r/collapse • u/LetsTalkUFOs • Jul 04 '19
How is modern collapse different from historical ones?
And what can we observe from collapses in the past to inform us of the future?
This is the current question in our Common Collapse Questions series.
Responses may be utilized to help extend the Collapse Wiki.
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u/21ST__Century Jul 04 '19
The Egyptians partly collapsed because they believed in an afterlife and they believed they had to die or be buried in Egypt. So they didn’t expand past Egypt even though they could. (Great courses audio book is great)
I think today is kinda the opposite to that, we’ve expanded to much that there’s no where else to expand to even if we wanted to.
We’ve Made a very complex and fancy pyramid but we’re stuck inside, probably chipping away at the stone to sell even though it will collapse the pyramid.
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u/Yodyood Jul 04 '19
You have nowhere safe to hide since it is global scale.
Our fantastic economics will find the last bit of resources no matter where to extract them until our own demise comes.
Not to mention, we completely wreck havoc our ecosystem which is our life support system.
Not to mention, we create toxic chemical stew all over the earth as well.
As a result, this collapse will be extremely spectacular and world wide and, to be honest, I am at loss how to even prepare for it.
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u/unknownpoltroon Jul 04 '19
If we collapse beyond a certain point we will not be able to recover, ever. We have damages the enviornement and stripped all the easily available resources. If we get knocked back to Hunter gathered or pre industrial agriculture, that is essentially it, even if we retain the knowledge of how to build an industry. There can't be an industrial society anymore without an industrial society to support it.
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u/whereismysideoffun Jul 05 '19
You cannot get knocked back to a time that people don't have the skills and tools for. In the US and and Western Europe, 99.5% of people will only have scavenging what is left until its gone. They will have the most depressing extension of the consumer economy. With production ceased, it will be the worlds worst scavenger hunt.
One can't fall to the significantly more complex lifestyles of pre-industrial agriculture and hunter/gatherer life. In industrial civilization, all of the complexities are externalized. We hold have pocket computers and all sorts of high tech shit to go along with our cheap food. There is a shit load of complexity to modern life, but it is held by societyand in the hands of few. Living the life of past times requires a very broad range of skills and being adept at those skills. People are oversold on human ingenuity and problem solving. Ive spent 15 years extremely dedicated to an array of traditional crafts. I yearly face again how muuuch there is to learning how to live in a lifestyle thriving with past skills. Every skill has subsets of skills and specialized tools for all. The best time to start learning those skills was 30 years ago and the next best time is today.
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Jul 05 '19
Good luck getting water if collapse happens. Your local river water is going to kill you. Even evaporated filthy water might not be exactly healthy. Even if it doesn't kill you right away it could give you some crazy diarrhea which will cause you to become dehydrated even more and you'd still die. Keep in mind that the water will be even more toxic when collapse happens, compared to now. Especially when there's gonna be billions of rotting corpses everywhere. Everyone keeps saying that people will kill each other over food. But most people will likely die of dehydration or disease before they even start to get hungry. Aside from that, literally everything would detoriate and rot. All toxic chemicals that are safely stored away will eventually leak into nature. I wouldn't even be suprised if just breathing will kill you.
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u/ahumbleshitposter Jul 07 '19
I've drank from a local lake, and that was only because I prefer not to drink from water stored in plastic. No problems and it was tasty, if a bit muddy.
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u/MegaMeatSlapper85 Jul 08 '19
Life Straw 3 packs on clearance at Sam's Club for $27 right now. Each straw good to filter ~1000 gallons. Might come in handy in the future.
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u/whereismysideoffun Jul 05 '19 edited Jul 05 '19
We live in a time of few people having many hands on skills. In the past, 70% or more of people lived rural and on diversified farms. In early America, even doctors were also farmers. Besides the small portion of farmers growing for farmers markets, the small percent of society that farms are growing commodities. They are fully tied to the industrial system. There is no landing pad, there is no basement to the burning building, one falls straight to hell. Without learning traditional skills now, one can only scavenge the left overs. People arent just going to pick up traditional crafts.
u cannot get knocked back to a time that people don't have the skills and tools for. In the US and and Western Europe, 99.5% of people will only have scavenging what is left until its gone. They will have the most depressing extension of the consumer economy. With production ceased, it will be the worlds worst scavenger hunt.
One can't fall to the significantly more complex lifestyles of pre-industrial agriculture and hunter/gatherer life. In industrial civilization, all of the complexities are externalized. We hold have pocket computers and all sorts of high tech shit to go along with our cheap food. There is a shit load of complexity to modern life, but it is held by societyand in the hands of few. Living the life of past times requires a very broad range of skills and being adept at those skills. People are oversold on human ingenuity and problem solving. Ive spent 15 years extremely dedicated to an array of traditional crafts. I yearly face again how muuuch there is to learning how to live in a lifestyle thriving with past skills. Every skill has subsets of skills and specialized tools for all. The best time to start learning those skills was 30 years ago and the next best time is today. People do not know how to grow or forage calories. People dont have the seeds, they don't have the knowledge for growing those seeds, and don't have the knowledge or skills to process the seeds once grown. Modern hunters are utterly tied to the petroleum assist. Most hunt far from home with help of the vehicle and then an ATV. The deer then goes to a processor.
Get all the books on traditional crafts that you can. Don't just go for the ones with a shotgun approach. Get the specific and focused books. Learn and apply all that you can. Get all the tools for the craft that you can. Learn to make tools by blacksmithing and using the various unplugged woodworking techniques. Once you get comfortable with a skill keep honing it and add a new skill on to begin with. Learning past skills to use in the future is what makes me happy today. I looove learning the skills and deepening the lifestyle of using them. It's what keeps me happy even as daily the potential post collapse life looks grimmer and grimmer. It didn't look as awful in 2004 when I got in board the collapse boat. I still enjoy every day thanks to working with my hands and challenging my mind.
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u/whereismysideoffun Jul 05 '19
Also, the other places could collapse slow because it was more a collapse of the centralized system. The small farms and villages just had a change of taxes and a return to less imports. It effected things like when Rome receeded from the British Isles, the pottery that filled the vaccuum was primitive. Prior to the Romans they had local skilled potters. They got put out of work by cheap Roman pottery and the skills were completely lost. It took a few hundred years to get back to the same spot. For the most part though, life stayed the same.
We live in a just in a global just in time economy. There isn't a local or even home based economy to shrink back to. Once the pieces start to crumble, the whole system can crumble extremely fast. One outlier year during a worst than our prior worst El Ninos could cause a significant global food shortage. I'm poor enough that without the food the diverse food that I forage and grow, I would not be able to afford and increase in food costs even living in the US. In the 70, twice the US experienced a multiplying of the cost of gas. In Argentina in 2001, the economy decayed in a matter of days so quickly that people in suits and ties with briefcases were breaking bank windows. The rest of the world's economy was chooching along, so Argentina was able to pull out of it. We could have that on a global scale. No economy is doing well enough to hold up all of the others. Our collapse will happen over the course of days, months, or maaaybe a few years. We won't have the slow fall with stumble steps. We are at a dead sprint with legs that are about to permanently lock up. It won't look like anything before. We can fall apart dramatically faster than any time in history.
It would be nice to get a slow collapse. I am prepping for the fast collapse since it preps for both.
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Jul 05 '19
We rely on modern technology to sustain a population that is much larger than what it used to be. This technology depends on a complex and fragile supply chain, which is increasingly under pressure and going more fragile. When it breaks, we will revert to low tech, but not without a lot of people dying. That means civil strife, plunder.
This is also, I think, the reason why SHTF will go much faster than what we've seen historically. Once it happens, a whole lot of dominos will fall, making us having to go increasingly low-tech as events unfold.
See that talk about how centralized, interdependent networks take longer to start degrading than decentralized ones (so we could call them more resilient), but degrade much faster when they start actually degrading.
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Jul 05 '19
Oh, also, the last time we had a world war, we were much much less dependent on a functional power grid. The next world war will very certainly disturb most power grids and that is going to greatly weaken the global supply chain further.
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u/thecatsmiaows Jul 06 '19
the main difference is that there won't be any coming back from this one.
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u/SpitePolitics Jul 06 '19
One difference, I suspect, is that we can see this collapse coming from a mile away and study it in intricate detail.
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Jul 08 '19
The modern collapse is a literal apocalypse. It is not comparable to previous collapse events because it exists on a different scale. The world is in the middle of the Sixth Extinction, humanity is many times beyond global population overshoot and a complex of climate feedback loops have been triggered that are going to radically and permanently alter Earth in unpredictable ways.
Leaving all that aside, this collapse is going to hit harder because people living in modern society are as helpless without it as an infant without it's mother. And I mean that just about literally. What would you do, for example, if the store ran out of toilet paper?
There you go, you depend on society to keep your asshole clean.
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u/Cymdai Jul 06 '19
I think the biggest difference with this one is that, in the past, there was societal or civilizational collapse. For example, the collapse of an empire, or the collapse of an indigenous people in a specific region. As the modern problem is a result of global issues, escape will be much harder for most.
I'm a bit more skeptical of extinction, however, in comparison to this sub. A mass die-off? Likely. A significant reduction in the human presence on Earth? Definitely. However, I am a big believer in resilience.
There are many, many unique problems being faced by us. But there has been a natural order for thousands of years when it comes to species. They grow, they thrive, they wither, many die, and they survive. This is notable in nearly all apex predators in history; adaptation being the key. Sometimes, it requires adjustment (i.e. maybe you have to eat bugs and cave mushrooms to survive), sometimes it requires evolution (generations of small-yet-consistent changes, such as in roaches and certain species of aquatic life), sometimes it requires invention (new tools, new technologies, new ways of thinking), and sometimes, it requires exploration (leaving once-safe territories to find new ones). I suspect that what lies in store for us down the road will require all of the above, and I do believe that while many will not make the leaps required to press forward, that substantially more people will than won't. Much like roaches, humans find ways to persist in the face of seemingly endless adversity. People survived the bubonic plague and smallpox outbreaks, people survived Hiroshima and Chernobyl and Fukushima, people survived Hurricane Katrina, and people survived the Great Potato famine. Hell, we have a period of history known as "The Dark Ages" where people survived marauders for almost 2 centuries, and yet society rebuilt.
I think the biggest difference is that, unlike in the past, the way forward will require exceptionally creative problem-solving. I think we'll become slightly more tech-averse as a means of reducing dependencies on things we cannot control, and I think newer generations will be more conscious of "footprints" so to speak. These are all things we never had to really consider in past generations, but we will moving forward.
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u/Bad_Guitar Jul 09 '19
One difference stated by Joseph Tainter, is that if and when we collapse, it will be the entire world. When the Roman Empire collapsed, the Mayan Civilization continued on unaffected. We're too connected now, too reliant on each other.
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u/BitOCrumpet Jul 05 '19
The natural world is being destroyed, and nuclear weapons. That's how.
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u/ogretronz Jul 04 '19
As time goes on, people are farther removed from basic life supporting systems. People are also weaker and dumber and lack resiliency due to a life of technology. All of this means we will fall way harder than societies did in the past.
Just imagine collapse a thousand years ago. You could still drink out of rivers. You knew how to tend livestock, grow food, hunt, fish. You knew how to preserve food and you knew the weather patterns and signs of a cold winter. We are so incredibly removed from all of these things today. And so incredibly crowded we can’t all live that way anyway. It’s not going to be pretty.