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Could be hardware (chips desoldering themselves, data cable shorting out when heating up, broken RAM), could be software (driver issue, IOMMU configuration, etc).
I would start with testing the memory chips. If those pass, I’d try a much newer/older kernel to see if that makes the problem disappear. If that doesn’t, maybe try running the OS that came with the laptop and verify that it’s a hardware issue. If it doesn’t happen on another OS, it’s probably some form. Of software issue; in that case you’d need to catch the crash somehow, like by plugging a USB-to-serial converter into a USB port, dumping the kernel output to that, and having a second machine monitor the kernel output while you try to trigger the crash.
If all operating systems have the issue, reseating RAM and perhaps any important cables may also help.
Societal collapse can happen; it happened to us in the Bronze age, several times in fact. War and famine causing enough chaos to destabilise and destroy cities or empires that took centuries to recover, if they recovered at all.
I don’t know what the Sea People event of the modern era would be. I do know that bombing a handful of factories around the world will set us back a couple of decades when it comes to computers and integrated devices. A second COVID hitting us right now while the world is still recovering would probably do a number on the world as well. Plus, nuclear war would ruin civilisation as we know it pretty quickly.
Unless Putin or Trump start launching nukes, I don’t expect any sudden collapses within one lifetime, but societal collapse is something that can happen eventually.