NASA-Funded Study Predicts Collapse of Civilization

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A "mule jump"?? Gotta be in Arkansas or Missouri.

I dont doubt, that there might be a crash sooner or later, but actually my grand aunt managed to survive second worldwar in the place I live now, so I should be as well able to survive an far less critical economical ressource crash. The garden will still be able to grow potatoes, the old fruit trees and bushes are still alive, a natural well is nearbye, I live directly near the forest, ... And in case that electricity or gas is shut down, I refused to throw away the old cast iron heating/cooking oven that is stored in the cellar, and that works with almost everything.

Life may return to "the simple life", but thats not the end of everything.

We do have more options than the past did. Rome fell and Romans ceased to exist. Only the Eastern Empire continued, but in the west, not a single Roman city survived, their language died, and writting it's self ended.

Rome fell from a peak of power and population. They went till they ran out of places to loot, then the economy ended. China is credited with felling the economy of Rome, by only accepting gold in payment for silk. Romans did have gold coins, larger silver coins, but all that is found now are the size of silver quarters.

Besides silk, Rome bought grain and oil from Egypt and Numidia. When they ran out of money, they paid in war. The destruction of war destroyed the very surplus production that allowed for exports. Taking the food, left nothing for the producers of the food.

Rome did not have Public Debt. Government was funded from taxes, and a share of the war loot, captives sold as slaves.

The war with Numidia was continued for seven years, it started because Rome could not pay their main supplier of grain and oil, and continued because they could not pay their army. A captured Numidia was in ruins, depopulated, and they army enslaved them, and set them to building Roman baths, public buildings, but did not restore the farm lands, increase the farm labor, and the army took what food was produced.

In one day Eturnal Rome went broke and out of food. The land was over farmed, all trees cut, and what crops there were were looted by the starving masses. Without money, with no way to control slaves or robbers, no one could produce.

Nothing was written about the period. Rome went from Capital of the world, to becoming a depopulated wasteland, very quickly. Reports from 410 say no one lived in the city, there were only some insane people living in tombs outside the city, and in the sewers and catacombs. A best guess is they were the final survivors of a long game of let's eat the neighbors.

Rome was based on conquest and tribute, Constantanople was a city on a major trade route. They continued, but could not revive the Western Empire.

Rome was the sole Superpower, spent lavishly on maintaining the best war machine, and having no one to fight, crumbled.

America is not broke, we went past that $17 Trillion dollars ago. Our tribute states take our bonds for their raw materials. Just the sub prime mortgage backed securities took down the banks of Europe, and default on the US Bonds, would touch almost every nation.

There is not enough gold to fund trade, assets would vanish, the world would stop, and famine would be the result.

What the governments that failed in the past have in common, they were at the highth of their power and population, when the music stopped, and very few survived the next year, then it got much worse.

There is no sign that the people relocated to some better place. They just vanish, nothing is left but ruins. A few people can start something, over time it can grow, but a lot of people seem unable to create something for survival on short notice.

What we know from recent famines. Tens of millions died in China several times in the last hundred years, when the rains failed for a while, and all the people died in months. The rest of China still functioned, money worked, but there was no way for them to get out, or for food to get in quickly enough. So they died. Russia also, the Ukraine, where Stalin might have helped, but just the disruption of food supply in the short term, killed millions.

There is a Corn Root Borer that is immune to the genetically modified corn poison, it is spreading rapidly. There is a Wheat Rust that has come from Africa to Southeast Asia, that has been unstopable. These two grains make up a large amount of the world grain supply, and we are already food short.

The climate is warming, becoming more dynamic, and unstable in new ways. Floods, droughts, tornados, hail, can all reduce food supply. Money cannot replace it.

There are a lot of ways civilization can end, and most do when they run into one. It is a risk like a 500 year flood, and they do happen. Some risks can be planned for, others, like the Big One along the west coast, due in both Washington and California, and at New Madrid, will reach an unheard of level of destruction, and reaching the survivors could take months.

When Katrina flooded New Orleans, none of the relief workers would come below I-12, fifty miles to the north, because it was not safe. The last report on New Madrid, large after shocks continued for two years. Rebuilding the roads, railroads, power lines, pipelines, and clearing the Mississippi for navigation could take ten years, and a huge expense.

The stock market is overdue for a 20% correction. a 3,000 point drop. We are not far from recession, nor is Europe. There are problems beyond our control.

Lots of people dying solves some problems and creates others. The dead are no longer workers and consumers.

I find the risks to be much higher and closer than the NASA Report.

It is true there are some better ways to deal with problems now, but our recent history has been one where population reduction buffered the change. World War I did not kill a lot, The Spanish Flu did, some fifty million. World War II a generation later also killed fifty million. The famines in China and Russia had an equal tally.

I have heard that as bad as it was, the whole earth population continued growing. It did leave more farm land per person.

Our situation is nothing has checked the population growth, with inflation the fifty million dead would now have to be a billion, to reach an equal effect. It would not reduce the population, just the rate of growth.

We are at peak soil and water. Both are being degraded. There are no reserves, new lands to place in cultivation, no water supply a dam and a pipeline away. Modern farming has skipped the fallow period, using chemicals to produce every year, For a lot more input, crop yields are declining. Energy inputs increase as production declines.

Rome did the same, used slave labor to farm all land year after year and the soils of Italy show it still. Egypt, the Mid East, Numidia, Spain, all the soils were tilled to sand. The fall of Rome did not produce a food surplus for the survivors.

Our wars, The Black Death, did reduce population and increase farm land per person.

Rome did debase the coinage, they put more lead in the silver and bronze coins. They used slave labor, as much as nine out of ten were slaves. that only cost food and shelter.

Political collapse was mostly by the murder of the ruler, and the murder of his replacement. While it may seem a great incentive for the next guy to do a better job, he was faced with an impossible task.

FDR had resources, he could not end the depression. Mao and Stalin made the problem disappear along with the people. The Romans would have understood State owned gold mines worked by slaves.

The historic fixes have been tried, make the people live on less, live in constant war, sell protection to weaker states.

Russia and Germany did recover, less people, paper money, resources of soil and water.

Rome left a sewer and water system that ran for a thousand years. They might have made a non metals money system work, but they could do nothing about exhausted soils no longer producing enough to feed the population.

Other cultures did not spring up in their wake, for the same reason, soil fertility and with it the rains, had been reduced to where over the range of the Roman Empire, the soils have still not recovered.

Nature takes 10,000 years to produce an inch of topsoil. That takes good conditions, a plant cover being left alone, a water cycle developing, and it can all be destroyed in a few years of farming.

Our social, political, economic failures are minor. Disrupting the food and water cycle rapidly leads to no people and a growing desert.

We did more with less for a while, produced more, but we have reached the point where more input does not provide more production.

The demand continues to grow. we are somewhere around 100,000,000 new people per year.

Russia and Germany survived the fall of Rome. Rome did not. It was more than a political and economic problem.

England is a good example of having every social, political, and economic problem possible, and still surviving as a people and nation. None of this lead to the culture extinction we see in the records of time.

Sumaria, Babalon, Mesopotamia, The Mid East, North Africa, are all recorded as The Bread Baskets of the world, at one point, and the unpopulated deserts of later times.

All offenses against man will be forgiven, offenses against the Earth, are never forgiven.

The saying I have heard, "You will know when you break a natural law, because you will be dead."

lotuspuppy -

I agree in large part with you. The eastern half of the empire had always been the richest part, and when the empire divided in two, it was that much harder for the western half to survive. In fact, the Western Roman Empire lacked much of the commerce in the east that had been going on since the Neolithic, while the west was largely made up of agrarian tribal societies. Then came the Barbarians, who were just as often frightened refugees fleeing from invasion, as they were out and out invaders. Barbarian tribes who might be allies who provided military service for the Romans one day, might be the enemy taking land by force the next. The weak, ineffectual emperors of the west would continue the fiction that land seized by the Barbarians was actually still part of the empire, granting military titles and honors on Barbarian chiefs and kings in order to claim that they were simply holding these lost territories for Rome. When the Barbarian tribes served as the latter day Roman army, they hardly fit the mold of the classical Roman legions that were well drilled, well disciplined military machines, but rather, looked like what they were: Barbarian tribal levies depending on personal ferocity and courage to win battles. While the latter day emperors were forgettable incompetents, the warlords of their Barbarian enemies were men of vision and intelligence, such as Theodoric, Clovis, Attila, and Genseric who were always looking beyond the horizon to raise their peoples above rude inhabitants of forests, steppes, and marshlands to become great powers. At the same time, the high scholarship of Tacitus and Suetonius gave way to more and more superficial writers who tried to explain away the collapse of the empire to supernatural reasons (usually God's wrath), while classical Roman art after the third century began to give way to something more resembling the cruder Medieval art. Ironically enough, after Roman civilization collapsed with more a whimper than a bang, it was the very Barbarians who had flooded into it's borders who had become it's heirs in the west, and who had rebuilt western civilization in the ruins of the old.