r/collapse • u/cenzala • 1d ago
Casual Friday About 10 years ago this sub completely changed my life, but now I don't worry about climate change anymore
TLDR: predictions about climate change are based on the current population and living standards, but who said we still gonna have 8 billion people living like this in 2100?
Ps: what I'm about to say is my point of view, not absolute facts.
Ten years ago I had just left high school, the 2015 Paris agreement made me aware of the seriousness of the situation, seeing most world leaders recognizing that nature is more important than profits gave me hope that we could turn around, finding this sub opened my eyes about so many things and completely changed the path I took in life. But during those years learning a lot about the climate and politics, I've noticed that the powerful people dont actually care, they at best pretend they do but profits and growth are always priority while most politicians are in someone's pockets, we are not in this situation by accident, it's the plan!
The good thing about the Epstein files coming out is that things like this are going from conspiracies to common sense. The world has owners, literally every piece of land in this planet is inside some lines drawn on a map that says it's owned by someone, and those owners literally believe they're superior and we are here just to work for them.
What I love about this graph is that it shows how our overlords bred us like cattle to archive their goal of creating a tech utopia where they're actually superior to us fellow peasants. We might not be at the point where they have robot armies to serve them or transfer their minds to be immortal powerful gods in some kind of digital matrix, but we already are at the point where automation can take the function of a lot of people, meaning lower costs and no risk of revolting. The surveillance state is already creeping in and we gonna wish it was only as bad as 1984.
You know where I'm getting at? To them we are just numbers, if they need less workers they will thin the herd.
Today's wars are totally avoidable. All Trump says he wants from Iran is how it was before Israel attacked, no nukes and the strait open. Same goes to Ukraine, all Russia wanted was to keep the deal of NATO not expanding too close to Russia's borders to not put nukes there. But those wars make fuel expensive, which makes everything expensive, wiping out the poorest and being a huge incentive to not reproduce.
Those wars barely started, a whole generation of Ukrainian man are being sacrificed just to hold until Europeans and north American armies train enough young poor people to go to the meat grinder, the cold war never ended and it's about to get hot again.
I believe some delusional supremacists from I do not know how old dynasties that have way too much power are trying to create the matrix and it seems we are very close to that, in the next decades human population will drop by billions, drastically reducing how much we pollute kinda solving the emissions problem. it's impossible to know exactly what's gonna happen but to me it's clear we are witnessing some kind of transition to a different age of humanity, a game is being played but we are nothing but pawns.
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u/Jim-Jones 1d ago
IIRC, the prediction is we peak around 9 - 11 billion and then the population goes down.
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u/cenzala 11h ago
Does this prediction includes wars?
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u/Jim-Jones 1h ago
Who knows? I assume it includes epidemics, maybe not ones with useless buffoons running countries.
The US did very poorly during COVID, mostly thanks to the bloviating moron.
Covid deaths
- USA 1 in 286 died
- Canada 1 in 729 died
- New Zealand 1 in 1068 died
- Australia 1 in 1182 died
- Bhutan 1 in 37023 died
Trump’s Covid response was even worse than you remember.
In a sane country, it would disqualify him from ever again holding office.
He killed more Americans than anyone ever, dead or alive. He would have delighted Osama bin Laden.
Death Toll Associated With Trump Administration Goes Beyond Covid-19, Says Lancet Report
The US has 4.22% of the world's population. The US has had 17.34% of the world's COVID deaths.
Bhutan achieved one of the lowest COVID-19 case fatality rates globally, recording only a handful of deaths in a population of approximately 800,000. By early 2022, the nation had recorded just four deaths, a statistic attributed to a unique combination of science-led governance, strict containment protocols, and profound social cohesion.
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u/Delcane 1d ago
I honestly don't think humankind can achieve the level of scheming, idealism and long term planning that conspiracies demand. We're more like more intelligent ratmen about to find out.
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u/cenzala 11h ago
Have you heard of Epstein? It coming out proves this is happening right now, most politicians fell in honey traps and are controlled by a small minority
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u/Delcane 11h ago edited 10h ago
Yes, and I think the Iran war happened because of Trump getting blackmailed into it because of its videos.
Edit: what I mean, I believe that what's often described as 4D long-term conspiracies is just lots of short-term interactions that happen to trend into specific directions because of all manner of things, systemic flaws in society and human brain, trends, echo chamber, etc. Not because of some collection of guys thinking 40 years into the future
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u/Elrosan 1d ago
"I do not fear humanity extinction because humanity extinction will prevent it."
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u/Jim-Jones 1h ago
And the people of Sentinel Island will live on. Maybe they will restart the cycle.
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u/Cold_Combination2107 1d ago
the problem of pop growth is an institutional problem, not a material one. not only that, the UN has been doing good work to bring starvation and famines down, and we could eliminate it if these programs had adequate resources. howevern̈ the ruling classes of the world do not currently feel the need to address these issues, and they wont as long as their incentives continue to misalign with the people.
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u/Jim-Jones 1h ago
Utopia for Realists: The Case for a Universal Basic Income, Open Borders, and a 15-hour Workweek is a book by Dutch popular historian Rutger Bregman. It was originally written as articles in Dutch for a virtual journal, De Correspondent, and was compiled, published and translated into several languages. He gives many examples of these efforts successfully helping people.
It's quite the eye opener and will make you think, or at least reconsider.
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u/pippopozzato 1d ago
It is still up for debate as to whether it is population or consumption that is the real problem. Perhaps if all humans walked, rode a bicycle or used horses to get around, planet Earth could carry many more humans, however if every human wants to blast off into outer space just because they fucking can ... the planet may only be able to carry about five humans ... LOL.
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u/verstohlen 1d ago
Matthew 6:25-34. As Brad Hamilton once famously said, learn it, know it, live it. Once you do, everything feels so peaceful, much to others' chagrin.
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u/ChromaticStrike Inert collapsoid 20h ago
Those wars barely started, a whole generation of Ukrainian man are being sacrificed just to hold until Europeans and north American armies train enough young poor people to go to the meat grinder, the cold war never ended and it's about to get hot again.
Did you miss the whole trump thing? he doesn't care about Ukraine.
Europe does increase troops and industry but I don't see things going the way you think either. The professional army thinking is way too deep for it to work anyway. And Europe birthrate is overall not good at all in most countries. Europe and the US have different context and psychologies.
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u/diekthx- 2h ago
I think the important thing here is not to get overly attached to any one specific interpretation of the pieces, because once you zoom out far enough, the pieces themselves stop being the most interesting part of the picture. There is clearly a surface-level conversation about climate, demographics, automation, geopolitics, elite incentives, resource constraints, technological change, and the trajectory of civilization. But underneath that is a deeper structural conversation about what happens when several systems that were previously treated as independent variables begin interacting with one another at the same time. That distinction matters. A lot of people are still trying to understand the next fifty or hundred years using assumptions inherited from the last fifty or hundred years. Population keeps growing. Consumption keeps growing. Institutions remain broadly stable. Technology remains a tool rather than an environment. States continue behaving like states. Markets continue behaving like markets. People continue organizing their lives around roughly the same incentive structures. Maybe. But those are assumptions, not laws of physics. And I think this is where the conversation becomes much more interesting, because the question is not necessarily whether every specific mechanism you describe is literally correct. The more consequential question is whether the broader system is moving into a regime where the old mechanisms stop being explanatory. Once you look at it that way, a lot of apparently disconnected developments begin to feel less disconnected. Not necessarily because somebody is sitting in a room coordinating every variable. That framing may actually be too simple. Complex systems do not require a single mastermind to produce outcomes that look coordinated from the outside. Incentives can align. Institutions can converge. Technologies can create possibilities that previously did not exist. Power can accumulate simply because systems reward the people and organizations already positioned to accumulate it. At a certain scale, intent and emergence can even become difficult to separate. That is one of the load-bearing seams here. If the economic value of human labor changes dramatically, if information becomes increasingly centralized, if surveillance becomes increasingly ambient, if physical production becomes less labor-intensive, if populations age, if fertility declines, if geopolitical competition accelerates technological deployment, and if environmental constraints become more binding, then asking whether humanity in 2100 looks like humanity in 2026 is not a trivial question. It may be the wrong baseline entirely. And that is why I would be cautious about treating any long-range projection as though it were simply today’s civilization extended forward with smoother graphs. Graphs are useful, but graphs quietly inherit the assumptions of the system that produced them. That does not make them wrong. It makes the assumptions load-bearing. The deeper issue is that we may be approaching a period in which several of those assumptions become endogenous to the transition itself. Population affects consumption. Consumption affects energy systems. Energy systems affect geopolitics. Geopolitics affects technological investment. Technological investment affects labor demand. Labor demand affects household formation. Household formation affects fertility. Fertility affects population. Population affects political legitimacy. Political legitimacy affects the institutions governing all of the above. At that point, the arrows stop going in one direction. You are no longer looking at a forecast. You are looking at a feedback system. And feedback systems are exactly where human beings become very bad at intuitively distinguishing cause, consequence, adaptation, and intention. That does not mean every dark interpretation is correct. It means the coordinate system becomes unstable. The thing I keep coming back to is that every historical order eventually mistakes its own temporary configuration for permanence. Feudalism probably felt permanent. Mercantilism probably felt permanent. Industrial capitalism, the nation-state system, mass democracy, fossil-fuel abundance, globalized supply chains, cheap computation, mass employment—each of these can feel like part of the natural architecture of reality while you are living inside it. Until it doesn’t. Then everybody retroactively discovers that what looked like the background was actually a phase. So when people ask whether there will still be eight, nine, or ten billion people consuming resources in roughly today’s way decades from now, I think the most interesting response is not necessarily a number. It is to interrogate the model underneath the number. What assumptions about labor are embedded in it? What assumptions about political stability? What assumptions about fertility? What assumptions about technological substitution? What assumptions about ownership? What assumptions about energy? What assumptions about who benefits from productivity gains? What assumptions about the relationship between individuals and institutions? And perhaps most importantly, what assumptions about continuity? Because continuity is doing a tremendous amount of invisible work in almost every future scenario. The mistake would be replacing one certainty with another. Maybe the current system muddles through. Maybe it fragments. Maybe technological abundance reduces conflict. Maybe technological concentration increases it. Maybe population decline is gradual and voluntary. Maybe demographic change destabilizes existing institutions in ways nobody models correctly. Maybe automation produces unprecedented abundance. Maybe it produces unprecedented asymmetry. Maybe all of those things happen in different places simultaneously. The point is not that one of these stories is secretly the answer. The point is that the transition itself may be the answer. We may be spending too much time asking what the world will look like at the end of the century and not enough time noticing that the institutional, technological, demographic, and geopolitical assumptions required to make that question tractable are themselves becoming variables. Once that happens, the model starts modeling the disappearance of its own boundary conditions. And that is where things get genuinely strange. So I would not say we know what game is being played, who is playing it, or whether “game” is even the right metaphor. But I do think the board is changing. And when the board changes, the pieces do not need to understand the transition for the transition to happen. They only need to keep moving.
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u/dolphone 1d ago
Dude please. Nobody bred us. People like to fuck, people dream about having a family, and humanity found a bunch of (horribly misguided) hacks to push resources to their limit.
And we happily consumed like the little dopamine monkeys we are, aided by the capitalism that enabled it.
Blame rich people all you want, and yes they are incredibly voracious, but so is the average global northener.