Why do you think that?

I'm assuming you're talking about the internet, networked services, etc, because that's the only conceivable way a collapse could happen that quickly... except all modern infrastructure we rely on like that has backups and redundancy built in, and largely separated failure domains, so that such a failure would never be able to happen that quickly.

I assume they mean nuclear war.

Yes, exactly. Even if some fabs survived, the ability to supply and staff them would not last long. The world's ability to manufacture advanced computers would disappear.

Even if the collapse is a fuzzy decades one I think it would also have an ever increasing probability of the remainder in under an hour as something entirely forgotten fails.

Or worse, decades in the future when historians look back, they might determine that collapse started before 2025 (perhaps 9/11, 2008 financial collapse, covid, the re-emergence of populist fascism, AI, microplastics, climate change ... take your pick).

Which means we might be living in collapse now, we just don't know it yet. "The Long Emergency" as James Howard Kunstler put it.

Like falling into a black hole; you don't notice as it happens, only looking back with more context.

Oh I see now, thank you for the helpful analogy! :)

Empires that collapsed not by military conquest didn’t know that they had collapsed until years later.

Is there any Empire that collapsed without military conquest? You can argue the collapse predated the conquest, but there’s always a conquest to seal the deal.

The British Empire didn't collapse due to military conquest by the Germans, it fell due to economic conquest by the United States (see the Atlantic Charter and U.S. intervention in the Suez Crisis).

Hasn't Kunstler been predicting the imminent end of oil supplies since the 1990s?

When a professional prognosticator's prognostications continue to be falsified by actual events, year after endless year, at some point don't people stop listening to them?

> When a professional prognosticator's prognostications continue to be falsified by actual events, year after endless year, at some point don't people stop listening to them?

Funnily enough - not whatsoever! And the benefits of this amazing fact are reaped by economists* the world over, year after year.

* And, to be fair, journalists, politicians, various flavours of youtuber, etc, etc.

"When a professional prognosticator's prognostications continue to be falsified by actual events, year after endless year, at some point don't people stop listening to them?"

Yet people still listen to Musk about when Tesla will have autonomous driving.

we'll be terraforming mars soon I just know it!

what do you think about the idea, though?

The creation of Fox News