Recently Cyndy sent me the link to this prediction of life in the year 2000, written in 1961, before the Beatles, before the Kennedy assassination, and before personal computers and the Internet. Like most futuristic predictions of the time it was optimistic, focused on domestic life and heavily laced with amazing technology, especially transportation technology. It was mostly about having more, fancier stuff. And like most short-term predictions, it forecast more dramatic changes in the next X years than had been seen in the previous X years. Cyndy also links us to this extraordinary article by Ran Prieur, The Slow Crash, which predicts civilization will end not with a bang but with a whimper: What I’m focusing on here is the scenario that includes only events we’re reasonably sure about: the end of cheap energy, the decline of industrial agriculture, currency collapse, economic “depression,” wars, famines, disease epidemics, infrastructure failures, and extreme unpredictable weather.
If that’s all we get, the crash will be slower and more complex than the kind of people who predict crashes like to predict. There won’t be any clear before, during, or after. Most people living during the decline and fall of Rome didn’t even know it. After the 1929 stock market crash, respectable voices said it was a temporary adjustment, that the economy was still strong. Only years later, when we knew they were wrong, could we draw a line at 1929. I suggest we’re already in the fall of civilization. In 2004 the price of oil doubled, bankruptcies and foreclosures accelerated, global food stockpiles fell to record lows despite high harvests, an apocalyptic religious cult hacked an election to tighten their control of the world’s most powerful country, and we had record numbers of hurricanes and tornadoes — and a big tsunami to top it off. If every year from here to 2020 is half as eventful, we’ll be living in railroad cars, eating grass, and still waiting for the big crash we’ve been led to expect from watching movies designed to push our emotional buttons and be over in two hours. You know how it goes: Electricity and water and heat are off and not coming back on. Food and fuel will never again be coming into the cities. People “revert to savagery” or “anarchy,” running wild in the streets killing and looting. If you live in the city, you will have to kill people to steal their food, or even eat them, and they’ll be trying to do the same to you. If you live in the country, you’d better have a big gun to fend off the hordes of starving urbanites scouring the countryside. This condition will last until a strong leader rebuilds “civilization.” I’m not entirely sure that the election was stolen, although Rayne has got me deeply worried about it. But the fact that both the US and China became net importers of food last year for the first time in half a century should be setting off alarm bells. So should the re-election in the most affluent country in the history of the world of a self-proclaimed “war president”. So should the break-up of arctic and antarctic ice, and the plan by China to achieve US per-capita levels of wealth (and hence consumption) by burning huge amounts of coal and continuing to increase its use of oil, mostly from the Mideast, by 16% per year. So should the corporatists’ rejection of Kyoto and of any limitations whatever to its staggering economic domination and the resultant subjugation and exploitation of much of the third world as impoverished, horrifically polluted, downtrodden economic colonies. Here are some of the key points that Ran makes about The Slow Crash, with my own two cents thrown in:
At this point I part company with Ran: He gets into secret weapons, mass killings and even a “human consciousness shift”. I know the latter, a great global “awareness” and coming-together idea is very popular among today’s young, and among techies and sci-fi fans, but to me it is the antithesis of Ran’s Slow Crash. If such a thing is possible it is far further in the future than the bullet-points above, so far away that I think it is foolish to think about it — it’s beyond the predictable ‘event horizon’. What Ran predicts in the five bullets above: Oil crisis, large but localized famines and epidemic diseases, global economic depression and a resultant interest rate and debt crisis and ‘pulling together’ and more, local genocides, makes sense to me, based on everything I’ve read, and on my instincts. So I’m going to pick up from that point, and make my prediction for 2045, the same short-term forecast period as the 1961 technophile’s prediction with which I started this article. Here we go:
This prediction may sound dire, but it’s not all that different from what the world went through in the 1930s and 1940s, and humanity is essentially the same species now we are then. I’m also not predicting anything radically different from what the world has already seen, in one form or another — no unprecedented crash, no global plague, no end of civilization or of the world as we know it. That could come later in the century, but not by 2045. Contrast this world in 2045 versus 2005, and compare the degree of difference between 2005 and 1965, and I think you’ll see the changes are comparable, consistent and, sadly, recurrent. What I’m predicting is not inconsistent with the predictions in The Fourth Turning, a well-researched but annoying 1997 book that tells us we’re destined (or doomed) to repeat the cycles of history at an ever-increasing scale of magnitude. In 2045 I will be, if I’m still alive, 93 years old. My grand-daughters will be about the age I am today. I can picture them now, lamenting, on whatever takes the place of blogs by then, the malaise of our society, its short-sightedness and preoccupation with immediate crises, our inability to learn the lessons of the past. They will be pleased about the growing awareness of the need to, and willingness to, conserve, and about the re-birth of entrepreneurship and innovation in the search for answers to the pressing economic and social problems of the day. They will probably still have big mortgages, and the threat of foreclosure will hang over them, as it will everyone else, but that will be just one more of the daily stresses they have learned to endure, to adapt to, as we have in our time. They will live more for the moment, in their 50s, than I do today in mine. But as the clock ticks on, as the overpopulation and despoiling and exhaustion of the planet continues at an unceasing and inexorable, but almost imperceptibly slow pace, will they still cling to hope that the next generation will be able to solve the problems they leave unaddressed? Will they even notice that the fate of all life on Earth has probably already passed The Tipping Point? Should we expect them to be any different from us? The intriguing graphic above is from a Rutgers University study asking whether 9/11 or The End of Oil could be the catalyst for the predicted ‘Fourth Turning’. The graphic is available in a legible wall-sized version on the site. |
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Wow! I usually like some of your stuff but this article is just plain ridiculous… there are so many errors it’s hard to know where to start.Since I don’t have much time, I’ll just pick the first two points. 1)”Peak Oil won’t lead to Mad Max-style gangs stealing gasoline, but rather increasing unreliability of electrical power in the West”You might want to look at how much of our electricity is generated by oil. try – http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epm/epm_sum.htmlI think we are talking about less than 3% and even that is declining. Oil is used primarily for transportation. We use coal,gas, nuclear, hydro, etc… for electricity.2) Food and famines – Calories per capita continues to increase throughout the world. There are no signs of this slowing down. With the continued SLOWDOWN in population growth, food productivity will not have to increase as fast as it has in the last thirty years. The biggest problem with food in the future – including poorer countries – will be obesity not starvation.
I’ve wondered, from time to time if inspite of your annoyance, you’d return to “What I’m predicting is not inconsistent with the predictions in The Fourth Turning, a well-researched but annoying 1997 book that tells us we’re destined (or doomed) to repeat the cycles of history at an ever-increasing scale of magnitude.I share your dislike of the style, and I found it well-researched .. and theissues and analyses in the book have stayed with me.
“If such a thing [‘a great global “awareness” and coming-together’] is possible it is far further in the future than the bullet-points above, so far away that I think it is foolish to think about it — it’s beyond the predictable ‘event horizon’.”This is where I disagree: I think that such a thing could happen almost anytime from now. The reason is that we have built and continue to build the infrastructure for something like that to happen. Just an example: some sort of reputation/wealth tag could change clothing fashion overnight.
A good read on cultures’ behaviour constellation during such times: The Ghost Dance: Origins of Religion by Weston LaBarre. Old, possibly out of print. But definitely will haunt an aware reader with the parallels in current cultural trends in (mostly) the U.S.
The sky is falling!Maybe not -http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/spiegel/0,1518,357366,00.htmlAnd –http://online.wsj.com/article_email/article_print/0,,SB111931466624264760-H9jgINnlaR4oJ2oZn2IaqeGm4,00.htmlBest regards, Ben
Hei Dave! I’ll be only 64 by then, so I’m obviously concerned about what’s possibly going to happen by 2045.What’s bothering me is that some ofyour predictions are happening NOW in 2008! only 3 years after you wrote the article, so I wonder were tooooooooo optimistic by setting your timescale to 2045? we might have far less time to adjust.No time to idle, time to act.