Civilization Decline

 

Ella Alderson

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Feb 8

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5 min read

2030 to Mark the Decline of Civilization

And its possible collapse, according to MIT study

When the Limits to Growth report was first released it received a scathing review in The New York Times. Critics called it “misleading and empty”. Despite being the work of a team of scientists from MIT, Limits to Growth was accused of passing off pseudoscience as real science, with the authors of The New York Times going as far as calling it “garbage”. According to them, the report had little to actually teach. Yet more recent examinations of the report — one in 2014 and another in 2021 — reveal the accuracy with which it has been able to predict the course of civilization. Earlier criticisms like the one from The New York Times have been found to be unsubstantiated or grossly misrepresentative of the information.

Limits to Growth is as impressive as it is intimidating. It predicts that all outcomes for our future show a decline within the next 20 years.

There is, then, a very real chance that we may be headed toward civilization’s collapse.

The report itself was published in 1972 and was aimed at exploring one thing in particular: growth. Growth, and all the different paths civilization might take in continuing to expand. To create predictions for these different paths the researchers created an — at the time — innovative global computer model based on dynamic systems. These are computer models that track the interactions of various factors considered to be part of the same system. The computer model was named “World3”.

There were 5 main factors the researchers considered significant to our quality of life: population growth, agriculture, resource depletion, industrial output, and the damage being done to the environment on a daily basis. These factors are all interconnected. Changing one will inevitably change the others, with the goal being to see how these interactions would play out over the next 100 years. Predicting the future is, of course, no easy feat. In their report the researchers admitted that the model is imperfect and cannot possibly take all of life’s nuances into account. But they also emphasized that we cannot wait for a perfect model to emerge — we need guidance for how to move forward with our society. They were confident that World3 was sophisticated enough that any future revisions to the model would not affect their conclusions in any major way.

So what was the conclusion they drew from World3?

That there is peril in our progress. Left unchecked civilization will reach its limit of growth well within the next century, with the worst case scenario exhibiting sharp population and industrial decline in the year 2040.

This scenario is called “Business as Usual” and is 1 of 3 main scenarios predicted by World3. The most optimistic of these is a Stabilized World scenario in which we pour a tremendous amount of energy and investment into renewable energy and recycling. Society continues to innovate at a steady rate but we are willing to make compromises and so purposefully stunt industrial output as we prioritize the environment and our quality of life. A stabilized world implies a kind of harmony between mankind, industry, and the environment. It’s also the farthest from reality, with data showing it as the scenario which least fits our current circumstances.

But the second possibility still shows promise. In the Comprehensive Technology scenario we aren’t as willing to compromise modern conveniences to prioritize the environment and so both population and industry continue to increase. They eventually reach plateaus over the next few decades. However, our innovation advances to the point where technology solves the problems of housing, food production, and environmental impact — including our current dilemmas of soil degradation and water pollution.

Growing meat in a lab drastically reduces the amount of resources needed to feed a country’s population. It’s innovation like this that could lead us into a Comprehensive Technology future.

And then we arrive at Business as Usual, the scenario which most closely matches the state of our world. As industrial output continues to rise to an eventual peak, innovation decreases when our machines reach their physical limits and quantum computing isn’t enough to spur any real technological progress. This means the untamed problem of pollution continues to run rampant across the globe. Recycling never becomes efficient enough to balance our surging mounds of waste. Our mistreatment of the environment causes a decline in food production that affects developing countries the most, ending in starvation for their population. Global population also declines as we squander our resources and our economy plummets to a crash.

Modern society as we know it collapses, and we learn a difficult lesson: that we can’t have unchecked economic growth and sustainability both at the same time.

The modern study comparing predictions from World3 to our current state of affairs was conducted by sustainability researcher Gaya Herrington using numbers from official databases. Gaya herself has degrees in both economical statistics and sustainability. Variables in her study included food production, ecological footprint, pollution, fertility, mortality rates, and 5 other equally important markers.

World3 didn’t get everything right, of course. Resource depletion, arable land and complications from population growth haven’t had as negative an impact as predicted in Limits to Growth. But the fact remains that the two scenarios which most closely fit the empirical data are still Comprehensive Technology and Business As Usual. Though we align best with the most dire scenario, society’s collapse isn’t yet inevitable if we understand the lesson at the heart of Limits to Growth.

Graphs compare the outcomes of the scenarios and how they will affect different variables in society. In the Business As Usual (BAU) model, society collapses from natural resource depletion. In BAU2 society collapses from pollution. Graphs from Limits to Growth: The 30-
Year Update by Meadows, D. H., Meadows, D. L., & Randers, J.

Humanity must impose certain limits on itself if it’s to achieve true sustainability. We live on a planet — and a universe — with finite resources where continuous growth simply isn’t possible. Even with grand advances in technology the natural world wouldn’t support much economic or population growth beyond the year 2100. We have only the next decade to decide which path we will take. If the Business As Usual model is to be believed, we have even less than this given that sharp decline will begin by the year 2030.

It could be that an unprecedented breakthrough like a working fusion reactor might completely change the course of humanity for the better. But while we can hope for miracles like these, we cannot expect them.We can choose to move towards harmony and equilibrium, or we can choose to continue avoiding the responsibility of change. The fact remains: we still have a choice. But our time to make it is running out.

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