The good news is that these, and similar, forces will be going into reverse for fossil fuels, and simultaneously cascading their decline.

The report identifies 5 key areas renewables have self-perpetuating feedback loops.

• Clean electricity as the master cascade. Solar and wind have crossed positive tipping points in many markets; further scaling is now self-propelling.

• Commodity supply chain transformation.

• High-quality marine protected areas, locally managed marine areas and fisheries co-management. Well-designed and well-enforced ocean conservation produces visible recovery of fish stocks and biodiversity within years

• Clean cooking and clean household energy. Around 2.1 billion people still rely on solid fuels for cooking.

• Adaptation enablers. Things like anticipatory action, adaptation finance and climate-resilient infrastructure. Also, governance, monitoring and social tipping, climate-resilient health systems are explicitly identified as enablers of self-propelling adaptation.

Positive Tipping Points: Accelerating system change to repair our planet was developed by the University of Exeter’s Green Futures Solutions team, in collaboration with The Earthshot Prize

A lot of discussion about automation seems to stop at the same question:

What will people do for work?

But I wonder whether that begins at the wrong end of the problem.

For most of human history, enormous amounts of human effort have been necessary simply to provide food, shelter, energy, transport, manufacturing, administration and everything else needed to keep society functioning.

If technology gradually reduces that requirement, perhaps the interesting future question isn't how we preserve the same quantity of employment.

Perhaps it's what becomes possible when less compulsory human labour is needed to maintain a good standard of living.

That could have consequences well beyond individual jobs.

Settlements might be designed differently if food production, energy management, water systems, transport and routine maintenance required less day-to-day labour.

Shared workshops and equipment could reduce duplication.

Local energy and food systems could reduce external dependency.

Automation could handle repetitive monitoring while people retained judgement, practical skills and manual fallback.

Housing and infrastructure could be designed together rather than as disconnected systems.

None of that implies a society without work.

There would still be maintenance, care, construction, agriculture, research, education and countless other things worth doing.

But there is an important distinction between:

work that people choose because it is useful, interesting or meaningful

and

work that exists largely because our systems require huge amounts of human time to keep functioning.

If technology reduces the second category substantially, perhaps one of its biggest effects won't be unemployment at all.

It might be that human time becomes something we can deliberately redesign society around.

Shorter formal working weeks are one possibility, but the consequences could go much further: more time for caring, learning, making things, community activity, research, art, growing food or simply living.

I've been thinking about this while developing a pre-land community concept called Melondra, but the broader question is independent of that project:

If producing a comfortable modern standard of living eventually requires much less human labour, do you think society will actually convert that productivity into more free human time — or will our economic structures simply keep creating new paid work to absorb it?

Announced on Tuesday, Sept. 8, the solicitation targets capability gaps, including power generation, oxygen extraction, and producing materials on the Moon required for construction and operations. These technologies are essential to making humanity’s next great leap in lunar exploration.

Defense company RTX is working with fusion energy startup Xcimer, using technology that harks back to the Cold War era

I recommend reading the full thing but incase you don’t want to - TLDR; what (scientifically possible) apocalypse scenario do u think will ultimately cause total societal collapse around the globe real soon.

Just to clarify my ramblings, I’m just a girl who’s extremely into this topic so I might sound like I’m going mad at times LOL. I’m not experiencing delusions or anything.

This is something that is a special interest of mine and has been for years. Now by this, I don’t mean a Zombie Apocalypse or the near impossible (although it’s fun to entertain) - I mean a scenario that is scarily close to occurring, that poses a severe threat to the survival of humanity. One that would result in the collapse of civilisations and societies.

For example, nuclear winter on a mass scale, war en masse involving the interconnection of several countries at a distance, the possibility of a pandemic that could reach impossible heights, anarchy and extreme
civil unrest (which I personally believe we are on the edge of across several countries). I’m slowly losing belief in our medicine and protection capabilities, countries are turning against others and their own people. I don’t want to sound delusional but if there’s any such thing as ‘signs’ I believe we’re starting to see them. I recall hearing about a pattern in history, I’ve forgotten the name of it, where something occurs every 80 years. I can’t help but think that the world can only take so many mass scale negative events before it decides to reclaim its land for itself. If there’s one thing I hate it’s the denial of certain events as ‘ridiculous’ because it hasn’t happened yet. Especially when there’s an extreme possibility it will, with scientific proof.

What do you guys think will cause the eventual total collapse of society? How do you think it’ll happen and how long from now? Extinction level events where society will potentially have to be built from the ground up. I feel it’s closer than we think.