At its height, the Roman Empire was home to about 30% of the world’s population, and in many ways
it was the pinnacle of human advancement. Its citizens enjoyed the benefits of central heating,
concrete, double glazing, banking, international trade,
and upward social mobility. Rome became the first city in
history with one million inhabitants and was a center of technological,
legal, and economic progress. An empire impossible to topple, stable and rich and powerful.
Until it wasn’t anymore. First slowly then suddenly, the most powerful civilization on earth
collapsed. By civilization, we mean a complex society where labor is specialized and social
classes emerge and which is ruled by institutions. Civilisations share a dominant mutual language and
culture and domesticate plants and animals to feed and sustain large cities,
where they often construct impressive monuments.
Civilization lets us become efficient on large scales, collect vast amounts of knowledge,
and put human ingenuity and the natural resources of the world to work. Without civilization,
most people would never have been born. Which makes it a bit concerning that collapse is
the rule, not the exception. Virtually all civilizations end, on average after 340 years.
Collapse is rarely nice for individuals. Their shared cultural identity is shattered as
institutions lose the power to organize people. Knowledge is lost, living standards fall, violence
increases and often the population declines. The civilization either completely disappears,
is absorbed by stronger neighbors or something new emerges,
sometimes with more primitive technology than before.
If this is how it has been over the ages, what about us today?
Just as Europeans forgot how to build indoor plumbing and make cement,
will we lose our industrial technology, and with that our greatest achievements,
from one dollar pizza to smartphones or laser eye surgery? Will all this go away too?
Today our cities stretch for thousands of square kilometers, we travel the skies,
our communication is instant. Industrial agriculture with engineered high yield plants,
efficient machinery and high potency fertilizer feeds billions of people. Modern medicine gives
us the longest lifespan we’ve ever had, while Industrial technology gives us an unprecedented
level of comfort and abundance – even though we haven’t yet learned to attain them without
destroying our ecosphere. There are arguably still different civilizations around today that
compete and coexist with each other, but together they also form a singular, global civilization.
But this modern, globalized civilization is even more vulnerable in some ways than past empires,
because we are much more deeply interconnected.
A collapse of the industrialized world literally means that the majority of people alive today
would perish since without industrial agriculture we would no longer be able to feed them.
And there is an even greater risk: What if a collapse were so
deeply destructive that we were unable to re-industrialize again?
What if it ruined our chances of enjoying a flourishing future as a multiplanetary species?
A global civilizational collapse could be an existential catastrophe:
something that ruins not just the lives of everyone alive today,
but all the future generations that could have come into being. All the knowledge we might have
discovered, the art we might have created, the joys we might have experienced, would be lost.
So, how likely is all of this?
Let’s start with some good news. While civilization collapses have happened regularly,
none have ever derailed the course of global civilization. Rome collapsed,
but the Aksumite Empire or the Teotihuacans and of course the Byzantine Empire, carried on.
What about sudden population crashes?
So far we have not seen a catastrophe that has killed much more than 10% of the
global population. No pandemic, no natural disaster, no war.
The last clear example of a rapid global population decrease was the Black Death,
a pandemic of the bubonic plague in the fourteenth century that spread across the Middle East and
Europe and killed a third of all Europeans and about 1/10th of the global population.
If any event was going to cause the collapse of civilization, that should have
been it. But even the Black Death demonstrates humanity's resilience more than its fragility.
While the old societies were massively disrupted in the short term,
the intense loss of human lives and suffering did little to negatively impact European economic
and technological development in the long run. Population size recovered within 2 centuries,
and just 2 centuries later, the Industrial Revolution began.
History is full of incredible recoveries from horrible tragedies. Take the atomic bombing of
Hiroshima during World War 2. 140,000 people were killed and 90% of the city was at least partially
incinerated or reduced to rubble. But against all odds, they made a remarkable recovery! Hiroshima’s
population recovered within a decade, and today it is a thriving city of 1.2 million people.
None of this made these horrible events any less horrible for those who lived through them.
But for us as a species, these signs of resilience are good news.
Why Recovery is Likely Even in the Worst Case
One thing that’s different from historic collapses is that humanity now has unprecedented destructive
power: Today’s nuclear arsenals are so powerful that an all-out global war could cause a nuclear
winter and billions of deaths. Our knowledge of our own biology and how to manipulate it
is getting so advanced that it is becoming possible to engineer viruses as contagious
as the coronavirus and as deadly as ebola. Increasingly the risk of
global pandemics is much higher than in the past. So we may cause a collapse ourselves and it might
be much worse than the things nature has thrown at us, so far. But if, say 99% of the population
died, would global civilization collapse forever? Could we recover from such a tragedy?
We have some reasons to be optimistic. Let’s start with food. There are 1 billion
agricultural workers today so, even if the global population fell to just 80 million,
it is virtually guaranteed that many survivors would know how to produce food.
And we don’t need to start at square one because we could still use modern high-yield crops.
Maize is 10 times bigger than its wild ancestor; ancient tomatoes were the size of today’s peas.
After agriculture, the next step towards recovery
would be rebuilding industrial capacity, like power grids and automated manufacturing.
A huge problem is that our economies of scale make it impossible to just pick up where we left off.
Many of our high tech industries are only functional because of huge demand
and intensely interconnected supply chains across different continents.
Even if our infrastructure were left unharmed, we would make huge steps backwards technologically.
But then again, we are thinking in larger time frames. Industrialization originally happened
12,000 years after the agricultural revolution. So if we need to start over after a massive collapse,
it shouldn’t be that hard to re-industrialize, at least on evolutionary timescales.
There’s a hitch, though. The Industrial Revolution was fuelled, literally, by burning
easily-accessible coal and we are still very much reliant on it. If we use it all up today,
aside from making rapid climate change much worse, we could hinder our ability
to recover from a huge crisis. So we should stop using easy-to-access coal,
so it can serve as a civilization insurance in case something bad happens.
Another thing that makes recovery likely is that we’d probably have most of the information we
need to rebuild civilization. We would certainly lose a lot of crucial institutional knowledge,
especially on hard drives that nobody could read or operate anymore. But a lot of the
technological, scientific, and cultural knowledge stored in the world's 2.6 million libraries,
would survive the catastrophe. The post-collapse survivors would know what used to be possible,
and they could reverse engineer some of the tools and machines they’d find.
In conclusion, despite the bleak prospect of catastrophic threats,
natural or created by ourselves, there is reason for optimism:
humankind is remarkably resilient, and even in the case of a global civilizational collapse,
it seems likely that we would be able to recover – Even if many people were to perish or suffer
immense hardship. Even if we lost cultural and technological achievements in the process.
But given the stakes, the risks are still unnervingly high. Nuclear war and dangerous
pandemics threaten the amazing global civilization we have built. Humanity is like a teenager,
speeding around blind corners, drunk, without a seat belt. The good news is that it is still
early enough to prepare for and to mitigate these risks. We just need to actually do it.
We made this video together with Will MacAskill,
a Professor of Philosophy at Oxford and one of the founders of the effective altruism movement,
which is about doing the most good you can with your time and money.
Will just published a new book called What We Owe The Future,
which is about how YOU can positively impact the long-term future of our
world. If you like Kurzgesagt videos, the chances are high you will like it!
The book has some pretty counter intuitive arguments,
like that risks from new technology, such as AI and synthetic biology, are at least as
grave as those from climate change. Or that the world doesn’t contain too many people,
but too few. And especially that everyday actions like recycling or refusing to fly
just aren’t that big a deal compared to where you donate, or what career you pursue.
Most importantly, it argues that, by acting wisely,
YOU can help make tomorrow better than today. And how WE together
can build a flourishing world for the thousands or millions of generations that will come after us.
Many things we at Kurzgesagt talk about regularly are discussed here, in much greater detail.
Check out What We Owe The Future wherever you get your books or audiobooks.
Did we manage to unlock a new fear for you?
Let’s counter existential dread with appreciation for humanity.
Look how far we’ve come as a species. What we’ve built
and where we’ve gathered. Let this new World Map Poster be a reminder of what we can achieve.