Help me write out a timeline.
Posted by Constant-Sandwich-88@reddit | collapse | View on Reddit | 48 comments
I think this is the right place to ask this. There's just too much going on that is leading to the literal fall of modern day civilization, it's hard to collate an actual timeline, and I need some help. My best friend is receptive, but reticent, to believing we are living in the beginning of the end. He challenged me to write out a list of things we can expect to happen, and loosely when. As you all are aware, nothing is guaranteed, but I'd like some input on when the bad things are going to happen, and if you can include some justification on the timing that will help. Everything from political to climate is welcome, as long as you can provide dates. Sources would also be appreciated.
I will provide an update after our next talk on the subject, it will be a few days.
Also, I wouldn't mind "pre how we got here" thoughts as well.
miahc_76@reddit
I belive post world war 2 capitalism is the actual driving issue. For nearly a century we have funnelled money and power to ever increasing global corporations, all at the detriment of normal people. The gulf is insurmountable now, and collapse is the only future.
Clearly it is much more complex than this but I truly think this the real reason.
ekjohnson9@reddit
Its actually the opposite. Post WW2 liberal US Hegemony lifted the most people out of global poverty in history, and that includes the headwinds from the mass death in places like China during that period.
Normal people were the richest they'll be in 3 generations. Especially the 3rd world.
Bugscuttle999@reddit
Stevie Pinker checking in. Thanks so much.
ekjohnson9@reddit
This isn't a refutation of what I said.
Bugscuttle999@reddit
No. It was not. I do, however, disagree entirely with your conclusions. They are cherry picked, at best.
ekjohnson9@reddit
Decades of global history is the opposite of cherry picked.
Bugscuttle999@reddit
Greed became the Ultimate Good. Only possible end is Collapse.
The_Weekend_Baker@reddit
The only thing I would add to that is that it was the widespread global prosperity associated with the post WWII years that did it.
Almost everyone alive today was born during a unique time in human history. Since the dawn of civilization, crushing poverty was the rule for the vast majority of people who ever lived, right up to the dawn of the Industrial Revolution.
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2022/6/1/23138463/how-the-world-became-rich-industrial-revolution-koyama-rubin
Post WWII is what really kickstarted it. It represented the birth of the modern middle class in the US, and that kind of widespread prosperity gradually spread throughout the world. Mostly the global north, but not exclusively.
Having more money = spending more money. Spending more money = more emissions generated to produce the products/services being purchased. And it's why someone born in 1950, who would be 75 today, has lived during a period of time when almost 90% of total emissions have been generated. Even someone as young as 30, born in 1995, has lived during a time in which 50% of emissions have occurred.
Bugscuttle999@reddit
Trumpists will crash the US economy, dragging the rest of the world down, as well.
Unrest following abuses of the Trumpist regime will result in imposition of martial law. Collapse into balkanization of US.
I hope to be very wrong. Maybe the Giant Meteor will save us? But I wouldn't bank on it.
katarina-stratford@reddit
Dude the "beginning of the end" happened decades ago.
Constant-Sandwich-88@reddit (OP)
Somehow, everything bad today comes back to Reagan. It's hard to find one thing wrong in the world that doesn't originate in that administration, and it would be remarkable if it wasn't so disgusting.
PimpinNinja@reddit
As bad as he was, it started earlier than that. I was taught about hothouse earth in 1975.
a_ill@reddit
Check this analysis done by the University of Exeter and the UK's Institute and Faculty of Actuaries. Even the mainstream institutions now expect half of the world to die by 2050.
https://global-tipping-points.org/risk-dashboard/
Local-Ad-8944@reddit
Worldwide people can barely afford bare necesities with a full time job, and some even with a side gig, only to come home to an empty home since people barely talk to each other, and relationahip are in an all times, then stare at your phone untill sleep since you most are mentally exhausted to even move from the couch. People in the apst worked really hars, but they still had energy and passions to do additional stuff:inventinf things, meeting friends etc. You dont see that drive in modern people anymore, ppl in 1st world countries and the developed zones in the 2nd and 3rd have become zombies. We have already collapsed, but itll take some years for the effects to take change.
InternetPeon@reddit
Right this way sir: https://www.reddit.com/r/collapse/s/i6qKszUJ5U
NyriasNeo@reddit
Why bother? You can't predict the actual collapse anyway and it is unlikely to be on a specific day as opposed to slide down the path in a continuous basis.
The thing I know for sure is that Amazon, doordash, gas pumps and reddit are going to work tomorrow, and the day after. Anything beyond that is just a probability cloud.
FirstEvolutionist@reddit
I'd do it just to consider interactions I might be missing. There's a lot going on.
smartaxe21@reddit
This was the result of a survey in this sub 6 years ago:
https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Ftf58n63uavr21.png
Constant-Sandwich-88@reddit (OP)
I guess I belong here because for the most part I fall right into the majority in most categories. The only ones I really differ on are the "Rule #1" questions, and that's because I think the mods here do a decent job of enforcing people respecting each other. Maybe we're just so over the world going downhill, it's not a hard job though.
mem2100@reddit
Poorer countries or those with more vulnerable geographies will fail first. This will accelerate by 2030. Pakistan is on that list - and they have nukes and hate their neighbor. Fascism is rising globally and that trend will accelerate as climate change worsens, increasing the odds of war.
We are at 1.5C now, at 2C, the level of disruption will at least double. At current course and speed we will reach 2C sometime in the 30's. Maybe by '35 in ten years.
Nuclear war is the only thing that will cause sudden collapse in the West. Absent that, it will come on slowly until a rapid unraveling somewhere between 2C - 3C. By 2060 latest.
The happy talk crowd will tell you about how growth in renewables is decarbonizing electricity. True dat. They DON'T mention that electricity is ONLY 20% of our global energy consumption.
By the end of '26 we will have a much clearer picture regarding the new warming rate. That rate will kind of drive the pace of what is happening.
kiwittnz@reddit
FYI: https://fragilestatesindex.org/
Xennylikescoffee@reddit
Compare what's already been done to what they have labeled yet to do in project 2025. (Not my site!)
https://www.project2025.observer/visualize/timeline
kiwittnz@reddit
O.M.G.
peaceloveandapostacy@reddit
Can someone please ELI5 what a dead cat bounce is … I’m assuming it’s like a false upturn at the bottom of a particularly large sell off?
bmeisler@reddit
Exactly. We had one last week!
peaceloveandapostacy@reddit
I live check to check and have never invested a day in my life. Yet somehow this nebulous group of people selling and buying pieces of companies that don’t really exist thousands of miles away influences the prices of things I need to buy to live. Pretty wild.
bmeisler@reddit
Indeed! It’s a consensual hallucination.
peaceloveandapostacy@reddit
Consensual hallucination…. Nice… I’m gonna use that
turtledovefairy7@reddit
The acceleration of change at the very least is well-documented. Show them a historical graph of world surface temperature and send them some articles about important tipping points and other effects and disasters. I think the world is likely to reach 2.0C in the next couple of years, maybe even this year depending on how fast we are accelerating. Reaching over 1.5C last year was already far beyond most past projections. One important variable to take in mind is how agriculture is being affected, so looking into that would be great. Another one are the consequences of heating in the tropics. Although an ETA is hard to think of, if the heat keeps going higher, life in the tropics will become less and less viable, leading gradually to a high increase of immigration even if we don’t suffer a more drastic rise in temperature over the span of a few years. One major disaster in my country were the floods of last year in southern Brazil, which submerged a lot of towns and destroyed the houses of millions of people, which was so massive it almost reverted the economic policies of the country.
TonyFMontana@reddit
In Fallout the nukes dropped around 2070 I think. We might just get there in 2050 at this rate !
KR1S71AN@reddit
Unbelievably optimistic. Nukes by 2035 is my bet.
TonyFMontana@reddit
If you’re name is Krisztián Then it’s funny
BigJobsBigJobs@reddit
You need a Collapse Bingo Card!
I just added "grey goo" and "resurrected Pliocene microbiotic horror" to mine.
CantSmellThis@reddit
There's a podcast called Breaking Down: Collapse
It's a couple years old but it is a really great ice breaker and explains things brilliantly.
https://shows.acast.com/breaking-down-collapse-2
tonyisthename3@reddit
One of the guys still puts out new episodes under the same podcast!
SethGrey@reddit
I stopped listening after a while, but what happened to the other guy?
unknownpoltroon@reddit
He collapsed
eco-overshoot@reddit
Here https://open.substack.com/pub/predicament/p/the-price-of-ignorance-is-brutal
elihu@reddit
Most of this stuff is just wild guesses at this point. A few things are relatively predictable, like CO2 emissions continuing at more-or-less their current pace for a long time, but even there there's a lot of uncertainty about how bad things will get when.
In the U.S. we have kind of a weird situation where we don't know when or if society will just completely collapse, but things are unlikely to get any better for about 3.8 years. The only constitutional mechanisms to get rid of a sitting president (impeachment and 25th amendment) are unlikely to happen, and even if they did we'd be stuck with president Vance.
And even if we could magically make Trump go away, we'd still have all the underlying problems that the US seems to be incapable of dealing with even in "normal" times (an expensive and mediocre health care system, climate change, wealth inequality, expensive housing, and so on) and other alarming things happening elsewhere in the world (the Ukraine war, the war in Gaza, China's will-we-or-won't-we posture with respect to invading Taiwan...).
If you don't live in the U.S., then collapse will be different. I don't think most of us expect "collapse" to be a single event that happened to everyone all at the same time. More likely it'll be a slow chain reaction that plays out over a long time. Unless collapse takes the form of nuclear war.
idkmoiname@reddit
Trying to predict how exactly a cascade in a chaotic system plays out is like a machine with a billion gears that have started to fail faster and faster, and then you want to predict which gears exactly will fail when.
That's not how that works.
ConfusedMaverick@reddit
Nobody knows for sure, of course, but looking at the global effects of climate change, my take is this...
Over the next 10-15 years:
The above will overwhelmingly affect the poorer parts of the world first, but the migration and economic effects will spill over to the rich world.
Over the 10-20 years following that (ie up to 2050 / 2060 or so):
From here, I guess it will just unravel into savagery for everyone, since the rich can only sustain their lifestyles thanks to the remnants of what will have passed. I would guess a global population below a billion towards the end of the century.
This assumes that climate change begins to slow down thanks to the collapse of global civilisation. If self sustaining feedbacks are as bad as I fear, it will accelerate faster, and probably result in a tiny global population (a few million) or even extinction towards the end of the century.
collapse2024@reddit
“What Derek Wilson calls the Five Holocausts - militarism, human oppression, economic destitution, the population explosion and environmental destruction -- may seem too big, too complex, and perhaps, in the end, too frightening to grasp… For all their complexity, these five looming catastrophes have a common character. Each implies self-destructive behavioir on a global scale. It's as if the whole of the world's population has been seized by collective irrationality.”
chopsui101@reddit
Everyone here……we lost democracy, it all started in 2020……
Me: it started in 2000, when liberals and conservatives traded freedom For mass surveillance
Playongo@reddit
Take a look at the busy workers handbook to the Apocalypse. https://medium.com/@samyoureyes/the-busy-workers-handbook-to-the-apocalypse-7790666afde7
MattyTangle@reddit
I've been blogging my view of the collapse since 2020 and mapping out the new shape of the world. Visit The Cassandaera if you are curious. Caveat Emptor
EpE34@reddit
Talk to the computers. This is my conversation with ChatGPT. climate breakdown timeline chat
ThrowFootAway5376@reddit
All I can think of is.
SP500 major downturn by summer. There should be a dead cat bounce before that, but with how destabilizing this guy is being... I think it's already trying to bounce and failing.
Thing is it comes back by 2027. A lot of people are laid off before that happens, I'm probably one of them at this point, but it comes back by 2027. Everyone forgets about all the fucky-pooing around at Social Security because everyone's too busy trying to ride the wave up and thinking they're rich again.
Trump announces all these tax breaks for SS recipients, further driving uphoria.
This is called "giving the program enough rope to hang itself with". It's malicious compliance. Because of a shortfall of funding, it's bankrupt within 6 years. Payouts drop 33% (or more?) and a new solution is proposed that privatizes it. This, of course, results in its total disintegration 10 years later.
This is before anything else bad happens, so who knows. I'm addressing one variable here and assuming everything else is status quo. But even under this best case scenario, anyone old, that has no family, or bad relations with their family, is dead by age 85. In the worst way imaginable. Homelessness. Medical debt and homelessness. Fortunately you won't see any one particular one of them for too long because their life expectancy on the streets would be measured in weeks.
costanotrica@reddit
AGI before 2035, everything follows from there.