The End of Our Civilisation

STOP BELIEVING THE LIES, SEEK THE TRUTH, AND KNOW THE TRUTH TO SURVIVE

Civilization is a complex society where labour is specialized and social classes emerge, and which is ruled by institutions. The future of our greatest civilization on earth now hides in the darkness.

Throughout the glory days of the 20th century, scientists, doctors, and engineers worked tirelessly, driven by greed, to acquire wealth, power, and fame - developed new tools, technologies, drugs, and chemicals.?

"Scientists are preoccupied with whether or not they could; they do not stop to think if they should."

It's ironic that a fantasy movie, Jurassic park, aptly describes the situation we are in. People in power live under an illusion based on theoretical idealism without understanding the practical realities of managing finance, natural calamities, war and infections.

But now, in the twilight of their time is fading and gone. All around us, the universe has been gripped by desolation and decay, and so, in the darkness, we wait for the end. Long before you realized it was coming, we anticipated the universe was on a path of inevitable decline. The callous attitude of leaders of nations, living under an illusion based on theoretical idealism, without understanding the practical realities of managing a pandemic, choose a path of no return.

Methodically, they hunted, harassed, humiliated and outraised us to prevent us from sharing information detrimental to their institutions and organizations. The social media that claim to be media that protect free speech was blocking us share knowledge.

Now a final place to weed out eternity, and embarked on their last incredible feat of engineering, "Space travel", which will demolish the world of materials, populate other planets with micro-organisms that travel in and on the space shuttle return to earth as superbugs, and pollute the planets.?

Trusting people in power, scientists sharing knowledge, technology and financial institutions feeding us information are constructing a shell to enclose the darkness based on hope.

The scientists knew the time was not the same across the universe, and slowly many years passed since we started warning about the 21st Century crisis. They knew they had only delayed, not averted, that ultimate demise, and the darkness would inevitably envelop them forever.

As Albert Einstein said,?"The world will not be destroyed by evil, but by civilization watching the future play out in front of them, without doing anything.

DECLINE OF THE PAST CIVILIZATION

At its height, the Roman Empire was the pinnacle of human advancement. and was inhabited by 30% of the world's population. The citizens enjoyed the benefits of central heating, concrete, double glazing, banking, international trade and upward social mobility.

Rome, the first city in history with one million inhabitants, was the centre of technological advances and legal and economic progress. A powerful Empire that was rich, stable and believed to be one that was impossible to topple, slowly then suddenly, the most powerful civilization on earth collapsed In September of 476 AD.

CIVILIZATION

Civilizations share a dominant mutual language, culture, and domesticated plants and animals to feed and sustain large cities where they often constructed impressive monuments. The civilization that says becomes efficient on large scales collects vast amounts of knowledge and puts human ingenuity and the world's natural resources to work.

Without civilization, most people would never have been born, which makes it a bit concerning that collapse. Is the rule, not the exception of virtually all civilizations, and on average, after 340 years, collapsed. Their shared cultural identity is shattered as institutions lose power, knowledge, and declining living standards, resulting in violence, and the population often declines.?

In the past, the civilization either wholly disappeared, was absorbed by stronger neighbours, or something new culture emerged, which is unlikely to happen shortly.

If this is how it's been over the ages, what about us today

If we lose our industrial technology and our greatest technology, and healthcare achievements from smartphones, transplants or laser eye surgery, go away, we cannot hope to survive.

Our communication is instant industrial agriculture with engineered high yield plants, efficient machinery and high potency fertilizer that feeds billions of people, which cannot be sustained, resulting in starvation and death of billions worldwide.

Modern medicine may have the most extended lifespan we've ever had. Industrial Technology gave us unprecedented comfort and abundance, even though we haven't yet learned to attain them without destroying our ecosphere.

Different today's civilizations compete and coexist, forming a distinct global culture. This modern globalized civilization is more vulnerable to decay and death than past empires because we are much more deeply interconnected.

A collapse of the industrialized world means that most people alive today would perish. Without industrial agriculture, we would no longer be able to feed them, and there's an even greater risk.

What if a collapse was so deeply destructive that we were unable to reindustrialize again? What if it ruined our chances of enjoying a flourishing future as a multi-planetary species?

A global civilizational collapse could be an existential catastrophe, something that ruins not just the lives of everyone alive today. Still, all the future generations that could have come into being, all the knowledge we might have discovered, the art we might have created, and the joys we might have experienced would be lost.

So how likely is all of this?

While civilization collapses have happened regularly, none have ever derailed the course of global civilization in the past. Rome collapsed, but the Aksumite Empire or the tier two coins, and of course, the Byzantine Empire carried on because the population was not in billions but thousands.

What about sudden population crashes??

So far, a pandemic, no natural disaster, or war has not killed much more than 10% of the global population. The last clear example of a rapid global population decrease was the Black Death, a pandemic of the bubonic plague in the 14th century that spread across the Middle East and Europe and killed a third of all Europeans and about 1/10 of the global population.

If any event was going to cause the collapse of civilization, that should have been the pandemic.?While the old societies were massively disrupted in the short term, the intense loss of human lives and suffering did little to negatively impact European economic and technological development in the long run.

Population size recovered within two centuries, and just two centuries later, the industrial revolution began. History is full of incredible recoveries from horrible tragedies.

Atomic bombing dropped on Hiroshima during World War II, 140,000 people were killed, and 90% of the city was at least partially incinerated or reduced to rubble. But against all odds, they made a remarkable recovery. Hiroshima's population, helped using the advances in modern medicine, recovered within a decade, and today, it's a thriving city of 12 million people.

None of this made these horrible events any less terrible for those who lived through them. One difference from historic collapses is that humanity now has unprecedented destructive power. Today's nuclear arsenals are so powerful that all-out global war could cause a nuclear winter and billions of deaths.

Knowledge of our biology and how to manipulate it is getting so advanced that it's becoming possible to engineer viruses as contagious as Coronavirus and as deadly as Ebola.

Increasingly, the risk of global pandemics is much higher than in the past because more than 23 antibiotics fail to kill the germs that kill us. So we may cause a collapse ourselves, and it might be much worse than the things nature has thrown at us so far.

But if, say, 99% of the population died, would global civilization collapse forever??

Could we recover from such a tragedy??

There are 1 billion agricultural workers today; if the global population of farmers fell, many survivors would not know how to produce food. Will this happen if we don't need to start at square one because we could use modern high-yield crops?

I did not believe, talk about, or imagine the problem of food production when I started warning about Methicillin Resistance Bacterial Infections. When Nigel Farage of BBC asked me how humans will cope when lockdowns and quarantine affect food supply and shortages during the COVID pandemic, I started thinking hard.

I started warning about the threat of treatment-resistant commensal "Methicillin Resistant Bacterial Infection" in 1989, developed devices, methods, strategies, and published articles in medical journals to help slow the spread in 2019. The institutions, device manufacturers and pharmaceutical companies ignored the warning, claiming disruptive technology would de-skill doctors to protect their investment.?

My article explains how treatment resistance infections affect farmers, resulting in food shortages. The next step toward recovery to rebuilding farming and animal husbandry will not be easy and will result in a huge problem that our economies of scale make it impossible just to pick up where we left off.

Our high-tech industries are only functional because of huge demand, but disrupted supply chains across different continents bankrupt the business. Even if our infrastructure were left unharmed, we would take giant technological steps backwards. If we are thinking in larger timeframes, Industrialization originally happened 12,000 years after the agricultural revolution.

So if we need to start over from our free, massive collapse, it will be hard to reindustrialize because of the cost of oil, coal, and laws introduced to reduce CO2 to protect the environment.

If we use it all today, aside from worsening rapid climate change, we could hinder our ability to recover from a massive crisis. We must stop using easy-to-access coal, so it can serve as civilization insurance in case something terrible happens.

Another thing that makes recovery likely is that we probably have most of the information we need to rebuild civilization. We would undoubtedly lose crucial institutional knowledge, especially on hard drives that nobody could read or operate anymore. But a lot of the technological, scientific and cultural knowledge stored in the world's 26 million libraries would survive the catastrophe.

The post-collapse survivors would know what used to be possible, and they could reverse engineer some of the tools and machines they'd fight.

In conclusion, despite the bleak prospect of catastrophic threats, natural or created by ourselves, there is a reason for optimism.

Humankind is remarkably resilient, and even in the case of a global civilizational collapse, it seems likely that we would be able to recover, even if many people were to perish or suffer immense hardship, even if we lost cultural and technological achievements in the process.

But given the stakes, the risks are still unnervingly high nuclear war and dangerous pandemics threaten the remarkable global civilization we have built. The good news is that it's still early enough to prepare for and to mitigate these risks if we stop believing the lies, seek the truth, and know the truth.