Ask Lemmy

I believe we're already there. Collapse is slow and honestly boring

Here's an unpopular opinion: we're gonna make it.

Things will change. Societies and cultures will change. The environment will change. We will adapt.

There will be challenges. There have always been challenges. We will overcome them.

There are enormous reasons for optimism. We are on the cusp of spreading out into the solar system. Everyday people have access to all of the knowledge in every library on the planet. We have the opportunity to become what our ancestors could only have dreamed of.

Don't let headlines or fatalism or tunnel vision distract from the big picture. We as a species are going to make it.

EDIT: I'll just leave this here. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aap8731

What society? All society? Western society? American society? Russian society? It's too broad a question, but-

The answer will always be greed over wealth and power imo. Greed drives basically all the evil in the world and pours down from top to bottom. We already see breakdowns in society when greed reaches levels that cause people to struggle to survive.

The response is almost always violent, until the balance of power is more equal. There are several nations around the world that are closer to collapse than people would like to believe.

6 years until a massive coffee crop failure plunges the world into chaos.

Probably a combination of climate cascade effects and another pandemic.

The massive captive factory chicken and pig populations are a ticking time bomb, but changes to ocean current and weather patterns have the possibility of being more like someone flicking s switch.

Lack of decent bread in the US. Coupled with some good cheese.

All these people think they know, as if predictions about the future have ever been more accurate than random chance.

• ~10 years. It will arrive sooner than people think. We are already in...

• climate. ...the unpredictable zone of the climate change. The situation is worse than people are thinking.

On a less catastrophic note, millennials could be the last generation to die of natural death. The 2024 newborns will probably die of the consequences of climate change.

10-20 years, climate change will cause massive drought which will cripple the food supply.

Doesn't have to be a complete or even large collapse of society, but it'll definitely hit way way harder than what covid did. Mass starvation in every developing country, food hoarding, some governments pretending to care, some profiteering on limited supplies, the usual.

A lot of the current economic and geopolitical problems are actually solvable even in a final stance scenario. But no one can literally form clouds to replace lost irrigation or reverse climate change in less than a year. Desalination, even on max funding, would not be nearly enough to replace the water that comes from rainfall, especially huge river systems like the Indus, Nile, etc.

Water conflict

Could happen multiple ways. Unpopular opinion on Lemmy who like to bury their head in the sand.

Western civilation is going to die from immigration. Places like the UK the largest cities are less than 50% white British. It's worse the younger down the age groups you get.

There is also the issue of population growth. I'm not sure our best and brightest are having the most kids anywhere in the world really yet world population increases.

The trajectory we are on is that we are doomed or maybe a country like China will make some difficult decisions that western countries won't and that will benefit them long term.

Best case scenario is AI gets to the point it can save us from ourselves. Which is the scariest thing of all.

Within the next 100 years maybe 200. The west will continue to weaken from multiple directions. The third world will continue to increase population and overuse their resources and miss manage the economy. Global warming will throw petrol onto the fire and mass immigration will happen. Some big war is also going to kick off and that will be the collapse of society (but I don't think so severe a new one can't be built). That will be the end of the West being the greatest place to live.

About 30 minutes.

Same reason it always is: end of the round

Oh shouldn’t be more than a few hours. Reason? Since when have we needed a reason?

It will be another series of plagued like covid. Each new one will learn to mutate faster and faster until we can no longer keep up with vaccines to stop it. Time frame is probably a could hundred years.

Can't collapse if it never got off the ground.