[D66] Theoretical Physicists Say 90% Chance of Societal Collapse Within Several Decades

[R.O.]

  Theoretical Physicists Say 90% Chance of Societal Collapse Within
  Several Decades

By
Nafeez Ahmed
vice.com
8 min
View Original 
<https://getpocket.com/redirect?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.vice.com%2Fen_uk%2Farticle%2Fakzn5a%2Ftheoretical-physicists-say-90-chance-of-societal-collapse-within-several-decades>

Two theoretical physicists specializing in complex systems conclude that 
global deforestation due to human activities is on track to trigger the 
“irreversible collapse” of human civilization within the next two to 
four decades.

If we continue destroying and degrading the world’s forests, Earth will 
no longer be able to sustain a large human population, according to a 
peer-reviewed paper <https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-63657-6> 
published this May in Nature Scientific Reports. They say that if the 
rate of deforestation continues, "all the forests would disappear 
approximately in 100–200 years.”

"Clearly it is unrealistic to imagine that the human society would start 
to be affected by the deforestation only when the last tree would be cut 
down," they write.

This trajectory would make the collapse of human civilization take place 
much earlier due to the escalating impacts of deforestation on the 
planetary life-support systems necessary for human survival—including 
carbon storage, oxygen production, soil conservation, water cycle 
regulation, support for natural and human food systems, and homes for 
countless species.

In the absence of these critical services, “it is highly unlikely to 
imagine the survival of many species, including ours, on Earth without 
[forests]” the study points out. “The progressive degradation of the 
environment due to deforestation would heavily affect human society and 
consequently the human collapse would start much earlier.”

The paper is written by Dr Gerardo Aquino, a research associate at the 
Alan Turing Institute in London currently working on political, economic 
and cultural complex system modelling to predict conflicts; along with 
Professor Mauro Bologna of the Department of Electronic Engineering at 
the University of Tarapacá in Chile.

Both scientists are career physicists. Aquino has previously conducted 
research at the Biological Physics Groups at Imperial College, the Max 
Planck Institute of Complex Systems and the Mathematical Biology group 
at the University of Surrey.

Their research models current rates of population growth and 
deforestation as a proxy for resource consumption, to calculate the 
chance of civilization avoiding catastrophic collapse.

Before the development of human civilizations, the Earth was covered by 
60 million square kilometres of forest. As deforestation has accelerated 
due to the human footprint on the planet, the new paper points out that 
there are now less than 40 million square kilometres of forest remaining.

“Calculations show that, maintaining the actual rate of population 
growth and resource consumption, in particular forest consumption, we 
have a few decades left before an irreversible collapse of our 
civilization,” the paper concludes.

Tracking the current rate of population growth against the rate of 
deforestation, the authors found that “statistically the probability to 
survive without facing a catastrophic collapse, is very low.” Its best 
case scenario is that we have a less than 10 percent chance of avoiding 
collapse. The authors write:

“In conclusion our model shows that a catastrophic collapse in human 
population, due to resource consumption, is the most likely scenario of 
the dynamical evolution based on current parameters…. we conclude from a 
statistical point of view that the probability that our civilization 
survives itself is less than 10 percent in the most optimistic scenario. 
Calculations show that, maintaining the actual rate of population growth 
and resource consumption, in particular forest consumption, we have a 
few decades left before an irreversible collapse of our civilization.”

This verdict would seem to indicate that there is an over 90 percent 
probability of a collapse of industrial civilization, based specifically 
on assessing the impact of deforestation on the ‘carrying capacity’ of 
the planet—the capacity of the planet to support human life.

The model developed by these scientists depicts human population growth 
reaching a maximum level that is undermined by the debilitation of 
forests. After this point, “a rapid disastrous collapse in population 
occurs before eventually reaching a low population steady state or total 
extinction… We call this point in time the ‘no-return point’ because if 
the deforestation rate is not changed before this time the human 
population will not be able to sustain itself and a disastrous collapse 
or even extinction will occur.”

The authors offer an intriguing techno-utopian twist to the study. They 
put forward the idea of building a Dyson Sphere, a hypothetical 
megastructure around our sun 
<https://interestingengineering.com/everything-you-need-to-know-about-hypothetical-sun-megastructure-the-dyson-sphere> 
which absorbs the bulk of its solar energy and sends it back to earth. 
“Again to be precise, the Dyson sphere does not have to be taken 
literally, but rather as an energy value,” Dr Aquinos told me. The same 
energy output could be produced in any other manner, such as “nuclear 
fusion” for instance.

In short, faced with the prospect of collapse, without changing our 
unsustainable levels of population growth and consumption the only other 
pathway to survival would be an unprecedented degree of technological 
development, the authors suggest.

It helps to think about the Dyson Sphere in the context of the 
‘Kardashev scale,’ a measure proposed by Soviet astronomer Nikolai 
Kardeshev in 1964 to assess the level of a civilization’s technological 
advancement based on the amount of energy it is able to harness.

The Kardashev scale suggests that if a civilization can achieve the 
technological prowess necessary to fully harness the energy from its own 
star, this would allow it to transcend conventional resource limits.

“The consumption of the natural resources, in particular the forests, is 
in competition with our technological level,” wrote Aquino and Bologna. 
Being theoretical physicists, much of the paper approaches these 
problems on a theoretical level, and parts of it are speculative—what 
would a society need to do to transcend resource limits, and what would 
such a society look like?

“Higher technological level leads to growing population and higher 
forest consumption… but also to a more effective use of resources. With 
higher technological level we can in principle develop technical 
solutions to avoid/prevent the ecological collapse of our planet or, as 
a last chance, to rebuild a civilization in extra-terrestrial space.”

Of course, the authors acknowledge that our engineering capabilities are 
currently insufficient to make such powerful technology possible.

So alongside their model of human-forest interactions, they compared it 
to a model of technological growth to determine whether we have a chance 
of developing such capabilities before ecological crisis triggers 
civilizational collapse. Unfortunately, not really. It’s in this 
specific context that they conclude we have a less than 10 percent 
chance of doing so and thereby averting collapse.

The broader implication, the authors speculate, is that this predicament 
might explain why we haven’t been able to detect evidence of intelligent 
alien life elsewhere in the universe: the dynamics modelled here suggest 
that intelligent civilizations tend to crash and burn due to 
overconsumption of their planetary resources, long before innovating the 
capabilities necessary to become more advanced and enduring.

Digging deeper into the paper raises a number of key issues.

Focusing in on its model of human-forest interaction, the collapse 
implications are especially sobering.

This is because the human-forest interaction model is based on 
“deterministically” running forward parameters for population growth and 
deforestation based on “current conditions.”

The assumption is that these rates and conditions will simply continue 
at around the same level. When we do this sort of exercise, the model is 
not set-up to assess ‘what if’ probabilities: rather, it demonstrates 
what would happen on a very literal ‘business-as-usual’ scenario that 
takes current trends and extrapolates them forward in time.

The verdict therefore seems quite stark: /if/ we continue at the current 
rate of deforestation, population growth and resource consumption, 
collapse would appear unavoidable within the next two to four decades.

The good news is that there is reason to believe that this worst-case 
scenario, although insightful in understanding the truly severe risks of 
our current trajectory, may not reflect more recent expectations about 
these trends.

According to the 2020 /State of the World’s Forests/ report 
<http://www.fao.org/3/ca8642en/CA8642EN.pdf> published by the United 
Nations Food & Agricultural Organisation (FAO) jointly with the UN 
Environment Programme (UNEP), the rate of global deforestation has been 
declining over the last few decades.

 From the 1990s to the period between 2010 and 2020, the net loss of 
forest area decreased from 7.8 million hectares per year to 4.7 million 
hectares per year. One reason for this is that despite ongoing 
deforestation, new forests are also being established, both naturally 
and through deliberate planning.

But the rate of deforestation also appears to have declined in 
real-terms. In the 1990s, the UN report states that the rate of 
deforestation was around 16 million hectares per year. Between 2015 and 
2020, this had declined to an estimated 10 million hectares per year.

Yet this does not justify complacency. In absolute terms, the UN report 
shows that global forest area still decreased overall by a colossal 178 
million hectares between 1990 and 2020, an area about the size of Libya.

We are also at grave risk of reversing this modest slowdown. The latest 
data <https://www.wri.org/blog/2020/06/global-tree-cover-loss-data-2019> 
produced from the World Resources Institute’s Global Forest Watch 
project confirms that primary forest loss was 2.8 percent higher in 2019 
than the previous year, indicating that we are about to see a 
re-acceleration in the rate of forest loss.

Similarly, projected rates of population growth are likely to be lower 
than previously anticipated. A new set of forecasts published 
<https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2020-07/tl-pss_1071320.php> by 
/The Lancet/ suggests that world population growth may begin to start 
shrinking after mid-century due to declining fertility rates, contrary 
to earlier major projections.

Unfortunately, the time-scale for these changes could well be too slow 
to substantially alter the implications of the new /Nature Scientific 
Reports/ model. As the study authors point out, “it is hard to imagine, 
in absence of very strong collective efforts, big changes of these 
parameters to occur in such time scale”—notwithstanding the possibility 
of “fluctuations around these trends.”

But these slowdowns indicate that averting such dangerous exponential 
growth trends could be feasible, especially with a more intentional and 
targeted approach.

Another way to avert collapse, the authors contend, is fundamental 
civilizational transformation.

The underlying driver of the current collapse trajectory is that 
“consumption of the planetary resources may be not perceived as strongly 
as a mortal danger for the human civilization”, because it is “driven by 
Economy”. Such a civilization “privileges the interest of its components 
with less or no concern for the whole ecosystem that hosts them.”

In the absence of rapidly building a Dyson Sphere, the physicists 
suggest that to escape our collapse trajectory “we may have to redefine 
a different model of society… that in some way privileges the interest 
of the ecosystem above the individual interest of its components, but 
eventually in accordance with the overall communal interest.”

So the most effective way to increase our chances of survival is to 
shift focus from extreme self-interest to a sense of stewardship for 
each other, other species, and the ecosystems in which we find ourselves.

In other words, to avert collapse we either need to become ET, or 
spearhead a civilizational paradigm shift. Which is more probable?

Ultimately, that’s up to us. If this study is remotely accurate, 
humanity has perhaps only a few more decades left to decide.

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