Societal Collapse

If we want to learn about human society’s resilience or fragility, it’s helpful to learn from our species’ prior experiences. The trouble is, since collapse is a relatively rare phenomenon, we’re short on data. One way we can get a bigger sample is by looking to the increasingly distant past,... [Read More]

Past societies often found their end amid a challenging climate. Environmental changes can put considerable strain on a society and there are many cases in history where it was a major contributor to their collapse, especially when the change was sudden. Today we are also living through a significant shift... [Read More]

Societal collapse has been with humanity since the agricultural revolution, but only during the enlightenment did humans gain the means to understand these cataclysms in a systematic way. This line of research continues today, and in this post, I will map out how the field of collapse research has developed... [Read More]

Existential risk studies look at events that have the chance of either ending humanity or its potential (for example, by locking us in an eternal pre-industrial state). These kinds of events can vary wildly. Humanity could be wiped out by nuclear war, a pandemic, a supervolcanic eruption and a variety... [Read More]

“Man exists. For him, it is not a question of wondering whether his presence in the world is useful, whether life is worth the trouble of being lived. These questions make no sense. It is a matter of knowing whether he wants to live and under what condition.” [Read More]