This post is part of a living literature review on societal collapse. You can find an indexed archive here. The first post of this living literature review gave a summary of the field of collapse studies. One thing that post makes clear is that we need better models of societal dynamics.
Existential Crunch is a living literature review about societal collapse. When I read new things, which update my views, I’ll also update my posts (1). This post highlights updates I made to three posts. However, before we dive into the changes, I have a little announcement: It’s been six months already since I started this project for real. Since then I have published five posts for the living literature review and two posts about other topics.
Navigating the parameters that allow food production
In the last year nuclear winter was a topic I spent a lot of time on. It is one of the potential global catastrophes that motivates me in general and it is directly relevant to my work (Jehn, 2023; Jehn et al., 2023). This makes it kind of obvious that I take nuclear winter seriously.
This post is part of a living literature review on societal collapse. You can find an indexed archive here. The risk of societal collapse is dependent not only on the problems a society faces, but also on the adaptation it makes to counter those problems. These adaptations can increase the resilience of a society and make it less vulnerable to potential hazards.
I created a list of researchers in the existential risk field based on the amount of papers they have published. In the following I provide links to their work. This is not meant as a strict evaluation of the value of their contributions to the field, but more as a quick overview of who is working on what.
This post is part of a living literature review on societal collapse. You can find an indexed archive here. If we want to learn about human society’s resilience or fragility, it’s helpful to learn from our species’ prior experiences. The trouble is, since collapse is a relatively rare phenomenon, we’re short on data.
This post is part of a living literature review on societal collapse. You can find an indexed archive here. Past societies often found their end amid a challenging climate. Environmental changes can put considerable strain on a society and there are many cases in history where it was a major contributor to their collapse, especially when the change was sudden.
Going forward this blog here will work somewhat differently. I got some funding by Open Phil to start a living literature review on societal collapse (thanks to Matt Clancy for making this happen). So how is this gonna work? The idea behind this project is to make research on societal collapse more accessible to anyone who’s interested in the topic, by writing it up in a nicely sorted and easy to read way.
Existential risk studies look at events that have the chance of either ending humanity or its potential (for example, by locking us in an eternal pre-industrial state). These kinds of events can vary wildly. Humanity could be wiped out by nuclear war, a pandemic, a supervolcanic eruption and a variety of other causes. Those events need knowledge from all kinds of fields, ranging from geology to medicine.
