Societal Collapse

Existential risk is not something static which lives outside of humanity. It is something humans shape. This can happen directly, when it comes to things which are created by humans, like nuclear weapons or indirectly, like if we sufficiently prepare for major volcanic eruptions or not. This means actors can... [Read More]

Life feels more rough, because it is. At least this is what I took as one of the main messages from Peter Turchin’s book “End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration”. In it Turchin takes us on a grand tour of his structural demographic theory and how... [Read More]

When we study societal collapse, we typically examine it through the lens of elites. Using the records and remains left by emperors, nobles, and the literate classes who had the most to lose when their world ended. But what if we’ve been asking the wrong question all along? After years... [Read More]

Life on Earth depends on a stable climate. Both the biosphere and our global society are calibrated to a narrow band of habitability. The global temperature is governed by a lot of interacting systems, but it mostly boils down to how much energy from the Sun reaches the planet’s surface... [Read More]

For this post I aim to essentially create a little repository of catastrophic risk lists, so other people can find those more easily and get an overview of how groups of experts with different backgrounds categorize and evaluate risks. The motivation behind both this post and the articles I will... [Read More]