Societal Collapse

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]

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]