If you die, you don't have to watch them starve to death next week. If there's a 90% chance you die storming the compound, a 10% chance you survive storming the compound and obtain food and a 100% chance you die if you don't find food soon, why wouldn't you take the chance at survival?
Because there may be other opportunities out there. If you leave, there may only be 5% chance you'll find other resources to survive. If you die there's 100% chance your kids will die.
John Baez's blog has a series on how civilizations collapse, first looking at the Anasazi, and then how one might model it using agent-based modeling and also looking at general collapse through differential equations: https://johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com/2013/01/20/anasazi-amer... https://johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com/2013/01/24/anasazi-amer... https://johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com/2014/03/25/civilization... https://j…
Connections was one of my favorite shows when I was younger, and it played on cable. I think it was the Discovery channel, as hard as that is to imagine now. I really miss the Discovery channel of my youth, when it was a gateway to science and history, and not primarily a vehicle of reality TV programming. At least I assume it still is, I abandoned it long ago (not long after it abandoned me).
I think it was The Learning Channel, before it went to complete TLC shit with incipid "reality" drama all day.
Connections was one of my favorite shows when I was younger, and it played on cable. I think it was the Discovery channel, as hard as that is to imagine now. I really miss the Discovery channel of my youth, when it was a gateway to science and history, and not primarily a vehicle of reality TV programming. At least I assume it still is, I abandoned it long ago (not long after it abandoned me).
I think it was The Learning Channel, before it went to complete TLC shit with incipid "reality" drama all day.
Yep, that sounds about right. I think maybe Discovery isn't quite as bad as I made it sound (even if it did go down hill some), but TLC just went straight to all reality shows, and I was conflating them.
> not to have anything others would want. Like food or the tools necessary to get food? Kind of hard to survive without that. No, I think the OP is absolutely right. Humans are social animals, and large groups of humans are more powerful than small ones. Those who survive will be those who join the best groups. And the best way to ensure you're in a good group is to use your abilities to shape your group into a good…
This is a good strategy past the first year.
Yes, because civilization collapse hits immediately in a single year, not a tens of years to century...
One year is good for surviving something local, like a hurricane or landslide or such.
More like nightmares. I've read articles about Syria being the first casualty in the coming migrant wars due to climate change.
I posted a comment about this a few days ago and got downvoted into oblivion. Seems like hn doesn't take the climate refugee threat seriously.
It's not that the refugees are the threat. The problem is everything will be overloaded if you accept too many, and armed conflict is likely if you don't.
I've thought a bit about this and come to the conclusion that the best way to survive is not to have anything others would want. If you have nothing others want you will not be attacked for it and have to defend yourself. That will get you past the first wave of deaths: holding on to our old way of life thinking 'property' is important. It's best if you can actually walk to an area where there is protection from the…
This seems more like a movie script expectation of what doomsday would be like. Doesn't history show that in most cases of natural disaster, communities tend to come together rather than devolve into violence? We always assume it will be everyone for themselves, everybody armed to the teeth, etc. Even in America I doubt that's how it plays out.
Communities yes, but they tend to toss out outgroups hard when they come for help. And then when a community can't deal with the change at all, it is more dangerous to others around.
There are limits of what banding together can do in small communities.
Suppose the global trade is hit, you don't have enough food and growing things locally becomes impossible. Will you find someone brilliant enough to solve it in a small community? It's not very likely... War is more likely.
I've thought a bit about this and come to the conclusion that the best way to survive is not to have anything others would want. If you have nothing others want you will not be attacked for it and have to defend yourself. That will get you past the first wave of deaths: holding on to our old way of life thinking 'property' is important. It's best if you can actually walk to an area where there is protection from the…
99.9% of humanity's history has been of slavery or subservience. Why would a collapse of modern society not change things back to how they always were?
You can't enslave people who are dead, the remaining few will have too much of bargaining power.
Look into what happened after Black Death epidemics.
Something else to consider, that the article doesn't really touch, is the pace of change. Even at global-disaster scale, climate change moves pretty slowly. The ocean may rise a couple of meters, but it's not rising a couple of meters later this afternoon. Interesting thing to think about... in the past century, Earth's population has quadrupled, with most of that occurring along coastlines. That means we built enoug…
This is what I was thinking. People seem to think of climate change as something like a tornado or something. Sea level, for example, rises so slowly that you can simply abandon the land on the coast that we start to lose and keep expanding inward. The easily flooded areas from more potent storms will probably be abandoned, too, over time. It won't be fun, for sure, but I don't see civilization falling any time soon.…
The most important bit will be food and water safety, parts ever father from equator will be overloaded in terms of food production. Water facilities are not prepared to deal with the magnitude of change and it will be a lot of work to bring them up.
The big problem here is that such preparations ahead of time are not exactly economically viable, and mostly impossible "just in time" as they require systemic changes.
Once these pressures are bad enough, we'll have a big problem.
Loved the message. Just like you can't run away from yourself (trust me), humanity can't run away from its collective self. My favorite book about this is Lucifer's Hammer: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucifer%27s_Hammer Not perfect but certainly echoes the article's theme that we'll still be in society, even after a catastrophe, and will have to work within it.
I wish I could remember the book, but it was targeted at preppers by someone who'd lived through a temporary collapse of government in S. America. And his advice was if you are truly a prepper, you aren't storing guns, ammo, and food, you're working to get your local government to prepare for disaster events. And his reasoning was this, as soon as the central government failed, the smaller towns created militias whic…
That won't work in a scenario of climate change, which is long term, slow.
The only solutions here are big systemic. It cannot even be attacked at a local level.
What does a local community do when the wells and reservoirs dry out?
Where do they get the food from when there's country wide shortage?
This is what I was thinking. People seem to think of climate change as something like a tornado or something. Sea level, for example, rises so slowly that you can simply abandon the land on the coast that we start to lose and keep expanding inward. The easily flooded areas from more potent storms will probably be abandoned, too, over time. It won't be fun, for sure, but I don't see civilization falling any time soon.…
The most important bit will be food and water safety, parts ever father from equator will be overloaded in terms of food production. Water facilities are not prepared to deal with the magnitude of change and it will be a lot of work to bring them up. The big problem here is that such preparations ahead of time are not exactly economically viable, and mostly impossible "just in time" as they require systemic changes.…
That's assuming there are mass migrations due to lack of food. Why can't they just adjust crops? We keep imagining agriculture as some sort of on-off switch - "We have crops, and then the global warming happens, and suddenly we no longer have crops". It doesn't work that way. We'll see production declines, maybe, but not sudden elimination of entire food supplies. And production declines can be dealt with intelligently - switching crops, altering harvest cycles, etc. Again, in the past century, humanity has handled a quadrupling of the population and wound up with more food surplus and lower food costs than at any point in history. And that's without whatever future the introduction of genetic engineering, internet-of-things, and other modern technologies bring to the table.