But social complexity is a function of energy, and we’re at the end of the agricultural age. In the short term, soil exhaustion makes agriculture impossible over most of the globe without fossil fuel subsidies or inputs of some kind; in the long term, global climate change is ending the Holocene interglacial and the general climate that made agriculture feasible. If we’re going to exist at some level above that of the stone age, where is the food going to come from, since we can’t farm? Where will the metals come from, since they’ve all been mined? Our civilization hasn’t left the resources behind to allow for the rise of a next civilization. Perhaps a rare pocket here or there might have the right constellation of factors, but even then, they’ll be geographically limited, without anywhere to expand into, so they’ll collapse rather quickly.

And why should any of this be at all surprising? Civilization is an aberration; why should we expect it to be aything other than a flash in the pan?

Evolution does not favor complexity; it favors diversity, and complexity follows. See Stephen Gould’s Full House; we’ve been through this argument several times on this site, including in previous theses.

Where I find myself with a slightly different view is that I doubt that man will revert to a “stone age� mode of civilisation, if I understood correctly, but I personally think that after a mass die off man will probably revert to a decentralized form, in any cases pre-industrial, but not necessarily stone age.

I also think it will remain to the survivors to re-learn many basic skills such a local farming and hunting and basic home making and survival techniques that have largely been forgotten. I think that if there is a collapse it won’t be a simple implosion like the Roman empire or even the Austria Hungarian. Present day world problems do seem much more profound. The issues of population growth, climatic change and depleted resources were never problems faced in such a magnitude simultaneously by another other epoch.

For that reason alone, the actual turbulence will probably resemble a mass clean up, natures way as it were of correcting imbalances in the global system of life. I also think that civilization will “progress�, in the sense of a continued order will exist out of the disorder, the scientist Ilya Prigogine won the noble prize for his demonstration the order comes from chaotic events, and personally I believe we’ll see some kind of dissipative breakdown leading to a new order, probably a highly dispersed, more adjusted and radically decentralized civilization.

I also wonder at the idea that the increasing complexity is the problem; I would reframe that in terms of entropy and disorder. If anything, evolution moves in the direction of increasing complexity, not the reverse. If true, a collapse would mark a phase of movement, from where we are now, to a newer form. That implies that all civilizations form one continues whole. It also opens the possibility that “after the collapse� a synthesis will have the chance to form, taking remnant of this civilization and building a new one, hopefully, if man learns from the past, more humane and small. This argument arrives at the same thesis using a different view point, if the underlying issue is mainly a collapse of fixed resources that our civilisation burns off through because of its excessive materialism and way of life, then the fundamental limit is the second lay of thermo-dynamics. Our industrial engine relies on abundant energy and technology will probably not reduce the use of that energy enough to avoid literally burning itself out as oil, gas and coal deplete – even with alternatives the population load and their infinite wants preclude that as a probable remedy. This thermodynamic decay, I speculate is mirrored in most other aspects

More importantly is that, some kind of remnant civilisation be left to transfer key artificats.

The index is compiled using the Fund for Peace’s internationally recognized methodology, the Conflict Assessment System Tool (CAST). It assesses violent internal conflicts and measures the impact of mitigating strategies. In addition to rating indicators of state failure that drive conflict, it offers techniques for assessing the capacities of core state institutions and analyzing trends in state instability.