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Doomsday scoreboard
41–50 of 167 posts
Re: Doomsday scoreboard
#42[deleted]
Re: Doomsday scoreboard
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
Out there, somewhere, is a nerd, laser etching Wikipedia onto metal plates, and burying them to be dug up later, just to be able to say, I knew this would happen!
Needs to carved in stone if they are serious.....
Then Ruin would be able to influence what is written.
Re: Doomsday scoreboard
#44"Days until next prediction might begin". Cute.
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#45Until we have nuclear disarmament, there’s a sword having over us.
It’s bound to happen eventually
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#46Where have I heard that name … oh this little apocalypse https://failure.museum/marchfirst/
Re: Doomsday scoreboard
#47I think they've gotta maybe define what counts as an "Apocalypse." The active "Fourth Turning" hypothesis expects a crisis on the scale of the Civil War. That degree of crisis has happened lots of times. Certainly the Civil War itself was accurately predicted for decades leading up to it.
Re: Doomsday scoreboard
#48I've been in the "doomer" camp for over a decade and been surprised how many things I thought were far off in the future have come to fruition earlier. But, the one thing I always find interesting, philosophically, about believing the world-as-we-know-it is coming to an end is that all of the things people are concerned about will happen no matter what . Being afraid of the end of the world is ultimately being afraid…
I am reminded of Roy Scranton's essay Learning How to Die in the Anthropocene [1] > I found my way forward through an 18th-century Samurai manual, Yamamoto Tsunetomo’s “Hagakure,” which commanded: “Meditation on inevitable death should be performed daily.” Instead of fearing my end, I owned it. Every morning, after doing maintenance on my Humvee, I’d imagine getting blown up by an I.E.D., shot by a sniper, burned to…
That's in line with the Stoics too. Memento Mori.
Re: Doomsday scoreboard
#49One of the currently active events is predicting something on the scale of the Great Depression
I mean that's bad but it's much better than what I picture in my head as an apocalypse
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#50The Limits to Growth book is an interesting read. To quote Box, "All models are wrong, but some are useful". I wouldn't take the dates-ranges estimated from the modelling that seriously, but the modelling assumptions are worth reading about and reflecting on. The overall modelling and dynamics seem pretty plausible to me.
From memory, the rough argument was that society depends upon input flows of energy, resources (metals etc) and food. Society needs to allocate resources and energy to extract these inputs. Energy sources such as fossil fuel reserves are finite stocks, some are cheap to extract (high energy return on energy invested). Over time we consume and deplete the high EROEI reserves and have to move on to consuming the lower EROEI reserves. This means that the fraction of energy society needs to allocate for energy extraction increases over time, so there's less energy for other uses. Similarly, we deplete the cheap to extract stocks of metal required to build and maintain industry, leaving stocks that require higher inputs of metal and energy to extract. Similarly for agricultural yields, as we mine and deplete accumulated stocks of nutrients out of the soil.
The business as usual scenario leading to "overshoot and collapse" behaviour is that we have increasing population, increasing industrial capital and increasing demands for energy, food and resource inputs, while the fraction of energy and resources that need to be allocated to energy, resource and food production grows over time. The fraction of remaining surplus energy and resources that can be allocated to things like education, healthcare, research, art decreases over time. At some point the growing fraction of energy and resources that needs to be allocated to energy and resource extraction becomes so large vs the existing population and industrial base that there simply isn't enough surplus to maintain healthcare, education, research, etc at the same level.
The "Overshoot and collapse" dynamic describes stocks of population, industry etc growing to peaks well beyond sustainable levels before the above dynamics catch up and cause them to rapidly decline.
The researchers did a bunch of modelling of alternative scenarios, exploring how to avoid these "Overshoot and collapse" dynamics.