Comments on: Timeline of Collapse http://anthropik.com/2006/02/timeline-of-collapse/ se wo were fi na wosan kofa a yenki Thu, 20 Nov 2008 18:39:57 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.3.3 By: Crashthulhu « Gamestribe Blog http://anthropik.com/2006/02/timeline-of-collapse/#comment-177709 Crashthulhu « Gamestribe Blog Wed, 23 Jan 2008 08:53:52 +0000 http://anthropik.com/2006/02/timeline-of-collapse/#comment-177709 [...] http://anthropik.com/2006/02/timeline-of-collapse/  [...] […] http://anthropik.com/2006/02/timeline-of-collapse/  […]

]]> By: Jason Godesky http://anthropik.com/2006/02/timeline-of-collapse/#comment-151656 Jason Godesky Mon, 02 Jul 2007 17:27:45 +0000 http://anthropik.com/2006/02/timeline-of-collapse/#comment-151656 It certainly makes me more confident in the prediction. It certainly makes me more confident in the prediction.

]]> By: jhereg http://anthropik.com/2006/02/timeline-of-collapse/#comment-151645 jhereg Mon, 02 Jul 2007 17:24:21 +0000 http://anthropik.com/2006/02/timeline-of-collapse/#comment-151645 Sometimes, I'm amazed at how prominent the bullseye on 2012-2015 is getting. Sometimes, I’m amazed at how prominent the bullseye on 2012-2015 is getting.

]]> By: Jason Godesky http://anthropik.com/2006/02/timeline-of-collapse/#comment-151623 Jason Godesky Mon, 02 Jul 2007 16:43:28 +0000 http://anthropik.com/2006/02/timeline-of-collapse/#comment-151623 <a href="http://europe.theoildrum.com/node/2721" rel="nofollow">Without exponentially more oil from Iraq, peak oil will be causing enormous problems by 2015.</a> Without exponentially more oil from Iraq, peak oil will be causing enormous problems by 2015.

]]> By: Living in Collapse (The Anthropik Network) http://anthropik.com/2006/02/timeline-of-collapse/#comment-137457 Living in Collapse (The Anthropik Network) Fri, 15 Jun 2007 18:15:25 +0000 http://anthropik.com/2006/02/timeline-of-collapse/#comment-137457 [...] But if we focus again from the historian's broad sweep of history down to a more personal level, we can also see that there is a significant difference between the disappearance of the last pockets of civilization, and the first areas opening up on the map again. Between 2012 and 2015, a whole constellation of problems will reach their inflection points at nearly the same time. Somewhere in that time frame, we will most likely experience our "apocalyptic shift," the inflection point in the curve of the "long descent" that we will experience as the end of civilization. Civilization won't disappear overnight, though it might feel like it had. By 2015, the trend of "the opening of the map" (basically "the closure of the map" run in reverse) should become increasingly relevant. The areas most difficult and marginal for civilization to exploit will become increasingly free of civilized influence, as the energy to exert power there will cease to exist. Long before civilization disappears, it will weaken. The space in which to live beyond civilization will open up long before the last city becomes a ruin. There are already some areas in the western half of North America where it is difficult to exert control; even in the east, one man was able to live in the Adirondacks for 20 years before he was caught. These spaces will grow as civilization collapses, and that growing alternative will provide one of the strongest accelerating trends in collapse. Historically, civilizations have never been able to tolerate other ways of life. The living example of life beyond civilization made it extraordinarily difficult to keep people from "going native." The first colonists in the New World had "gone to Croatan" before the next boat from England arrived. Without the expanding energy base to exterminate such examples as civilizations did in the past, the example of a more human way of life will only further accelerate the accelerating trend of collapse. [...] […] But if we focus again from the historian’s broad sweep of history down to a more personal level, we can also see that there is a significant difference between the disappearance of the last pockets of civilization, and the first areas opening up on the map again. Between 2012 and 2015, a whole constellation of problems will reach their inflection points at nearly the same time. Somewhere in that time frame, we will most likely experience our “apocalyptic shift,” the inflection point in the curve of the “long descent” that we will experience as the end of civilization. Civilization won’t disappear overnight, though it might feel like it had. By 2015, the trend of “the opening of the map” (basically “the closure of the map” run in reverse) should become increasingly relevant. The areas most difficult and marginal for civilization to exploit will become increasingly free of civilized influence, as the energy to exert power there will cease to exist. Long before civilization disappears, it will weaken. The space in which to live beyond civilization will open up long before the last city becomes a ruin. There are already some areas in the western half of North America where it is difficult to exert control; even in the east, one man was able to live in the Adirondacks for 20 years before he was caught. These spaces will grow as civilization collapses, and that growing alternative will provide one of the strongest accelerating trends in collapse. Historically, civilizations have never been able to tolerate other ways of life. The living example of life beyond civilization made it extraordinarily difficult to keep people from “going native.” The first colonists in the New World had “gone to Croatan” before the next boat from England arrived. Without the expanding energy base to exterminate such examples as civilizations did in the past, the example of a more human way of life will only further accelerate the accelerating trend of collapse. […]

]]> By: Anonymous http://anthropik.com/2006/02/timeline-of-collapse/#comment-30626 Anonymous Tue, 21 Nov 2006 21:02:39 +0000 http://anthropik.com/2006/02/timeline-of-collapse/#comment-30626 Quick couple of comments on the iron business, though I know this thread is the better part of a year out of date. One, in the immediate decades during and post-collapse, there will indeed be extremely generous quantities of metals lying around literally for the taking. However, metal above ground, refined into useful concentrations, also decays and rusts very quickly. The scavenger societies which will grow up around the ruins of civilization to mine out the useful bits and quite likely base part of their livelihood on the resulting trade (there was pre-agriculture stone age trade in materials like obsidian which spanned great distances, for example) , this is a very short term situation. After a century, how much of that metal will remain unrusted? Without a lot of energy (and labor!) the rusted stuff is basically a waste material. Especially in the early years when the stuff is plentiful, people will go for the low-hanging fruit first. Anything rusty will be left to rust even more, and so on. Rust itself is a high grade ore. However, the single biggest source of readily accessible iron after 50-100 years will typically be rebar in concrete. Even in extremely densely reinforced concrete, the rebar makes up only perhaps 10% of the total volume. Rebar still rusts, even when its encased in cement (cement is very porous and admits and holds water very well), and as it rusts, not only does it swell and break the cement around, but also, the breaking of the cement to get into it will tend in most cases to result in not a high grade rust ore, but a low grade rust-and-dust ore that needs even further processing. With energy supplies being very limited, it is one thing to rework existing metal, it is another thing to start smeling essentially from ore all over again. How to filter such rubble? it would from an engineering standpoint probably involve a lot of crushing and mechanical manipulation. For a material like iron, not worth your time when there's still _something_ left to be picked clean from the rubble elsewhere. Thus, in practical terms, the process of selecting the few good slivers and chunks from the mass will continue to allow the vast majority of the available iron to decay back into useless concentrations (for metalworking goals). After perhaps another 50 years, the supply of such metal will also probably in most cases be depleted, leaving now much lower grade 'ore' remaining. In addition, keep in mind that _smelting_ iron, which is necessary to remove the oxygen from rust and rust-like iron ores, requires rather high temperatures, which cannot be achieved, using plant matter as fuel, without charcoal _and_ properly shaped furnaces _and_ a forced draft. There was a very widespread culture of metalworking that had developed for two thousand years before iron smelting was discovered the first time around. Today, while any library has dozens of books about smelting iron, don't underestimate how much knowledge, especially practical knowledge useful for the small scale smelting one would be able to carry out 150 years post-collapse, will be lost. Not only will whatever knowledge is widespread today almost immediately lose its value as people learn the hard way that knowledge about machines is no longer important for life and knowledge of life and the earth _is_, but even among the communities of scavengers who _do_ retain daily contact with the carcass of civilization picking the bones, reworking good metal will dominate for a long time- so long that smelting will have to be invented all over again. It will not likely play a significant role, since it will be working a _downhill_ slope the whole time, and not an uphill escalation like it did the first time. Those who do rediscover smelting (and really, nonferrous metals, aside from bronzes, lack sufficient strength and hardness to really play an important _technological_ role, though demand for them as ornamentation, small luxury articles, etc, will likely persist as long as the articles themselves do) will do so in an environment where their stocks of available ores will be rapidly diminishing. Rusty rebar still entombed in crumbling cement is an okay (albeit labor intensive) ore- city rubble after 150 years is much less so. The nature of reinvented smelting in scavenger communities is such that while they might practice it for a century or even two, it will die out in each site after not very long. Scavengers who sit on ancient landfills and dig up artifacts will have a longer go at it, since the oxygen-poor environment in those will keep a lot of ferrous metals unrusted for a lot longer.. though it will cost a lot more in labor to dig the stuff up than just collect it from the ruins. Overall, though, the technological impact of this supply of iron will probably not have a very long duration. In the critical first years during and after collapse, from the perspective if the preservation of knowledge important for such scavenging, the demand for the products of such scavanging will also be nearly zero- why would i need to worry about how to make a knife when there are literally millions of acceptable (if not very good) knives free for the taking in the abandoned settlements? When that one wears out? for the first decade or more, the huge surplus of cheap industrially made tools and implements will quite easily meet the demand without any real widespread incentive for anybody to rework or manufacture those metals. Thus, the incentive to learn or teach the techniques and knowledge of such a business will be much more limited to those for whom it is a matter of choice, not economic livelihood. Someone who even today works metals as a hobby or a labour of love will likely teach his children (or any other eager to learn young'un) regardless of the economic argument. But, those people are few and far between, and they will be the only real foundation of the future scavenger societies that will keep most of the world in an odd mostly-foraging iron age for probably two centuries or more. Also, as regards the great abundance of metal products, I very strongly argue that the scavenger industry will be one of reworking the metals and very rarely even getting to the point of fully melting them, not only because of the obvious issues of fuel and labor availability in the absence of large economic structures, but also because of the issue that in today's world, very few metal products are made of alloys with very good general properties. Theyre made of alloys designed to be the cheapest thing that will do the job. Fifty years ago, generic average-quality steel was a staple material in everything from childrens toys to washing machines to kitchen appliances to skyscrapers to cars. Today, dozens of different alloys have replaced them all in the quest to cut costs. These alloys are not easy to mix together or consider as a bulk material. They will likely be, over time, identified for their particular properties and be treated more or less as different raw materials altogether, but the degree of manipulation required to change the formulation of those alloys will likely never reappear in many sites, and where it does, it will probably not become too widespread. We will have an iron age for a while, but the economics of scavenging will only last for a couple of centuries, and will in the process undo the conditions which made the remains of the cities such good sources of metals. Once that rust mixes with the rest of the crumbled ruins, it will need, effectively, an industrial-age level of technology to ever exploit again in any meaningful quantity if at all. The lack of industrial technology at that point will make it a moot point. The smaller trickle of scavenged metals from the remaining bits on the carcass will further take the economics of using metals away from most reality, and it really won't be until geologic activity, mostly erosion, expose new high quality ores, that metal use would ever really be possible on a widespread scale again. As pointed out, metals are not necessary for agriculture or civilization, even big imperial civilization. However, civilizations which lack metals also run into the limits of their ability to outrun the consequences of their escalation _much_ sooner, sometimes after only a few centuries, and collapse. Metals allow the game to continue for a lot longer before the crash comes (and make it a lot owrse than before). While I disagree with Jason on the totality of the unviability of any kind of horticulture, agriculture, eyc, it is indisputable that the scale of it will not be repeatable for a long time. The best flatlands which produced not only the food surpluses but also the territorial coherency and geographic ease of mobility that were important enabling factors in the growth of agricultural villages/towns beyond some level of scale into kingdoms and empires are exactly the ones which are most disastrously depleted and on artificial life support today. Little hamlets practicing some level of horticulture will persist for much longer- but they will be individual cases and not have the ability to really replicate themselves anywhere else. Over time, they will either form into their own peculiar local culture, or else be integrated into the larger hunting&gathering communities around them and be just a local peculiatiry. Agriculture and civilization will be out of the question for a long, long time. Metals will be widely available for a couple of centuries, and for a couple centuries more remain familiar if uncommon, before they become scarce enough that most people won't even recognize them. But, without metals and the great magnification of power they offer, civilization, stripped of its most fertile territory, will have no chance in the regions where it was marginal even in the best of times. By the time that land does recover to conditions where agriculture would be practical on it, there will not be any real remaining agriculturalists or civilization ready to pounce on it and rebuild a neolithic farming society (assuming that there is some kind of inherent pressure in people to establish farming, which is a ridiculous idea).. agriculture was an accident people fell into when the conditions were right. Usually, the conditions werent _that_ right, and the people crashed into the limits and fell back out of agriculture with a few bruises and a population drop, but pretty quickly and without much trace. Only in a few places was it able to catch on long enough to really turn into anything serious. Without the easily available resources , metals especially, even those, if people fall into the mistake again (by random chance they likely will) and the conditions are just so (its not impossible) and an escalation is again triggered, it will not get nearly as far as it got the first time around, and the crash, just as inevitable as always, will necessarily come much sooner and before very much lating environmental damage is done. That's the real issue. Agriculture and civilization are like mold, they will pop up when the conditions are right and a spore by random chance falls into them- but until the conditions exist for such an escalation to reach crisis proportions, those new emergences of the mistake will burn out and the rest of the world will barely notice. It will likely happen over and over and over again. Until geologic time passes and the mineral prerequisites are again available, there is _no_ chance that civilizations will ever develop into world-threatening monsters again. This was a one hit wonder. Quick couple of comments on the iron business, though I know this thread is the better part of a year out of date.
One, in the immediate decades during and post-collapse, there will indeed be
extremely generous quantities of metals
lying around literally for the taking.
However, metal above ground, refined into useful concentrations, also decays and rusts very quickly. The scavenger societies which will grow up around the ruins of civilization to mine out the useful bits and quite
likely base part of their livelihood on the resulting trade (there was pre-agriculture stone age trade in materials like obsidian which spanned great distances, for example) , this
is a very short term situation. After a century, how much of that metal will remain unrusted? Without a lot of energy (and labor!) the rusted stuff is basically a waste material.
Especially in the early years when the stuff is plentiful, people will go for the low-hanging fruit first.
Anything rusty will be left to rust even more, and so on. Rust itself is a high grade ore. However, the single
biggest source of readily accessible iron after 50-100 years will typically be rebar in concrete. Even in extremely densely reinforced concrete, the rebar makes up only perhaps 10% of the total volume. Rebar still rusts, even when its encased in cement (cement is very porous and admits and holds water very well), and as it rusts, not only does it swell and break the cement around, but also, the breaking of the cement to get into it will tend in
most cases to result in not a high grade rust ore, but a low grade rust-and-dust ore that needs even further processing. With energy supplies being very limited, it is
one thing to rework existing metal,
it is another thing to start smeling essentially from ore all over again.
How to filter such rubble? it would
from an engineering standpoint probably involve a lot of crushing
and mechanical manipulation. For a
material like iron, not worth your time when there’s still _something_
left to be picked clean from the rubble elsewhere. Thus, in practical terms, the process of selecting the
few good slivers and chunks from the
mass will continue to allow the vast majority of the available iron to decay back into useless concentrations (for metalworking goals). After perhaps another 50 years, the supply of such metal will
also probably in most cases be depleted, leaving now much lower grade ‘ore’ remaining.
In addition, keep in mind that _smelting_ iron, which is necessary to remove the oxygen from rust and rust-like iron ores, requires rather
high temperatures, which cannot be achieved, using plant matter as fuel,
without charcoal _and_ properly shaped furnaces _and_ a forced draft.
There was a very widespread culture of metalworking that had developed for two thousand years before iron smelting was discovered the first time around. Today, while any library has dozens of books about smelting iron, don’t underestimate how much
knowledge, especially practical knowledge useful for the small scale smelting one would be able to carry out 150 years post-collapse, will be lost. Not only will whatever knowledge is widespread today almost immediately lose its value as people
learn the hard way that knowledge about machines is no longer important for life and knowledge of life and
the earth _is_, but even among the
communities of scavengers who _do_ retain daily contact with the carcass of civilization picking the bones,
reworking good metal will dominate for a long time- so long that smelting will have to be invented all over again. It will not likely play
a significant role, since it will be
working a _downhill_ slope the whole
time, and not an uphill escalation
like it did the first time. Those
who do rediscover smelting (and really, nonferrous metals, aside from bronzes, lack sufficient strength and hardness to really play an important
_technological_ role, though demand
for them as ornamentation, small
luxury articles, etc, will likely
persist as long as the articles
themselves do) will do so in an
environment where their stocks of available ores will be rapidly diminishing. Rusty rebar still entombed in crumbling cement is an
okay (albeit labor intensive) ore-
city rubble after 150 years is much
less so.
The nature of reinvented smelting in
scavenger communities is such that
while they might practice it for
a century or even two, it will die out in each site after not very long.
Scavengers who sit on ancient landfills and dig up artifacts will
have a longer go at it, since the
oxygen-poor environment in those will
keep a lot of ferrous metals unrusted for a lot longer.. though it will
cost a lot more in labor to dig the stuff up than just collect it from
the ruins.
Overall, though, the technological impact of this supply of iron will
probably not have a very long duration. In the critical first years during and after collapse, from the
perspective if the preservation of knowledge important for such scavenging, the demand for the products of such scavanging will also be nearly zero- why would i need to worry about how to make a knife when
there are literally millions of acceptable (if not very good) knives
free for the taking in the abandoned
settlements? When that one wears out?
for the first decade or more, the huge surplus of cheap industrially made tools and implements will
quite easily meet the demand without any real widespread incentive for
anybody to rework or manufacture those
metals. Thus, the incentive to learn or teach the techniques and knowledge
of such a business will be much more limited to those for whom it is a matter of choice, not economic livelihood. Someone who even today works metals as a hobby or a labour of love will likely teach his children (or any other eager to learn young’un) regardless of the economic
argument. But, those people are few and far between, and they will be
the only real foundation of the future scavenger societies that will
keep most of the world in an odd
mostly-foraging iron age for probably
two centuries or more.
Also, as regards the great abundance of metal products, I very strongly argue that the scavenger industry will be one of reworking the metals
and very rarely even getting to the
point of fully melting them, not only because of the obvious issues of fuel and labor availability in the absence of large economic structures, but also because of the issue that in today’s world, very few metal products are made of alloys with very good general properties. Theyre
made of alloys designed to be the cheapest thing that will do the job. Fifty years ago, generic average-quality steel was a staple material in everything from childrens toys to washing machines to kitchen appliances to skyscrapers to cars. Today, dozens of different alloys have replaced them all in the quest to cut costs. These alloys are not
easy to mix together or consider as a bulk material. They will likely be, over time, identified for their particular properties and be treated more or less as different raw materials altogether, but the degree of manipulation required to change the formulation of those alloys will
likely never reappear in many sites, and where it does, it will probably
not become too widespread. We will
have an iron age for a while, but
the economics of scavenging will only
last for a couple of centuries, and
will in the process undo the conditions which made the remains of the cities such good sources of
metals. Once that rust mixes with the
rest of the crumbled ruins, it will
need, effectively, an industrial-age
level of technology to ever exploit again in any meaningful quantity if at all. The lack of industrial technology at that point will make it a moot point. The smaller trickle of
scavenged metals from the remaining bits on the carcass will further take the economics of using metals away from most reality, and it really won’t be until geologic activity,
mostly erosion, expose new high quality ores, that metal use would
ever really be possible on a widespread scale again.
As pointed out, metals are not necessary for agriculture or civilization, even big imperial civilization. However, civilizations which lack metals also run into the
limits of their ability to outrun the consequences of their escalation _much_ sooner, sometimes after only a few centuries, and collapse. Metals
allow the game to continue for a lot longer before the crash comes (and
make it a lot owrse than before).
While I disagree with Jason on the totality of the unviability of any kind of horticulture, agriculture, eyc, it is indisputable that the scale of it will not be repeatable for a long time. The best flatlands which produced not only the food surpluses but also the territorial coherency and geographic ease of mobility that were important enabling factors in the growth of agricultural villages/towns beyond some level of scale into kingdoms and empires are exactly the ones which are most disastrously depleted and on artificial life support today. Little hamlets practicing some level of horticulture will persist for much longer- but they will be individual cases and not have the ability to really replicate themselves anywhere else. Over time, they will either form into their own peculiar local culture, or else be integrated into the larger hunting&gathering communities around them and be just a local peculiatiry. Agriculture and civilization will be out of the question for a long, long time.
Metals will be widely available for
a couple of centuries, and for a couple centuries more remain familiar if uncommon, before they become scarce enough that most people won’t even recognize them. But, without metals and the great magnification of power they offer, civilization, stripped of its most fertile territory, will have no chance in the
regions where it was marginal even in the best of times. By the time that
land does recover to conditions where agriculture would be practical on it,
there will not be any real remaining agriculturalists or civilization ready to pounce on it and rebuild a neolithic farming society (assuming
that there is some kind of inherent
pressure in people to establish farming, which is a ridiculous idea).. agriculture was an accident people fell into when the conditions were right. Usually, the conditions werent _that_ right, and the people
crashed into the limits and fell back out of agriculture with a few bruises and a population drop, but pretty
quickly and without much trace. Only
in a few places was it able to catch on long enough to really turn into anything serious. Without the easily
available resources , metals especially, even those, if people fall into the mistake again (by random chance they likely will) and the conditions are just so (its not
impossible) and an escalation is again triggered, it will not get nearly as far as it got the first time around, and the crash, just as inevitable as always, will necessarily come much sooner and
before very much lating environmental damage is done. That’s the real issue. Agriculture and civilization
are like mold, they will pop up when the conditions are right and a spore by random chance falls into them- but
until the conditions exist for such an escalation to reach crisis proportions, those new emergences of the mistake will burn out and the rest of the world will barely notice.
It will likely happen over and over and over again. Until geologic time
passes and the mineral prerequisites are again available, there is _no_ chance that civilizations will ever develop into world-threatening monsters again. This was a one hit wonder.

]]> By: tribe.net: anthropik.com http://anthropik.com/2006/02/timeline-of-collapse/#comment-27248 tribe.net: anthropik.com Wed, 25 Oct 2006 22:47:23 +0000 http://anthropik.com/2006/02/timeline-of-collapse/#comment-27248 <strong>Timeline of Collapse</strong> I'm very sorry to be posting another doom & gloom blog entry, but I think its... Timeline of Collapse

I’m very sorry to be posting another doom & gloom blog entry, but I think its…

]]> By: Where Have All the Savages Gone? (The Anthropik Network) http://anthropik.com/2006/02/timeline-of-collapse/#comment-21031 Where Have All the Savages Gone? (The Anthropik Network) Fri, 25 Aug 2006 13:36:14 +0000 http://anthropik.com/2006/02/timeline-of-collapse/#comment-21031 [...] That is generally what we've called "collapse" here: when that window of opportunity opens. We've predicted that window to be something like 2012-2015, or thereabouts. But by the same token, if we approach the process of rewilding as solely a question of practical skills, we are lost. Our domestication entailed far more than just the destruction of our bodies and the atrophy of our independence; it also entailed the enslavement of our minds, the separation of mind and body, the profound mistrust of our senses, and our abandonment to a purely human discourse when the intuitive, anthropomorphic voices of animals and plants and rocks and rivers fall silent, and all we can hear are our own voices, talking to ourselves. [...] […] That is generally what we’ve called “collapse” here: when that window of opportunity opens. We’ve predicted that window to be something like 2012-2015, or thereabouts. But by the same token, if we approach the process of rewilding as solely a question of practical skills, we are lost. Our domestication entailed far more than just the destruction of our bodies and the atrophy of our independence; it also entailed the enslavement of our minds, the separation of mind and body, the profound mistrust of our senses, and our abandonment to a purely human discourse when the intuitive, anthropomorphic voices of animals and plants and rocks and rivers fall silent, and all we can hear are our own voices, talking to ourselves. […]

]]> By: Water, Water, Everywhere (The Anthropik Network) http://anthropik.com/2006/02/timeline-of-collapse/#comment-20709 Water, Water, Everywhere (The Anthropik Network) Tue, 22 Aug 2006 13:31:03 +0000 http://anthropik.com/2006/02/timeline-of-collapse/#comment-20709 [...] Vidal's article includes predictions for the complete breakdown of China's economy by 2015, due to water problems. [...] […] Vidal’s article includes predictions for the complete breakdown of China’s economy by 2015, due to water problems. […]

]]> By: The Anthropik Network » The Escape Plan http://anthropik.com/2006/02/timeline-of-collapse/#comment-12272 The Anthropik Network » The Escape Plan Mon, 05 Jun 2006 14:38:16 +0000 http://anthropik.com/2006/02/timeline-of-collapse/#comment-12272 [...] Civilization is unsustainable, and there's one thing all unsustainable systems have in common: they're never sustained. In the case of our own civilization, the converging crises of 2012-2015--from the peaking of global oil production, climate change, mass extinction, and ultimately the synergy of these factors and the diminished capacity of our complexity to meet them--makes it seem very likely that our current state of collapse will be painfully evident within the next decade, as we pass a major inflection point in that descent. A century from now, there will no doubt still be cities, where life is nasty, brutish and short, but it is difficult to imagine a plausible scenario where civilization's global dominion is even able to last another 15 years. Civilization will become just one of several means of organizing human society; by far the most brutal and unpleasant one, and for that reason if for no other, one that will ultimately lose ground and become, save in exceptional, small, isolated pockets, a bad memory. [...] […] Civilization is unsustainable, and there’s one thing all unsustainable systems have in common: they’re never sustained. In the case of our own civilization, the converging crises of 2012-2015–from the peaking of global oil production, climate change, mass extinction, and ultimately the synergy of these factors and the diminished capacity of our complexity to meet them–makes it seem very likely that our current state of collapse will be painfully evident within the next decade, as we pass a major inflection point in that descent. A century from now, there will no doubt still be cities, where life is nasty, brutish and short, but it is difficult to imagine a plausible scenario where civilization’s global dominion is even able to last another 15 years. Civilization will become just one of several means of organizing human society; by far the most brutal and unpleasant one, and for that reason if for no other, one that will ultimately lose ground and become, save in exceptional, small, isolated pockets, a bad memory. […]

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