A scientist has made the shocking claim that there’s a 49% chance the world will end in just 25 years. Jared Diamond, American scientist and historian, predicted civilisation could collapse by 2050. He told Intelligencer: “I would estimate the chances are about 49% that the world as we know it will collapse by about 2050.”
Diamond explained that fisheries and farms across the globe are being “managed unsustainably”, causing resources to be depleted at an alarming rate. He added: "At the rate we’re going now, resources that are essential for complex societies are being managed unsustainably. Fisheries around the world, most fisheries are being managed unsustainably, and they’re getting depleted.
“Farms around the world, most farms are being managed unsustainably. Soil, topsoil around the world. Fresh water around the world is being managed unsustainably.”
The Pulitzer Prize winning author warned that we must come up with more sustainable practices by 2050, “or it’ll be too late”.
MIT predicted society would collapse by 2040 back in the 70s.
That was a pretty good prediction then. “World will end” is obviously a stupid wording, but the point is clear. The entire food supply chain as it is today will collapse, the question is just when it will happen and if we will have completely switched to indoor farming before then.
That model keeps getting tweaked and rerun, as others have mentioned, its from 'The Limits to Growth, otherwise known as the ‘World 3 model’.
In this one, instesd of measuring ‘pollution’, which was…fairly difficult to get accurate data on… they just used CO2 instead.
Pretty much same result, we are pretty much at the peak of modern civilization right now.
IIRC, thats a screen grab from Paul Beckwith, a pretty well renowned climate scientist… he has a youtube channel, he puts out like a 20ish slide powerpoint recapping other recent climate studies every week or so …
Basically we are fucked, all our climate models from 5 or 10 years ago were actually too optimistic, we already blew through 1.5C, the SMOC, the Anatactic part of the thermohaline cycle, already collapsed a decade ago, and we did not notice untill the last few months.
We are tracking closer to the ‘8.5C by 2100’ level of climate sensitivity models than anything else.
Insurance companies are basically already abandoning roughly the lower third of the US, too much climate disaster danger, can’t afford to insure homes and neighborhoods.
UK Society of Actuaries recently put together their own risk assessment, from the ground up instesd of top down as the World 3 model… they are also predicting massive losses, economic damage, begging governments and insurance companies and banks to adopt mitigation strategies.
Almost there
LtG has been pretty on point with its modelling compared to real life data since its publication.
BUT LtG wasn’t a prediction for the end of the world, it was/is a model of interconnected metrics about our society at large and to illustrate two points:
You cannot have infinite growth in a finite system.
Society has to maintain a harmony of these metrics to prevent itself from collapsing.
Basically what happened after its publication, a bunch of economists attacked it with their can openers. Some whackjobs claimed the club of rome was an illuminati front, a few scientists recalibrated the model with updated data, showing evidence in its favour and the world moved on ignoring it and the myriad of other climate warnings
See also:
Complex systems collapse theory/paradigm.
Societies throughout history more or less accrue complexity costs in a similar fashion as big, poorly managed software projects accrue technical debt.
It all keeps working untill it doesn’t, and then, rather rapidly breaks.
If you do not actually maintain and preserve the integrity of foundational systems, and build a more extravagant/expansive set of systems atop that foundation… well, castles made of sand wash into the sea, eventually.
Do you have a link to that study?
I see the Limits of Growth study was based on the work of an MIT scientist, perhaps that’s the prediction mentioned.