Societal Collapse

This post was originally an invited contribution to the United Nations Scientific Panel on the Effects of Nuclear War. I’m also sharing it here as an overview of the current state of nuclear winter research (+ related topics) and the open questions the field is grappling with. It was written... [Read More]

The proportion of the global population living under the spectrum of political systems classed as a democracy is near its all-time high, and stands (very approximately) around 4 billion, or around half of the global population. From a historical perspective, democracies have had quite the run over the last two... [Read More]

Recently, I visited a cold war bunker near Saarbrücken. It was a test bunker for West Germany, where they could try out all their new, fancy ideas on how to make the best bunker. To keep it secret, they build it in parallel to a new highway and it is... [Read More]

To better understand societal collapse we not only must examine the factors that could lead to collapse, but also what might happen during and after collapse. One crucial thing here is economics. What are the direct effects of collapse on an economy? How would prices change? Would trade continue? All... [Read More]

Existential risk is not something static which lives outside of humanity. It is something humans shape. This can be directly, such as things that are created or deployed by humans like nuclear weapons. Or it can be indirectly, like whether or not humans have sufficiently prepared our infrastructure for major... [Read More]