With worrying global trends like climate change, pollution, increasingly divided or radical governments, economic woes, misinformation and disinformation everywhere, dangerous health crises and so on, what do you think - how much time do we have before “it all comes crashing down”? What will end life or our way of life as we know it first?
Or do you think we’ll make it? If so, how?
To the millions of girls in college in Afghanistan, I do think society has collapsed. They’ve been thrown back into the dark ages. If it weren’t for the extreme brevity of democratic Afghanistan, I would call the takeover by the Taliban societal collapse for sure.
Not all cities are still there. The ones that died out don’t appear in stories and ended up being swallowed up by the ground. Farms were deserted, cities disappeared from maps, entire civilisations vanished.
Just because humans still exist doesn’t mean society didn’t collapse. Humans existed before society did, and humans will continue to exist even if society doesn’t, until new societies will be formed by the survivors.
I think that’s a little sensationalist. For instance, we do find the ruins of ancient cities in archeological digs and can link them to where we do have surviving records of their appearance in stories.
Your point is taken, though. I do, however, remain convinced that people massively overestimate how many people would die in some form of collapse though, unless it somewhat swiftly took down major portions of the Earth’s biosphere.