Societal Collapse

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 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]

As long as we are not in the year 2100, we will not know exactly what path humanity will have taken when it comes to climate change in this century. But we can at least make educated guesses about the trajectory we are on. Given this, it seems that a... [Read More]

Space weather often comes up as a topic when discussing what environmental hazards might lead to societal collapse or at least a massive societal disruption. The main idea here is that geomagnetic storms coming from the Sun create failures in the electrical grid so large that they cannot be repaired... [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]