Is modern techno-industrial society a historical anomaly whose time will soon pass?

It depends. Right now we are really focused on industrial technology and medicine. On other areas we have actually gone backwards.

So as long as we keep focusing on a single area of civilization and believing that moving forwards in time automatically means we are more advanced in absolute terms, we will keep buying into the meme that every human to have lived before our time was a savage.

so you don't have any

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Replacement rate fertility. The wealthier people are, the more they enjoy their lives, the less they want their lives cluttered up with children. So the richer countries have not only low reproductive rates, but rates so low that they cannot ever be fixed.

Greece was like a 1.2; you need at least a 2.1 (2.1 people being born for every women) or you go extinct.

Nobody to my knowledge has ever recovered from a 1.6 or lower.

Poor people, on the other hand, have many children in order to get free labor and the hopes that one of them makes it in life and can support the parents. So you have Nigerian birth rates of like 9.1.

look around you

Not an argument.

I have a hard time believing humanity will ever regress further than a New Iron Age.

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if we do regress further, we'll at least have plastics to melt down and reshape

How many people out of a thousand know how to smelt and work iron, though? If we got into a serious cataclysm that left us in a population of like a thousand we'd have a lot of people with advanced and newly useless technological know-how, but few with the skills that would make the difference between iron age and stone age.

In a situation like that we'd just have to hope that literacy and literature is preserved.
If the population was that low it would take centuries for mankind to stop being in serious danger of going extinct at any moment. Even if knowledgeable people survived they would probably expend all their energy on just barely eking out a living rather than building generators and shit.

>How many people out of a thousand know how to smelt and work iron, though
How many knew how in the Iron age?
You don't actually need all that many smiths, just a few workshops churning out product that gets traded among the plebs.

Very very VERY good posts, well done.

chekd

X^D

Yes if Africans keep breeding.

No, not all technology is the same and some technology is too useful to ever really go away.

>Nobody to my knowledge has ever recovered from a 1.6 or lower.
Got a source for this? I don't doubt the fact that sub replacement level fertility is a serious issue but this gets brought up quite frequently and is always unsourced.

I have my doubts that this is something that is impossible to recover from, society as a whole would simply contract and civilisation would simplify itself, much like it has done during plagues or some of the most destructive wars in history.

We'd need a very serious and all-pervasive catastrophe to go back to even medieval levels. Simply put, there's too much useful shit around to use for generations. Quickest example I can think of is steel springs from cars and trucks make excellent quality swords and spoons make more than decent arrowheads. Like someone already said, the most important part would be that literacy and the collective know-how we've accumulated aren't 100% lost.

Positive feedback
Less resourcesmore pressure to exploit resources.
Loss of biodiveristy and earth system change looks like its going to kill us and the few that do survive the initial couple hundered years of collapse probably won't make it very long.
Usually takes about 8~20 million years for ecological complexity to emerge and establish a steady state after a global disturbance of this scale.
We have the potential to preventively save ourselves, I don't think there is a chance in hell of doing retroactively.

We are in general.
A primitive society just will not be ecologically possible after the collapse.

nah. genetic engineering and direct neurological interaction will ensure us as a space-faring race. people who think otherwise don't understand the emerging technologies and their implications concerning resources, the environment, and society as a whole. among other things doomsayers don't understand about reality that I'm too lazy to dig in to this time.

t. someone who is obsessed with the peaks of the pyramids while ignoring the base and foundations

Say whatever you want, but a truly universal collapse of human society is unlikely at this point. Even if we blow ourselves the fuck up, there's likely to be at least one place on Earth that maintains a high, or at least a higher than the rest level of technology, and keep a large portion of our knowledge base, and that's all that we as a species need.

>Whatisecologylol?
This is what happens when you are raised in an artificial environment. People end up thinking that technology just exists on its own. Completely desenitized from the world that gives you everything. This is really fucking sad and I'm going to numb myself now bye.

>artificial environment
elaborate

Advanced industrial societies are incredibly vulnerable to shocks that are quite likely to happen as time goes on. Something as seemingly trivial as a 2 meter sea level rise would displace hundreds of millions of peope from the coasts to the surrounding regions. These migrants would also not be anything like what we are currently dealing with because they would be backed by destabilized governments with access to nuclear weaponry, trying to blackmail other nuclear powers into giving them resources to stabilize their own internal situations.

Furthermore, global warming will result in changed rainfall patterns combined with the dissapearance of mountain glaciers and groundwater depletion will devastate agriculture in the mid latitudes, while the soils of the now more hospitable northern lands are too acidic for major agricultural conversion.

Sure, genetic engineering of the crops themselves will help to a certain degree, but even if you can get rice to grow in salt water, it isn't possible to make them adapt to the warmed tropical regions because excessive heat will destroy the fruiting bodies. The world's staple crops are all from temperate regions and the current heat of the tropics already pushing the plants to their limits. Increased atmospheric water vapour will also lead to much more frequent occurences of crop destroying rain and hailstorms as well, which is again a problem that we can't genetically engineer our way out of.

This new world being built before eyes is shaping up to finally be the disaster that malthus predicted and if you think that any sort of stability that is required to maintain industrial civilisation can withstand these pressures, you are sorely mistaken.

I just hope I'm dead before we have to deal with the worst of it. Preferably vaporized in a direct hit by a nuclear missile.

wew

>I'm not going to do anything to prevent this completely preventable catastrophe from happening I'll be dead lol
This is some Boomer tier thinking

Even assuming any of that happens it won't make much difference on the larger scale of things. Dictators have genocided more just because they felt like it.

At this point the damage to the climate has already been done and we are at the point of no return even if we had zero carbon emissions from this day forward. I'd rather not suffer through something I had no part in or control over.

>completely preventable

Maybe if you have a time machine and go back to the 70s.

The full potential of globe warming Co2 takes 40 years to materialize because the ocean is so vast that it's inertia is slowing it down. The global warming effects we are seeing today is what came out of the smokestacks and tailpipes in 1977 and our emissions in 2017 won't become apparent until 2057.

Really? I thought carbon emissions would work similar to smoking, where yes, you have done damage but on stopping your risks for shit happening go down drastically over time and the damage much more minor

How long have people been claiming that the specific time in which they live just so happens to also be the very peak of human achievement?

The Ocean is much heavier and cooler than the atmosphere and it takes a long time to warm up, so any emissions we feel today were emitted 40 years ago. Furthermore, burning fossil fuels causes global dimming due to smog and if we stopped burning them, we would get an immediate pulse of global warming because more of the sun's energy would reach the surface of the earth instead of being reflected into space.

I think so.
I mean, it is unusual that in the last 100 years progress, scientific, societal and cultural has been so terrifying rapid. There was change at every period in history but this is rudiculous.
I dont believe it is normal. Maybe some catastrophe will reduce humans to point zero again or just the decadance of society will make humanity nothing more than cattle, ending historic change since there will be nobody to do it

Depends.
You're actually overlooking the fact that for vast swathes of human history the contemporary inhabitants considered themselves to be inferior in achievement compared to those that came before.

the amount of dimming from solar radiation smog causes has to be lower than the ozone layer, post source or you're bullshitting

About as long as there have been people claiming that there is no way that the only way is up.

bitsofscience.org/real-global-temperature-trend-global-dimming-still-masks-50-percent-co2-warming-6990/

events in the future don't influence the present, you magnificent moron.

The leaders of the civilized world are working with the knowledge that their decisions could cause the downfall of the societies they love and seek to maintain, and none of them are the psychotic like Pol Pot, the capitalist nation states will survive, even if retracted and reduced

>Advanced industrial societies are incredibly vulnerable to shocks that are quite likely to happen as time goes on
CLAIM BASED ON WHAT FUCKING DATA?!?!

didn't read the rest of the post, your first sentence instantly reflects how retarded you are.

>clearly see that the bus is headed toward the cliff, which goes down three quarters of a kilometer
>hey we should probably make a turn
>events in the future don't influence the present you magnificent moron

>CLAIM BASED ON WHAT FUCKING DATA?!?!
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_protests_in_the_United_Kingdom
>By Tuesday 12 September 2000, 3,000 petrol stations were reported to be closed due to a lack of fuel.[19] There were also reports that there would be no fuel left within 48 hours.[19] Tony Blair, the Prime Minister put the oil companies under pressure to resume deliveries. BP said that they would resume deliveries if police escorts were given to the tankers.[19] Tony Blair had been in contact with the oil companies during the day and announced that supplies would be back to normal within 24 hours,[8] with the oil companies having been ordered under the government's powers to commence deliveries to the emergency services.[20] At the same time BBC News reported that the government's COBRA committee had drawn up plans to deal with the crisis, including using the military to assist in moving supplies and restricting the sale of fuel.[20] South West Trains were reported to be reducing some of their services to preserve fuel supplies.[19] Deliberately slow-moving convoys of lorries caused traffic jams on the M1 and M5 motorways.[21]

A strike by truck caused this, not a war, revoluition or naval blockade.

I suggest you see your way out of this discussion, mouthbreather.

Crises brought about by supply problems are not unique to advanced industrial societies. If anything I'd argue we are more equipped to deal with things like this (especially in agriculture) than ever before.

you're confusing the ability for humans to think abstractly and predict consequences to their actions with physics and the future's ability to influence the present. your argument is semantical.

with the same logic and amount of data you are using, I could claim that people are increasingly likely to be struck by meteors as society advances technologically and in the future, because someone in alabama was struck by one after it went through their roof.

I swear to god when are they going to start teaching logic in school.

>Crises brought about by supply problems are not unique to advanced industrial societies
Didn't claim they were.

> If anything I'd argue we are more equipped to deal with things like this (especially in agriculture) than ever before.
And here's where you would be wrong. The globalization of the food market has meant that yes, a local poor harvest will not cause a crisis becausew fod can always be shipped in from other regions, but the price shocks of a major staple crop area being disconnected from the global market place will cause prices to rise worldwide. The last time this happened in a big way was in 2010, when Russia banned all wheat exports because the hot summer and wildfires had devastated harvests in Russia. They did this because they wanted to ensure their own people still had cheap bread, but this decision impacted countries that had long relied on the Russian export market, specifically middle eastern and north african nations. It is no coincidence that the rise in food prices was the final tipping point that caused the populations of these regions to overthrow their governments, leading to the chaos we have now in that part of the world.

ft.com/content/485c93ae-a06f-11df-a669-00144feabdc0

Great point, although "everything is going to go to shit soon" has been just as popular of an idea.

yeah, that sure totally gutted the economic integrity of the western world, bro.

Arab Spring won't be the last riot related to the price of basic food, but it definitely wasn't the first. I'm not arguing that it's impossible for these things to happen, but that they'll go much more smoothly than before. Also, I'm not sure I'd call all the countries of the Middle East "advanced industrial societies".

The Bronze Age collaps:

>A general systems collapse has been put forward as an explanation for the reversals in culture that occurred between the Urnfield culture of the 12th and 13th centuries BC and the rise of the Celtic Hallstatt culture in the 9th and 10th centuries BC.[35] General systems collapse theory, pioneered by Joseph Tainter,[36] hypothesises how social declines in response to complexity may lead to a collapse resulting in simpler forms of society.

>In the specific context of the Middle East, a variety of factors, including population growth, soil degradation, drought, cast bronze weapon and iron production technologies, could have combined to push the relative price of weaponry (compared to arable land) to a level unsustainable for traditional warrior aristocracies. In complex societies that were increasingly fragile and less resilient, the combination of factors may have contributed to the collapse.

>The growing complexity and specialization of the Late Bronze Age political, economic, and social organization in Carol Thomas and Craig Conant's phrase[37] together made the organization of civilization too intricate to reestablish piecewise when disrupted. That could explain why the collapse was so widespread and able to render the Bronze Age civilizations incapable of recovery. The critical flaws of the Late Bronze Age are its centralisation, specialisation, complexity, and top-heavy political structure. These flaws then were exposed by sociopolitical events (revolt of peasantry and defection of mercenaries), fragility of all kingdoms (Mycenaean, Hittite, Ugaritic, and Egyptian), demographic crises (overpopulation), and wars between states. Other factors that could have placed increasing pressure on the fragile kingdoms include interruption of maritime trade by piracy by the Sea Peoples, as well as drought, crop failure, famine, or the Dorian migration or invasion.[38]

Lots of similarities with our age:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Bronze_Age_collapse

This is also interesting, can draw parallels to our modern states:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palace_economy

and yet Egypt survived

>Arab Spring won't be the last riot related to the price of basic food, but it definitely wasn't the first.
It was the first one in an era where the international market that was originally set up to distribute resources in a way that is more profitable failed the consumers though. The global trade system had been set up specifically to stand up to a variety of stressors, but it couldn't hold the line when a major producer backed out of it.

>but that they'll go much more smoothly than before
Maybe in the sense that mass starvation is indeed rather unlikely to happen because we are much better at preserving and distributing food, but giving the people of the world enough food to not starve, while raising the prices to a level where they spend all their income on it is going to result in a far larger and harder to control population than the pile of cadavers that would have been the result of a failed harvest a century ago.

It's these kinds of never before seen circumstances that modify historically routine events like crop failure such a pain in the ass for planners when studying future social shocks because we have no examples to look at how modern society reacts to these kinds of events.

And it never became as powerful as it was before the bronze age collapse.

kinda. it never reached a high point again; it was basically an ottoman style decline for hundreds of years on

barely desu

they were the exception

The premise for the thread suggests that industrial society will suffer a crisis that will bring its end, caput, done, no tech, no economy, no nothin', if anything survives the industrial collapse like egypt did the bronze age, it's not the end

and yet America survived..

I sure hope so

you know how we're about to hit peak oil?

The same issue applies to all fossil fuels, if we do go down we probably won't have enough energy left to restart from scratch. It's probably renewable energy, nuclear, accelerated mercury vril power, or bust from here on out.

>because we have no examples to look at how modern society reacts to these kinds of events

Right so with a small sample size I don't think it's entirely accurate to say a shock would be the apocalypse

I've never, in any of my posts argued that we will return to an iron age level existance. My argument is that industrial society requires a certain level of social mobilization and organization that is unmaintainable if the consumer's lives become too disrupted for a state function. Local organizations such as militias, gangs and posses will be able to usurp many of the previous functions of the state such as the monopoly of force and humanity will break apart into a more localized level of organization, comparable to the Chinese Warlord states or the Post-Soviet Caucasus.

These instances were manageable because the international systems of finance combined with hard and soft power were able to stabilize the situation after a period of chaos, but if the whole world has this occur at around the same time all over the place, the stresses will prove unbearable and there will be no stopping the dominoes from tumbling.

Technology wise the situation would not immediately deteriorate, but a decline over a period of decades, let alone a century, would be certain.

we are not about to hit peak oil, we still have the artic and the deep sea

>small sample size
There is no sample size because it hasn't happened yet, but you are right to say a shock by itself is not the apocalypse. What would be close to the apocalypse from a modern point of view is a series of shocks eroding the strength of the international and state organs stretching over a period of decades (normalizing the deterioration of stability and conveniently concealing it from the masses to a certain extent), before we find that once another shock happens, it proves to be the one that breaks the eggshell in that part of the world.

We can see that today with the situation in Libya and the Levant, but it is being beaten back by nations that are still stable enough to conduct operations of that scale on foreign soil because their own problems are not nearly as damaging as they would have to be to prevent actions from being taken.

and most of the us. peak oil isnt a thing since fracking, and the next thing, and the next, etc.

youtube.com/watch?v=G0R09YzyuCI

If industrial society collapsed you would have so much scrap metal around the civilization that comes after would probably create some pretty cool shit from it an other garbage they find

Assuming we don;t destroy the environment to such a point where civilization can no longer exist and we somehow safely deactivated all our nuclear reactors before the collapse

Is there a vaporwave album associated with this image?

>Nobody to my knowledge has ever recovered from a 1.6 or lower.

Iceland: 2.04
Sweden: 1.91
Ireland: 2.01
Finland: 1.8

People used to say same thing about coal. I am not worried bout it. The future will take care of itself .

Humanity and morals have gone too far. We live in a time where we waste our scientific and medical capabilities on turning penises into vaginas and keeping people with severe genetic and acquired disabilities on life support.

Yes, all of our scientific and medical capabilities are wasted on turning penises into vaginas.

How retarded are you?

>something as trivial as a 2 meter sea rise
>2 metre sea rise
>trivial

Veeky Forums everyone

it's trivial if you aren't dutch

desu I'm glad oceanic life will have more habitat at the expense of humanity

>deliberately misquoting posts
Veeky Forums in action right here

An environment that did not emerge from complex interaction in its constituents.
Basically, the taking of the 'natural world' and arbitrarily rearranging it.
Pic related, look at this shit, and all the other "human" habitats. It's does not, and cannot come to existence on by its own properties.
We are completely dependent on earth systems for survival, we have not transcended the living systems we are a part of. It's like thinking apples exist independent of apple trees, fucking delusional.

Potatoes are reproduce from seed potatoes. This leads them to become adapted to being potatoes, instead of the environment that allows potatoes to exist. This has dire consequences, I.e blight
youtu.be/RQKMpkcH_10

REMEMBER

REMEMBER THE 14 WORDS

"THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION AND ITS CONSEQUENCES HAVE BEEN A DISASTER FOR THE HUMAN RACE"

B U R N T H E C I T I E S

YES

WE LIVE IN THE AGE OF ENDLESS SUFFERING

>it's trivial if you aren't dutch

Dude, when scientists talk about "sea level raise of 2 meters," they mean that stuff that's now on the current sea level will be now under the sea level. The coasts are not pushing two meters inland.

>posting the edited version

Go to bed Pol Pot

We havnt tapped into mass hydroponic farming yet in sheltered enviroments.
Hell, institutionalised cannibalism+the culling of the old while you keep protected productionlines necessary for bunkered down arcologys at strategic places whose genetically engineered halfgod populations lord over the hunter gatherers of the wastes should be possible even in the most shittiest conditions.

All that immigration sure helps

>morals have gone too far.
t. grandpa

>Iceland, Ireland or Finland
>High fertility because of immigration

More Icelanders are born each year than there are immigrants in Iceland in total, while Baltic and Slavic migrants in Ireland and Finland have lower fertility and than the natives and if you subtract them, Ireland and Finland both have more natives being born than the total immigrant populations in those countries.

I am not even sure you have a argument.
Then again
>Entire of UK
>Literally runs dry because ONE FUCKING REFINERY in county of Cheshire is blocked
>Only 8 days of supplies being stopped

Food price != Food availability
2010 no wheat export from Russia didn't turn into famine to their export nations, instead they had to just purchase more expensive resources.
What will be worth watching out for, will be if Brazil suddenly stops harvest exports for 2-3 years.
Even then thats not even indicating anything, when there still exists axes and untamed land to grass on.

I tried to run a GURPS campaign where the players had t flee over land from Tiryns in Mycenaean Greece, through crete, anatolia (and the collapsed Hittite empire), to warn the Pharoah of massing groups of sea people. Campaign would culminate in the Battle of the Delta, go on a few years break as the players hang out in Egypt, then have a muder mystery section with the murder of ramses III.

Never really took off and I can't find any players to try again.