{"id":62530,"date":"2022-04-25T15:33:39","date_gmt":"2022-04-25T20:33:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=62530"},"modified":"2022-04-25T15:33:39","modified_gmt":"2022-04-25T20:33:39","slug":"why-complex-systems-collapse-faster","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=62530","title":{"rendered":"Why Complex Systems Collapse Faster"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Why Complex Systems Collapse Faster<\/a><\/h3>\n

All civilizations collapse. The challenge is how to slow it down enough to prolong our happiness.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\"Dennis<\/picture><\/div>\n
Temple of the Great Jaguar, Guatemala<\/span>DENNIS JARVIS<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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During the first century of our era, the Roman philosopher Lucius Annaeus Seneca wrote to his friend Lucilius that life would be much happier if things would only decline as slowly as they grow. Unfortunately, as Seneca noted, \u201cincreases are of sluggish growth but the way to ruin is rapid.<\/em>\u201d We may call this universal rule the Seneca effect.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Seneca\u2019s idea that \u201cruin is rapid\u201d touches something deep in our minds. Ruin, which we may also call \u201ccollapse,\u201d is a feature of our world. We experience it with our health, our job, our family, our investments. We know that when ruin comes, it is unpredictable, rapid, destructive, and spectacular. And it seems to be impossible to stop until everything that can be destroyed is destroyed.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The same is true of civilizations. Not one in history has lasted forever: Why should ours be an exception? Surely you\u2019ve heard of the climatic \u201ctipping points,\u201d which mark, for example, the start of the collapse of Earth\u2019s climate system. The result in this case might be to propel us to a different planet where it is not clear that humankind could survive. It is hard to imagine a more complete kind of ruin.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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So, can we avoid collapse, or at least reduce its damage? That generates another question: What causes collapse in the first place? At the time of Seneca, people were happy just to note that collapses do, in fact, occur. But today we have robust scientific models called \u201ccomplex systems.\u201d Here is a picture showing the typical behavior of a collapsing system, calculated using a simple mathematical model (see Figure 1).<\/p>\n

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\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Why Complex Systems Collapse Faster All civilizations collapse. The challenge is how to slow it down enough to prolong our happiness. Temple of the Great Jaguar, GuatemalaDENNIS JARVIS During the first century of our era, the Roman philosopher Lucius Annaeus Seneca wrote to his friend Lucilius that life would be much happier if things would […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[31388,153,154,6856,2692],"class_list":["post-62530","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-survival-2","tag-civilisational-collapse","tag-complex-systems","tag-complexity","tag-systemic-collapse","tag-ugo-bardi"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62530","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=62530"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62530\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":62531,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62530\/revisions\/62531"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=62530"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=62530"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=62530"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}