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Today’s Contemplation: Collapse Cometh CCVIII–Keep Calm and Carry On…Human Ingenuity and Technology Will Save Us! Part 1

July 25, 2025 / 2 Comments on Today’s Contemplation: Collapse Cometh CCVIII–Keep Calm and Carry On…Human Ingenuity and Technology Will Save Us! Part 1

Today’s Contemplation: Collapse Cometh CCVIII–Keep Calm and Carry On…Human Ingenuity and Technology Will Save Us! Part 1 Human cognition and the many psychological mechanisms that impact our species’ comprehension, emotions, and beliefs about the world are fascinating subjects, as is epistemology (aka the ‘theory of knowledge’). Despite being mostly enthralled with biology during my late […]

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The Bulletin: September 6-12

September 12, 2024

The Bulletin: September 6-12 We really need a plan Signs of Collapse: Broken Things | how to save the world Lockheed Martin Develops System to Identify and Counter Online “Disinformation,” Prototyped by DARPA The Seneca Cliff of Petroleum Production – by Ugo Bardi Is the World Walking Blindfolded Toward a Nuclear War? – Global Research […]

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A Concise History of the Global Empire

A Concise History of the Global Empire Like all past empires, the Global Empire has gone through its parable of growth and glory and is now starting to decline. There is not much we can do about it; we must accept that this is how the universe works. For everything that exists, there is a […]

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Ignorance, Hubris, and Stupidity

Ignorance, Hubris, and Stupidity Artwork from Ken Avidor As I frequently point out, we face a series of predicaments all brought to us as a result of our own behavior of using technology, which has produced the predicament of ecological overshoot. When a species goes into overshoot, it always faces the same outcome: collapse. There is quite literally no way to […]

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Collapsing by Doubling Down: How Leaders Create Their Own Ruin

January 7, 2022

Collapsing by Doubling Down: How Leaders Create Their Own Ruin Napoleon won all the battles he engaged in, up to Borodino (1812), which was a non-victory, equivalent to a loss. From then, on it was all downhill from him. Napoleon had engaged in a task too big even for him: invading Russia. It is typical […]

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Phrasing the Question Right is the First Step to Find an Answer. How to Prevent Nuclear War

Phrasing the Question Right is the First Step to Find an Answer. How to Prevent Nuclear War Professor Bernard Lown died this February at 99. A great man by all means: Physician, cardiologist, professor at Harvard University, and a physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. He was the inventor of the defribrillator, the […]

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Taboos and illusions in the environmental question: The viewpoint of a physician

October 24, 2020

Taboos and illusions in the environmental question: The viewpoint of a physician Physicians have a view of the world that makes them especially able to understand the concept I called the “Seneca Cliff.” Here, Lukas Fierz, Swiss physician, provides some basic principles that apply to collapses of complex systems, it doesn’t matter if we deal […]

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Collapse: the way we imagined it, and the way it was.

Collapse: the way we imagined it, and the way it was. Even those of us who could see some kind of collapse coming (the “collapsniks”) were taken by surprise by the form it took. But, as always, for everything that happens there has to be a reason for it to happen. Above: the Seneca Curve. Collapses […]

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The Seneca Cliff According to H.P. Lovecraft

February 22, 2019

The Seneca Cliff According to H.P. Lovecraft It is strange how sometimes fiction manages to catch human feelings and ideas in ways that are not easy to articulate in terms of facts and models. H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) has been one of the world masters of the horror genre, managing to flesh out some of our […]

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How do you Stop the Arms Race? By Starting a New War, for Instance

January 6, 2019

How do you Stop the Arms Race? By Starting a New War, for Instance Do you see a ghostly Seneca Cliff in this graph? (source) There is a good rule that you should always be careful when extrapolating your data, especially over the long term. And there is an even better rule saying that you […]

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The Seneca Rebound: why Growth is Faster after Collapse. Explaining the European World Dominance

October 29, 2018

The Seneca Rebound: why Growth is Faster after Collapse. Explaining the European World Dominance Lisbon: the monument to the European sailors of the age of explorations, starting with the 15th century. What made Europeans so successful in this in this task? My interpretation is that it was the result of periodic “Seneca Collapses” of the […]

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Dealing With Collapse: The Seneca Strategy

October 1, 2018

Dealing With Collapse: The Seneca Strategy The ruins of the Egyptian Pyramid of Meidum, perhaps the first large building to collapse in history (*). The collapse of large structures is part of a fascinating field of study that we may call “Collapsology.” I already wrote a book on this subject, titled “The Seneca Effect” (Springer […]

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The Coming Population Crash: A Seneca Cliff Ahead for Humankind?

The Coming Population Crash: A Seneca Cliff Ahead for Humankind? This is a condensed and modified version of a paper of mine that appeared on “The Journal of Population and Sustainability” this year. The image above is the well known “Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse” by Albrecht Durer – 1498. Yes, I know it is […]

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The road to the Seneca Cliff is paved with evil intentions. How to destroy the world’s forests

The road to the Seneca Cliff is paved with evil intentions. How to destroy the world’s forests The oldest stories of human lore have to do with cutting trees and with the disasters that followed as a consequence. Above, Legendary Sumerian heroes Gilgamesh and Enkidu kill the guardian of the trees, Huwawa (image source). Several […]

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Trump and Berlusconi: harbinger of the coming Seneca Cliff

January 20, 2018

Trump and Berlusconi: harbinger of the coming Seneca Cliff Donald Trump and Silvio Berlusconi have many similarities as country leaders. I argue here that they are the symptom of a giant political transition which is reversing the trends that started more than two centuries ago with the French revolution. Human rights have a cost and […]

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