Interesting article by Tom McKay on PolicyMic.com
I believe the alternative to the solution they recommend is to trust and believe in The Lord Jesus Christ. We need to live kingdom minded; this world is not supposed to last!
Matthew 6: 19 "Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal,
20 but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal.
21 For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.
NASA Study Concludes When Civilization Will
End, And It's Not Looking Good for Us
By Tom McKay from PolicyMic.com
Civilization
was pretty great while it lasted, wasn't it? Too bad it's not going to for much
longer. According to a new study sponsored by NASA's Goddard Space Flight
Center, we only have a few decades left before everything we know and hold dear
collapses.
The
report, written by applied mathematician Safa Motesharrei of the National
Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center along with a team of natural and
social scientists, explains that modern civilization is doomed. And
there's not just one particular group to blame, but the entire fundamental
structure and nature of our society.
Analyzing
five risk factors for societal collapse (population, climate, water,
agriculture and energy), the report says that the sudden downfall of
complicated societal structures can follow when these factors converge to form
two important criteria. Motesharrei's report says that all societal
collapses over the past 5,000 years have involved both "the
stretching of resources due to the strain placed on the ecological carrying
capacity" and "the economic stratification of society into Elites
[rich] and Masses (or "Commoners") [poor]." The so-called Elite
population restricts the flow of resources accessible to the Masses,
accumulating a surplus for themselves that is high enough to strain natural
resources. Eventually this situation will inevitably result in the destruction
of society.
Elite
power, the report suggests, will buffer "detrimental effects of the
environmental collapse until much later than the Commoners," allowing the
privileged to "continue 'business as usual' despite the impending
catastrophe."
Science
will surely save us, the nay-sayers may yell. But technology, argues
Motesharrei, has only damned us further:
Technological
change can raise the efficiency of resource use, but it also tends to raise
both per capita resource consumption and the scale of resource extraction, so
that, absent policy effects, the increases in consumption often compensate for
the increased efficiency of resource use.
In other
words, the benefits of technology are outweighed by how much the gains
reinforce the existing, over-burdened system — making collapse even more
likely.
The
worst-case scenarios predicted by Motesharrei are pretty dire, involving
sudden collapse due to famine or a drawn-out breakdown of society due to the
over-consumption of natural resources. The best-case scenario involves
recognition of the looming catastrophe by Elites and a more equitable
restructuring of society, but who really believes that is going to happen?
Here's what the study recommends:
The two
key solutions are to reduce economic inequality so as to ensure fairer
distribution of resources, and to dramatically reduce resource consumption by
relying on less intensive renewable resources and reducing population growth.
These
are great suggestions that will, unfortunately, almost certainly never be put
into action, considering just how far down the wrong path our civilization has
already gone. As of last year, humans are using more resources than
the Earth can replenish and the planet's distribution of resources among its
terrestrial inhabitants is massively unequal. This is what happened to
Rome and the Mayans, according to the report.
...
historical collapses were allowed to occur by elites who appear to be oblivious
to the catastrophic trajectory (most clearly apparent in the Roman and Mayan
cases).
And
that's not even counting the spectre of global climate change, which could be a
looming "instant planetary emergency." According to
Canadian Wildlife Service biologist Neil Dawe:
Economic
growth is the biggest destroyer of the ecology. Those people who think you can
have a growing economy and a healthy environment are wrong. If we don't reduce
our numbers, nature will do it for us ... Everything is worse and we’re still
doing the same things. Because ecosystems are so resilient, they don’t exact
immediate punishment on the stupid.
In maybe
the nicest way to say the end is nigh possible, Motesharrei's report
concludes that "closely reflecting the reality of the world today ... we
find that collapse is difficult to avoid."
Writes Nafeez
Ahmed at The Guardian:
"Although
the study is largely theoretical, a number of other more empirically-focused
studies — by KPMG and the UK Government Office of Science for
instance — have warned that the convergence of food, water and energy crises
could create a 'perfect storm' within about fifteen years. But these 'business
as usual' forecasts could be very conservative."
Well, at
least zombies aren't real.
