Saturday Thoughts: Predictions

Predictions are a tricky thing, they have a tendency to make one look foolish. I will risk looking foolish.

I expect this to be the last great empire of the False King. I expect that other empires may follow this one, but they will be lesser- because less will be left to work with after this empire falls. I do expect this empire to fall.

I do not know how it will fall. If the earth is lucky, it will fall quickly and quietly- like a puppet with cut strings. This last greatest empire of the False King is fragile. goods travel thousands of miles with very little margin for error. And these are not luxuries, these are basic needs such as food, natural gas to heat homes, gasoline to run cars and make fertilizer and pesticides, minerals and timber and other raw manufacturing materials, clean water to drink (or more likely waste) and electricity to power everything else. It is possible that if the systems are threatened by large enough systemic pressures, that all supply lines will break at once or nearly so, and the empire will fall like a broken puppet to floor of the stage.

If the earth is less lucky, the fall will be fast and violent. Resource wars will break out, people will starve and panic and run. There will be vast devastation, but nothing that life cannot recover from- just nothing human beings can survive.

If humans are lucky, and the earth is even less lucky, the end will arrive like a battered wife falling down a long flight of stairs. There will be jarring blow after jarring blow as the first crisis- whatever it is- ignites the next and so on down through a fragile web of systems. Some humans may survive this in a humbler manner than the last two or three centuries have allowed us to get used to. There may again be empires, but they will resemble Genghis Khan and Alexander the Great- large but drawing only upon the renewable resources of the planet and thus not a danger to it.

The apocalypse may not thunder in at all. The end could creep in by degrees like the dusk at midsummer. So the when the end arrives, it will not be noticed, but will be the 'way things are.'

The earth is- as far as human civilization is currently concerned, a closed system. We are using up limited non-renewable energy to power unchecked growth in population and consumption. This will not end well under any circumstances. The only hope for continuing the current empire's preferred method of existence is to find a cheap, high return renewable energy source that rivals the energy density of fossil fuels. This is the current strategy that the empire is betting on.

I don't expect this work. I think it is probably possible, but I don't think we have allowed ourselves enough time or resources to achieve that goal.

I don't know when things will fall. I have some ideas, but I am not certain. I am planning with the assumption that I will live to see the end. But many prophets expecting to do so were proven wrong, so I am also planning for other contingencies.

But I expect to see an empire fall in my lifetime that will dwarf the fall of Rome and leave its citizens feeling as though the world has ended.