> Barring several fairly large changes to our energy and resource systems, our civilization is mathematically and physically guaranteed to collapse within the next 200 years at most.
Would you mind elaborating on this or posting some links with more evidence for this? As stated, your claim seems reminiscent to previous claims that humanity would soon not be able to grow enough food for the projected population. So far, unexpected scientific advances have managed to increase food yields substantially, and we can now effectively produce more than enough food to feed people (though we clearly have issues ensuring that food gets to everyone who needs it). So I wonder what is different now, that makes this looming catastrophe "provable" and "mathematically and physically guaranteed".
I agree that humanity is facing significant challenges (e.g., climate change), but I think the claim of "guaranteed collapse" is not as well established.
I'm not the GP, but I suspect api has in mind something like this [0]. The money quote from that article is this:
"At that 2.3% growth rate, we would be using energy at a rate corresponding to the total solar input striking Earth in a little over 400 years."
The obvious first-order thermodynamic consequences of that fact for the temperature of the surface of the earth are pretty undeniable.
[0] http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2012/04/economist-meets-...
Though, to be a bit picky, showing that we can't indefinitely sustain our current trajectory is a different argument than saying a collapse is inevitable.
This is a cautionary tale about something that stock market traders know well: never try to call the top of a bubble. You'll just look like a fool, and if you bet on it you will lose all your money.
The "Population Bomb" crowd in the 70s and the peak oilers of today tried to do just that: to call the top. They were not wrong about the underlying realities, but they were absolutely wrong about the timing -- which is nearly always the case. Bubbles almost always go higher and further than anyone ever expects or imagines.
We're exponentially growing on the back of finite resources that we are consuming without replenishing. That's a bubble. I don't know when it will pop, but it will. Question is what happens then, and will we have enough alternatives available to keep going or not?
On the counterpoint side:
Life faced a similar situation prior to the advent of photosynthesis. It was growing exponentially and consuming chemical resources that would have been depleted. Had photosynthesis not evolved in time, life would have likely mostly died out and retreated to small colonies around a few hydrothermal vents.
That might have been one of the first great filters. We seem to be past that one.
The Great Filter is just the thing that explains most of why intelligent life is (or seems) so rare in the universe. It could be true, for example, that some cosmic event kills life before it becomes technological 99% of the time (= Great Filter), and also that, say, 60% of technological civilizations destroy themselves via destroying their environment.
(1) An intelligence reaches a critical intellectual mass and begins to utilize the free resources that are present in its environment.
(2) In doing so it grows and develops exponentially.
(3) By the time it develops far enough intellectually to realize the problem -- exponential growth built on finite non-replenishable supply -- it's already too late.
We seem to have realized this problem around 1950-1970, and we have done very little about it so far. That's because huge complex systems are hard to change, and all the incentives point the wrong way.
It's too early to say, but my money's on population crashing first. 100 years ago, you could see nearly anyplace a large population at something approaching the Malthusian limit; that's much reduced now.
The sore spots are worse but there are fewer of them. And something like a Haiti is extremely path dependent - it takes several improbable events conspiring to make one; so they can be unmade.
Jared Diamond's "Collapse" pretty much convinced me he was not just wrong but flat and 100% wrong. Through his writing , I learned to not only disapprove of apocolyptic narrative but how to counter it.
I would not be surprised of there were big, resource-oriented wars on the horizon but I doubt that'll lead to collapse, and I attribute those more to things like monetary policy and the odious politics of debt than human nature in the raw. It's difficult to explain just how violently wrong-headed people were in the 20th Century to create the big disasters.
I'm not talking about cleanliness. That's a quality of life factor but ultimately it's not what's important. The important thing is supply, mostly of energy.
(It's also important to note that to a great extent the West has cleaned up its environment by outsourcing polluting industries to Asia, Africa, and South America.)
Last I checked we still got more than 80% of our energy from fossil fuels. That has changed very, very little in the past 50 years. My grandparents drove a gasoline car, my parents drove a gasoline car, and I drive a gasoline car, and the power grid where I live is powered by 60% natural gas and 15% coal. Where I grew up it was almost 100% coal, same as it was three generations ago.
We were supposed to be driving EVs powered by fusion reactors by now.
If you're rich you can buy solar panels and an EV and convince yourself there is no problem, but until that stuff falls geometrically in price to the point that it achieves mass adoption it's a luxury toy that will make no impact. Either that or the future will require that 90% of humanity be reduced to medieval subsistence-level poverty. That's not quite the collapse some have predicted, but I highly doubt that sort of neo-feudal civilization is going to go to the stars. So it counts for the Fermi Paradox. The universe may be filled with such small, limited, planet-bound intelligences.
I'm slightly encouraged by an apparent Moore's Law in solar, but storage is now the bottleneck. I'm also very cynical about technological advancement outside of IT and a few other narrow areas. I agree with Peter Thiel that basically all major technological advancement outside of computers and some biotech stopped around 1970. Cars, planes, power plants, etc. are all basically the same today as they were then.
Cleanliness - basic control of waterborne disease, the level of schmutz from power, control of pernicious trash - is huge. Queen Victoria's husband Albert died of this sort of disease 150ish years ago. This is vanishingly rare now if it exists at all.
I don't buy "90% in medieval subsistence level poverty" because medieval subsistence level poverty doesn't scale. It went obsolete even with the potato as a base food crop in the early 19th Century - I'd accuse the Irish potato famine of ending anything remotely like it. If there's feudalism again, then it's because we can't organize ourselves in anything more efficient than that.
I can't say that some sort of Malthusian equilibrium is impossible, only that it seems unlikely. Historically, we had two notable examples in the 20th Century - the Ukrainian famine post the Bolshevik Revolution, and the Chinese Great Leap Forward. Both were, paradoxically, caused by belief systems grounded in Malthusian predictions. Now that's largely inductive predicting on my part, but we just know better now.
There's a heck of a lot of muddling through between going to the stars and a continuous Malthusian crisis. I'd say "going to the stars" has more than anything else failed to capture at least the popular imagination.
Few nonrenewable resources have a remaining supply measured in hundreds of years.
Barring several fairly large changes to our energy and resource systems, our civilization is mathematically and physically guaranteed to collapse within the next 200 years at most.
That's not a hypothetical filter. It's a real one that we can see, and we are not past it.