A scientist has made the shocking claim that there’s a 49% chance the world will end in just 25 years. Jared Diamond, American scientist and historian, predicted civilisation could collapse by 2050. He told Intelligencer: “I would estimate the chances are about 49% that the world as we know it will collapse by about 2050.”
Diamond explained that fisheries and farms across the globe are being “managed unsustainably”, causing resources to be depleted at an alarming rate. He added: "At the rate we’re going now, resources that are essential for complex societies are being managed unsustainably. Fisheries around the world, most fisheries are being managed unsustainably, and they’re getting depleted.
“Farms around the world, most farms are being managed unsustainably. Soil, topsoil around the world. Fresh water around the world is being managed unsustainably.”
The Pulitzer Prize winning author warned that we must come up with more sustainable practices by 2050, “or it’ll be too late”.
“Popsci author repeats claim he’s been using for decades to sell books that most anthropologists question”.
Man, sometimes I think newspapers and traditional media should be banned from reporting on science at all. I am very critical of social media and what Internet does to communication, but I’ll admit that the extremely focused experts that communicate on a narrow field for a living do a much, much better job of parsing published claims than traditional generalist news ever did. I am exhausted of impossible galaxies, stars that “should not exist”, healthy superfood, cures for cancer and world-ending events.
Any good broad-scale critique fro anthropologists that’s worth reading? I’ve only read one of his books, nearly 20 years ago, but most of what I’ve heard him say has seemed more or less on point.
All I have is what you can get by looking him up, and I am definitely not an expert. I’m saying that this one guy referencing his one model for his one theory of society-as-ecology deserves a more nuanced headline than “the world is ending in 25 years”. If I can speak on anything here it’s on the reporting.
He isn’t even saying anything that controversial when you dig through to the actual statements, which is a constant of mainstream news reporting on science news. “With all these things, at the rate we’re going now, we can carry on with our present unsustainable use for a few decades, and by around 2050 we won’t be able to continue it any longer” is barely any more severe of a warning than any climate scientist or ecologist has been making about these things for the past four decades.
Hell, if anything he seems to be less concerned than the average Lemmy denizen:
He explained: "As for what we can do about it, whether to deal with it by individual action, or at a middle scale by corporate action, or at a top scale by government action - all three of those.
"Individually we can do things. We can buy different sorts of cars. We can do less driving. We can vote for public transport. That’s one thing.
“There are also corporate interests…I see that corporations, big corporations, while some of them do horrible things, some of them also are doing wonderful things which don’t make the front page.”
Post that around these parts, you’ll get people calling you a corporate shill for even entertaining that personal behaviour has an impact in this process or that any corporation is doing anything positive.
Don’t hear the Express go “dude on the Internet thinks it’s high time we ban cars before we all die”, though.
I would estimate the chances are about 49% that the world as we know it will collapse by about 2050.
Emphasis added. That’s a pretty big bit of weasel-wording there, the world “as we know it” has changed drastically in the past 25 years. Things that we thought were indispensable to the proper functioning of the world order - such as, for example, the lack of a pudding-brained pedophillic fascist in the White House - are no longer operative. Yet we’re muddling along well enough, all things considered.
Things are rapidly changing in so many ways right now. Projecting that far forward with any confidence is a bit of a fool’s errand.
That’s a pretty big bit of weasel-wording there
Absolutely, the world today is also not as we knew it in the 25 years ago, and it’s very different compared to the 70’s, where the future looked a bit more rosy.
Optimistic
Well I already knew I wouldn’t manage to retire…
Well at least this means there’s a 50% chance I won’t need the retirement savings that Im not going to have
That’s WAY later than I thought!
This is cause for celebration! 🎉
yep, sounds like we can start worrying about that in about 20 years then.
24
Not sure if you’re celebrating because that’s earlier than you thought, or later than you thought…
Extra time! I wouldn’t have given us 5.
I think it’s easy to forget the scale and momentum of the thing… But yeah, the longer we go without scaling back our energy and resource consumption the harder we’re gonna hit that wall.
Gestures broadly at everything
We need to send a bunch of scientists to the edge of the
galaxyglobe to create a foundation that will help reduce the duration of the chaos to only a millennia.Nostradammit!
I do believe this to be true, capitalism has already hit its peak of extraction, water has entered the asset market, similar to gold, housing and diamonds. Humanity is in for a massive shock, migration, collapse of political systems. I will be fragging the billionaire bunkers if anyone cares to join me.
I checked my magic 8 ball, we are screwed
I’d rather the magic 8 ball make our decisions than most politicians. We’d have a higher chance of survival
Calling Jared Diamond a scientist is pushing it.
I was thinking the same thing so I looked him up and he has a BSc in biochemical science (Harvard) and a PhD from Cambridge in biophysics of the gallbladder. Colour me shocked. Still, kind of stepping outside his zone of expertise on this grand statement.
Pulitzer Prize winning author
To be fair though, he’s been writing on this topic for nearly 20 years. His book collapse is still one of the best history books I’ve read.
So he’s been writing on the topic for 20 years and twenty years ago he predicted that the world would collapse in 45 years?
Kind of. Definitely said that if we continue to degrade local climates, we could face massive risks to population centers.
The reason I ask is that people have predicted the end all through history and it never seems to quite happen when they predict it. So if he said it would take twenty years when he first started,… well here we are.
Y’know, Quasimodo predicted all this.
Problem:
What’s sustainable for 7 billion people (now) isn’t sustainable for the population in 2050.
https://www.un.org/en/desa/world-population-projected-reach-98-billion-2050-and-112-billion-2100
“World population projected to reach 9.8 billion in 2050, and 11.2 billion in 2100”
We need a plan to either sustainably feed 10 billion people or dramatically reduce the population.
Most of the northern hemisphere isn’t even making 2 per couple. It is Africa which keeps churning out babies to be blunt
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/birth-rate-by-country
What we have also seen is education and rising economies reduce the birth rate. If we want to actually curb things: the trend of reducing foreign aid is going to make things worse
What does collapse even mean? All humanity dies? Fifty percent of humanity dies? Many die and those that don’t revert to Mad Max life styles?
no more strawberry frosted doughnuts at Dunks.
And no more Fortnite Battle Pass®.
The collapse of society “as we know it” where we as a species cannot survive by following the same.lifestyle we have depended on in the past.
Our company helps manage a significant percentage of a critical piece of nationwide infrastructure. With what I see everyday, my wife and I have decided to buy fertile land that can be farmed and has its own source of subterranean water so that we can grow enough food to survive (we already switched to plant based diets). We also are investing heavily so that our home can be “off-grid”. Summer is covered, but we are still working on winter power generation.
We are not at “prepper” level, but if you’re building a new home, why not try to build in some resiliency?
Funny I’m in the process of going solar and where I live, I’m not allowed to go off grid. How stupid is that?
You can still buy a battery bank and hybrid inverter that’ll do solar -> battery -> grid. It’s not full off grid, but you can almost completely eleminate grid usage.
But you can’t eliminate the connection charge. And as far as I can tell there’s nothing to prevent them from increasing that to very high values. Currently it is $25 where I live but they are arguing to raise that to $30 as I type this. That’s a 20% increase.
My bill is mainly transmission charges, as I put in during the day and pull out at night to charge my EV. Not sure what your bill looks like, but there’s a lot of savings for me. The grid could also collapse tomorrow and it wouldn’t affect my electricity.
Yeah, we opted for the battery. It was tough because without the battery the solar definitely pays for itself and the cost wasn’t too bad, but with it it isn’t certain. When calculating that, the inputs rely on you to predict so many things in the future. So I went with my gut. I just feel like energy costs are going to go up much more than “they” are saying. With climate change, AI, greed and the fact that we are installing some things that will consume more energy. I hope I’m right.
How do you like yours?
Mine is great, except I have to devise a way to safely remove snow off a 25 foot high installation at a bad angle. I lost about a month of production last winter due to covered panels.
I wasn’t allowed to go off grid in my previous home where I had solar installed either. There was also a hard cap on the amount of solar I was allowed to install. Both of these rules were put in place due to lobbying from the largest power company in the region (Duke Energy in my case). It totally sucks,
Was it Florida because that’s where I am and the rules are the same as what you’ve stated?
Yes, FL west coast.
I’m on the East Coast. So I wonder what happens if you put enough solar on your house to go off grid and then just don’t pay your power company? They put you in jail? LOL.
Sorry, I don’t recall the actual specifics now. I believe it was something like they made it a code violation to not have your home connected to the power grid and you just get fined and harassed until you “fix” it.
We’re rather resilient, but it’s gonna be dicey.
The general breakdown of civilization,.nad mutiple points of fialuer that.can no longer be papered over.
and no one.comes bevase theres been too many disasters. A bridge collaoaes and no one foxes it, a wildfire and no firefighters, a hurricane and no one comes to help, the ibtent goes nldown and.doeat come back up again. The lights go off and don’t come back on, your toilet doesn’t flush and the grocery store has empty shelves.amd no gasoline available etc
Are you ok?
deleted by creator
That’s all part of the collaspe, even teh lettres crash an the lanugage deteriorat es. That’s wat heppens when tha whole world goes into panick mode an evrybody is always on the run.
A bridge collaoaes and no one foxes it
But… I want them to fox the bridges :(
They’ve been making these kinds of predictions for a long time. This doesn’t mean that there aren’t very real existential threats to humanity around every corner, we may well experience a complete disaster, lord knows our logistics chain is delicate and largely ignored and props up everything we care about.
But what a lot of people miss in all of these predictions, is how adaptable and malleable human life is.
Will there be flooded cities and shanty-towns across coasts? Probably. Will there be gleaming cities of solar-powered utopia? Also probably. Will there be unrest, crime and war and famine? Absolutely. Will there be new comforts and escapes and new ways to stay safe and protected by your state in return for your attention, your money and your time? Also absolutely. Will it all be fragile? Yes, and it is now as well.
The future doesn’t hold just one thing, it holds many things. The future has always been the same: more of everything and then some. Look at us now, people predicted by this time we would have flying cars and robots… which we do! In some places. But we also still have uncontacted amazonian tribes, so we have everything we had in the previous century plus more.
