Societal Collapse

In the last year nuclear winter was a topic I spent a lot of time on. It is one of the potential global catastrophes that motivates me in general and it is directly relevant to my work (Jehn, 2023; Jehn et al., 2023). This makes it kind of obvious that... [Read More]

The risk of societal collapse is dependent not only on the problems a society faces, but also on the adaptation it makes to counter those problems. These adaptations can increase the resilience of a society and make it less vulnerable to potential hazards. This post will look at several papers... [Read More]

I created a list of researchers in the existential risk field based on the amount of papers they have published. In the following I provide links to their work. This is not meant as a strict evaluation of the value of their contributions to the field, but more as a... [Read More]

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]