A scientist has made the shocking claim that there’s a 49% chance the world will end in just 25 years. Jared Diamond, American scientist and historian, predicted civilisation could collapse by 2050. He told Intelligencer: “I would estimate the chances are about 49% that the world as we know it will collapse by about 2050.”
Diamond explained that fisheries and farms across the globe are being “managed unsustainably”, causing resources to be depleted at an alarming rate. He added: "At the rate we’re going now, resources that are essential for complex societies are being managed unsustainably. Fisheries around the world, most fisheries are being managed unsustainably, and they’re getting depleted.
“Farms around the world, most farms are being managed unsustainably. Soil, topsoil around the world. Fresh water around the world is being managed unsustainably.”
The Pulitzer Prize winning author warned that we must come up with more sustainable practices by 2050, “or it’ll be too late”.
We need to send a bunch of scientists to the edge of the
galaxyglobe to create a foundation that will help reduce the duration of the chaos to only a millennia.
Calling Jared diamond a historian is just nonsense.
The minute I saw his name I rolled my eyes.
Move along nothing to see here.
“Why 49% and not 50%?” “I wanted it to sound more accurate than it is”
Totally. I assume his error margin is about 30 times that difference
Because it’s a simple way of saying “We’re not quite over that most likely outcome line yet, but we’re getting there.”
I do believe this to be true, capitalism has already hit its peak of extraction, water has entered the asset market, similar to gold, housing and diamonds. Humanity is in for a massive shock, migration, collapse of political systems. I will be fragging the billionaire bunkers if anyone cares to join me.
“Popsci author repeats claim he’s been using for decades to sell books that most anthropologists question”.
Man, sometimes I think newspapers and traditional media should be banned from reporting on science at all. I am very critical of social media and what Internet does to communication, but I’ll admit that the extremely focused experts that communicate on a narrow field for a living do a much, much better job of parsing published claims than traditional generalist news ever did. I am exhausted of impossible galaxies, stars that “should not exist”, healthy superfood, cures for cancer and world-ending events.
Any good broad-scale critique fro anthropologists that’s worth reading? I’ve only read one of his books, nearly 20 years ago, but most of what I’ve heard him say has seemed more or less on point.
All I have is what you can get by looking him up, and I am definitely not an expert. I’m saying that this one guy referencing his one model for his one theory of society-as-ecology deserves a more nuanced headline than “the world is ending in 25 years”. If I can speak on anything here it’s on the reporting.
He isn’t even saying anything that controversial when you dig through to the actual statements, which is a constant of mainstream news reporting on science news. “With all these things, at the rate we’re going now, we can carry on with our present unsustainable use for a few decades, and by around 2050 we won’t be able to continue it any longer” is barely any more severe of a warning than any climate scientist or ecologist has been making about these things for the past four decades.
Hell, if anything he seems to be less concerned than the average Lemmy denizen:
He explained: "As for what we can do about it, whether to deal with it by individual action, or at a middle scale by corporate action, or at a top scale by government action - all three of those.
"Individually we can do things. We can buy different sorts of cars. We can do less driving. We can vote for public transport. That’s one thing.
“There are also corporate interests…I see that corporations, big corporations, while some of them do horrible things, some of them also are doing wonderful things which don’t make the front page.”
Post that around these parts, you’ll get people calling you a corporate shill for even entertaining that personal behaviour has an impact in this process or that any corporation is doing anything positive.
Don’t hear the Express go “dude on the Internet thinks it’s high time we ban cars before we all die”, though.
I would estimate the chances are about 49% that the world as we know it will collapse by about 2050.
Emphasis added. That’s a pretty big bit of weasel-wording there, the world “as we know it” has changed drastically in the past 25 years. Things that we thought were indispensable to the proper functioning of the world order - such as, for example, the lack of a pudding-brained pedophillic fascist in the White House - are no longer operative. Yet we’re muddling along well enough, all things considered.
Things are rapidly changing in so many ways right now. Projecting that far forward with any confidence is a bit of a fool’s errand.
That’s a pretty big bit of weasel-wording there
Absolutely, the world today is also not as we knew it in the 25 years ago, and it’s very different compared to the 70’s, where the future looked a bit more rosy.
Wow, Jared Diamond and a tabloid.
This seems no more or less likely than before.
He’s playing it very save with 49%. As if he knew math or something
Yeah, that was another red flag. Margins of error on any kind of calculation like this are going to be big; “roughly half” would be a strong claim. Coming out with an exact percentage about a social sciences issue is crackpot territory.
I was gonna say… Was briefly concerned until I saw Jared Fucking Diamond’s name.
Honestly is he a scientist? Does he do science,or just find shit that supports his idea.
Edit, I did a bit of googling and it does appear he is still publishing papers, but it feels like he has been beating the “we all gonna die” drum for a long time now.
He’s makes his money as a popular writer, and actual historians say he’s a hack.
Calling Jared Diamond a scientist is pushing it.
I was thinking the same thing so I looked him up and he has a BSc in biochemical science (Harvard) and a PhD from Cambridge in biophysics of the gallbladder. Colour me shocked. Still, kind of stepping outside his zone of expertise on this grand statement.
To be fair though, he’s been writing on this topic for nearly 20 years. His book collapse is still one of the best history books I’ve read.
Well not a history book so much. Its funny how he doesn’t like footnotes “they would incur costs”
He is a entertaining storyteller, but that’s about it.
So he’s been writing on the topic for 20 years and twenty years ago he predicted that the world would collapse in 45 years?
Kind of. Definitely said that if we continue to degrade local climates, we could face massive risks to population centers.
The reason I ask is that people have predicted the end all through history and it never seems to quite happen when they predict it. So if he said it would take twenty years when he first started,… well here we are.
Pulitzer Prize winning author
So that’s why I planned to live in mountains and grow my own food. I thought I was high. Thanks Science.
What does collapse even mean? All humanity dies? Fifty percent of humanity dies? Many die and those that don’t revert to Mad Max life styles?
The collapse of society “as we know it” where we as a species cannot survive by following the same.lifestyle we have depended on in the past.
Our company helps manage a significant percentage of a critical piece of nationwide infrastructure. With what I see everyday, my wife and I have decided to buy fertile land that can be farmed and has its own source of subterranean water so that we can grow enough food to survive (we already switched to plant based diets). We also are investing heavily so that our home can be “off-grid”. Summer is covered, but we are still working on winter power generation.
We are not at “prepper” level, but if you’re building a new home, why not try to build in some resiliency?
Funny I’m in the process of going solar and where I live, I’m not allowed to go off grid. How stupid is that?
You can still buy a battery bank and hybrid inverter that’ll do solar -> battery -> grid. It’s not full off grid, but you can almost completely eleminate grid usage.
I wasn’t allowed to go off grid in my previous home where I had solar installed either. There was also a hard cap on the amount of solar I was allowed to install. Both of these rules were put in place due to lobbying from the largest power company in the region (Duke Energy in my case). It totally sucks,
Was it Florida because that’s where I am and the rules are the same as what you’ve stated?
Yes, FL west coast.
I’m on the East Coast. So I wonder what happens if you put enough solar on your house to go off grid and then just don’t pay your power company? They put you in jail? LOL.
Sorry, I don’t recall the actual specifics now. I believe it was something like they made it a code violation to not have your home connected to the power grid and you just get fined and harassed until you “fix” it.
This is something historians struggle with, because “Collapse” has happened before, the most famous of which might be the Bronze Age Collapse, or the fall of the western Roman Empire in 473. Needless to say, those didn’t result in human extinction, or even the extinction of human habitation in those locations (so Greece was inhabited before the Bronze age collapse, but that predates Classical Greece, which we think of as it’s golden age, and one for humanity).
Specifically, it was (natural) climate change or political turmoil (those usually go hand in hand) making long established trade routes and subsistence patterns untenable, and with it, destroying the power of the people who controlled that trade. There was a reduction in trade, as the elites had the money to import, and the disposition to distinguish themselves from the lower classes. There was certainly some population reduction, because food was not moving as much, and populations were reduced to what the locality could support. I want to note that at this point, we see migrations (although we do see violence). I want to thank Patrick Wyman’s podcast for teaching me this answer.
So I think, in this case, I think its likely we see this. The current power structure will probably not survive, although pockets of it may hold on in places, and maybe even survive into the next iteration (so think about the Catholic Church, an ancient roman institution survives to this day). Instead, I expect to see local polities spring up, holding on to or rejecting various aspects of the old world. A process of balkanization implies the rest of the world looks on in horror, but I expect to see some process of it happening everywhere. Immediately, these fragments will resemble the world we recognize, but in the centuries that follow, the world will become unrecognizable to us.
I think its also important to note that like, the destruction of the social order, which would suck for a lot of reasons (like the development of technology like vaccines), doesn’t necessarily mean a “dark age.” Some knowledge was lost (like Roman concrete in the fall of Rome) but I dont think the fall of the modern world precludes the loss of electricity, or motor vehicles, or even something like the telephone.
Thanks for the answer but I’m still not really certain what it would mean to me. I mean if these fascists went away, it might be worth it. Just depends on who rises to take their place.
You just asked what does collapse means, and I knew the answer. I certainly don’t know what it would mean for you.
Well the purpose for asking what a world collapse looks like was to determine what life for a typical person would be and I consider myself to be a typical person (in the US). I kind of view it like the beginning of the movie Interstellar.
In that movie people still had houses but there were items that were in short supply. People had chronic illnesses and there wasn’t much that could be done, so they would die prematurely. Crops were failing and it looked like the end of all, or virtually all, life was approaching. I wonder if that’s what it looks like.
A lot of the answers were on a macro scale not a sort of day to day life scale. That’s what I meant about what it would mean to me.
no more strawberry frosted doughnuts at Dunks.
And no more Fortnite Battle Pass®.
The general breakdown of civilization,.nad mutiple points of fialuer that.can no longer be papered over.
and no one.comes bevase theres been too many disasters. A bridge collaoaes and no one foxes it, a wildfire and no firefighters, a hurricane and no one comes to help, the ibtent goes nldown and.doeat come back up again. The lights go off and don’t come back on, your toilet doesn’t flush and the grocery store has empty shelves.amd no gasoline available etc
Are you ok?
That’s all part of the collaspe, even teh lettres crash an the lanugage deteriorat es. That’s wat heppens when tha whole world goes into panick mode an evrybody is always on the run.
deleted by creator
A bridge collaoaes and no one foxes it
But… I want them to fox the bridges :(
We’re rather resilient, but it’s gonna be dicey.
They’ve been making these kinds of predictions for a long time. This doesn’t mean that there aren’t very real existential threats to humanity around every corner, we may well experience a complete disaster, lord knows our logistics chain is delicate and largely ignored and props up everything we care about.
But what a lot of people miss in all of these predictions, is how adaptable and malleable human life is.
Will there be flooded cities and shanty-towns across coasts? Probably. Will there be gleaming cities of solar-powered utopia? Also probably. Will there be unrest, crime and war and famine? Absolutely. Will there be new comforts and escapes and new ways to stay safe and protected by your state in return for your attention, your money and your time? Also absolutely. Will it all be fragile? Yes, and it is now as well.
The future doesn’t hold just one thing, it holds many things. The future has always been the same: more of everything and then some. Look at us now, people predicted by this time we would have flying cars and robots… which we do! In some places. But we also still have uncontacted amazonian tribes, so we have everything we had in the previous century plus more.
Utopia? Have you see Earth today?
There will be no shortage of wealthy liches who want to create some kind of bubble-city where everything looks perfect. We already have it now, it will just become more stratified and more atomized.
Optimistic
I checked my magic 8 ball, we are screwed
I’d rather the magic 8 ball make our decisions than most politicians. We’d have a higher chance of survival
MIT predicted society would collapse by 2040 back in the 70s.
That model keeps getting tweaked and rerun, as others have mentioned, its from 'The Limits to Growth, otherwise known as the ‘World 3 model’.
In this one, instesd of measuring ‘pollution’, which was…fairly difficult to get accurate data on… they just used CO2 instead.
Pretty much same result, we are pretty much at the peak of modern civilization right now.
IIRC, thats a screen grab from Paul Beckwith, a pretty well renowned climate scientist… he has a youtube channel, he puts out like a 20ish slide powerpoint recapping other recent climate studies every week or so …
Basically we are fucked, all our climate models from 5 or 10 years ago were actually too optimistic, we already blew through 1.5C, the SMOC, the Anatactic part of the thermohaline cycle, already collapsed a decade ago, and we did not notice untill the last few months.
We are tracking closer to the ‘8.5C by 2100’ level of climate sensitivity models than anything else.
Insurance companies are basically already abandoning roughly the lower third of the US, too much climate disaster danger, can’t afford to insure homes and neighborhoods.
UK Society of Actuaries recently put together their own risk assessment, from the ground up instesd of top down as the World 3 model… they are also predicting massive losses, economic damage, begging governments and insurance companies and banks to adopt mitigation strategies.
That was a pretty good prediction then. “World will end” is obviously a stupid wording, but the point is clear. The entire food supply chain as it is today will collapse, the question is just when it will happen and if we will have completely switched to indoor farming before then.
Almost there
LtG has been pretty on point with its modelling compared to real life data since its publication.
BUT LtG wasn’t a prediction for the end of the world, it was/is a model of interconnected metrics about our society at large and to illustrate two points:
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You cannot have infinite growth in a finite system.
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Society has to maintain a harmony of these metrics to prevent itself from collapsing.
Basically what happened after its publication, a bunch of economists attacked it with their can openers. Some whackjobs claimed the club of rome was an illuminati front, a few scientists recalibrated the model with updated data, showing evidence in its favour and the world moved on ignoring it and the myriad of other climate warnings
See also:
Complex systems collapse theory/paradigm.
Societies throughout history more or less accrue complexity costs in a similar fashion as big, poorly managed software projects accrue technical debt.
It all keeps working untill it doesn’t, and then, rather rapidly breaks.
If you do not actually maintain and preserve the integrity of foundational systems, and build a more extravagant/expansive set of systems atop that foundation… well, castles made of sand wash into the sea, eventually.
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Do you have a link to that study?
I see the Limits of Growth study was based on the work of an MIT scientist, perhaps that’s the prediction mentioned.
Well I already knew I wouldn’t manage to retire…
Well at least this means there’s a 50% chance I won’t need the retirement savings that Im not going to have
