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.

This post is the first in a living literature review on societal collapse. You can find an indexed archive here. Societal collapse has been with humanity since the agricultural revolution, but only during the enlightenment did humans gain the means to understand these cataclysms in a systematic 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.

I want to try something different with this post here. The post is actually a conference paper for the Stanford Existential Risk Conference in April. I publish it both here and as a preprint to test if I can get more feedback for it this way.

Some time ago I came across the potato famine and how it contributed or even caused the revolutions of 1848. I wondered if this is an good example to show how cascading failures lead societal crisis. Starting from a natural event to an agricultural crisis, to an economic crisis, to a financial crisis and finally resulting in a political crisis.

“Man exists. For him, it is not a question of wondering whether his presence in the world is useful, whether life is worth the trouble of being lived. These questions make no sense. It is a matter of knowing whether he wants to live and under what condition.” Simone de Beauvoir despises fascism. She despises oppressors in general and collaborators in particular.

The prospect of a famine-free world hinges on improved governance and peace. It is as simple - or as difficult - as that. Cormac Ó Gráda Sometimes it happens that you are vaguely aware of a person and you know they coined a term and then by some random chance you come across evidence that this person effectively made the world just much worse.

Almost all researchers use “gap-spotting”, a process that only creates boring research questions It usually does not happen that I read through a non-fiction book in two days, but I could not put this one down. In the recent months, I noticed that one thing that I have to improve to become a better researcher is to come up with more and better research questions.

How warm will it get? This question is probably on the mind of every person dealing with the issue of climate change. It is so important because all other consequences of climate change depend on it. The less the earth warms, the better mankind will cope with it. In the following, I will deal with this question and its implications.