CivilizationsEnd

CivilizationsEnd wrote

Global industrial civilization has about 15-20 years before energy importing countries begin to de-industrialize due to a permanent energy crisis. I’d suggest looking into a project like this: https://collapseos.org/

If you are a hardware person, I’d also strongly consider exploring how to build an integrated circuit without a billion dollar clean room

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CivilizationsEnd wrote

“It also has an important flaw, in that it drastically underestimates the quantity of natural resources available for extraction.”

Using the word ‘available’ here is misleading, Earth has lots of resources that will never be extracted because it is thermoeconomically unreasonable to access them. Digging stuff out of the earth isn’t free and the harder the dig the bigger the cost.

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CivilizationsEnd wrote

To super simplify it, the falling rate of return on energy extraction (called Energy Return on Energy Invested or EROEI) means that industrial civilization will grind to a halt within 25 years, even if climate change was not a factor. We’ve extracted all the easy fossil fuel plays. You can read more here: https://surplusenergyeconomics.wordpress.com/2021/06/23/203-surplus-energy-economics/

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CivilizationsEnd wrote

I have been studying this for over a decade, and my current feelings are that there are many possible futures, of varying likelihoods. The ones in which western civ does not collapse and be replaced are not very likely. But what does that mean?

It appears that the financial system has avoided another global financial crisis via unlimited money printing by sacrificing the integrity of the usd. This will lead to the end of the Bretton Woods/Petrodollar system, which is why you are starting to see geopolitics and conflict heat up again; the global order is falling apart.

We are years away from a serious energy crisis that will dwarf the 1973 oil embargo, and it will be permanent. I can go into this in more detail but it is based in physics and is completely unavoidable.

We are a decade away from widespread permanent water shortages that will cause mass migration out of areas without water.

And of course, climate change will cause massive, overlapping famines.

Any one of these might be survivable for a civilization. All of them at once won’t be.

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