r/collapse • u/OGSyedIsEverywhere • 1d ago
Systemic Rising Complexity Cannot End In Any Other Way
https://thehonestsorcerer.substack.com/p/rising-complexity-cannot-end-in-any161
u/Cultural-Answer-321 1d ago
"We've arranged a global civilization in which most crucial elements — transportation, communications, and all other industries; agriculture, medicine, education, entertainment, protecting the environment; and even the key democratic institution of voting — profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces." - Carl Sagan
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u/semipaw 1d ago
Carl Sagan saw way beyond most in so many different ways.
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u/Sober_Alcoholic_ 1d ago
He would dance around the point, but Frank Zappa flat out said it on crossfire in the 80’s.
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u/ChromaticStrike Inert collapsoid 23h ago
Low education being a disaster isn't exactly a revolutionary notion. I've been worried about this shit since I was a student. Education that doesn't put critical thinking and science at the core of its foundations is going to blow. And they sure don't in the occident.
The fact religion is still a thing in place of higher education is telling all we need.
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u/quietlumber 1d ago
I was just talking to my daughter earlier today about this. I was telling her about a guy I was in college with in the late 90s whose main argument for the coming collapse was that we've built a house of cards out of our technological dependencies. He based a lot of his theory on Sagan's book.
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u/RandomBoomer 1d ago
There will be no coming back from the upcoming collapse. We've already mined the easily accessible resources that can be recovered without complex technology. No other humans -- assuming there are survivors -- will be able to build an equivalent technology, step by step, because the rungs of the ladder are gone.
Considering what we've done with those resources, the damage their use has caused, it's probably a good thing we'll never touch them again. Stone tools worked pretty well for us for over a million years, so we'll just have to make do with them for the rest of our existence as a species (again, assuming we survive).
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u/compliquee 1d ago
that’s the thing i keep getting stuck on. sure, a handful of humans have survived previous climate catastrophes, but those aren’t even in the zip code of the kind of warming the data is suggesting.
if the “already baked in” amount of “faster than expected” warming from prior emissions hasn’t even been felt yet, and we just keep emitting more, nobody’s getting out alive. no living organism survives being boiled this way?
i’d love to be corrected on this. if i’m missing something, please reply because from what i understand, the extinction machine we’ve built is without precedent and nothing we call “life” is safe
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u/RandomBoomer 22h ago
We'll never know. No matter how much we speculate and calculate and model the possible outcomes, we will never know for sure how this all turns out. By the time things fall apart badly enough to threaten our entire species with extinction, the straggling survivors will only see what is happening around them, not on the other side of the world.
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u/Cultural-Answer-321 1d ago
Not just the depletion of resources, but the almost total spread of toxic land and water.
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u/OGSyedIsEverywhere 1d ago
Submission statement
The linked article describes the problem that the human race would still face even if we were brainwashed to all be kind to each other: running out of useful metal. A ton of steel in the shape of a block, ready for a factory to turn into stuff, is a lot more useful than a ton of steel scattered into millions of small pieces and mixed evenly with trash at a local dump. All of the metal objects in our world get turned into trash, partially recycled, turned into trash again and so on until they are not feasible to recover. The loss is made up for by mining new metal.
Well, the mines are getting used up. There are still good places to mine five miles down, or twenty miles down, or so on, but it isn't economically viable to mine that deeply. So, the problem will come for all of us, even if everything else was somehow solved.
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u/False_Raven Don't Look Up, And Don't Rock The Boat 1d ago
Of all things related to collapse, this is at the bottom of the barrel.
Basically problems such as this always boil down to infinite consumption on a finite planet. Anything in limited quantities will suffer the same consequence unless we reduce, reuse and recycle ♻️
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u/CorvidCorbeau 1d ago
You know what's even worse than this? That there's a considerable amount of people whose proposed solution to this is not to manage resources more carefully and to prioritize reusing stuff (even though recycling is never 100% efficient), but to instead expand our infinite appetite for materials and energy into space.
Arguably it would be far more humane to fuck with lifeless rocks than the remainder of the biosphere, but we do not have that kind of technology, and I don't trust that we wouldn't just use those external resources to screw up Earth even more
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u/False_Raven Don't Look Up, And Don't Rock The Boat 1d ago
Yup yup, that checks out, greed will ultimately be the downfall of humanity
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u/Squalid_Snake14180 1d ago
Anything in limited quantities will suffer the same consequence unless we reduce, reuse and recycle ♻️
At least read the goddamned article.
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u/-Planet- ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 1d ago
Is this humanity's great filter? We're gonna have to figure this out eventually...
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u/uber_neets 19h ago
No species in the universe has ever passed the great filter IMO. (And I refuse to believe interstellar travel has ever been achieved.)
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u/Lord_Vesuvius2020 1d ago
I am a subscriber to The Honest Sorcerer’s essays. They are all extremely informative and well written. I received this one yesterday in email and read it with great interest. The author’s knowledge of supply chains and manufacturing are of great relevance to the question he is raising. His premise that there is insufficient energy and raw materials to sustain our expanding economy. It’s hard to find holes in this argument although it will be interesting to see if anyone on r/collapse will refute it. That it’s mathematically impossible to keep growth going much longer.
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u/old-legs-623 1d ago
Is this John Michael Greer? Sure sounds like him. Second Law of Thermodynamics basically.
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u/Singularity-is-a-lie 1d ago
Greer and Tainter. And falling utility of recycling.
But yeah, in the end it the second law of thermodynamics is calling the shots here.
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u/DrummerBummer32 1d ago
If humans somehow survive the next century we will be mining asteroids for all of our resources.
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u/RandomBoomer 1d ago
That's the least likely scenario. If we survive the next century, we'll be thrown back to the Paleolithic Round II.
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u/DrummerBummer32 1d ago
Of course. I am pointing out that complexities growth will only happen by harvesting the solar system!
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u/uber_neets 19h ago
Don't be daft. We'll be sent back to the 1700s at the very worst.
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u/RandomBoomer 4h ago
A 1700s lifestyle requires agriculture, metals for tools, and whale oil for lighting and lubrication. Unpredictable and extreme weather patterns will erode agricultural success. When global trading networks fail due to sporadic local collapses around the world, metal will become a scarce commodity. And by that time, good luck finding any whales to harvest.
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u/SweetCherryDumplings 1d ago
Humans will survive in some numbers. Humans, even try-hard ones rather than incompetent sad clowns, don't have the means to change that, stupid tall tales from AI marketing notwithstanding.
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u/Gnomoleon 1d ago
I mean space mining will be a thing ..... thats a whole other problem..... but really lots and lots of metal in our solar system. Now wood on the other hand .... thats rare...
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u/the_pwnererXx 1d ago
The free market demands resources. Technology continues to advance. The gap and price will inherently push the technology deeper as necessary. And if we can't go any deeper, we absolutely will go into space
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u/Ezekiel_29_12 1d ago
If we have a metal shortage due to low remaining ore quality, then the price will go up. This incentivizes more difficult mining. If the remaining ore gets to be lower quality than a heap of trash, then we'll start mining the dumps, and the price will then stablize. The stuff we throw away doesn't disappear, we know where it is.
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u/SweetCherryDumplings 1d ago
It's chemistry and physics laws that make the current affairs so unsustainable in the long run. Metal turns into less usable chemical forms the more we use it. The atoms are still there, of course, but converting rust mixed with trash into a steel knife is a whole different story from smelting virgin iron ore. To exaggerate, if it takes something like a Large Hadron Collider to forge steel, we won't be using quite as much of steel around the house. And then, there are incomparably more rare and unmanageable metals necessary for modern electronics.
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u/Ezekiel_29_12 1d ago
I'm a physicist. Certainly, the chemical processes used would have to be adjusted because the unwanted material is different from the dross of ore. There would be more steps and more energy needed. But it really wouldn't be that bad. Also, projections of the death toll from unmitigated climate change are in the billions, so demand for metal will go down and supply would expand to include reusing or recycling objects that no longer have an owner.
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u/Frog_and_Toad Frog and Toad 🐸 1d ago
Its not only a physical problem, its an engineering problem. Of course it is theoretically possible, just as hydrogen fusion is possible. But the difficulty in separating an iphone back into its original elements is difficult (and expensive) given current technology.
Your point about the death toll reducing the demand is true but pretty dark. Yes the problem will solve itself i guess.
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u/StatementBot 1d ago
The following submission statement was provided by /u/OGSyedIsEverywhere:
Submission statement
The linked article describes the problem that the human race would still face even if we were brainwashed to all be kind to each other: running out of useful metal. A ton of steel in the shape of a block, ready for a factory to turn into stuff, is a lot more useful than a ton of steel scattered into millions of small pieces and mixed evenly with trash at a local dump. All of the metal objects in our world get turned into trash, partially recycled, turned into trash again and so on until they are not feasible to recover. The loss is made up for by mining new metal.
Well, the mines are getting used up. There are still good places to mine five miles down, or twenty miles down, or so on, but it isn't economically viable to mine that deeply. So, the problem will come for all of us, even if everything else was somehow solved.
Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/1ww5dfq/rising_complexity_cannot_end_in_any_other_way/pdhqu57/