Democracy and capitalism won't survive. 100 years from now we will all be north Korea. 1000 years from now we will all live in medieval feudalism.
this post was submitted on 31 Jul 2025
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this but unironically. democracy can only function in a society with good education, otherwise you end up with populists.
and education gets to the people because it pays off for the people economically. you give 12 years of your lifetime, you receive a well-paying job afterwards. if economic growth slows down, people won't be engineers anymore and people will receive less education, thus weakening democracy.
Worse than medieval feudalism. Lords were expected to look after their vassals.
My bet for climate change is a massive migrational crisis and wars over resources.
Humankind won't disappear, not even civilization. But life would probably be shit, and many many people will die.
I think a lot will depend on whether nuclear wars break out but yeah, even in the worst case scenarios I don't see civilization dissappearing entirely. And honestly it all kinda makes sense to me. Nature has to regulate itself somehow. If one species becomes too dominant things get tipped out of balance. If you have an infection because an organism that is usually present in small numbers on your body has turned predatory and is growing beyond sustainable levels you develop a fever until things are back to normal. It's the alternative to dying. (Matrix Elrond had it right)
Life isn't shit now? Life wasn't shit in the "good times"?
It may as well still get a bigger shit
One half of us die, the other half will be happy with the results. To bad it won't be those who denied and brought the problem about
If, in some cataclysm, all of scientific knowledge were to be destroyed, and only one sentence passed on to the next generation of creatures, what statement would contain the most information in the fewest words? I believe it is the atomic hypothesis that all things are made of atoms — little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another. In that one sentence, you will see, there is an enormous amount of information about the world, if just a little imagination and thinking are applied.
Richard Feynman
So, if, during the apocalypse, you have access to a means of passing on a message to the poor bastards who have to live in the New World, it should be this:
"Everything is made of atoms"
Atomism existed for millenia before we investigated this possibilty to such a degree that we were able leverage that concept to change the world. Its goes back to the 8th century BCE in India and the 5th century BCE in Greece. In both cases, people engaged in it imaginatively and thinking was applied. But its reach was small and only effected a small group who weren't able to make a large societal impact.
Even in the 17th century, when there was a revival of interest in epicurean atomism, it was actively competing with corpulism. Hell, Mendelev, creator of the periodic table, didn't believe in atoms. That's sort of crazy to me!
Dalton, whose atomic weight was leveraged by Mendeleev and the rest rejected, posited what later became the basis of modern atomic theory. Einstein further developed this with Brownian motion describing how atoms effected the seemingly random movements of pollen. Perrin later verifies this experimentally in 1908.
So more than just the idea, it's the culture of inquiry, debate, skepticism, investigation, and, eventually, experimentation that is important. Not just the idea. I guess, if I were to preserve anything, it would be that culture. No sentence can do that. But people's radiance can.
* Disclaimer: this is a quick gloss of a long timeframe. A lot of details were omitted.
nah, the idea that everything is made from atoms is not very useful for most practical applications. you can even build fully-functional wind turbines, lightning bulbs and probably even telegraph networks without ever understanding anything about atoms.
Fuck Ted Faro.
Periods mfer! Can you use one‽
The plan has always been to let the poor people die
When we experience and maybe survive the next mass extinction, its going to be vastly more difficult to reindustrialize / redigitalize even if knowledge persists because we've already extracted the most easily accessible materials from the earth and extracting resources is becoming increasingly difficult.
If you know how to build a battery but you cant build the machines to get the lithium, you just cant build a battery. But I suppose over time we'd find better ways to recycle.
Plus, we will hold on to some percentage of technical knowledge that will help us adapt faster.
FYI, http://collapseos.org/ is planning for this eventuality.
Sent from my TI-84+
The majority of humans won't survive the next 100 years, because almost nobody lives to be 100.
Do you mean that the majority of people currently alive will die due to climate change?
Do you mean that humanity's population will drop by over 50% and will not recover?
Do you mean that in the future, the majority of deaths will be due to climate change, even in 200 years from now when the new (much hotter) equilibrium will be all anyone has ever known?
I think there will be a large decline in population numbers, but it should be through low birth rates and not through wars/famines. also, it will take probably a century or longer, and not happen within a few years.
we're facing extreme economic pressure in the next 5 years to successfully implement economic reforms (tax the rich, universal basic income) to be able to survive. but, as many people have pointed out already, UBI is ultimately only a bandaid solution, because it relies on political goodwill from activists fighting for the good cause, and that makes it questionable whether it can stay implemented un-interruptedly for very long times. so, population decline would make the society more resilient because people could demand higher wages, because there's lower supply of human labor, and that would be a long-term solution.
But would that really constitute "the vast majority of humans won't [survive]?"
I don't necessarily disagree, but I don't understand what OP means by that claim.
Misleading headline. I would wager that 100% of humans alive today will not survive, if we don't act quickly to resolve senescence.
I don't care if I don't survive but I'm taking a couple of polluters with me lmao
It depends on which kind of climate disaster we're facing. If it's reversible over the next million years, humanity as a species should be fine. The population would be cut down to just a tiny fraction, and the survivors might have to start from pre-industrial tech level.
If it's irreversible, and the Earth becomes a Venus like hellscape, the whole planet should be pretty much sterilized. Good luck surviving that.
My biggest issue used to be that in the global industrial base collapses, we won't have surface coal/oil available to restart it. I've been informed that we might be able to restart just from turpentine. (Wind and solar both need advanced manufacturing techniques so can't be bootstrap electrical sources.)
That said, I don't think I'm very interested in hanging around after the global Internet collapses. My interests are too niche to be satisfied within a regional power grid.
Water is the only renewable energy source that isn't that much more complicated than coal.
Some humans will survive but, with the state of the world today, I think we're already pretty close to losing our humanity.
as a species, maybe, as a civilization, no.
Eventually, no one alive will survive.
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