welcome back my friends i just saw kurz kazakh posted a video like 13 hours ago so let's check
it out uh before we get into it i'm doing this daily dance newsletter every day it's completely
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it out completely free uh kel still coming along tell you more about that soon uh and what else
is there to say i think that's about it i hope you're all doing well let's get into the video
civilization on the brink of collapse and could we recover and the reason why we're doing this
video you know you might be like what does this have to do with physics well our world society
is completely and utterly dependent on science and technology and all of the most fundamental
of that stuff comes from our understanding of physics and you know if you go way back
everything we've done in physics has essentially led to where we are today and so you can bet
the way out of this is you know discoveries uh and you know lots of stuff in physics whether
it's from you know engineers manipulating things we know or whoever this is how we're going to
recover so i thought we could maybe talk about that towards the end of the video and you know
there are things like nuclear war and stuff things like that which again thanks to physics
at its height the roman empire was home to about 30 percent 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 collapse
by civilization we mean background theme is reminding me of something but i can't pick it it's
something recent as well society where labor is specialized and social classes emerge and
which is ruled by institutions civilizations 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 really 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's been over the ages what about us today
have you guys ever seen that uh mit study that tried to predict the collapse of
civilization uh there was a study in 1972 and it basically predicted uh society global civilization
would collapse by 2040 and guess what we're right on track uh and they it was fairly recent as well
they were they did some more news on it and uh the author was saying yeah like the computer
simulations are still on track so but this she was trying to be optimistic by saying you know like
there's ways we can stop this still uh and there's new things you know that we didn't know about in
1972 so you know obviously nothing is set in stone and the simulation is extremely simplistic
any simulation of complex phenomena is going to have to be some kind of you know simplification
we need to kind of act now if we want to avoid these costs that are a lot larger than what
we're currently seeing 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's an even greater risk what if a collapse was so deeply destructive that we were unable
to reindustrialize again what if it ruined our chances of enjoying a flourishing future
as a multi-planetary don't get too scared i have a simple solution to this problem
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 i
remember when i was younger and uh stephen hawking was saying you know come on guys we gotta you know
get a move on we've got about a thousand years left probably right and um i remember thinking
where is he pulling this number from a thousand i i was at the time i was like it's more like
a hundred just you know if you know some of the numbers of these things like the finite
resources we have it's closer to 100 stephen like what is he talking about so i figured
you know either i was wrong or he's just trying to be optimistic and then just before he died
uh which was a you know tragedy he announced you know he knew he was passing on and he announced
that okay i lied we actually have more like 100 years you know i was being optimistic i wanted
to you know not scare people but we need to get a move on you guys need to get your [ __ ] together
and so i was like ah yeah there it is there's the truth so yeah you don't trust take my word for it
take stephen hawking 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 axon
doesn't i don't think that is really that good news you know that's not exactly relevant to
the current civilization fire or the tier tier and of course the byzantine empire carried on
what about sudden population crashes so far we've not seen a catastrophe that has killed much more
than 10 percent of the global population no pandemic no natural disaster in our time
you know you've probably heard of mass extinction events several of them where a lot of the life on
earth just completely disappeared the last clear example of a rapid global population decrease
was the black death a pandemic of the bubonic plague in the 14th century that spread across
the middle east and europe and killed a third of all europeans and about one tenth of the global
pop random thing i remember i've always wanted to go to madagascar and i saw the other year
maybe a while back now that um the black death the plague is um you know still around in madagascar
and there's a massive problem there because cultural tradition is after someone dies there
the whole village apparently gets together and like you know has to touch the body and carries
them i think it's to the funeral or something um and oh sorry no after they bury the body
they then dig it up and then they all have to touch it and lift it up and that's kind
of you know a problem when the black death is going around so you know that's kind of how
it spreads and so i i believe the the government there actually tried to ban a local like tradition
which has been around for a long time there which is you know pretty crazy and no one's
really listening to it so i haven't actually checked up on this situation always wanted to go
to madagascar and see those little lemurs um but yeah i just thought that was an interesting thing
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 two centuries and just two centuries later the industrial revolution
began history is full of incredible recoveries from horrible tragedies take the atomic bombing of
hiroshima during world war ii 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's 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 historical that's extremely untrue because worst case would
be some kind of natural disaster that shifts and you know the natural balance that the earth
our ecosystems and just global climate is in because that renders the planet something
like venus or mars that's not good there's no recovery from there maybe i don't know like
is that humanity now has unprecedented destructive power today's nuclear arsenals are so powerful
that all-out global war could cause a nuclear winter and billions of deaths there's so many
people in uh i just guess outside of you know the hard sciences um particularly physics maybe you
know i'm looking at the historians in particular who like to say you know you can judge what's
going to happen in the future based on what's happened in the past and look that was that's been
true for all of human history but i think we're actually at an impasse here where you it that
doesn't apply anymore the future is currently you know we can't tell what's going to happen because
the power we now yield and all of this technology has completely changed not just our world but us
are we even human anymore like we're like elon likes to say you know we're actually already
like half cybernetic we're like half cyborg with iphones we're attached to it all day every day
you don't we're very different creatures you know in whilst we're the same as you know like 50 000
years ago our brains haven't seemed to really have changed just you know over a lifetime what results
you know from this experience these experiences is something kind of different i'm not sure the
same rules apply i think we're playing a different game and we can't look to the past anymore i think
with all this technology which is actually propping up civilization the only way to
predict the future is to look into science and nature and where it could lead not into the past
anymore that'll piss a lot of people off i'm sure so you know come at me in the comments
but what i'm getting at is we're approaching some great filters it kind of looks like uh
some of which we've never you know had to face before i'm not sure the past is a good indicator
you know maybe we had simulations of civilizations arising technological ones you know we could use
what happens there uh but with what's happened in the past uh the past humanity not sure it uh
is the same anymore different game our knowledge of our own biology and how to manipulate it is
getting so advanced that it's 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 no way but if say 99 of the population died would global civilization collapse nature's
imagination far exceeds our own my friends 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's 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 ten 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 reindustrialize at least on evolutionary timescales there's a hitch though
the industrial revolution was fueled 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 good idea
another thing that makes recovery likely is that we 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
engineers most papers aren't printed these days and anymore so up to a point i'm not
sure how long ago you know we switched 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 civilization or 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 seatbelt the good news is that it's still
early enough to prepare for and to mitigate these risks we just need to actually do it
okay so my simple solution you want to hear it you ready we just need more physicists and engineers
that's all we need we got to face problems in the future big major technological problems
that will only be overcome with science and technology how are we going to overcome them
if we only have two engineers or physicists in the world who can actually help with this problem
so yeah get out there become an engineer or physicist help save the world