Is Civilization on the Brink of Collapse? - YouTube

At its height, the Roman Empire was home to about  30% of the world’s population, and in many ways  

it was the pinnacle of human advancement. Its  citizens enjoyed the benefits of central heating,  

concrete, double glazing,  banking, international trade,  

and upward social mobility. Rome became the first city in  

history with one million inhabitants  and was a center of technological,  

legal, and economic progress. An empire impossible  to topple, stable and rich and powerful.

Until it wasn’t anymore. First slowly then  suddenly, the most powerful civilization on earth  

collapsed. By civilization, we mean a complex  society where labor is specialized and social  

classes emerge and which is ruled by institutions.  Civilisations share a dominant mutual language and  

culture and domesticate plants and  animals to feed and sustain large cities,  

where they often construct impressive monuments.

Civilization lets us become efficient on large  scales, collect vast amounts of knowledge,  

and put human ingenuity and the natural resources  of the world to work. Without civilization,  

most people would never have been born. Which  makes it a bit concerning that collapse is  

the rule, not the exception. Virtually all  civilizations end, on average after 340 years.

Collapse is rarely nice for individuals.  Their shared cultural identity is shattered as  

institutions lose the power to organize people.  Knowledge is lost, living standards fall, violence  

increases and often the population declines.  The civilization either completely disappears,  

is absorbed by stronger neighbors  or something new emerges,  

sometimes with more primitive  technology than before.

If this is how it has been over  the ages, what about us today?  

Just as Europeans forgot how to build  indoor plumbing and make cement,  

will we lose our industrial technology,  and with that our greatest achievements,  

from one dollar pizza to smartphones or  laser eye surgery? Will all this go away too?

Today our cities stretch for thousands of  square kilometers, we travel the skies,  

our communication is instant. Industrial  agriculture with engineered high yield plants,  

efficient machinery and high potency fertilizer  feeds billions of people. Modern medicine gives  

us the longest lifespan we’ve ever had, while  Industrial technology gives us an unprecedented  

level of comfort and abundance – even though  we haven’t yet learned to attain them without  

destroying our ecosphere. There are arguably  still different civilizations around today that  

compete and coexist with each other, but together  they also form a singular, global civilization.

But this modern, globalized civilization is even  more vulnerable in some ways than past empires,  

because we are much more deeply interconnected.  

A collapse of the industrialized world literally  means that the majority of people alive today  

would perish since without industrial agriculture  we would no longer be able to feed them.

And there is an even greater  risk: What if a collapse were so  

deeply destructive that we were  unable to re-industrialize again?  

What if it ruined our chances of enjoying a  flourishing future as a multiplanetary species?

A global civilizational collapse  could be an existential catastrophe:  

something that ruins not just the  lives of everyone alive today,  

but all the future generations that could have  come into being. All the knowledge we might have  

discovered, the art we might have created, the  joys we might have experienced, would be lost.

So, how likely is all of this?

Let’s start with some good news. While  civilization collapses have happened regularly,  

none have ever derailed the course of  global civilization. Rome collapsed,  

but the Aksumite Empire or the Teotihuacans  and of course the Byzantine Empire, carried on.

What about sudden population crashes?

So far we have not seen a catastrophe  that has killed much more than 10% of the  

global population. No pandemic,  no natural disaster, no war.  

The last clear example of a rapid global  population decrease was the Black Death,  

a pandemic of the bubonic plague in the fourteenth  century that spread across the Middle East and  

Europe and killed a third of all Europeans  and about 1/10th of the global population.

If any event was going to cause the  collapse of civilization, that should have  

been it. But even the Black Death demonstrates  humanity's resilience more than its fragility.  

While the old societies were  massively disrupted in the short term,  

the intense loss of human lives and suffering  did little to negatively impact European economic  

and technological development in the long run.  Population size recovered within 2 centuries,  

and just 2 centuries later, the  Industrial Revolution began.  

History is full of incredible recoveries from  horrible tragedies. Take the atomic bombing of  

Hiroshima during World War 2. 140,000 people were  killed and 90% of the city was at least partially  

incinerated or reduced to rubble. But against all  odds, they made a remarkable recovery! Hiroshima’s  

population recovered within a decade, and today  it is a thriving city of 1.2 million people.

None of this made these horrible events any  less horrible for those who lived through them.  

But for us as a species, these  signs of resilience are good news.

Why Recovery is Likely Even in the Worst Case

One thing that’s different from historic collapses  is that humanity now has unprecedented destructive  

power: Today’s nuclear arsenals are so powerful  that an all-out global war could cause a nuclear  

winter and billions of deaths. Our knowledge  of our own biology and how to manipulate it  

is getting so advanced that it is becoming  possible to engineer viruses as contagious  

as the coronavirus and as deadly  as ebola. Increasingly the risk of  

global pandemics is much higher than in the past. So we may cause a collapse ourselves and it might  

be much worse than the things nature has thrown  at us, so far. But if, say 99% of the population  

died, would global civilization collapse  forever? Could we recover from such a tragedy?

We have some reasons to be optimistic.  Let’s start with food. There are 1 billion  

agricultural workers today so, even if the  global population fell to just 80 million,  

it is virtually guaranteed that many  survivors would know how to produce food.  

And we don’t need to start at square one because  we could still use modern high-yield crops.  

Maize is 10 times bigger than its wild ancestor;  ancient tomatoes were the size of today’s peas.

After agriculture, the next step towards recovery  

would be rebuilding industrial capacity,  like power grids and automated manufacturing.  

A huge problem is that our economies of scale make  it impossible to just pick up where we left off.  

Many of our high tech industries are  only functional because of huge demand  

and intensely interconnected supply  chains across different continents.  

Even if our infrastructure were left unharmed, we  would make huge steps backwards technologically.

But then again, we are thinking in larger time  frames. Industrialization originally happened  

12,000 years after the agricultural revolution. So  if we need to start over after a massive collapse,  

it shouldn’t be that hard to re-industrialize,  at least on evolutionary timescales.

There’s a hitch, though. The Industrial  Revolution was fuelled, literally, by burning  

easily-accessible coal and we are still very  much reliant on it. If we use it all up today,  

aside from making rapid climate change  much worse, we could hinder our ability  

to recover from a huge crisis. So we  should stop using easy-to-access coal,  

so it can serve as a civilization  insurance in case something bad happens.

Another thing that makes recovery likely is that  we’d probably have most of the information we  

need to rebuild civilization. We would certainly  lose a lot of crucial institutional knowledge,  

especially on hard drives that nobody could  read or operate anymore. But a lot of the  

technological, scientific, and cultural knowledge  stored in the world's 2.6 million libraries,  

would survive the catastrophe. The post-collapse  survivors would know what used to be possible,  

and they could reverse engineer some  of the tools and machines they’d find.

In conclusion, despite the bleak  prospect of catastrophic threats,  

natural or created by ourselves,  there is reason for optimism:  

humankind is remarkably resilient, and even in  the case of a global civilizational collapse,  

it seems likely that we would be able to recover  – Even if many people were to perish or suffer  

immense hardship. Even if we lost cultural  and technological achievements in the process.

But given the stakes, the risks are still  unnervingly high. Nuclear war and dangerous  

pandemics threaten the amazing global civilization  we have built. Humanity is like a teenager,  

speeding around blind corners, drunk, without  a seat belt. The good news is that it is still  

early enough to prepare for and to mitigate  these risks. We just need to actually do it.

We made this video together with Will MacAskill,  

a Professor of Philosophy at Oxford and one of  the founders of the effective altruism movement,  

which is about doing the most good  you can with your time and money.

Will just published a new book  called What We Owe The Future,  

which is about how YOU can positively  impact the long-term future of our  

world. If you like Kurzgesagt videos,  the chances are high you will like it!

The book has some pretty  counter intuitive arguments,  

like that risks from new technology, such  as AI and synthetic biology, are at least as  

grave as those from climate change. Or that  the world doesn’t contain too many people,  

but too few. And especially that everyday  actions like recycling or refusing to fly  

just aren’t that big a deal compared to  where you donate, or what career you pursue.

Most importantly, it argues  that, by acting wisely,  

YOU can help make tomorrow better  than today. And how WE together  

can build a flourishing world for the thousands or  millions of generations that will come after us.  

Many things we at Kurzgesagt talk about regularly  are discussed here, in much greater detail.

Check out What We Owe The Future wherever  you get your books or audiobooks.

Did we manage to unlock a new fear for you?

Let’s counter existential dread  with appreciation for humanity.

Look how far we’ve come as  a species. What we’ve built  

and where we’ve gathered. Let this new World  Map Poster be a reminder of what we can achieve.