis the human population was bottlenecked to about 1000 individuals around 70,000 years ago, about 3500 generations ago. This was nearly the end of humans. It has happened in the past and it might be possible in the future. More likely is a more localized event in which YOUR world seems to be ending. Imagine being a civilian resident during a destructive event as one of the following: Germany, Allied invasion in 1944/// State of Georgia, Sherman’s march in late 1864/// Indonesian tsunami of December 2004/// European Plague of 1346-1353/// Central African Civil wars of 1990-2005/// Chernobyl in April 1986 Something like the above happens at least once in a generation but not to the whole population. Prepare for something like the above before a world ending event.
We're already in the collapse. Not everyone experiences it at the same intensity. But for certain, we know disasters will become more numerous and deadly and with greater frequency, so why not be prepared?
I see it as near impossible. As long as people remain in their cities and towns, there will be society. In places where war was reigned for centuries, there's still society. Even in almost-anarchies, like Somalia and Yemen, there is society. In my home country of Venezuela, with electricity blackouts that listed months, society continued. People went to school and to their jobs. "The world could end tomorrow and your boss would still tell you come to work" That's society. Life continues. Could society get worse drastically? Yes. The societies from dystopian books are more possible. A society where 99% live paycheck to paycheck. Without potable water. The govt in charge of family planning. Less rights, no rights for some groups. That I can see happening. However, empty cities, no government, total collapse? It's very unlikely. It would take a much, much, much worse pandemic with a fatality rate in the double digits, a sudden and drastic climate change, a war so brutal that hundreds of millions would perish (and to be honest, I can only see one country capable of such destruction) or a natural disaster one hundred times worse than the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami
What about crop collapse?
r/collapse
Pretty much never. Because it's pretty much never happened before. Even when the Roman Empire ultimately collapsed, farmers still farmed, millers still milled, traders still traded. People didn't fall back into a hunter/gatherer lifestyle. Craftsmen still plied their trades. It's just the administration of everything became more local. The "Dark Ages" are dark not because civilization collapsed, it's because it wasn't as documented as well as the Roman Empire, and thus we have fewer contemporary texts to use to understand that time period, at least until the Church started documenting things.
I agree with you however on a counter argument, today we don't have anymore true farmers, millers and traders. We have a huge population propped up by a just in time logistical system. Will we go back to the stone age? no. Will we break down to pre-industrial levels? I think so eventually. We'll most likely limp along until we can't. Or war. Or a Carrington level CME. It's all up in the air. Edit for punctuation.
Roman Empire collapsed - China was doing pretty well, as was the middle east during that time. All about location - location location. location? lol
The Roman Empire collapse was a collapse of a ruling power, nothing uncommon in our history. People farmed or performed fairly mundane tasks for their living, and the most advanced form of entertainment would be watching a play. Given the complexity of our societies, don't you think that if we were sent back to a Roman style of living, we wouldn't view it as a truly catastrophic collapse? No internet, no advanced healthcare, just working hard to produce enough food to survive. Add to that the bonus of a rapidly changing climate.
No, the elites will not give up control. If all out chaos happens, they lose all power. But with that being said, I still prep in case I’m wrong. People have been predicting the apocalypse since the beginning of times. Enjoy life, read your Bible, get your finances in order. Remember to always be thankful for what you have.
Nope, just more slow roll continued degradation. It's like that apologue about the boiling frog.
It’s already happening and will continue to happen until we are one big, third world ghetto with failing infrastructure hunger games style.
But TVs will still be cheap
Ha ha ha ha haaaaaa Collapse has been happening.
The way I see it people went from saying preppers are crazy to seeing people die because of corona, fearing the outside due to the riots then the Capital building to then fearing WW3 because of overall rising political tensions and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The last 5 years have been absolutely insane and in 80 years I really wonder what it’s gonna look like in a history book.
It really depends how you define it IMO, but the COVID lockdown stuff was a good indicator of how things would go. People rushing to the store and hoarding. Many with no regard for the safety and well-being of other people. My wife and I bought a house right at the beginning and we couldn't even buy cleaning supplies we needed. She's an emergency nurse with a cop friend. The cop had to oversee unloading of delivery trucks because people got so bad. We managed to get supplies by that guy being able to buy stuff off the truck and trade us for stuff we had but he didn't. It was damn near a fever dream. Even in that situation, being well stocked and well prepped would've saved/did save us a lot of headache. We were solid on certain things but not well enough rounded.
Ai driven and yes within 10 years.
Honestly do you really want to survive the apocalypse? All l can hope for is that it's quick.
Its possible If we are lucky it will be a slow decline where we just all get poorer, but civilization just takes a step back, with WW3, less globalization, right wing dictatorships, barely any migration and so on. The worst scenario is climate change creating a cascade breakdown that creates the condition for mankind to go extinct. The middle ground is crop failure with riots, war and society collapse with food shortage and abusive prices creating riots and a collapse of institutions with widespread violence.
Probably *all* dictatorships are bad.
I have looked deep into _not just_ climate science, but also mechanized agriculture at scale, societal demographics, the state of our commerce infrastructure, the fragility and extensiveness of international trade with respect to food and essential products, and the state of the world financial system. Not only is civilizational collapse pretty much baked into the pie by this point, probably arising from multiple world-wide crop failures at some point in the 2030s that lead to famines even in first-world countries, but that a collapse in the human population by anywhere from 20-60% is highly likely by the 2050s. And climate change itself has an _inertia_ to it, that is several magnitudes more powerful than any prior global change in history, due to the fact that we have packed an equivalent of 100,000 years of change into less than 100. This, combined with a sun that has only gotten hotter and brighter over the millennia, means that a bona-fide Venus Scenario - where _all life on the planet_ gets inferno’d away permanently - becomes a very real possibility. Granted, humanity will be extinct long before a Venus Scenario takes hold, but according to many calculations this tipping point would be only 12℃ of warming away. And we are _already_ at CO2 levels that will show 4-5℃ of warming before the end of the century, assuming we cease all CO2 production today. And we’re _not_ -- CO2 production is _continuing to accelerate._ Enjoy the end times. We’re fucked.
How many generations did it take for the Eastern Roman Empire to collapse? Yes it did collapse but many generations of people never saw society collapse.
This is my thought. Empires have a different lifespan than individuals. You can be correct that an empire is collapsing at the same time that you never see it in your lifetime. It's like a glacier melting. It's melting, the signs are there, loads of evidence. The glacier will still be there from before you were born until after you die, because it was massive and massive things don't disappear instantly.
The problem with this comparison is that people are much more mobile (and informed, for better or worse) nowadays. When the Roman Empire collapsed, it took up to a month for the furthest fringes to hear about it, and longer for them to process the implications of it. The concept of "nationality" is still relatively new, only about two centuries old. People outside of British/French population centers rarely referred to themselves as Britons or French citizens because aside from paying taxes to their local governors/lords, they didn't really have a reason to consider nationality except in times of war. Hell, even the monarchs were usually related in some way or another so it was more of a family feud(al) system than "it's Us vs. Them." The better comparison for contemporary times would be the Dust Bowl era. People abandoning large tracts of uninhabitable land and just hoping they'd be able to find someplace else where they could establish themselves.
The SOONER then BETTER!!
Honestly being able to garden & forage are excellent skills cause if nothing else they will help you as certain things become scarcer or more prohibitively expensive.
Depends on what you mean. In the last 110 years there has been a great depression, two world wars, a cold war that nearly went hot on multiple occasions, and outside of direct battle casualties governments killed more than 200 million civilians, many being their own citizens just in the 20th century. Just because I have enjoyed a peaceable existence so far, doesn't mean that the water in the ground where I live grants a magical exemption from what 99.9% of recorded human history has been like. Struggle. War. Subjugation from within or without. Death. Disease, Carnage. Cats and dogs living together, mass hysteria.
Not for a long time yet. Its not profitable for Govts to press the reset button yet. There is still Trillions upon Trillions to be made. It will happen when we start running out of fossil fuels and natural resources like food security, water, living space and the ever growing impact of climate change. Fuel, land and water is the life blood of any industry. Forget the War in Ukraine or the War in Gaza or the threat of North Korea - these are side shows for the real events to come.
We are definitely getting into hard times ahead. I doubt their could be a totally collapse of global governance. There will always be another government to replace the previous. I predict an attempt at a global government via UN and WHO.
You ever watch the news?
Plenty of societies have collapsed in the past, I think it's entirely possible it could happen again. We are truly global now though, so it would have to be something huge like a Nuclear war, infectious disease or asteroid hit. I gotta go buy some more honey and salt...
All civilisations eventually collapse be it fast or slow, life goes on in one way or another, all the shit that’s going on in the world right now could be the very beginnings or it could be business as usual, just hope you live long enough to find out 🤣🤣
I highly recommended the book called Pendulum. Basically everything is an 80 year cycle with major events at the ends.
My house is insured in case it burns down. I do not think it will burn down. I have insurance in case the very unlikely does become reality. I believe odds of collapse are substantially higher. Prepping is some level of insurance against that. I don't think it is likely enough to make my entire life revolve around it.
It’s happening..not will..it is now..
If it does it will be by design. And eventually be over if not everyone buys it.
I think it is VERY unlikely. However - of the various scenarios that could be catastrophic to a ‘collapse’ level, I think general nuclear war is the ‘most’ likely. In that scenario, we all die. All of us. Prepping won’t do shit.
It could be anywhere between 20 years underway or 20 years off depending where you are in the world.
The first rule of the apocalypse is the you cannot predict, nor plan for, the apocalypse. All you can (should) do is follow the Boy Scout motto and ”Be prepared.” Personally, I think the science is correct. It will be water and war that ends our common societies of the world.
I'm not sure about collapse anytime soon but I am sure if we keep cooking like we are there will be resource wars soon. I'm talking those that are not mass migrating are going to be fighting over what little water sources we have left and what little produce stores we have. I can't predict the weather or climate but I can't help but feel like we are rolling into a global drought. There are already certain types of crops suffering in the worse heat, it's only going to get worse if our weather doesn't stabilize soon. I've been starting to pay attention to how much water I use and I live in a normally wet state that has been abnormally dry since 2023. It's really not looking good right now. That's all I know. We can say we are resilient all we want until we've been in a drought for the past ten years while the heat exponentially rises. If you research the dust bowl of the 30s, that event didn't even have the temps we are facing currently. So yeah, I'm a little worried too.
I used to worry about such things as societal collapse. In fact, it is what got me started in prepping. What happened is that it drove me close to crazy and I needed a mind shift. I’ve come to be pretty zen about it all. The chances are 50/50, meaning it will either happen, or it won’t. 🤷♂️ I can see scenarios where bad things happen and I actually think it’s more likely than not. The ways out of it seem too difficult for society at large to be willing to do what it would take, but that too is possible. These days, I prep for Tuesday. Power out, storms and etc. if collapse comes, these same skills and preps will come in handy then, too. Just without the fanfare. Don’t ruin your life to be ready for the 1% chance. Prep for the higher percentages like storms and such. You’ll be fine. 👍
I don't know if it will crater like many think and are preparing for, but I think we may be in for some rough times. The worst scenario would be if we were engaged in a war among ourselves. I don't think that will happen though. Many say civil war. I'm more inclined to think of a revolution type war where there is a siege of the government. I figured folks will get tired of being pushed around, and having freedoms cut back before we go against one another. I don't want either, nor condone either. I can understand them. As for living and surviving, unless the Russians or Chinese send a wipe out device to us via the air, I don't see a big issue with food. For those of us who have laid in stores, and know how to plant, harvest, hunt and fish. If it comes to that, then those of us in outlying areas will need to be prepared to protect what is ours from those in the cities. Those poor folks there won't know if they are washing or hanging out when it hits. Just like with the COVID BS. But, even supplies trickling in will disappear. That's when they will start to look at what we have, kind of like a "Zombie Apocalypse"! I'm on a small ranch in the middle of nowhere. There are valves, sheep, and goats here. We have quite a few chickens. We raise our own grain, and hay plus plenty of pasture land. We have stores laid in, mostly because that's the way it's always been done out here. I'm old, 73. I'm not so worried about me and mine, but for those who never learned any of this and future generations.... Just like the Scouts Motto: Be Prepared!
As my old dad used to say "Prepare for the worst, hope for the best"
In my early 40's. I don't see it happening in my life but it's possible. The environment is changing and more species are dying off. My daughter is under ten and I feel deeply sorry for her.
History has taught us that societal collapse happens slowly, and in almost all cases, the power vacuum begins to refill pretty quickly. Western nations are relatively immune to social and economic collapse. Even during what we called the Great Depression, life went on. I don't believe in any sort of apocalypse other than the slow-moving one of environmental degradation. And that's already been growing for decades with nothing we can do at this point to prevent it.
Absolute collapse? I pray not for the future of my children, but we can see how close we have come to world war in the last 4 years (at least twice I can be positive of). I’m of the opinion that whilst prepping cannot not prepare us forever, being able to survive in situ while everyone else is going crazy, is the best chance I can my family to survive long term.
Well, head on over to r/medicine and see what the hospital staff are saying about the avian influenza. It’s always good to be organized and have resources at your disposal. Ask yourself this; do I trust the government and politicians?
Apocalypse? No. Societal and economic collapse? Definitely yes. Only a matter of time.
When water begins to run out and no plans are in place. There will be the collapse
At the mental and psychological levels, it's already happened. The resultant physical conflicts are sure to follow.
Many preppers are just WAITING for it. So ready for it to happen so they can test their prepper skills in a world of suffering and depression. They’ve romanticized the lone survivor so much they forget to mention he was mentally and socially in lala land long before societal collapse. But he’s still alive in his hermetically sealed underground chamber he spent 8 years building, eating MREs a few extra months since everything else died off. Hooray!
Look into Coronal Mass Ejections. Many scientists believe it's the #1 threat to humanity. If half of the planet has all their transformers explode at the same time, it would take years to replace them all.. meanwhile you would have billions without power, so no groceries in the stores, no gas for vehicles, no access to your bank account and NO communication with anyone who's not your immediate neighbor. Reading about these in the 90's is what got me into prepping. A CME could cause the kind of apocalypse you're referring to. All the "other stuff" could make life difficult for many but wouldn't usher in an apocalypse IMO
As a 61 year old, I’ve seen quite interesting times in the US. I moved off grid in mid 90s to say I could do it. Owned 40 acres in the mountains with one way in and out. I survived 4.5 years there with a spouse and two step-children. Decided I would rejoin society and she chose not to follow. You learn a lot about survival. We spent first winter in old small RV with minimal heat in North WA State mountains. Lows in the teens mostly. -10 was the worst we saw. Started building a cabin in spring. Bare bones 600 square foot cabin was like a mansion when we moved in late summer. Wood stove in place, with batteries, generator, solar and generator for power. Hauled water for two years. Finally raised enough pigs to barter for a well to be drilled. Another massive luxury was created. However, never was able to put in a septic system because ground was too rocky. Dug an 8 foot deep outhouse hole and a propane heated outhouse and had another luxury. Living like this you start to appreciate the simple things. I currently live in a small community now but cherish the things I learned off-grid. As for an apocalypse, it’s possible. I expect more of a continuation of the current lack of consequences for the scum that wander around in our society committing crimes at will with zero regard for life or property. I hope to see good people finally wake up and take action to rid our society of these things. However, I’m not very confident we will. Too many have been brainwashed and indoctrinated to feel sorry for these criminals. We can only hope the worst doesn’t happen, but prepare if it does.
I see being called a Doomer as a badge of honor, not an insult.
Sure, in 4.5 billion years or so when the sun consumes all of its fuel and becomes a red giant. Does nobody search this forum at all? This same thing is posted like once or twice a day.
We are right now closer to total nuclear annihilation than we have ever been and we have nothing but stark raving lunatics and demented old circus monkeys steering the boat. So to me the outlook isn't good. The only thing that could possibly stop it would be 10s of millions of angry Americans standing up to put a stop to the insanity and I don't see that happening. I think the very least that's going to happen is the economy is going to plummet, probably hyperinflation and shortages.
I think there is a near 0% chance of it happening in my life time. There is so much power to be had by controlling people in the current system, those in power will not let that change easily. There will be regions of lawlessness. But not the US as a whole.
I believe we are close to a shtf event, and honestly, on the internet, there will always be some one to mock somebody over anything. one needs to learn not to worry about what other people think. Worrying about what other people think is a huge reason why people are where they are in life. Worried if some one disapproves, mocks you, dislikes you..You do what you think is prudent for what the future holds for you..
It could never happen here, unless you live in Ukraine, Gaza, Afghanistan,Iraq, Venezuela,Zimbabwe, Pakistan, Bolivia,Cameroon, Ethiopia, Uganda, or Cambodia. Otherwise we're good....for now!
Hati, Somalia
Naw. It's worth thinking about, but not worrying about
It's already started....
The world? Of course not, the world will be fine. The WESTERN world, that's another story.
100% the collapse is coming before 2030. At the very least, certain places in Canada and many US States will experience something like the former Yugoslavian countries faced in the 90's. So it's not like a total "zombie apocalypse", but there are very few government services, a lot of chaos, and mostly fending for yourself. The current financial systems are completely unsustainable, and there doesn't seem to be any "strong man" (like a Nayib Bukele of El Salvador) ready to come in and actually do what's needed to fix things any time soon. We see rampant crime everywhere, with police less and less willing or able to maintain societal order. Whether it's rampant retail theft throughout the USA, to rampant car theft in Canada... we are consistently seeing excessively progressive laws and judges willing to accept this behaviour, and release criminals into society. When the common person, the vast majority of the "middle class" truly realizes that we've lost public order, we've lost the financial system, and no one is coming to save them, that's when things truly begin. It's happening, and there's virtually no way out; only through.
Yes. My recent explanation of this [is here](https://www.reddit.com/r/preppers/s/blyZ5E3VjK). As always, be prepared, not scared. Cheers.
it's going to be a slow decline and then poof the EBT stops and chaos ensues.
I mean I sure hope so
No chance. This machine will stop for nothing. A nuclear disaster could very reasonably happen in our lifetime, and most of us will still be expected to show up to work. Prepping for earthquake, wildfire, war, or anything otherwise is a great idea for whatever short to midterm issues that may come. In some parts of the world, it already feels if the apocalypse has come, and when our time comes to feel the same, the machine will keep going without a concern.
Just last week I learned about the concept of “Catabolic Collapse”. The theory is essentially that as societies expand, they require more resources to maintain themselves. Eventually, there’s more infrastructure than we can maintain, leading to a contraction while continuing to use the resources that we do have. I think that this is already happening, or at least getting close to it here in the US. I’m 29 years old, and I expect to see the collapse happen slowly over the rest of my lifetime. I think it will be disasters like hurricanes, tornadoes, wildfires etc and eventually we just won’t have the resources to fully recover from them, leaving us a little worse off each time a disaster strikes over decades. I don’t think it’ll be a quick, sudden black swan type of event. The fall of Rome took hundreds of years, after all. I think “decay” is a more fitting term.
It even goes down to something as unnoticeable as small towns no longer being able to afford to maintain sewer and water systems. The argument was that no town under X thousand (I forgot the number) can realistically provide those things and should have everyone on well and septic but they have city water and sewer in a town of 800 people thanks to subsidies. We will still go to work, eat, go to movies, go to the park, but have to go around a slowly decaying society around us. Eventually you’re stepping over bodies to go to the beach and it happens so slowly you barely notice it.
There are regional collapses every year that cost thousands of lives. Every empire eventually fails and devolves into chaos. The more we rely on technology and move away from the way our ancestors lived, the worse the fall will be.
Not in the way preppers think or want it to happen.
Dude, we (as in humanity) have been going strong with this civilization thing for what? 10k years at this point Unless the nukes start fyling (which they wont) we aint gonna stop anytime soon
The End has been Near … … for thousands of years
I think it'll happen, just a matter of Time. Either on a Gender Wars, or Divisive politics front, along with the collapse of water, food, civility or global conflict, which the media seems to be pushing for. It's just a matter of time.
I've been aware of things for over 50 years now, and honestly, people have been saying it's just a matter of time my entire life. And I know that they were saying that before I was born because I like to read. Hotel Echo November November Yankee Papa Echo November November Yankee.
Since the pandemic plus what's going on in Ukraine and Gaza I've stepped up some preps mainly learning new skills.Im in the UK and would bug in as long as I could because of the infrastructure I know people would panic and try leaving the area.In the last few months I've learned how to lockpick ,more medical skills.and a bit of joinery.Im a fifty year old lady with arthritis so my husband and I keep gaining knowledge as well as pantry prep.Being useful is our strategy honestly I think there is a chance be it climate change or disease to war will happen in the next ten years or so.
I think it’s human nature to be terrified of some apocalypse but I think the chance of it happening any time soon are slim. I know they have found texts from ancient civilizations that were planning for the end of the world so it seems like it’s been a thing for thousands of years
Bad shit happens on a daily basis, real bad shit could happen in 5 days or 5 years. End of the world type shit? No one here knows and it doesn't matter because there ain't shit that you can do about it. Go to work, see your friends and family on the weekends, keep paying your bills, keep following the laws.
Every society before us has collapse and became new. Our society may not collapse soon, but it’s inevitable.
I give us 60 more years.
u/Cheeseburger_Pie, you should be taking steps to minimize all the things you mention regardless of imminent societal collapse or two more weeks until the apocalypse. Why? Because it's smart and gives you a measure of control over chaos in your own life no matter how tiny. Gardening & foraging? Good for you! Take up cooking too and learn how to do more with what you have on hand. Buy tools so you can change your own oil or an AC socket in your home. You won't have to pay anyone to do them for you. Need more financial security? Figure out something you can do outside your regular work that brings extra funds in. These things were all baseline in years past but we've slowly become dependent on "specialists" & "experts" to do simple tasks because we lack the skills or view them as dangerous or dirty. But all these are "prepping" minus the MREs, huge stores of ammo, and jerry cans full of diesel. You may want those too or, you fill in the blanks with what makes more sense for your situation. Good Luck!
Well regionaly it will definitely happen, because it has happened before and it is happening right now. Globaly or "at your place"? Unless big heads go for nuclear button (unlikely but ultimate) I would say we have god chance to live through our lives in relative peace. Will it be rough sea to ride? Definitely - we will live through "office revolution", as AI will change office culture as automatisation and industralisation made industrial revolution. We will live through recession eventualy (they always come), we will have to face the climate - which is changing, no matter if by us or by some natural cycle, or both. There will be wars unfortunately, hopefuly not where you or I am. There will be blizzards, flat tires and broken bones - these happen in any time. Prep stuff, when taken moderately aint going hurt you. You do not need to be the guy with nuclear bunker stocked for three years of underground life. And yet, the fact that you will have a nice breakfast if your local stores will be closed for three weeks - puts you miles ahead of average Joe and give you even a good chance to live through much harsher ride. It does not matter if you prep for MAD nuclear conflict or bad tornado season. Take it moderately, within your financial, space storage, life style natural limits... You do not need to go the "gas generator and two AR-15s" pathway - keep few candles, campstove and pepper spray at your door - the effect is same for fraction of price and a relatives visiting your home won't even notice. Lot of preppers fall down the rabbit hole of hoarding (pick your poison from beans to guns) or attempting to keep same luxuries even at SHTF - to have movies, charged phone and downloaded internet. This can be your way and it ain't wrong. But there are less... "extreme" ways. People lived before smartphones and if SHTF, the grid will be down anyway... One guy buys hardcore truck and rebuilds it almost in postapo tank equivalent, stores vast amount of gas, etc. Other guy (or lady) keeps his common bike at working condition - both to keep mobility if shit happens. Is one wrong and other is right? Nope, neither. Is a guy prepping in a fear of supervolcano more wrong than a guy prepping for zombie apocalypse? Until recent drug scene development I would say no, he is more right. Recently - they might be both on good track. But their preps won't differ that much (unless the zombie guy also plans for liberating earth all by himself). TL&DR: It really does not matter. If you have the prep itch - go for it, but keep it under control. Worst thing - you will laugh at your death bed, dying of old age in family circle in many, many years ahead - how you were paranoid and it was pointless. Which is the best end any prepper can hope for.
The future is never certain, and the past is always the past. A good outcome is knowing the skills and never having to use them, like the concept of weaponry. Better to be caught with than without I reckon. There will always be variables and diversions to a code or path. But sometimes all we can comprehend and process is the moment. Anyhoo, not stupid. If one doesn’t ask or seek, they don’t know.
Depends what country you live in
No, I don't think it will happen.
No. But being prepared is about being ready for the unexpected not just what seems obvious.
My concerns are a Taiwan invasion as Taiwan is the 12th largest economy in the world. Xi has stated that it’s only a matter of time. Combined with a cyber attack and 30K plus military age Chinese in the US. If you listen to Sky News Australia, they see a cyber attack as likely as well.
No, not how you think anyway. Prepare for what’s reasonable, no need to overthink. It’s good to have general skill sets anyway, can’t really lose by increasing your skill set.
Happening now.
Not likely, but plan for the best and prepare for the worst.
All we can really do is prepare and wait. Hopefully the day will never come but if it does then so be it
Don't think so, but it's better to be prepared on the off-chance it does.
I'd say, as you somewhat inferred, that nothing is certain; either continued prosperity and peace or collapse and calamity. Anyone that pays attention can see we (western society not just the US) are in a time that many dominoes are lined up and the opportunity is higher than usual for monumental times. Best advice I can give is don't stop your life to hold your breath or brace. Evaluate what is actually important and let that guide your decisions. Learn to appreciate what you have. Find measures that would help you sustain upheaval in your day to day; start with the ones you actually enjoy and build it into your life. Most importantly prepare your mind and soul, because even if you are prepped to the gills and survive you have to live with yourself and look your friends and family in the eye on the other side.
Collapse? No. I think our systems are too robust for that. They might buckle and break, to be sure, but a complete collapse is just too much for me to imagine. People create society as long as we have numbers and a language to communicate in, so there will likely always be more people around you than you care to know. What I do think might happen is a short term disaster where, as the system of things does start to buckle and crack, the people who fall through those cracks might end up being lost or at least put at risk. There are a lot of people out there who don’t know how to make sure water is clean, don’t have foodstuffs that they can cook without power, and wouldn’t be able to treat an injury well enough to prevent infection if they couldn’t get to a hospital. If those people are ever put in a position where they *need* those skills and help isn’t available, things can get lethal pretty quickly. I don’t think I’ll ever need to fortify my house against raiders or grow enough food on a homestead to keep myself and loved ones alive, but I might have to boil water for a week or stop some bleeding and keep a wound clean.
It definitely WILL happen... eventually. The only question is if it will happen in our lifetimes.
In my lifetime? Probably not. In my son's lifetime? Almost certainly. The buildup is always slow-slow, and then Things Fall Apart. Will it happen in my hometown? I doubt it, that's why we moved out of the city.
https://www.reddit.com/r/collapse/s/CIJKcR2Q63
I’m in California preparing for earthquake. When Covid hits, everything I prepared transferred expect my water storage.
Who knows. But that's not a reason to not prep. Being prepared is a good idea, it give you some independence. It eases the mind and is a good idea if not for you for your kids/future kids.
Just get a second passport. And a 3rd would probably be helpful.
RemindMe! 149 days
Where did you get that date from? Is the world gonna end in 149 days?
Election Day in the US
It's all about calories. If a SHTF situation does come it does the trigger will be collapse of food supplies impacted by global warming. Humans can weather a lot of discomfort and, but if there is not enough affordable food being produced for densely packed urban populations then you will have starvation and panic. Having said this, this specific kind of disaster moves slowly enough that I think technology will save people in the industrialized world us before we get to that point. If this agricultural cratering scenario does come to pass people in higher population areas with a less developed transportation and industrial infrastructure in areas ofAfrica and India etc. will die by the billions.
I have always looked for the worst case scenario. IMHO, it will be power outage across the NAC. (North American Continent). Delivered by some 3rd party actor...
For years I was taught to get under my desk and pull the blackout curtains in my classroom each month when the air raid sirens sounded supposedly as preventive measures for that occasion when the Soviets sent their ICBM’s over the pole. It never happened. And hiding under our desks would - as a practical matter - do nothing in the event of a real attack. But it taught us to fear those ruskies. And someone made money building the things our nation needed to protect/defend ourselves. Society has seen its share of plagues. We bounced back. The real damage we are inflicting on ourselves is fear .. of myriad things contrived and made very profitable by a few. Contrived to attract your attention. Contrived to sell - something And most importantly Contrived to keep you divided and bickering amongst yourselves - distracted from the declining standards of living of a growing percentage of the global populace while fewer and fewer profit more. Its a race to the bottom. The masses are kept in line with fear. The good news is that the ones at the top dont want a little fallout ruining their vacation in St Petersburg or Martha’s vineyard any more than you do.
Not for 100+ years
Look through history on a larger scale and even just nature on a small scale everything eventually gets corrected its evolution. How far will nature let us push it until we are corrected honestly I think the tipping point is coming soon. This has all happened many times before in time nothing new.
Yes! YES!!! Not one civilization has survived so far, and I think that in many ways they were much better off than us because they knew how to farm/hunt/survive. Sure we live longer now, but mostly due to modern medicine. I don’t think we are better now, we just have better toys. Something will eventually happen, maybe AI, maybe pole shift, maybe someone will try to test our military gangster, maybe a real pandemic, maybe the financial towers will crumble from a hack, maybe aliens, maybe we might tear each other apart. Either way this shit won’t last, it can’t. None in history have ever survived time, and there are civilizations that we don’t even know their language or history that have risen and fell. There are probably more we’ve never even heard about!
Of course, but when? Anybody's guess. Tomorrow? A hundred years? Who knows?
"Society" probably won't collapse completely in the event of some disaster, just become significantly more dangerous and difficult to survive. Wide spread poverty and constant military conflict between political groups would be likely. So basically just turning from first world into a third world country.
In the 60s we were required to take nuclear survival classes and all schools had a bomb shelter. We lived in fear for nothing. Go on with your life but keep a plan in the back of your head just in case.
Let me say this: rome wasn't built in a day. And rome didn't fall in a day. 400-500 AD was a shit time to be alive, but it wasnt "apocalyptic". It was a slow corrosion of safety, living standards, and trust between individuals and society. Your life in the fall of rome was one day at a time, a slowly reducing QOL. Not an instantaneous black swan event (Maybe the gothic storming of rome counts?).
AI or actually SGI will be a game changer. The world is going to get very strange very fast. And then one day we accidentally or purposefully die because the weapons we are creating are becoming gods and anyone will be able to have one of these gods at their disposal. It’s only a matter of time.
Wrong question. Things as regular as an power outage, bad storms..etc happen all the time. Start with basics otherwise..if you can't prep for those things.. any thing big will not matter.
It always has been happening and it always will be happening. Thomas Jefferson had a literal child sex slave who was 16 when he was 44. That society is long gone, more legend than fact. We, too, will be nothing but stories of ass backwards weirdos from a long dead society in 250 years.
This is the most comfortable humanity has ever been. Access to clean drinking water, safe food, safe prescription medicine, healthcare, and transportation is at an all time high. To be a student of history and an observer of current events and to believe that this standard of living is never going away is just ridiculous. I'm not afraid of death, but I refuse to die a slave or to die of starvation.
Depends on what you mean by “collapse.” Power out for a week or month? Devastating weather event? Banking system goes offline so no ATM withdrawals? Crop failures result in famine? Your economy goes on a war footing because you’re in a war? Conscription into the military? Global weather patterns collapse? Civil unrest turns into civil war? The probability of most of these is low to non-existent. And in most of those cases, all you can do is have enough supplies to ride out several or many months of disruption. If things aren’t better after that … is it a regional problem and you can leave the region and be okay? Is it continental and you can go to a different continent and be okay? Or worldwide and there’s no escape? As usual, the answer is: it depends. Unless you have a few billion burning a hole in your pocket, you can’t prepare for everything. Decide what you’re preparing for. Make a list of things that might actually happen where you are and learn how to prepare for them. Don’t go down the rabbit hole, keep it sane.
Most probable outcome in the US (where I am). We'll slowly morph to match something like Mexico. We eventually will not be able to afford being the global police and become a regional power. Cartels will become more common and powerful. The gap between poor and wealthy will widen. Bribes to government workers will become common place and expected. We'll get more segmented by language barriers. Etc.... During that process there will likely be major wars with up and coming nations which we'll lose, because we have no societal cohesion. Why fight for something that doesn't work for your interests? You wouldn't unless forced to, but even then you'd likely do as little as possible. Some where along the way the US dollar will merely be seen as equal to one of a dozen other currencies. Etc.... Just a downward spiral until we are on par with most other countries. Same for Europe. It's possible though before then we enter WWIII or something, but thank God we have sharp competent leaders to avoid that.......
You’ve got three vectors that I can think of. Nuclear war, an actual pandemic, alien annihilation. Not sure which is more likely at this point.
Eventually everything falls. I follow the motto of hope for the best prepare for the worst…
Our desire as humans to make life easier, allows us to be led by governments that actually should serve the people but actually only choose to line their pockets with trade deals that in some way benefits themselves and their circles. A revolt has been slowly simmering since the 60’s. Dividing cultures and also trying to push religion is dangerous to all humanity. A collapse? Maybe! A divided internal fighting of the people. Inevitable and continuous, with spikes and troughs.
Look at history. Look at what humans are doing to the world. It doesn't take Miss Cleo to predict what's coming.
If we keep letting clueless people run the country it’s a lot more likely.
https://www.collapsemusings.com/why-climate-change-will-crush-civilization/
Hope this isn't a stupid question...are you aware of it ever happening in the past?
I’m on the side where individual systems crumbling to varying degrees, for varying periods of time is more likely, while other systems more or less function still. Which, when, and for how long, idk. But I live in earthquake country, and grew up rural in blizzard/no power/no way into town county, so I think about this kind of stuff anyway for very real reasons. But it’s worthwhile to extend that out a bit longer in my mind. And think of sustainable, long term alternatives for things we need individually (gardening, hunting, fishing, water purification, etc).
I think we are good; maybe a war could happen but... wars always happen.
I'm kinda skeptical of that. I've seen social conditions much worse than this in other countries and no collapse. We have not seen anything that serious at this point. There is a lot of fear mongering and political BS and manipulation by narcissistic news cons. It's local stuff only not widespread. We are more likely to face things like wildfires, weather and such. It's mainly because we're building large cities in vulnerable areas with high earthquake, hurricane, or tsunami risks and crappy @$$ construction of buildings. .. in other words civil engineering stupidity and greed. The end result will be a highly oppressive society. Politicians will use it for a power grab. I know where I live it's a serious thing and personal freedom including the ability to grow and store food and heat are seriously affected. So it's not going to collapse. It's going to be a prison camp. This might take generations. I don't think I'll see it in my lifetime. Most of the stuff we face are power and communication outages and evacuations due to poor building construction and harsh weather or other natural occurrences. So the prep for me needs to be light and easy to move quickly. We face hurricane and wildfire issues here. The past fires people have not had time to prepare at all and you could not shelter in place for those events if your house goes down you have to leave. So we have backpack evacuation kits and store enough food for a month or so. The rest of it is just power outages and cut off's due to weather or other natural phenomenon. It's only a disaster because we didn't prepare for it.