I have lived my entire adult life in the looming shadow of ecological and societal collapse. By the age of thirteen I already clearly visualized the primary drivers of collapse, overpopulation and over-consumption. I began writing and speaking about the danger of collapse in 1992, when this was still considered an extremely far-fetched hypothesis. Three decades later, collapse is now discussed openly in the mainstream media. I’m not motivated by schadenfreude and take no pleasure in being right.
It’s possible that I’ll be taken more seriously now, but this is cold comfort since collapse is by now almost certainly unavoidable, as two physicists recently demonstrated in an excruciating peer-reviewed paper for Nature, the gist of which was summarized for the lay person in the Vice article “Theoretical Physicists Say 90% Chance of Societal Collapse Within Several Decades.”
The first half of the paper is tough sledding for non-mathematicians, but the second half is math-free and relatively comprehensible. The section titled “Fermi’s paradox” confirms what I’ve been saying for years: that the reason we appear to be alone in the cosmos is because intelligence tends to snuff itself out, after an all-too-brief burst of irrational exuberance. As the paper puts it, “only civilizations capable of … [switching] from an economical society to a sort of ‘cultural’ society in a timely manner, may survive.” In other words, the only civilizations that make it through the bottleneck are those rare ones that prioritize collective long-term survival over individual short-term profit. Or as my video “Overshoot” puts it more succinctly, “intelligent life is a cruel joke.”
