What is collapse?

[K-Dog]

You will know collapse when you see it.

Sure...but how many years do you need to see it and claim it before everyone else figures out you pulled the trigger on claiming it WAY early?

I am not concerned about claiming collapse early because we live in a world which denies collapse altogether.  About collapse I prefer being right or wrong, rather than be early or late.

As things are.  Things are happening as rational doomers predict.  There is a shooting war.  Prosperity America has no more.  I never was a 'Earth is going to turn into Venus guy'.  I have not predicted things too early.  Some years ago I came up with a musical chairs theory.  A crisis comes and some people don't make it on through to the other side.



How many people with long term unemployment from frequent economic downturns in America ever get back to work?  Not many.  2008 almost did me in.  Musical chairs.  Fewer resources find fewer people to distribute themselves amongst.  As if resources were sentient. 

But resources have no intelligence, human culture only makes it look that way.  Where are you on the supply chain gang?  Cycles of musical chairs become more frequent and more brutal now.  Lebanon has 50% unemployment and that is not the only country in DIRE straits as I type.  There is a serious shooting war and no protest.  Social collapse.  Half of America is ok with WWIII.  The choo-choo train of collapse can be heard approaching in the distance.  People don't know it is too late to make America great.  They do not hear the train.

I have not claimed anything too early.  Collapse is delayed because substitutions for resources are available.  Easy oil became depleted and people into collapse in 2000 thought the end was nigh.  Fracking extended the oil endowment but a Seneca cliff of oil production is on the horizon.

You can't say it ain't so.

* Considering that it is too late to do anything to avert collapse.  Nobody was too early!

[RE]

You will know collapse when you see it.

Like Pornography, it's tough to define but you know it when you see it.

It is important to realize you can use the word as a noun or as a verb, and to me it has more utility as a verb.  Collapse is a process that occurs over time, it has past, present and future tenses.  Our civilization has not yet collapsed, it is in the process of collapsing.  What I do nowadays mainly is to note various events that are occuring which are leading indicators of further unraveling of Industrial Civilization.  No one of these events is the end or even the beginning of the end of the process, although it is the end of the beginning (thank you illuminati scumbag Winston Churchill).

Picking benchmark numbers to label our civilization's place on the collapse timeline is quite arbitrary and varies a lot by location.  However, the trajectory everywhere now is the same wherever you go and whatever benchmark you care to examine.  It's headed South.



RE

[Tonyprep]

Technically, a collapse happens over a very short period, suddenly. At least that's what the dictionary says. If so, I can't see a global collapse happening, though some regions might. I guess I'm in the "Long Emergency" or "Long Descent" camp though I don't follow the authors of those tomes, any longer, as they seem to have gone off track.

It's amazing how long people can keep kicking the can down the road, as almost everyone doesn't even consider the end of civilisation, even though that's a given, at some stage. I'm sure I won't be as calm about it when the NZ branch of civilisation hits the buffers.

[RE]

Technically, a collapse happens over a very short period, suddenly.

Short is a relative comparison.  The Roman Empire collapse took a couple of hundred years.  Compared to how long the empire was around, that was pretty short but long measured by the human life span.  Industrial Civilization has been around 270 years.    If collapse takes 50 years, that is still pretty short.  It's also hard to put a finger on when collapse has completed.  In a sense the Roman Empire never finished collapsing, it is still with us in the form of the Holy Roman Catholic Church.

RE

[FarmGirl]

You will know collapse when you see it.

Sure...but how many years do you need to see it and claim it before everyone else figures out you pulled the trigger on claiming it WAY early?

I am not concerned about claiming collapse early because we live in a world which denies collapse altogether.  About collapse I prefer being right or wrong, rather than be early or late.

The very existence of forums like this, going back to ROE and dieoff.org and Earth Day 1970 demonstrates that no, not everyone in this world denies collapse. And folks who see personal collapse around them, not collapse because the body count is high enough for it to be a REAL collapse, but still, maybe a plunge in living standards (Greece? Russia? parts of SE Asia and Africa? Tonga?)? These things involve the pain and suffering of societal and economic dislocation, even if it isn't a real collapse.Arguably, a definition of collapse not as stringent as the one I've proposed is reasonable, but collapse isn't the best word for it. What happened to Appalachia, as industry fled and left behind the culture that LBJ found so abhorrent he needed to create new programs to try and lift them up out of abject poverty? It wasn't a collapse, but it was certainly a poverty stricken, societal meltdown scarring lives and the psyche of an entire region. Those raised in that environment certainly haven't forgotten it. Economic collapse? Working up to a REAL collapse, or not working up to it even, can have other components utilizing the word collapse? Societal collapse? A degradation of the overall functioninf of society? Economic collapse? Cultural collapse? Each a degradation of critical parts of the systems we live within, but none of them being a REAL collapse? I don't know, but it would seem that the things we call collapse would fit into those lesser categories better than the real deal, the OMG we're all gonna die where are my buckets of beans and a gun type event.

As things are.  Things are happening as rational doomers predict. 

Define "rational doomer". The scientists that thought we would be dying off back in 1970 by the end of the 80's? Or only folks who agree with one particular doomer perspective? Which allows the broken clock routine in the door since at least the invention of the internet and the newsgroup format?

There is a shooting war. 

American has been at war for for 222 out of 239 years. There is always a shooting war.

Prosperity America has no more. 

America has lost it before during recessions and depressions, which arguably end, and then life continues to go on. And prosperity for whom? Appalachia didn't have it even as other parts of the US did post WWII. Economically depressed areas have always been around in America, even during the good times. Is it fair to proclaim "collapse" generally when it isn't all encompassing? Maybe collapse is a % of the population "not doing well", whatever that might mean. Mostly it probably means "I'm not doing so well", but that is pretty common in America in general, during good times and bad.

I never was a 'Earth is going to turn into Venus guy'.  I have not predicted things too early.  Some years ago I came up with a musical chairs theory.  A crisis comes and some people don't make it on through to the other side.

Soon as we can see the body count, we'll know its a real collapse or just a lightweight one then?

How many people with long term unemployment from frequent economic downturns in America ever get back to work?  Not many.  2008 almost did me in.  Musical chairs.  Fewer resources find fewer people to distribute themselves amongst.  As if resources were sentient.

I'll bet the same could be said of post Great Depression until WWII arrived, the recessions of the 70's as the rebalancing of American supremecy shifted, the end of the Cold War began to create the circumstances for the MAGA extreme as globalization sold out the American working people and now America has the demographics of immigration working against the happiness of old white folks, which just about every doomer on this forum is. Our perspective doesn't represent the global population, just a bunch of old farts who lived through that demographic shift. And are probably natural doomers to begin with. Which is why I find metrics so valuable when bandying about terrifying words...the metrics should match the word.

As far as resources being sentient, I would again bow to RE's knowledge of economics on how conservation and substitution work within the context of changes of resource mixes and costs. That would appear to cover the idea of how they could appear to be sentient.

I have not claimed anything too early.  Collapse is delayed because substitutions for resources are available.  Easy oil became depleted and people into collapse in 2000 thought the end was nigh.  Fracking extended the oil endowment but a Seneca cliff of oil production is on the horizon.

You can't say it ain't so.

Depends on the particular "it" you thinking of, but it appears to be oil? Easy oil was depleted about the time it took entirely new technologies to get the "harder" oil. That date is 1901 I believe. Fracking was this thing that came along in 1949 after I guess the next harder oil ran low? 

On March 1949, Halliburton and Stanolind completed the first successful, commercial, hydraulically fractured wells in Oklahoma and Texas. During some tests in East Texas, they attempted to mix in river sand to keep fractures propped open. It worked, and the use of proppant became an established procedure. Source.

* Considering that it is too late to do anything to avert collapse.  Nobody was too early!

Well, that I would argue. Because ultimately this isn't about a bunch of us modern, old white doomer men, but an idea, a philosophy, that dates back to the origins of major religions.

[AGelbert]

Technically, a collapse happens over a very short period, suddenly.

Short is a relative comparison.  The Roman Empire collapse took a couple of hundred years.  Compared to how long the empire was around, that was pretty short but long measured by the human life span.  Industrial Civilization has been around 270 years.    If collapse takes 50 years, that is still pretty short.  It's also hard to put a finger on when collapse has completed.  In a sense the Roman Empire never finished collapsing, it is still with us in the form of the Holy Roman Catholic Church.

RE

Yep.

I think you may be able to borrow this quote very, very soon:

"There are decades where 💣 nothing happens; and there are weeks where
💥 decades  happen"--Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

[Tonyprep]

Technically, a collapse happens over a very short period, suddenly.

Short is a relative comparison.  The Roman Empire collapse took a couple of hundred years.  Compared to how long the empire was around, that was pretty short but long measured by the human life span.  Industrial Civilization has been around 270 years.    If collapse takes 50 years, that is still pretty short.  It's also hard to put a finger on when collapse has completed.  In a sense the Roman Empire never finished collapsing, it is still with us in the form of the Holy Roman Catholic Church.

RE

Oh, it's a little quibble. It's hard to think of a decline over a couple of centuries as being a collapse but the decline is often referred to as collapse. Whether industrial civilisation's decline will be regarded as a collapse, is something for future historians, if such beings will exist.

[RE]

Technically, a collapse happens over a very short period, suddenly.

Short is a relative comparison.  The Roman Empire collapse took a couple of hundred years.  Compared to how long the empire was around, that was pretty short but long measured by the human life span.  Industrial Civilization has been around 270 years.    If collapse takes 50 years, that is still pretty short.  It's also hard to put a finger on when collapse has completed.  In a sense the Roman Empire never finished collapsing, it is still with us in the form of the Holy Roman Catholic Church.

RE

Oh, it's a little quibble. It's hard to think of a decline over a couple of centuries as being a collapse but the decline is often referred to as collapse. Whether industrial civilisation's decline will be regarded as a collapse, is something for future historians, if such beings will exist.

I think when the lights go out permanently most people will consider collapse as being well along.

RE

[K-Dog]

There was discussion in the tower of babble around 1970 about the world going to shit by the year 2000.  The date was delayed by a cosmic microsecond when tight oil substituted for easy oil, which is now GONE.  Original 1970 doom discussions neglected other conversations in the din or the tower.  Some conversations diabolically evil.

The powers that be, whom have had a lock on the American psyche ever since they told women to smoke with 'torches of freedom' in the 1920's dealt with 1970-ish Earth Day discussions.  They killed them dead.

[K-Dog]

"There are decades where 💣 nothing happens; and there are weeks where
💥 decades  happen"--Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

[FarmGirl]

The powers that be, whom have had a lock on the American psyche ever since they told women to smoke with 'torches of freedom' in the 1920's dealt with 1970-ish Earth Day discussions.  They killed them dead.

Ehrlich, he being the maker of some of those doomer 1970 claims, is still alive and well. I presume you were speaking figuratively then? Because if there ever was a case of rinse-recycle-repeat, I think he is the poster-scientist for it.

[RE]

This is definitely Collapse.



https://wtop.com/baltimore/2024/03/key-bridge-in-baltimore-collapses-after-hitting-large-boat/

Part of Key Bridge in Baltimore collapses after large boat collision, sending vehicles into water

RE