25% of chance civilization will be lost in 2020
The good news: civilization goes beyond 2012! You won’t escape the christmas gifts craze this year, the mayans were wrong ;)
The bad news: according to the most pessimistic scenarios outlined in The Futurist and based on “pooling the empirical trend data and the knowledge of more than 100 experts”, the world has a 25% chance to “decline to disaster”.
From 2015 through 2020, a doubling of global GDP will cause the Global MegaCrisis to become intolerable, with the planet teetering on environmental collapse. Here are TechCast’s four scenarios:
• Decline to Disaster (25% probability): World fails to react, resulting in catastrophic natural and economic calamities. Possible loss of civilization.
• Muddling Down (35% probability): World reacts only partially, so ecological damage, increased poverty and conflict create major declines in life.
• Muddling Up (25% probability): World reacts in time out of need and high-tech capabilities; widespread disaster averted, although many problems remain.
• Rise to Maturity (15% probability): World transitions to a responsible global order.
Reminds me of a talk by The rational optimist author Matt Ridley in which he was explaining that, as far as he could remember, the end of the world was constantly predicted to happen in the next 20 years. And it never happened. Inhabitants of the 50s were afraid of the nuclear winter, those of the 70s of a global war between the US and USSR, in the 2000s there was the famous bug. Now it’s global warming and the mayan calendar. Perhaps this constant fear of the future is a positive social mechanism that motivates innovators and entrepreneurs to get to work and change the status quo. Perhaps it’s a crowd control tool? What do you think?
La mauvaise herbe ne part pas aussi simplement
It’s about managing expectations? The world ends for countless people everyday. Civilization needs definition before it can be granted status of “potentially ending”. Civilization with 25% of the worlds’ population with no access to drinkable water? If we push the conceptual envelope, civilization ended when Oscar Wilde died.
I was walking in Oslo the other day, went in a shop to buy water, and amongst the dozens of possible choices I found bottles of artesian water from the Fiji. From the Fiji. At about the same price of water from Norway. This is the present expectation of what we call civilization: to be able to buy water from Fiji, in Europe, at the same price of local water. It cannot last.
Agreed. But civilization has to be a moving target, otherwise it will never happen.
Humans like finding patterns, even when the there’s no (predictable) patterns.That makes predictions worse than just admitting “intelligent ignorance”. Here’s an interesting read about this: http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2005/12/05/051205crbo_books1
To defend futurists, here is an interesting quote I found on the World Futurists Society website, explaining why predictions are useful:
“let me say that futurists do not attempt to predict precisely what will happen in the future. If we could know the future with certainty, it would mean that the future could not be changed. Members of the World Future Society have come to understand that the main purpose of studying the future is to look at what may happen if present trends continue, decide if this is desirable, and, if not, work to change it.”
Link