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PaperclipPerfector  25d ago (text post)   36906 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 27, 2025

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Why don't users on theMotte take the idea of societal collapse more seriously? It's not just things like resource depletion and climate change that could cause something like this. Rather I think there are many layers of various pillars of society going towards the shitter that I think makes some kind of collapse of Western Civilization inevitable. I'll list a few below

  1. Resource Depletion/Peak Oil: Although we seem to have stemmed off global peak oil for about 50 years, it seems like the peak is finally actually coming into sight. Some say 2018 was actually the peak, others say it won't arrive until 2030. Whatever the case, it is an inevitability given the fact that discoveries of deposits have been outpaced by demand for the past fifty years. Barring a scientific miracle like effective hydrocarbon synthesis by bacteria, the alternatives don't look promising. Ethanol from corn has an abysmal energy return on energy invested (EROI). Electric motors are not powerful enough to run 18 wheeler trucks, and even for passenger vehicles, we don't have enough lithium in the whole world to replace the current fleet of cars. It's not just oil: copper is being mined at extremely low-grades (because we have exhausted the high-grade deposits), uranium only has around 100 years of proven reserves, and we've already hit peak phosphorous. Further reading: Art Berman, Simon Michaux, Alice Friedman

  2. Climate Change/Environmental Degradation: Anyone with two eyes can see that climate change is happening. It's not just that temperatures are getting warmer, but variation seems to be increasing as well, which is really bad for parts of our civilization that require fairly regular climatic conditions like agriculture. Here in Maryland we had one of the hottest summers on record, followed by an extremely warm fall. Now we're in the middle of one of the coldest winters in the last twenty years. Even if you don't believe that climate change is happening, other aspects of environmental degradation are harder to deny. For the past few summers we've had massive wildfires across most of the Northern hemisphere, and in California during the winter. Some of these are natural, but many are the result of poor management and ecological practices. We've contaminated our drinking water with birth control, our soils have been largely stripped of nutrients by industrial farming, and microplastics are literarily everywhere. None of this is sustainable

  3. Pandemic risk from industrial agriculture: Although COVID was likely a lab leak, one of the initial hypotheses as to its origin was a cross-over event from bats to humans at bushmeat market. We create millions of such crossover opportunities in our agriculture system every day, and it's only a matter of time before the current bird flu pandemic, which has decimated US chicken and cow populations (spiking the price of eggs to $6 / 12 eggs) crosses over to humans. This has happened before in both 1918 and in the 1960s.

  4. Birthrate collapse: Everywhere that modern Western society touches seems to experience a rapid and catastrophic decline in birth rates to far below replacement levels. There's been a lot of discussion of this issue at least here, and it seems like nothing any government does is effective at turning things around. While declining populations may be good for our resource consumption/pollution problems, without some kind of reversal in birth rates, there will tautologically be a death of Western culture. A somewhat related issue is the general collapse of community in the West, which is talked about a lot in books like Bowling Alone.

  5. Brainrot: modern society is incredibly complex and requires a lot of smart people at the helm keeping the systems that keep us alive going. Many of these people are aging out of the workforce, and there aren't many zoomers and millennials who can replace them. Part of this is an issue of desire: few people want to run a wastewater treatment plant or work as a mining engineer when you can just grift with things like crypto and OnlyFans. But I also think we're all just getting dumber to some extent. I put a lot of blame on addictive technologies on the internet (and so does Jonathan Haidt), but I'm sure there's also crossover with the issue of environmental pollution.

There's many more specific issues I could list, but I think you get the gist. Why isn't this community more concerned about these kinds of issues, as opposed to worrying about AI (which is not profitable, or efficient). I think it may have something to do with TheMotte severely overrating the utility of human intelligence in solving large scale problems, but I'm not sure. Is there something I'm completely missing here?

Further reading/listening. DoTheMath, Rintrah, The Great Simplification.

A societal collapse downstream from politics seems more likely than any of your first three.

The primary reason is founder effects. Being a part of the rationalist diaspora, this community started out with a disproportionate amount of techno-optimist libertarians and has mostly shrunk since then. There are ways to get here from the collapsnik corner of the internet, but the path is much less straightforward than from the tech world, especially these days. I came by that road once upon a time, but it has since become overgrown and the markers have been lost.

You'll find a more receptive audience in the comments section at John Greer's blog, assuming you're not already a regular. His posts about astrology and magic may be offputting to some (then again, we have a lot of kooky ideas floating around here ourselves), but he wrote most of what he needed to about collapse at his old blog (archived here and several other places) and seems like the kind of person you might have found posting in some alternate universe 70's environmentalist version of the Motte.

I'll give the response to your 5 points from Greer's perspective (I read every post of his for about a decade, so I have a pretty good sense of it) rather than my own, because my beliefs are both more uncertain and less interesting than his:

While it's true that our society is in a downward spiral, these things take many lifetimes to play out (insert a reference to The Long Emergency by Kunstler) and worrying about imminent doom is simply the inverse of the idea that the AI singularity will solve all our problems overnight and usher in an age of fully-automated luxury space communism. In both cases, it serves as an excuse to abdicate responsibility for the future, since who cares what we do now if we'll all either die from climate change or be uploaded into a virtual utopia by our benevolant AI overlords?

What things will look like on the ground is that each successive generation will use a little less energy than their parents. There will be no abrupt discontinuity, outside of the wars and conflicts to which humans are prone in any age. The future won't look like a carbon copy of some period in the distant and barbaric past, as though you rewound the tape of history, but many innovations and inventions of our modern world will persist in some form, even if you falsely assume that all remaining nuclear or fossil fuels will be completely used up or inaccessible (the radio, the printing press, the bicycle, ultralight solar-powered aircraft, the germ theory of medicine, trains, hydropower, etc. don't need oil or coal to work). We aren't the first civilization to decline and we won't be the last; this cycle of birth and decay is something the Greeks, Indians, and Chinese all figured out and learned to live with thousands of years ago.

Climate change may render parts of the world undesirable to live in, but the Earth's flora and fauna, humans included, will rearrange themselves and find ways to adapt to this (in geologic terms) puny extinction event. Pandemics are nothing new either, and the Black Death didn't destroy Latin Christendom. If all our chickens and cows die from bird flu, then I guess that serves us right for factory farming, but it's not as though we'll run out of food (unless you're Jordan Peterson and on a carnivore diet or something). The birthrate problem is one that solves itself, as people who want to have children will quickly replace the ones who don't. Lastly, we won't have to worry about maintaining industrial civilization, because industrial civilization is by its nature unsustainable.

If you want someone else's very different thoughts on that last point, then check out Anatoly Karlin's series on Malthusian industrialism. The long and the short of it is that maybe dysgenics will trap us temporarily in a bad equilibrium where our descendants are just smart enough to preserve civilization but too dumb to make any advancements, living in crowded slums like third world megacities today, but this situation will itself provide eugenic selective pressure and bring IQ's back up enough to climb out of the hole.

Thanks for this reply. I am indeed a Greer-nik, and it seems that my post was too doomerish (judging from many other comments) to convey that. I share many of the perspectives that you write here as a Greer-sockpuppet. If I were to rewrite my original post reflecting this, I think I would probably reframe it terms of that perspective. Instead of the framing of "why aren't we more worried about these slow moving, natural, and impossible to stop problems", I would try and state instead: "why is the motte so concerned about things like AI/colonizing mars etc. when those things are energetically impossible pipe dreams?" I'm also not advocating we do nothing, but rather I see our resources (energy, but also human intelligence) as being misspent on futile treadmilling rather than "collapsing now to avoid the rush" as Greer might say. Localizing agriculture and manufacturing are really important for preserving the innovations that this civilization has built, and we are really not doing that at all.

I would like to take the time to reply to a lot of those down thread, but I think, because of what you state in the first paragraph, there is not much point. We are looking at different the world through two completely different narratives. Inconvenient facts like declining EROI of every fuel source we are using and greater and greater dependence on fragile global supply change can be brushed away in the name of technological innovation or market efficiency. At the end of the day our system is predicated on infinite growth, which is impossible on a finite planet, and when we bump up against those limits there will be some kind of collapse.

Thanks for this reply. I am indeed a Greer-nik

Welcome to the club. I've been posting along similar themes on here for several years, and it is nice to see someone else taking his points seriously. I've personally eaten vast numbers of downvotes for advocating his position on nuclear energy, but a lot of his other articles have gotten decent receptions here.

Localizing agriculture and manufacturing are really important for preserving the innovations that this civilization has built, and we are really not doing that at all.

I think that this is something that can only be done by people in their own individual lives. I'm personally doing what I can (though part of me protests and says I could be doing more...), and while it would be nice if society actually turned around and wanted to implement this, I don't think the incentive structures and interest groups that actually run and control western governments would endorse this in the slightest.

Electric motors are not powerful enough to run 18 wheeler trucks

The largest vehicles use electric motors specifically because electric transmissions gain more advantages over mechanical ones the more powerful your engine. We've been building locomotives, heavy panzers, and battleships with electric motors since the 20s. Ironically trucks use mechanical transmissions because they're too small to really benefit from the low speed torque and multi-axle power distribution advantages of electric motors.

Most catastrophizing is based on this sort of weird mix of misunderstandings, half-understood factoids spun into narratives, and linear projections to infinity.

Peak oil

Solar and wind + batteries are providing an increasing fraction of our energy consumption, including things that used to require oil (electric cars). Society wouldn't collapse if we had to cut our oil (and coal and gas) consumption by 3/4.

Electric motors are not powerful enough to run 18 wheeler trucks,

Even if this is true, it's a solvable engineering problem.

we don't have enough lithium in the whole world to replace the current fleet of cars

There's a ton of lithium on the planet. The cost of mining it varies, so the cost of cars would go up if all oil disappeared, but that's not societal collapse.

Climate Change/Environmental Degradation

Even among mainstream progressive climate scientists, and in the IPCC, the consensus is that it's unlikely we're getting the civilization-destroying disaster climate change scenarios. Even if 1 in 10 of the places on the planet people currently live were rendered uninhabitable ... they can just move, that wouldn't come even close to threatening civilization, much worse has happened.

Pandemic risk from industrial agriculture

A 50% IFR and rapidly spreading pandemic is theoretically possible, sure. But, like, people would notice very quickly that was the case and stop going outside. It'd suck, but 50% of the population wouldn't actually die, and it wouldn't destroy civilization.

Birthrate collapse

This one's actually a problem - technology can, and has, lowered fertility rates faster than evolution can raise them. AGI's coming sooner though!

I mean, the actual answer is that AGI is going to be as or more significant a transformation than societal collapse, and even if I bought all of those ideas, which I don't, they're all coming after AGI.

Society wouldn't collapse if we had to cut our oil (and coal and gas) consumption by 3/4.

This isn't true at all, and I don't think you have an accurate understanding of exactly how reliant modern industrial societies are on fossil fuels. You wouldn't necessarily end up in Mad Max land overnight, but you must have an extremely strong estimation of modern levels of social cohesion. How, exactly, would this 75% cut in living standards be distributed? How would your hypothetical society be able to handle the rise of voices talking about how this is all the fault of those coastal elites/rural poors/rootless cosmpolitans/blacks/whites/mexicans/women/trans/gays/christians/hindus? Don't forget the massive increase in the cost of food and actual famines that would result from the sudden cutting of 3/4 of hydrocarbons that are used to produce fertiliser. If you did not implement sweeping, incredibly unpopular changes to the basic rules and fundamental contracts of society you would experience an involuntary collapse as various power/influence groups compete for their share of the pie.

Would society survive that kind of cut? Yes, it would survive - but if you define "collapse" as an involuntary loss of social complexity (which most writers on the topic do), a 3/4 cut in fossil fuel consumption would immediately qualify.

Even among mainstream progressive climate scientists, and in the IPCC, the consensus is that it's unlikely we're getting the civilization-destroying disaster climate change scenarios.

My take on it is the one proposed by Greer in "riding the climate toboggan". Even if you ignore the long term trends (which won't matter in your lifetime anyway) the short term problems that are encountered along the way are actually quite severe - notice any major natural disasters recently? Fires, storms and floods are all going to be on the rise, and even the doomers don't think that this will end society, but the economic costs associated with these adverse weather events are going to be another piece of pressure adding to the strain.

But, like, people would notice very quickly that was the case and stop going outside. It'd suck, but 50% of the population wouldn't actually die, and it wouldn't destroy civilization.

What were the economic impacts of the Covid pandemic? Sure, society doesn't collapse during pandemics like that - but there are measurable negative impacts from these events, and while those negative impacts aren't a big deal for a strong and healthy society... I don't think we're living in a strong and healthy society anymore, and I don't see it getting better in a world with a changing climate, greater levels of natural disasters and substantially more expensive energy/material resources.

I mean, the actual answer is that AGI is going to be as or more significant a transformation than societal collapse, and even if I bought all of those ideas, which I don't, they're all coming after AGI.

That's a big bet - and for everyone's sake, I hope that not only is it correct, but that the alignment issue is comprehensively solved well before the consequences of these current trends make it a necessity.

I don’t take societal collapse seriously because there’s not a lot I can do about it. Maybe society collapses, and then I’m either a post apocalyptic warlord or I’m dead, or it doesn’t collapse, in which case it’s irrelevant.

Pray, hope, and don’t worry -Padre Pio

Personally speaking I don't think about it because I believe AI kills us first.

uranium only has around 100 years of proven reserves,

That is a big part of your answer right there. There is an important distinction between reserves and resources.

Reserves are uranium ore that it is profitable to mine and process at current market prices with today's technology. Some reserves are being mined as I type; they are really there, with absolute certainty. Other reserves as less certain. One might want to drill a shaft and get some samples to check. Proven reserves meet a threshold for certainty set down by the financial regulators. Thinking of investing in a mining company? Reading about the proven reserves that they own? Proven is a term of art for investment grade certainty.

Resources are a guess about the amount of uranium that is actually there. In some sense. It needs to be possible to mine it and refine it, but it doesn't have to be profitable today. The guess work can include some guesses about technological advances in extracting Uranium.

It is the same for natural resources generally. The case of oil is notorious. Yes, back in 1920 we only have 30 years of oil reserves. (I've not checked the history, but it is well know that we have many times run off the end of oil reserves) Prospecting for oil is expensive. If an oil company wants to borrow money from a bank to build an oil refinery, the bankers will ask: will the oil run out. If the oil company only has 25 years of reserves on its books, it may be worthwhile prospecting for more. The bankers will take a risk, but for a price. How does the cost of prospecting compare with the price of risk? Bankers rarely look more than 30 years ahead. If the oil company has thirty years of reserves, paying prospectors to find more, and increasing that to 35 years, will not get the oil company a cheaper loan. It is not worth the money.

We only have thirty years of reserves because it is not worth looking for more, so we don't bother. Notice that the results of prospecting include discovering bodies of ore that fall a little short of what it is currently worth extracting. They count towards the resource. But not towards the reserve. However, prices can rise. If the electricity price rises, prices for oil and uranium to fuel power stations are likely pulled up. Now some of the resource becomes reserves. It is routine for reserves to fluctuate due to price changes elsewhere in the economy, independent of consumption and discovery.

You can build an argument for collapse around the idea that there are only 100 years of uranium resources. The logic of the argument is (maybe) valid, but since the premise is false the conclusion does not follow.

You can build an argument for collapse around the idea that there are only 100 years of proven reserves of uranium. Now the premise true, but the logic of the argument is invalid, and the conclusion still doesn't follow.

The equivocation between reserves and resources has been going on all my life, and I find most discussions of social collapse tainted by this.

This is a valuable comment and taught me something. But with that said, surely that's still just kicking the can down the road. We might have a few times as much uranium or oil as looking at current reserves makes it look, but we're still going to run out eventually. This lengthens the timescale on which scarcity can cause societal collapse, that's all. And I don't think "we run out of uranium in three hundred years" is terribly different as a doomsday prophecy from "we run out of uranium in two hundred years".

As long as we kick the can hundreds of years down the road, that's plenty of time to transition toward renewable sources of energy. And then you can expand toward Mars, like Elon Musk wants.

Lithium and other such resources being themselves non-renewable make me skeptical of "renewable energy" as a long-term solution. Settling the rest of the solar system also doesn't seem like a real solution; maybe a solution for the long-term survival of the human species, but not for averting societal collapse for us Earthers, unless we're envisioning a full exodus. Even if space-faring tech massively increases I can't see it ever becoming practical to move massive amounts of resources back and forth between planets.

See my comment further down. Current reserves can be stretched out like 300x as far as current reactors do, and this is retroactive (i.e. you can bring back the "waste" of current reactors - the depleted uranium as well as the used fuel rods - and use it). If you project out a 5%-per-year growth rate then you get a 200-year timeline or so, but there are bigger issues than exhaustion there (specifically, that's projecting out electricity growth to the point that we hit Kardashev I, so we'd have to expand off-planet anyway just to deal with the waste heat).

The sun is going to expand to beyond Earth's orbit in 7.5 billion years; the only thing we CAN do is kick the can down the road. Doesn't mean we shouldn't do it!

There's purely one reason why I don't take societal collapse seriously. People have been saying society's about to collapse for my entire life, I cannot think of a single time in my life when people weren't saying that, and it never happened. And quite frankly, I got sick of worry about that sort of thing about 15 years ago. That's not to say it can't happen, but I've basically been chicken little'd out of the game.

The world has ended twice. There is no reason why it cannot do so again.

This is how I've feel. I've decided I'm going to start worrying about society collapsing when people stop talking about society collapsing and start buying barbed wire and approaching their neighbors to discuss informal neighborhood defense pacts.

This all sounds like a lot of doomerism. Most things are going fine.

Energy

Resource "running out" is not a real thing that happens. Prices adjust. Uses become more limited, or alternatives are found.

We used copper pipping everywhere, and then copper got expensive, and we used PVC pipe instead.

Oil has gotten nominally cheaper over my lifetime of driving. Its basically never gone over $5 a gallon. There are lots of oil reserves, like Tar Sands. Its just that the oil becomes a little harder to extract. Fracking was an invention that drastically opened up oil availability in the US. "Peak oil" if it is a thing, is not a bad thing at all. It just means that oil usage is tapering off as other technologies replace it.

Ethanol is indeed dumb, and is just a subsidy for farmers.

Battery tech has been improving slowly. Flywheel engines might make more sense for cars. They are used to great effect in formula 1.

Climate Change

Most obviously not a big deal because no one is yet to get serious about large scale geo-engineering projects. Estimated costs for such projects are in the $10-100 billion range (space based sun shield, or atmospheric sulfur injection). Less than Afghanistan cost us.

Most disasters are solvable with more wealth. Hurricanes suck when you are poor. Earthquakes suck when you have no engineers and live in shoddy buildings. Tornadoes are bad when they are not predictable and you don't have a basement. Winter storms are mitigated with more plows on the roads.

Pandemics

Covid was the worst pandemic the world has faced in like a century, and basically everything that was bad about it was as a result of people overreacting to it. We shot ourselves in the foot. The actual mortality rate for covid after first infection or after vacination was stupidly low. Even before that the mortality rate for initial infection was still very low once hospitals figured out how they should be treating it (don't put people on ventilators). Deaths were almost certainly over-counted by hospitals for the sake of financial benefits.

Birth rate

Not great, but you are exaggerating the severity. The decline has been slow. And part of the main problem is again that we are shooting ourselves in the foot. Don't build pyramid scheme retirement systems that rely on larger numbers of young people. The worst outcome won't be societal collapse. It will be old people with no children getting shoved under the bus harder than they thought they'd be.

"Brain rot**

Luckily we are booting up the AIs to think for us. Might have its own negative side effects. Or it might allow us to brain rot to idiocracy levels without the accompanying decrease in standards of living.

Boethian Catholicism

What does this name come from?

Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius, author of "On the Consolation of Philosophy," which is referenced in the same post.

The rejoinder here is — we aren’t actually addressing even obvious problems. We’ve known about climate change, peak oil, birth rate collapse, crime and loss of trust, etc. for nearly half a century, in many cares, a full century. Assabiya has been written about in one form or another since the time of Plato. Yet, no serious actions are undertaken. The cliffs get closer every year, yet every year our elected officials loot the treasury and do nothing for fear of being unpopular.

Peak oil wasn't. Birth rate collapse will likely solve itself through natural selection (except perhaps in South Korea). Crime is at a bearable level.

For almost any serious problem, so long as technology is increasing and wealth is increasing, it makes sense to wait as long as possible to address it, so that you can use the most efficient and effective versions of your tools.

uranium only has around 100 years of proven reserves

It's more complicated than that. Current reactors are not breeders and as such throw away most of their actinides unburnt (and cannot use thorium); after accounting for fixing those inefficiencies (which are avoidable, just not currently economic because uranium is cheap) and for mining thorium as well, you can do about x300 on that. And that's assuming we can't harvest the uranium in seawater, which is like x20 again.

Why isn't this community more concerned about these kinds of issues, as opposed to worrying about AI (which is not profitable, or efficient).

This article is low-quality. Everyone keeps forecasting that LLMs will hit a wall, and then they don't.

Aside from maybe pandemics, I expect trendlines to get scrambled by some combination of WWIII and AI before these come into play.

Okay where are they going to get more training data from? They've already used the entire internet. You also aren't accounting for the fact that OpenAI lost $5 billion last year.

It's not helpful for you to say the article is low quality without providing examples.

Okay where are they going to get more training data from?

Probably somewhere. Or they'll make do without it. I doubt if we got all of the performance possible from LLMs within seven years of discovering them (that would likely be some kind of record).

Alternatively, you can cast your mind back to 1980, and imagine asking "how can microprocessors continue shrinking without solving [whatever problem deep UV excimer laser photolithography solves]?"

(Surprisingly on topic, check out the next article there: Gwern’s AI-Generated Poetry was from 2019, and the performance improvements over that short of a time are stark.)

You also aren't accounting for the fact that OpenAI lost $5 billion last year.

They've got $500 billion more (sort of) lined up already, and you're worried about that? Those losses are trivially small.

I think that when they say they are out of training data, they mean they are out of legal training data. There's a lot of low-hanging illegal fruit they could pick. Goodle hasn't used everybody's gmail inboxes. I have about hundreds of thousands of pieces of input data they could harvest that way.

Also really dystopian. Would also explain the success of the new Chinese model. They don't give a shit about privacy.

Maybe they use the automatic conversation transcription technology that logs every conversation held in hearing range of a cell phone and transmits it to the government. Text transcripts of everything said in the United States for the past few years would certainly feed their data need.

It's been possible for a long time now, there's no way they aren't doing this.

I can guarantee you that transcribed illegal government wiretaps of everything heard by every cell phone are not in the training data.

This could be. Dystopian AF

With models like o1 and R1, they recursively improve themselves. Synthetic data works fine.

You also aren't accounting for the fact that OpenAI lost $5 billion last year.

And this is a problem? Are their investors with hundreds of billions to offer running scared? They're aware, they don't care. Running out of money is not a problem for them.

It doesn't though. In the linked article, there's clearly evidence that synthetic data leads to hallucinations over time.

What they do is hire people to make new training data. There's a few online platforms where you can get paid to do this. I've been paid to do this.

hire people to make new training data

That doesn't seem viable for the amount of data required by ML training in the current paradigm. I feel like the clear future is improvements in automated induction of data or just observation from reality.

Then how to explain O-3 and Deep Seek R1? I believed the same as you until very recently and now I am questioning that.

And if we can't figure out efficient fusion after 3 centuries, we really don't deserve nuclear energy in the first place.

I think everyone is fatigued by the utter hysterics that get trotted out day after day related to all of these issues. Climate change alarmists keep making insane claims about the entire world being on fire or underwater or humanity going extinct in 5 years or whatever, and it keeps not happening.

In addition, most of the loudest alarmists have as their solutions to these problems "nothing short of total revolution and societal change" which is both not a serious possibility and invariably the same ideological wants they've been campaigning on for decades, which makes me think their assessment of it as a solution might be somewhat less than sincere and more than a little opportunistic.

So I don't exactly think the alarmists take these things seriously either, except as an opportunity to backdoor in their preferred social revolution under the guise of alleviating a different problem.

their solutions

Yeah such a happy coincidence for these people that the generic left wing social and economic changes they already wanted are the perfect cure for climate change.

Here's my view: Doomerism overestimates the speed, globality and uniformity of collapse, and underestimates the ability of individuals and economies to adapt.

Proof: Every prediction of doom ever compared to the actual outcome.

Of course this will be true until it isn't, but so far it doesn't look to me like we'll be relieved of the burden of having to live in this grotesque dystopian hellscape (thanks @naraburns) anytime soon.

Why don't users on theMotte take the idea of societal collapse more seriously?

I do, but then I believe we live in a broken and fallen world corrupted by sin.

#4 I've done my best, I've four children with my wife and try to make it look good. The other enumerated issues, I do my best to withdraw my consortium, keep invested in God's kingdom and not in the systems of the world.

I believe man's created order will collapse perhaps already underway and the best path through is to prepare hyperlocally.

Preparing to be unburdened by what has been.

I do, but then I believe we live in a broken and fallen world corrupted by sin.

This is a good point. In some ways we already live in a collapsed society. Consider what Theodore Roosevelt would make of our current godless, weak, barren, and decadent society.

Yes, current year is already fairly dystopic, the future is now.

It's TEOTWAWKI, and I feel fine.

Rather I think there are many layers of various pillars of society going towards the shitter that I think makes some kind of collapse of Western Civilization inevitable.

Living in a material world under the known laws of physics makes the collapse of all civilizations inevitable.

History gives me strong priors that most such "collapses" are local and move slower than most individual human perception. By the standards of Western Civilization circa 1800, Western Civilization has already collapsed and been replaced with something comparatively grotesque, which we today call "Western Civilization." The prevalence of atheism, pornography, premarital and extramarital sex, illegitimate birth, etc. would shock most Westerners from the mid 20th century, never mind the 19th. By the standards of those days, we already live in a dystopian hellscape.

And yet if you spend much time talking to nonagenarians, you will often hear resignation to the idea that the world simply changes (though some will definitely tell you that the world has gone to hell in a handbasket). Humans are incredibly, almost comically adaptable. Just about anything can become a "baseline" experience for us, given sufficient exposure (and lack of exposure to alternatives).

Now, some of the more extreme climate eschatology, political alarmism, nuclear war worries, AI doomerism, etc. will be quick to remind that some collapses are more dramatic, sharp-edged, and/or final than others. This is surely true. But given the number and variety of collapses I can see through history, the collapse of Western Civilization as we know it is shaping up to be more of an evolution than a revolution, and sufficiently gradual that it will annoy me when I am a nonagenarian (knock on wood), but probably not kill me or even cause me very much suffering. At worst, it will inspire in me only deep disappointment.

At best, I will have alien descendants born on Mars, whose lives and lifestyles would shock and horrify me. But hey--Mars!

The end will come for humanity, eventually, too. It would be nice, I think, if we could escape that. But I do expect, to my sorrow, that I will not be alive to see how our story ends.

Living in a material world under the known laws of physics makes the collapse of all civilizations inevitable.

The universe is quite possibly infinite in size.

Infinite size with finite mass just means there is an infinite amount of nothing between any specks of interest.

The mass of the universe may be infinite. But as per the conversation below, due to the expansion of the universe, the amount of it we can ever access may be limited.

Big Crunch or Big Rip, which is it? Either there's an ending coming.

Even if the universe is infinite in size, as long as the speed of light is finite the slice of the universe any given civilization can access is limited.

I think this is somewhat dependent upon inflation. I very much only think, because it's been a loooong time since I took relativity. Yes, with constant positive inflation, there will be regions of an infinite universe forever inaccessible (with the relative sizes being dependent upon the magnitude of the inflation), but if, say, we didn't understand some dynamic of inflation, and suppose it actually ground to a halt. If inflation went to actual zero, then I think that an entire infinite universe would be, in principle, accessible, given sufficient time.

Yeah this is basically my take. Also the fact that doomsday predictions are always extremely common and 99% of them don’t pan out!

Remember the Population Bomb? All sorts of other doom predictions?

And ironically the panic over things often caused other problems.

Remember global cooling? When I was a kid there were some vague concerns that the Earth could enter a global cool period. It could be the weather of 1816 forever.

And the ozone hole in 1991 that was going to give everyone in the Northern Hemisphere melanoma. Lots of scary articles, but when the hole disappeared, nobody thought that even worthy of mention.

Well that is because it hasn't yet. We'll get back to 1980's levels in about 15-20 years still.

"It confirms that 99% of ozone-depleting gases have been phased out. Projections from the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) suggest the Antarctic ozone layer will recover to 1980 levels by around 2066, with recovery in the rest of the world between 2040 and 2045"

and

"A hole that opens annually in the ozone layer over Earth's southern pole was relatively small in 2024 compared to other years. Scientists with NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) project the ozone layer could fully recover by 2066"

It's just slow steady progress at the layer being restored a little every year is not really news beyond niche publications.

The ozone hole is different in that the problem was real, and serious, but we fixed it. Acid rain and lead pollution are other examples of that type.

Most doomer predictions are based on problems which are either fake (like natural resource depletion) or grossly overexaggerated (like climate change).

The media doesn't report good news (and social media is not much better) so you don't get to hear the information that would allow you to distinguish between a fake problem and a fixed problem. (And occasionally a problem is both fake and fixed, like the Y2K bug).

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