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”.
Well I already knew I wouldn’t manage to retire…
Gestures broadly at everything
That’s WAY later than I thought!
This is cause for celebration! 🎉
Not sure if you’re celebrating because that’s earlier than you thought, or later than you thought…
Extra time! I wouldn’t have given us 5.
I think it’s easy to forget the scale and momentum of the thing… But yeah, the longer we go without scaling back our energy and resource consumption the harder we’re gonna hit that wall.
yep, sounds like we can start worrying about that in about 20 years then.
I checked my magic 8 ball, we are screwed
I’d rather the magic 8 ball make our decisions than most politicians. We’d have a higher chance of survival
We need to send a bunch of scientists to the edge of the
galaxyglobe to create a foundation that will help reduce the duration of the chaos to only a millennia.I do believe this to be true, capitalism has already hit its peak of extraction, water has entered the asset market, similar to gold, housing and diamonds. Humanity is in for a massive shock, migration, collapse of political systems. I will be fragging the billionaire bunkers if anyone cares to join me.
Calling Jared Diamond a scientist is pushing it.
I was thinking the same thing so I looked him up and he has a BSc in biochemical science (Harvard) and a PhD from Cambridge in biophysics of the gallbladder. Colour me shocked. Still, kind of stepping outside his zone of expertise on this grand statement.
Pulitzer Prize winning author
To be fair though, he’s been writing on this topic for nearly 20 years. His book collapse is still one of the best history books I’ve read.
So he’s been writing on the topic for 20 years and twenty years ago he predicted that the world would collapse in 45 years?
Kind of. Definitely said that if we continue to degrade local climates, we could face massive risks to population centers.
The reason I ask is that people have predicted the end all through history and it never seems to quite happen when they predict it. So if he said it would take twenty years when he first started,… well here we are.
Problem:
What’s sustainable for 7 billion people (now) isn’t sustainable for the population in 2050.
https://www.un.org/en/desa/world-population-projected-reach-98-billion-2050-and-112-billion-2100
“World population projected to reach 9.8 billion in 2050, and 11.2 billion in 2100”
We need a plan to either sustainably feed 10 billion people or dramatically reduce the population.
Most of the northern hemisphere isn’t even making 2 per couple. It is Africa which keeps churning out babies to be blunt
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/birth-rate-by-country
What we have also seen is education and rising economies reduce the birth rate. If we want to actually curb things: the trend of reducing foreign aid is going to make things worse
Nostradammit!
Y’know, Quasimodo predicted all this.
What does collapse even mean? All humanity dies? Fifty percent of humanity dies? Many die and those that don’t revert to Mad Max life styles?
no more strawberry frosted doughnuts at Dunks.
And no more Fortnite Battle Pass®.
The collapse of society “as we know it” where we as a species cannot survive by following the same.lifestyle we have depended on in the past.
Our company helps manage a significant percentage of a critical piece of nationwide infrastructure. With what I see everyday, my wife and I have decided to buy fertile land that can be farmed and has its own source of subterranean water so that we can grow enough food to survive (we already switched to plant based diets). We also are investing heavily so that our home can be “off-grid”. Summer is covered, but we are still working on winter power generation.
We are not at “prepper” level, but if you’re building a new home, why not try to build in some resiliency?
Funny I’m in the process of going solar and where I live, I’m not allowed to go off grid. How stupid is that?
You can still buy a battery bank and hybrid inverter that’ll do solar -> battery -> grid. It’s not full off grid, but you can almost completely eleminate grid usage.
But you can’t eliminate the connection charge. And as far as I can tell there’s nothing to prevent them from increasing that to very high values. Currently it is $25 where I live but they are arguing to raise that to $30 as I type this. That’s a 20% increase.
My bill is mainly transmission charges, as I put in during the day and pull out at night to charge my EV. Not sure what your bill looks like, but there’s a lot of savings for me. The grid could also collapse tomorrow and it wouldn’t affect my electricity.
Yeah, we opted for the battery. It was tough because without the battery the solar definitely pays for itself and the cost wasn’t too bad, but with it it isn’t certain. When calculating that, the inputs rely on you to predict so many things in the future. So I went with my gut. I just feel like energy costs are going to go up much more than “they” are saying. With climate change, AI, greed and the fact that we are installing some things that will consume more energy. I hope I’m right.
How do you like yours?
Mine is great, except I have to devise a way to safely remove snow off a 25 foot high installation at a bad angle. I lost about a month of production last winter due to covered panels.
We’re rather resilient, but it’s gonna be dicey.
They’ve been making these kinds of predictions for a long time. This doesn’t mean that there aren’t very real existential threats to humanity around every corner, we may well experience a complete disaster, lord knows our logistics chain is delicate and largely ignored and props up everything we care about.
But what a lot of people miss in all of these predictions, is how adaptable and malleable human life is.
Will there be flooded cities and shanty-towns across coasts? Probably. Will there be gleaming cities of solar-powered utopia? Also probably. Will there be unrest, crime and war and famine? Absolutely. Will there be new comforts and escapes and new ways to stay safe and protected by your state in return for your attention, your money and your time? Also absolutely. Will it all be fragile? Yes, and it is now as well.
The future doesn’t hold just one thing, it holds many things. The future has always been the same: more of everything and then some. Look at us now, people predicted by this time we would have flying cars and robots… which we do! In some places. But we also still have uncontacted amazonian tribes, so we have everything we had in the previous century plus more.
So that’s why I planned to live in mountains and grow my own food. I thought I was high. Thanks Science.
Civilization doesn’t equal the world. Life will carry on and heal from the damage us ‘smart apes’ have done in our hubris.
This argument frustrates me greatly. Humans are far more adaptable than most other species, and the damage we are already doing to less adaptable species and ecosystems is incalculable and irreversible. We will kill off much of Earth’s life long before we manage to destroy ourselves.
Species are going extinct at a rate of 1,000 to 10,000 times faster than the normal “background rate” of extinction, driven by habitat loss, climate change, and pollution. Every species that we drive to extinction represents a multi-billion year legacy that will never return. Arguing that life will continue after the collapse of humanity is only partly true. There are a hell of a lot of species that will never continue, because our actions destroyed them.
We’re also roughly at the halfway point of Earth’s ability to support complex life, which emerged about a half billion years ago and has roughly another half billion years before the increased heat of the aging sun disrupts carbonate weathering to the extent that one of the main pathways of photosynthesis is no longer possible. Yes, during that 500 million years, in the absence of ongoing anthropogenic extinction, species will again diversify to fill the gaps. But there will be no tigers or elephants or rhinoceros after humanity, just as there were no non-avian dinosaurs after the asteroid.
I’m not making an argument. I’m learning to identify with a bigger picture for my sanity.
My heart weeps greatly for all of the species that are going extinct on this planet.
And I find some hope that life itself will continue here, even if it’s not complex life. Life has survived extinction events before. Life is adaptable.
I’m trying to be less attached to the form life takes, because I can’t stop climate change.
So it’s something that gives me peace. It’s not an argument that what is happening is right. Because it’s not.
A scientist has made the shocking claim that there’s a 49% chance the world will end in just 25 years.
100% it will not, no scientist worth anything would ever make such a moronic claim.
A possibility could be that civilization will end, but that’s not the same as the end of the world, it’s just the end of civilization.
The earth may change in ways that make it uninhabitable for humans, but that’s not the end of the world, “just” the end of humanity.
It’s very hard to take people serious when they make such obviously erroneous (stupid) claims.Most likely it’s an American, and it’s just USA that will end, because Americans tend to think USA = The World.
no scientist worth anything would ever make such a moronic claim.
He didn’t. It would have taken you five seconds to read the excerpt OP posted and notice that the actual quote is “I would estimate the chances are about 49% that the world as we know it will collapse by about 2050.”
He didn’t say the world will end. He didn’t even say that civilisation will end. He said that the social order we enjoy today could collapse. But rather than take five seconds to notice that, you decided to yell about nothing because it was more important to voice your opinion than it was to check your facts.
Dunno if everyone is enjoying that social order. But it’s certainly true that there’s less order than there was 20 years ago.
I would estimate the chances are about 49% that the world as we know it will collapse by about 2050.”
EXACTLY, so no scientist would make the previous stupid claim, just as I described, meaning it’s probably poor journalism editorializing what the scientist really claimed.
Do you really think I should have made my post LONGER? Further describing how and why it’s stupid, can you really not see it from the part I described?
Do you really think I should have made my post LONGER?
No but you could’ve made it much shorter by cutting out the commentary based only on the headline and didn’t read the article.
My comment was NOT based on the headline, read again…
I made a quote from the selected parts OP used!
And disregarding the bullshit I receive for it, my comment is actually factual and correct, contrary to the article and the criticism of my comment.I quote a part that is CLEARLY in error, as I stated NO serious scientist would write such bullshit.
I think you’re being, not only pedantic, but also just wrong. “The world will end” is a perfectly apt description to just about anyone about what is going on. The world will be uninhabitable for A MAJORITY of life that currently exists.
Permian extinction: last time shit like this happened, temps rose 10°C over 10,000’s of years. Still killed 90% of ALL LIFE. To be so arrogant as to presume that the USA collapsing would not have any knock on effects on the rest of the world. To presume that what kills of humans would do nothing to any other life. To presume that that scientist is a moron who just LOVES AMERICA so very much, because why else would he say things that make me feel bad?
I think you’re being, not only pedantic, but also just wrong.
What part of what I quoted can’t you read? It’s not being pedantic, it’s a matter of facts. Calling it the end of the world is extremely poor semantics, and poor semantics lead to poor understanding.
The world will be uninhabitable
That’s not the end of the world either. I described that VERY clearly.
Permian extinction:
Exactly, and that was not the end of the earth either, even the end of all life on earth is not the end of the earth. You may call it merely semantics, I call it facts. Poor semantics result in poor understanding.
Your argument is not wrong in the clinical sense. Just in the sense that it is so obtuse and irrelevant that your insistence that it is the only correct way to view things makes me not take you seriously.
deleted by creator
OK so being correct is irrelevant. And making a correct statement is obtuse.
Got it…
How do you imagine your comment to show you to have a point? Apart from just being obtuse yourself!
49% chance the world will end in just 25 years
Giant meteor coming to wipe out all of the world’s life?
predicted civilisation could collapse by 2050
Oh, so just the collapse of current civilisation. That’s happened many, many times already.
While not a good thing for those experiencing it, consider this. As we look back on previous civilisations, would we consider ours to generally be the best up to now? I’d say so. Perhaps what comes next will be even better.
The collapse of a particularly large civilisation is usually a slow affair that is difficult even to spot from the inside as it’s happening (consider the slow crumbling of the USA currently for example).
So while it is a period of turmoil and not a small amount of suffering, it’s not like everybody is going to die and humanity will go extinct, or anything.
Oh, so just the collapse of current civilisation. That’s happened many, many times already.
Collapse of local civilizations has happened a lot of times. Collapse of the global civilization has not happened yet. And previous collapses happened often improved the living conditions for big parts of the population, because they were farmers who no longer had to support the ruling classes after the collapse. Collapse of food production and distribution when e.g. only 1% of the population are professional farmers (in Germany) will be fundamentally different.
