August 5th, 2026
The arguments I have presented so far do not specify WHEN our civilization will collapse; they show only that it will eventually collapse. In this essay, I shall present factors that I consider indicative of the imminence of collapse.
Nuclear Weapons
These provide us with a useful marker for how our civilization has coped with technological change in times past. The initial reaction to nuclear weapons was “Wow, I gotta get me some of THESE!” America devoted resources to rapidly expanding its stockpile, and Russia, the UK, and France all poured money into getting their own nukes. Meanwhile, a number of other countries — Israel, South Africa, China, and a few others — began developing or considering development of their own nuclear weapons.
The Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 scared the crap out of everybody. We came terrifyingly close to a nuclear war, and that convinced both the USA and the USSR that measures had to be taken to rein in these weapons. First came a treaty banning atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons. Then came the Non-Proliferation Treaty, in which countries promised not to develop nuclear weaponry in return for getting full access to peaceful nuclear technology. Then the two superpowers began negotiating treaties to put safety barriers around the use of nuclear weapons. This process continued through the 1980s and 1990s. But then, starting in 2002, the system began to disintegrate. The USA pulled out of some treaties; the USSR pulled out of others. Negotiations of new treaties failed to progress.
Then we started to encounter problems with proliferation. Pakistan got its own nuclear weapons; India quickly followed. North Korea doggedly pursued its own nuclear weapons program despite facing strong resistance led by the USA, and eventually acquired the technology. They now have an estimated 50 nuclear warheads.
The system constraining nuclear weapons has been weakened in this century; Mr. Trump tore up the only treaty limiting Iranian nuclear weapons, and destroyed confidence by its allies that the USA would use its nuclear weapons to defend them. This has led many of these countries — Germany, Japan, Italy, and possibly a few others — to debate the desirability of developing their own weapons.
After an initial rush, civilization began erecting safeguards to prevent a nuclear war, but those safeguards have been eroding in this century. Humanity has made an effort to protect itself from these weapons, but its efforts have been too limp to provide adequate protection.
AI
There have been a great many new technologies introduced over the last hundred years, but almost none of these technologies present us with existential threats. There are, of course, some technologies that indirectly pose existential threats, such as utilization of fossil fuels generating climate change, which I shall address shortly. AI, however, poses a more direct threat, with three forms.
First is the threat of sudden massive unemployment. Many people fear that they will lose their jobs to AI. I rather doubt that this will be a significant problem. Western civilization has undergone many cases of technological change leading to unemployment. The problem was most serious in the early 19th century when thousands of people who made thread and cloth were replaced by machines. This led to the Luddite movement and some violence, but ultimately many of those who lost their livelihood found new sources of income. We have had these kinds of problems ever since. The Internet destroyed the jobs of travel agents, workers at local bookstores and a number of other industries. At the same time, it opened up millions of new jobs for programmers, website designers, musicians, and artists. The employment shock from AI will be larger than any previous shock, but at the same time, AI will boost GDP so much that we will be able to hire millions of people to set up a proper education system with a one-to-one ratio between teachers and students.
Next comes the threat of interstate cyber-warfare. Already a number of nations have created groups of programmers who specialize in techniques for penetrating the digital infrastructure of antagonists. The USA and Israel jointly introduced a virus into the software that operated the centrifuges that Iran used for making highly enriched uranium; that software destroyed the centrifuges. Of course, Iran simply started over with new centrifuges isolated from the Internet. Again, I doubt that such efforts pose an existential threat to civilization. Nations can certainly wreak havoc with each other’s digital infrastructure, but they dare not create malware so broadly destructive that it escapes into the overall Internet.
Lastly comes the potential for terrorists to use AI to design bioweapons that kill billions. I doubt that even terrorists would be so vicious as to design a general-purpose bioweapon capable of killing everybody; surely they would want SOMEBODY to survive their pandemic. Even so, it is entirely possible that terrorists could miscalculate and create a weapon that could kill billions. Such a pandemic would wreak so much damage that civilization would be unsustainable with a smaller population and the process of downsizing would likely not be carried out competently, leading to a complete collapse.
Climate Change
The threat of climate change is especially indicative of the incompetence of our civilization. Scientists began warning society nearly 40 years ago that emissions of carbon posed a profound threat to our well-being. Initially there was some willingness to address the problem, but the fossil fuel industry spent enough money to build a powerful opposition, and many countries resisted taking the steps necessary to stave off disaster. The federal government of America was far and away the worst offender here; it opposed most efforts to reduce carbon emissions. However, many of the states were not as corrupt and began installing wind turbines and solar power, leading to a 30% decline in average carbon emissions per capita since the year 2000. Even this, however, is far from sufficient to stave off the worst damages from climate change. Here’s a graph from Statista showing total global emissions:
As you can see, we have accomplished almost nothing in the way of reducing the growth of carbon emissions. Climate change is getting worse; here’s another graph showing the number of big weather disasters in the US, including only those that cost more than a billion constant dollars in damages:
Lastly, here’s a chart showing estimated total worldwide costs of climate change:
Source: https://www.statista.com/chart/11673/the-soaring-costs-of-climate-change/
These costs are growing fast; they are projected to reach $38 trillion dollars per year by 2050, or about 15% of global GDP. I find this number hard to believe; it represents annual growth in costs of about 12%. Moreover, for a variety of reasons, if annual growth in costs exceeds 4%, it will overcome GDP growth, meaning that the world will suffer increasing overall poverty thereafter, and experience shows that conditions of increasing poverty trigger either a revolution or heavy-handed political oppression. That’s the grim future the world faces.
It gets worse. The oceans absorb much of the additional heat generated by the carbon emissions. The net effect of this is to cushion the atmosphere from the effects of climate change, rather like a shock absorber. The oceans don’t remove the heat generated by carbon emissions; they merely slow down the effects of that heat. The mathematics works out to a delay of about 30 years. That is, the climate change we are experiencing today is due to carbon emissions over the last 30 years, and the carbon emissions we make today will not exert their full effect for 30 years. To put it another way, we aren’t seeing the full consequences of our actions; our children will bear that burden.
Yet, despite the ever-increasing forest fires, killer heat waves, more powerful hurricanes, and other weather-based disasters, we STILL do not take climate change seriously. Mr. Trump declares climate change to be a hoax and millions of Americans believe him, disregarding the events that are taking place all around them.
This, I think, is the conclusive evidence that humanity is unable to understand and cope with the environment it has created. We are faced with an existential threat in climate change, and we refuse to acknowledge the danger or do much about it. The destruction of civilization is already underway. It is in early stages now, but by the time it reaches catastrophic levels, nothing we can do will be sufficient to prevent disastrous levels of destruction.