This is Not the Collapse You Are Looking For
Abandon all hope and pull up your socks
I don’t spend a lot of time worrying about the American collapse. For one thing, Umair has that topic sewn up. But really, as collapses go, it’s kind of small potatoes.
Sure, the gradual disintegration of history’s most powerful empire will have consequences for pretty much everyone, most of all the citizens of that fair land, who, depending on where exactly they reside, are already feeling the pinch. But it’s the nature of empires to fall and this one has lasted longer than many. Just because Rome and Han lasted for centuries doesn’t mean most empires have a lifespan much beyond that of their founding psychopath.
Besides, it’s becoming clear that life outside of imperial rule has generally been better, longer, healthier, and more fun than inside it. All right, the fun part is not well attested in the archaeological record, but fun is overrated anyway. The point is, empires are bad for your health, whether you live in or around them.
And the sand-castle virtues are all swept away
In the tidal destruction, the moral melee.
The elastic retreat rings the close of play
As the last wave uncovers the new-fangled way.
The transition from empire to lack of it can be nasty, but only for the relatively small portion of people who find themselves on the shifting borderlands. Most can avoid the trouble by judicious relocation, and that becomes easier as the empire’s hold on mobility weakens and migrations begin to flow freely again, as they have for almost all of our history.
Climate collapse is a lot less fun, but I’m not talking about that either. Entire ecosystems are oozing around the globe or vanishing altogether. Mass extinctions are becoming page 9 news, mentioned right under the latest divorce of the third-rate celebrity no one has ever heard of. Yes, we’ve screwed up this planet well and good. Not quite as badly as when cyanobacteria started to photosynthesize, but if we’ve been less thorough, we’re much faster in our wholesale destruction.
Really don’t mind if you sit this one out.
My words but a whisper, your deafness a shout.
I may make you feel but I can’t make you think.
Your sperm’s in the gutter, your love’s in the sink.
We won’t be able to avoid this collapse either, because we’re simply not self-aware as a species. We talk, we debate, we warn and argue, we come up with plans and strategies, then we do what every other species does: convert free energy into body mass at the highest rate we can.
The best source of free energy we’ve found so far is oil, but the equation will be no different if we somehow manage to master nuclear fusion before we completely fry the planet. It might earn us a brief respite, a century or two, but then we’ll just use so much more of it that we’ll cook the place with the waste heat. We won’t even need the help of the greenhouse effect.
We’ll keep doing this because humanity is not competing against the nearly extinct tigers and lions. That’s not how evolution works. We are competing with the Joneses next door, and we can’t stop ourselves. The winners will inherit a barren planet and a brief future as the remnant of the most successful species in the planet’s history.
That particular collapse is too big for me to wrap my mind around. Sure, it’s fun to think and talk about and to ask all kinds of questions. What it would take for us to be able to make rational collective decisions and abide by them? A species-level moral consciousness, perhaps, mediated by a super-duper version of Neuralink? All of us joining the Overmind? The subtle guidance of R. Daneel Olivaw?
None of the above are particularly appealing, but neither are the alternatives.
There is an intermediate collapse.
To sustain our technological civilization, we are taking stuff out of the ground, and the cost of doing so is becoming prohibitive.
What stuff? All kinds. Oil, of course. Coal. Metals, rare earth, clay, silicon, and limestone for the cement that binds our concrete, and, most of all, gravel that acts as its filler.
Gravel, yes. Those little pebbles will end us.
Imagine you need gravel for your garden path, so you take a bucket, walk to the stream, find a good spot, scoop it up, and bring it home. The path looks nice, so you want two buckets the next day, but you’ve already used up yesterday’s patch. No problem, just walk a bit further and there you are. The day after, you take a wheelbarrow and bring back ten buckets worth with less effort.
Your improved technology has briefly reduced the effort of getting the gravel, but the day after you have to walk twice as far because your neighbours want nice garden paths too and have asked for your help. In no time at all you have an open-pit dig with mechanical scoops, bulldozers and trucks, a separation plant to sort the stuff into grades, warehouses and distribution channels, marketing departments, managers, and McKinsey consultants telling those managers how to cut costs. That gravel is no longer cheap.
We’ll make a man of him
Put him to trade
Teach him to play Monopoly
And not to sing in the rain.
Over the last century or so, we’ve taken more stuff out of the ground than is the weight of the entire terrestrial biomass, counting every human, tree, worm, whale, amoeba, ladybug, slime mould, water lily, and the flea on your dog’s back. Yes, your dog has fleas, but let’s not get into that.
We double our rate of extraction every twenty years, and no technological advance can keep the costs down indefinitely.
In just twenty more years, we’ll be up to double the amount and every single thing will cost us at least twice as much. In twenty more, we won’t be able to afford the gravel for our garden paths, or the sand for our glass and computer chips, or the oil to power the machines that dig all that stuff up.
By the year 3000, we’ll have used up the entire mass of the Earth, and one has to wonder where we’ll put it. SpaceX can’t lift that much stuff into Low Earth Orbit even if Elon steps out to push. On the other hand, there won’t be an Earth anymore, so there won’t be a Low Earth Orbit either.
At the moment, you — yes, you!— are extracting your own weight in gravel, limestone, oil and whatnot every week. Don’t worry, though, so am I, and I weigh more than you do. It’s a nice way to work up a sweat.
So why don’t we cut down?
Because. Our. Technological. Civilization. Depends. On. It.
No more mining, no more technology. End of story.
And you shake your head
And say it’s a shame.
Let’s do something else then, let’s recycle and reuse everything. Circular economy! That’ll show those doomsters!
Except that recycling uses energy and energy cometh from fossil fuels that are taken out of the ground.
Well, we shouldn’t be using fossil fuels anyway. Let’s use renewables! Wind! Solar! Tidal! We gotta science the shit out of this!
Renewable power plants produce from about four to about twenty times the energy that goes into their construction. Their production uses increasingly rare minerals that come out of the ground. Coaxing them out of the ground uses ever more energy. Eventually, the energy cost of extracting those minerals will be more than those windmills produce, and renewables just won’t be renewable anymore.
Well, we have to recycle our landfills then, don’t we? There must be enough of those rare minerals there that we don’t have to dig up anymore.
Er, no. We are doubling the amount we use every twenty years. In a century, we’ll need three times more than we’ve ever dug up in the first place.
Besides, while recycling uses less energy than mining for aluminum, glass, and tin, if you aim to recycle 100% of everything, the energy cost goes up and up. By the time those trace recyclable materials become expensive enough to justify full recycling, we won’t be able to afford the energy to do so.
So! Come on ye childhood heroes!
Won’t you rise up from the pages
Of your comic-books, your super crooks,
And show us all the way.
So what can we do?
Nothing. Not a thing.
This is not a matter of inventiveness, investment, policy, grit, luck, or economics. All of those are subject to human ingenuity and human capacity for self-deceit.
This is physics, and physics doesn’t give a damn.
Here are some random facts:
There is no Santa Claus.
We are all mortal.
There is no such thing as sustainable economic growth.
Adulthood is measured by your acceptance of those facts and, as we are all adults here, we know that living with them can be tricky.
So.
Technological civilization will end. It will be succeeded by something that will be low-tech and may or may not be civilized.
We shouldn’t care.
Civilization is about living in cities and states and that may not be the best way. Semi-sedentary hunter-gatherer tribes may be a better option. Or a worldwide mesh of interlocking clans, Cherokee style. Or something Ada Palmer might dream up or, much better, something that Ursula Le Guin did dream up. Or something else entirely.
We have no way of knowing and if we did, whatever emerges will be impermanent. With our human lifespans, we have trouble grasping just how much the world changes, at least until we get to my age and start to grumble about how things were so much better back when.
Spin me back down the years and the days of my youth.
Democracy, if there ever was such a beast, has at best become a desperate effort to elect the lesser of two evils. At worst, it’s a shiny toy to keep us all amused.
Capitalism, a good idea when it was used to weaken the power of feudal lords, has been back-doored and riddled with zero-day exploits to usher in the new caste of feudal lords.
Internet, crafted in the days when finding out simple facts could take years of effort and ingenuity is used today to remove our capacity for thinking and replace it with TikTok videos.
These things cannot continue indefinitely. They will be swept away by one or more of the multiple cascading crises, one or more of the oncoming collapses. They will end.
They should end.
So what can we do? For real?
Collapse will not happen all at once and it will not happen everywhere at the same time. Things will keep getting worse for some time. Then they will start getting different and that will be the time to be prepared and to follow the change.
So we can prepare. We can make our communities more resilient. We can diversify the ways we get our water, our food, our clothes, and our shelter because our future will contain no supermarkets.
That does not mean stockpiling dry food, bottled water, and guns. Stockpiling has exactly the opposite effect, opening a rift between those who have stockpiles and those who don’t and weakening communities. Those with the biggest stockpiles will become local lords, those without will start sharpening sticks to perforate those lords.
We can preserve knowledge. Smartphones are not here to stay. If we can keep Wikipedia going on distributed servers and accessible through low-bandwidth wind-powered radios, we will have accomplished much.
What do you do when the old man’s gone —
Do you want to be him?
Above all, we can look forward, not back. Collapse, in the end, just means abandoning what doesn’t work, letting it fall by the wayside, and seeking new paths.
Reality check
Things will be grim for a while.
Population will decline sharply, because villagers use more land than city dwellers, because hunting and gathering needs more land than petroleum-based intensive agriculture, because our environment is already degraded. Population decline is a polite way of saying that a whole lot of people are going to die.
Let me tell you the tales of your life
Of your love and the cut of the knife
The tireless oppression the wisdom instilled
The desire to kill or be killed.
There will be more wars. If you think Sudan’s civil war is hell, there will be many, many more like that. When factories no longer produce bullets, they will continue low tech until people are so thinly spread out that it takes just too much effort to find the next person and club their brains out.
People will flee those wars and massive migrations will be commonplace. Communities and remnants of states that aid refugees to find places to live in will earn allies. Those that build walls will be overrun.
In the end, there is very little sane advice to be given, except that clinging to what you have is the surest way to lose it. Conservatism rises in times like these, and it makes them worse.
Look forward, but not too far, lest you let mirages of your own imagination deceive you. Step lightly, but step always.
But your new shoes are worn at the heels
And your suntan does rapidly peel
And your wise men don’t know how it feels
To be thick as a brick.
—* — *— *—
It shouldn’t have to be said: I borrowed most of ideas ideas above, and I stole the rest. Some Medium authors that deserve the credit, but I hope will share the blame, are B, Tessa, Tania, Zivah, Umair, De Clarke, Daniel, William, Martha. There are many others.
