civilisation >> 'irreversible collapse' ?
Can complex, advanced civilizations really collapse?
Excerpts from S. Motesharrei and E. Kalnay, “A Minimal Model for Human and Nature Interaction,” 2012.
modern civilization, armed with its greater technological capacity, scientific knowledge, and energy resources, will be able to survive and endure whatever crises historical societies succumbed to.
In this paper we attempt to model collapse mathematically in a more general way.
Human And Nature DYnamics (HANDY) is based on the classical predator-prey model.
We can think of the human population as the “predator”, while nature (the natural resources of the surrounding environment) can be taken as the “prey”, depleted by humans. Based on the long history of collapse of civilizations discussed in the introduction, we separated the population into “Elites” and “Commoners”, and introduced a variable for accumulated wealth. We have also added a different dimension of predation whereby Elites “prey” on the production of wealth by Commoners.
As a result, HANDY consists of just four prediction equations: two for the two classes of population, Elites and Commoners, one for the natural resources or Nature, and one for the accumulated Wealth.
We will discuss three sets of scenarios (graph are ‘Soft Landing to Equilibrium’):
- Egalitarian society (No-Elites)
- Equitable society (with Workers and Non-Workers)
- Unequal society (with Elites and Commoners)
The model was also used to find a sustainable equilibrium value and the maximum carrying capacity within each of these three types of societies.
In sum, results of our experiments, indicate that either one of the two features apparent in historical societal collapses —over-exploitation of natural resources and strong economic stratification— can independently result in a complete collapse.
=> Collapse can be avoided, and population can reach a steady state at the maximum carrying capacity, if the rate of depletion of nature is reduced to a sustainable level, and if resources are distributed equitably.
Also: http://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2014/mar/14/nasa-civilisation-irreversible-collapse-study-scientists