Why the demise of civilisation may be inevitable

* 02 April 2008
* From New Scientist Print Edition.

The changing shape of society

DOOMSDAY. The end of civilisation. Literature and film abound with tales of plague, famine and wars which ravage the planet, leaving a few survivors scratching out a primitive existence amid the ruins. Every civilisation in history has collapsed, after all. Why should ours be any different?

Doomsday scenarios typically feature a knockout blow: a massive asteroid, all-out nuclear war or a catastrophic pandemic (see "Will a pandemic bring down civilisation?"). Yet there is another chilling possibility: what if the very nature of civilisation means that ours, like all the others, is destined to collapse sooner or later?

A few researchers have been making such claims for years. Disturbingly, recent insights from fields such as complexity theory suggest that they are right. It appears that once a society develops beyond a certain level of complexity it becomes increasingly fragile. Eventually, it reaches a point at which even a relatively minor disturbance can bring everything crashing down.

Some say we have already reached this point, and that it is time to start thinking about how we might manage collapse. Others insist it is not yet too late, and that we can - we must - act now to keep disaster at bay.
Environmental mismanagement

History is not on our side. Think of Sumeria, of ancient Egypt and of the Maya. In his 2005 best-seller Collapse, Jared Diamond of the University of California, Los Angeles, blamed environmental mismanagement for the fall of the Mayan civilisation and others, and warned that we might be heading the same way unless we choose to stop destroying our environmental support systems.

Lester Brown of the Earth Policy Institute in Washington DC agrees. He has long argued that governments must pay more attention to vital environmental resources. "It's not about saving the planet. It's about saving civilisation," he says.

Others think our problems run deeper. From the moment our ancestors started to settle down and build cities, we have had to find solutions to the problems that success brings. "For the past 10,000 years, problem solving has produced increasing complexity in human societies," says Joseph Tainter, an archaeologist at Utah State University, Logan, and author of the 1988 book The Collapse of Complex Societies.

If crops fail because rain is patchy, build irrigation canals. When they silt up, organise dredging crews. When the bigger crop yields lead to a bigger population, build more canals. When there are too many for ad hoc repairs, install a management bureaucracy, and tax people to pay for it. When they complain, invent tax inspectors and a system to record the sums paid. That much the Sumerians knew.
Diminishing returns

There is, however, a price to be paid. Every extra layer of organisation imposes a cost in terms of energy, the common currency of all human efforts, from building canals to educating scribes. And increasing complexity, Tainter realised, produces diminishing returns. The extra food produced by each extra hour of labour - or joule of energy invested per farmed hectare - diminishes as that investment mounts. We see the same thing today in a declining number of patents per dollar invested in research as that research investment mounts. This law of diminishing returns appears everywhere, Tainter says.

To keep growing, societies must keep solving problems as they arise. Yet each problem solved means more complexity. Success generates a larger population, more kinds of specialists, more resources to manage, more information to juggle - and, ultimately, less bang for your buck.

Eventually, says Tainter, the point is reached when all the energy and resources available to a society are required just to maintain its existing level of complexity. Then when the climate changes or barbarians invade, overstretched institutions break down and civil order collapses. What emerges is a less complex society, which is organised on a smaller scale or has been taken over by another group.

Tainter sees diminishing returns as the underlying reason for the collapse of all ancient civilisations, from the early Chinese dynasties to the Greek city state of Mycenae. These civilisations relied on the solar energy that could be harvested from food, fodder and wood, and from wind. When this had been stretched to its limit, things fell apart.
An ineluctable process

Western industrial civilisation has become bigger and more complex than any before it by exploiting new sources of energy, notably coal and oil, but these are limited. There are increasing signs of diminishing returns: the energy required to get each new joule of oil is mounting and although global food production is still increasing, constant innovation is needed to cope with environmental degradation and evolving pests and diseases - the yield boosts per unit of investment in innovation are shrinking. "Since problems are inevitable," Tainter warns, "this process is in part ineluctable."

Is Tainter right? An analysis of complex systems has led Yaneer Bar-Yam, head of the New England Complex Systems Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to the same conclusion that Tainter reached from studying history. Social organisations become steadily more complex as they are required to deal both with environmental problems and with challenges from neighbouring societies that are also becoming more complex, Bar-Yam says. This eventually leads to a fundamental shift in the way the society is organised.

"To run a hierarchy, managers cannot be less complex than the system they are managing," Bar-Yam says. As complexity increases, societies add ever more layers of management but, ultimately in a hierarchy, one individual has to try and get their head around the whole thing, and this starts to become impossible. At that point, hierarchies give way to networks in which decision-making is distributed. We are at this point.

This shift to decentralised networks has led to a widespread belief that modern society is more resilient than the old hierarchical systems. "I don't foresee a collapse in society because of increased complexity," says futurologist and industry consultant Ray Hammond. "Our strength is in our highly distributed decision making." This, he says, makes modern western societies more resilient than those like the old Soviet Union, in which decision making was centralised.
Increasing connectedness

Things are not that simple, says Thomas Homer-Dixon, a political scientist at the University of Toronto, Canada, and author of the 2006 book The Upside of Down. "Initially, increasing connectedness and diversity helps: if one village has a crop failure, it can get food from another village that didn't."

As connections increase, though, networked systems become increasingly tightly coupled. This means the impacts of failures can propagate: the more closely those two villages come to depend on each other, the more both will suffer if either has a problem. "Complexity leads to higher vulnerability in some ways," says Bar-Yam. "This is not widely understood."

The reason is that as networks become ever tighter, they start to transmit shocks rather than absorb them. "The intricate networks that tightly connect us together - and move people, materials, information, money and energy - amplify and transmit any shock," says Homer-Dixon. "A financial crisis, a terrorist attack or a disease outbreak has almost instant destabilising effects, from one side of the world to the other."

For instance, in 2003 large areas of North America and Europe suffered blackouts when apparently insignificant nodes of their respective electricity grids failed. And this year China suffered a similar blackout after heavy snow hit power lines. Tightly coupled networks like these create the potential for propagating failure across many critical industries, says Charles Perrow of Yale University, a leading authority on industrial accidents and disasters.
Credit crunch

Perrow says interconnectedness in the global production system has now reached the point where "a breakdown anywhere increasingly means a breakdown everywhere". This is especially true of the world's financial systems, where the coupling is very tight. "Now we have a debt crisis with the biggest player, the US. The consequences could be enormous."
“The networks that connect us can amplify any shocks. A breakdown anywhere increasingly means a breakdown everywhere”

"A networked society behaves like a multicellular organism," says Bar-Yam, "random damage is like lopping a chunk off a sheep." Whether or not the sheep survives depends on which chunk is lost. And while we are pretty sure which chunks a sheep needs, it isn't clear - it may not even be predictable - which chunks of our densely networked civilisation are critical, until it's too late.

"When we do the analysis, almost any part is critical if you lose enough of it," says Bar-Yam. "Now that we can ask questions of such systems in more sophisticated ways, we are discovering that they can be very vulnerable. That means civilisation is very vulnerable."
“We are discovering that networked systems can be very vulnerable. That means civilisation is very vulnerable”

So what can we do? "The key issue is really whether we respond successfully in the face of the new vulnerabilities we have," Bar-Yam says. That means making sure our "global sheep" does not get injured in the first place - something that may be hard to guarantee as the climate shifts and the world's fuel and mineral resources dwindle.
Tightly coupled system

Scientists in other fields are also warning that complex systems are prone to collapse. Similar ideas have emerged from the study of natural cycles in ecosystems, based on the work of ecologist Buzz Holling, now at the University of Florida, Gainesville. Some ecosystems become steadily more complex over time: as a patch of new forest grows and matures, specialist species may replace more generalist species, biomass builds up and the trees, beetles and bacteria form an increasingly rigid and ever more tightly coupled system.

"It becomes an extremely efficient system for remaining constant in the face of the normal range of conditions," says Homer-Dixon. But unusual conditions - an insect outbreak, fire or drought - can trigger dramatic changes as the impact cascades through the system. The end result may be the collapse of the old ecosystem and its replacement by a newer, simpler one.

Globalisation is resulting in the same tight coupling and fine-tuning of our systems to a narrow range of conditions, he says. Redundancy is being systematically eliminated as companies maximise profits. Some products are produced by only one factory worldwide. Financially, it makes sense, as mass production maximises efficiency. Unfortunately, it also minimises resilience. "We need to be more selective about increasing the connectivity and speed of our critical systems," says Homer-Dixon. "Sometimes the costs outweigh the benefits."

Is there an alternative? Could we heed these warnings and start carefully climbing back down the complexity ladder? Tainter knows of only one civilisation that managed to decline but not fall. "After the Byzantine empire lost most of its territory to the Arabs, they simplified their entire society. Cities mostly disappeared, literacy and numeracy declined, their economy became less monetised, and they switched from professional army to peasant militia."
Staving off collapse

Pulling off the same trick will be harder for our more advanced society. Nevertheless, Homer-Dixon thinks we should be taking action now. "First, we need to encourage distributed and decentralised production of vital goods like energy and food," he says. "Second, we need to remember that slack isn't always waste. A manufacturing company with a large inventory may lose some money on warehousing, but it can keep running even if its suppliers are temporarily out of action."

The electricity industry in the US has already started identifying hubs in the grid with no redundancy available and is putting some back in, Homer-Dixon points out. Governments could encourage other sectors to follow suit. The trouble is that in a world of fierce competition, private companies will always increase efficiency unless governments subsidise inefficiency in the public interest.

Homer-Dixon doubts we can stave off collapse completely. He points to what he calls "tectonic" stresses that will shove our rigid, tightly coupled system outside the range of conditions it is becoming ever more finely tuned to. These include population growth, the growing divide between the world's rich and poor, financial instability, weapons proliferation, disappearing forests and fisheries, and climate change. In imposing new complex solutions we will run into the problem of diminishing returns - just as we are running out of cheap and plentiful energy.

"This is the fundamental challenge humankind faces. We need to allow for the healthy breakdown in natural function in our societies in a way that doesn't produce catastrophic collapse, but instead leads to healthy renewal," Homer-Dixon says. This is what happens in forests, which are a patchy mix of old growth and newer areas created by disease or fire. If the ecosystem in one patch collapses, it is recolonised and renewed by younger forest elsewhere. We must allow partial breakdown here and there, followed by renewal, he says, rather than trying so hard to avert breakdown by increasing complexity that any resulting crisis is actually worse.
Tipping points

Lester Brown thinks we are fast running out of time. "The world can no longer afford to waste a day. We need a Great Mobilisation, as we had in wartime," he says. "There has been tremendous progress in just the past few years. For the first time, I am starting to see how an alternative economy might emerge. But it's now a race between tipping points - which will come first, a switch to sustainable technology, or collapse?"
“It's now a race between tipping points - which will come first, a switch to sustainable technology or collapse?”

Tainter is not convinced that even new technology will save civilisation in the long run. "I sometimes think of this as a 'faith-based' approach to the future," he says. Even a society reinvigorated by cheap new energy sources will eventually face the problem of diminishing returns once more. Innovation itself might be subject to diminishing returns, or perhaps absolute limits.

Studies of the way cities grow by Luis Bettencourt of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, New Mexico, support this idea. His team's work suggests that an ever-faster rate of innovation is required to keep cities growing and prevent stagnation or collapse, and in the long run this cannot be sustainable.

The stakes are high. Historically, collapse always led to a fall in population. "Today's population levels depend on fossil fuels and industrial agriculture," says Tainter. "Take those away and there would be a reduction in the Earth's population that is too gruesome to think about."

If industrialised civilisation does fall, the urban masses - half the world's population - will be most vulnerable. Much of our hard-won knowledge could be lost, too. "The people with the least to lose are subsistence farmers," Bar-Yam observes, and for some who survive, conditions might actually improve. Perhaps the meek really will inherit the Earth.

Read the companion article about pandemics
From issue 2650 of New Scientist magazine, 02 April 2008, pa

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------


-see third posting for the pandemic article.

This article recently illustrates something that occured to me recently - everything is too specialised and interdependent, thus it must be more precarious in the event that something suitably harmful took out a certain percentage of the population. Whereas in the past civilisation could survive, today the system seems too interdependent to make this likely because of various factors, mainly that peoples capacities and self-sufficiencies are less, and the dependency on larger and more complex organisations and operations to function at your end is increasing.

In the past equal numbers of producers and consumers died out, leaving a balance that could very quickly recovery after something like the outbreak of a haemorragic fever. Today, it is now realised that major orgs have supercritical individuals and nodes that if incapacitated cannot allow the organisation to operate normally. A classic example of how organisation complexity can manifest a disaster was the BA T5 disaster recently, where because there was a critical lack of experienced 'nodes' able to make it work, the whole operation was a monumental cock-up. Part of the problem was lack of time to noperate within processes. The just-in-time mentality means that each node requires the next node - an increasing number of nodes - to operate effectively. This did not happen on the luggage handling system because it was, according to observers, designed too lean to cope with substantial disruption. I think what the rub of this is that our system is more vulnerable to transient disruptions to the wider supply system than it was before. This could lead to a so-called 'tipping point' with enough pressure that previously would have led to temporary if severe depression, may now lead to longer, more severe problems and a greater sensitivity to collapse.

We are together in a much worse situation. We are reliant on a vast supply system dependent on fuel food and drugs- mainly diesel fuel - but there is very little stored in the event of a supply chain collapse. The result would be that coal cant get to coal stations, and electricity for phone networks and the like is disrupted. In the event of an outbreak, ports bunker down, staff dont come into work, global fuel trade shuts down, everywhere collapses. Technological components for everything need to be shipped about, but the factories wont be able to work and assemblies lacking supplies, if the diesel for all the lorries cannot be shipped to the refinery, from the refinery and then to the user.

Excessive organisational complexity to my mind manifests in phenomena like the escalation of cyber crime, and a government that hasn't any idea how to intervene to stop, nor will it many other problems caused by related trends like globalisation, and open supplies of unregulated copies which are infiltrating our supply lines. The complexity of our society, or technological and organisational inter-dependency, means each part is more vulnerable to multiple other failures.

And each failing becomes more critical.

An example is that everything in the supply chain is 'just in time' which means that every producer of virtually everything is more vulnerable to temporary changes in the supply chain. This in turn could give rise to collapse from which the whole lot may not be able to recover. On top of this, our culture is becoming more complicated and divided, making an effective response to supply chain problems much more difficult than it was before.

Our financial systems look increasingly dependent, and everything on telecommunications and banking systems - all that is now beyond organisational regulation and thus fraud threatens to destroy commercial opportunities on the web, whilst the information networks are vulnerable to energy supply.

To use animals as an example, we experience regular extinction events. One obvious reason is that organisms may gain small advantages by increasing their system complexity and the differentiation of many cells. But the system becomes very reliant upon one cell subset that functions distinctly from the others, and if struck the whole system dies. These systems seem to be less robust in the first place, and potentially make creatures less adaptable.

Another animal comparison, any animal that can only metabalise one energy source in one form, where its supply is not guaranteed, is very vulnerable. Our reliance on particular energy supplies, which rely on a global supply chain, is worrying.

To repeat the article message, what this all means is that, in the event of a large outbreak like a serious flu, the system may not be recoverable. Food supplies, if hit, and the old adage that cities are 4 meals away from anarchy should give us an idea what global supply dependencies might do if unusual pressures hit the global network. All the parts, all the components, drugs and other supplies, have to be shipped about. They are inter-reliant for final products to be made, meaning that just one or two suppliers could be knocked out and the industry may not be able to operate its line. And where would the energy for it come from? More nuclear power is needed, and dual fiuel trucks that could operate on gassified biomass would be needed, and much longer food supplies. Without food and clean water and telecommunications, refuse and the rest, our cities will degenerate with great increases in disease. Then you lose critical parts of your support organisations, and these, which may be spatially seperated, may cease to function altogether.

To illustrate the idea betterm consider a simple jelly-mold of an organism. Very simple society and social structure. One would imagine that such an organism is very well defended against pathogens. It would simply seal off the infected part and regrow elsewhere.

This is an effective strategy that is similar to how producer socioeties operate as they spread across the land. Something terrible could happen to one part, the remainder can function untouched, and civilisation can recover

But then consider a very complex animal with many cell types. An invader may distribute around the body, attack one subtype, and the organism dies. It cannot continue to regenerate because everyone is not dependent merely on a local network, but the network whole and its supply networks.

The organbisations that run all of this, in the event of va very nasty viral epidemic like Black Death, weould loose so much critical staff as they stayed away, that most or all would be temporarily, at least, in capable of operation. Then everylittle thing. which has become dependent on a vast interdependent supply and trading system, ceases to function.

And that's it.

Will a pandemic bring down civilisation?

* 05 April 2008
* From New Scientist Print Edition. Subscribe and get 4 free issues.
* Debora MacKenzie

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* The food lifeboat

FOR years we have been warned that a pandemic is coming. It could be flu, it could be something else. We know that lots of people will die. As terrible as this will be, on an ever more crowded planet, you can't help wondering whether the survivors might be better off in some ways. Wouldn't it be easier to rebuild modern society into something more sustainable if, perish the thought, there were fewer of us.

Yet would life ever return to something resembling normal after a devastating pandemic? Virologists sometimes talk about their nightmare scenarios - a plague like ebola or smallpox - as "civilisation ending". Surely they are exaggerating. Aren't they?

Many people dismiss any talk of collapse as akin to the street-corner prophet warning that the end is nigh. In the past couple of centuries, humanity has innovated its way past so many predicted plagues, famines and wars - from Malthus to Dr Strangelove - that anyone who takes such ideas seriously tends to be labeled a doom-monger.

There is a widespread belief that our society has achieved a scale, complexity and level of innovation that make it immune from collapse. "It's an argument so ingrained both in our subconscious and in public discourse that it has assumed the status of objective reality," writes biologist and geographer Jared Diamond of the University of California, Los Angeles, author of the 2005 book Collapse. "We think we are different."
Ever more vulnerable

A growing number of researchers, however, are coming to the conclusion that far from becoming ever more resilient, our society is becoming ever more vulnerable (see page 30). In a severe pandemic, the disease might only be the start of our problems.

No scientific study has looked at whether a pandemic with a high mortality could cause social collapse - at least none that has been made public. The vast majority of plans for weathering a pandemic all fail even to acknowledge that crucial systems might collapse, let alone take it into account.

There have been many pandemics before, of course. In 1348, the Black Death killed about a third of Europe's population. Its impact was huge, but European civilisation did not collapse. After the Roman empire was hit by a plague with a similar death rate around AD 170, however, the empire tipped into a downward spiral towards collapse. Why the difference? In a word: complexity.

In the 14th century, Europe was a feudal hierarchy in which more than 80 per cent of the population were peasant farmers. Each death removed a food producer, but also a consumer, so there was little net effect. "In a hierarchy, no one is so vital that they can't be easily replaced," says Yaneer Bar-Yam, head of the New England Complex Systems Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts. "Monarchs died, but life went on."
Individuals matter

The Roman empire was also a hierarchy, but with a difference: it had a huge urban population - not equalled in Europe until modern times - which depended on peasants for grain, taxes and soldiers. "Population decline affected agriculture, which affected the empire's ability to pay for the military, which made the empire less able to keep invaders out," says anthropologist and historian Joseph Tainter at Utah State University in Logan. "Invaders in turn further weakened peasants and agriculture."

A high-mortality pandemic could trigger a similar result now, Tainter says. "Fewer consumers mean the economy would contract, meaning fewer jobs, meaning even fewer consumers. Loss of personnel in key industries would hurt too."

Bar-Yam thinks the loss of key people would be crucial. "Losing pieces indiscriminately from a highly complex system is very dangerous," he says. "One of the most profound results of complex systems research is that when systems are highly complex, individuals matter."
“One of the most profound results is that when systems are highly complex, individuals matter”

The same conclusion has emerged from a completely different source: tabletop "simulations" in which political and economic leaders work through what would happen as a hypothetical flu pandemic plays out. "One of the big 'Aha!' moments is always when company leaders realise how much they need key people," says Paula Scalingi, who runs pandemic simulations for the Pacific Northwest economic region of the US. "People are the critical infrastructure."
Vital hubs

Especially vital are "hubs" - the people whose actions link all the rest. Take truck drivers. When a strike blocked petrol deliveries from the UK's oil refineries for 10 days in 2000, nearly a third of motorists ran out of fuel, some train and bus services were cancelled, shops began to run out of food, hospitals were reduced to running minimal services, hazardous waste piled up, and bodies went unburied. Afterwards, a study by Alan McKinnon of Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, UK, predicted huge economic losses and a rapid deterioration in living conditions if all road haulage in the UK shut down for just a week.

What would happen in a pandemic when many truckers are sick, dead or too scared to work? Even if a pandemic is relatively mild, many might have to stay home to care for sick family or look after children whose schools are closed. Even a small impact on road haulage would quickly have severe knock-on effects.

One reason is just-in-time delivery. Over the past few decades, people who use or sell commodities from coal to aspirin have stopped keeping large stocks, because to do so is expensive. They rely instead on frequent small deliveries.

Cities typically have only three days' worth of food, and the old saying about civilisations being just three or four meals away from anarchy is taken seriously by security agencies such as MI5 in the UK. In the US, plans for dealing with a pandemic call for people to keep three weeks' worth of food and water stockpiled. Some planners think everyone should have at least 10 weeks' worth. How long would your stocks last if shops emptied and your water supply dried up? Even if everyone were willing, US officials warn that many people might not be able to afford to stockpile enough food.
Two-day supply

Hospitals rely on daily deliveries of drugs, blood and gases. "Hospital pandemic plans fixate on having enough ventilators," says public health specialist Michael Osterholm at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, who has been calling for broader preparation for a pandemic. "But they'll run out of oxygen to put through them first. No hospital has more than a two-day supply." Equally critical is chlorine for water purification plants.
“Hospital pandemic plans fixate on having enough ventilators. But they'll run out of oxygen first”

It's not only absentee truck drivers that could cripple the transport system; new drivers can be drafted in and trained fairly quickly, after all. Trucks need fuel, too. What if staff at the refineries that produce it don't show up for work?

"We think that if we can make people feel safe about coming to work, we'll have about 25 per cent staff absences if we get a flu pandemic like the one in 1918," says Jon Lay, head of global emergency preparedness for ExxonMobil. If that happens, then by postponing non-essential tasks, and making sure crucial suppliers also hang tough, "we can maintain the supply of products that are critical to society".

Some models, however, suggest absenteeism sparked by a 1918-type pandemic could cut the workforce by half at the peak of a pandemic wave. "If we have 50 per cent absences, it's a different story," says Lay, who says his company has not modelled the impact of absence on that scale. And what if a pandemic is worse than 1918?
Critical infrastructure

All the companies that provide the critical infrastructure of modern society - energy, transport, food, water, telecoms - face similar problems if key workers fail to turn up. According to US industry sources, one electricity supplier in Texas is teaching its employees "virus avoidance techniques" in the hope that they will then "experience a lower rate of flu onset and mortality" than the general population.

The fact is that the best way for people to avoid the virus will be to stay home. But if everyone does this - or if too many people try to stockpile supplies after a crisis begins - the impact of even a relatively minor pandemic could quickly multiply.

Planners for pandemics tend to overlook the fact that modern societies are becoming ever more tightly connected, which means any disturbance can cascade rapidly through many sectors. For instance, many businesses - including New Scientist's parent company - have contingency plans that count on some people working online from home. Models show there won't be enough bandwidth to meet demand, says Scalingi.

And what if the power goes off? This is where the complex interdependencies could prove disastrous. Refineries make diesel fuel not only for trucks but also for the trains that deliver coal to electricity generators, which now usually have only 20 days' reserve supply, Osterholm notes. Coal-fired plants supply 30 per cent of the UK's electricity, 50 per cent of the US's and 85 per cent of Australia's.
Powerless

The coal mines need electricity to keep working. Pumping oil through pipelines and water through mains also requires electricity. Making electricity depends largely on coal; getting coal depends on electricity; they all need refineries and key people; the people need transport, food and clean water. If one part of the system starts to fail, the whole lot could go. Hydro and nuclear power are less vulnerable to disruptions in supply, but they still depend on highly trained staff.

With no electricity, shops will be unable to keep food refrigerated even if they get deliveries. Their tills won't work either. Many consumers won't be able to cook what food they do have. With no chlorine, water-borne diseases could strike just as it becomes hard to boil water. Communications could start to break down as radio and TV broadcasters, phone systems and the internet fall victim to power cuts and absent staff. This could cripple the global financial system, right down to local cash machines, and will greatly complicate attempts to maintain order and get systems up and running again.

Even if we manage to struggle through the first few weeks of a pandemic, long-term problems could build up without essential maintenance and supplies. Many of these problems could take years to work their way through the system. For instance, with no fuel and markets in disarray, how do farmers get the next harvest in and distributed?
Closing borders

As a plague takes hold, some countries may be tempted to close their borders. But quarantine is not an option any more. "These days, no country is self-sufficient for everything," says Lay. "The worst mistake governments could make is to isolate themselves." The port of Singapore, a crucial shipping hub, plans to close in a pandemic only as a last resort, he says. Yet action like this might not be enough to prevent international trade being paralysed as other ports close for fear of contagion or for lack of workers, as ships' crews sicken and exporters' assembly lines grind to a halt without their own staff, power, transport or fuel and supplies.
“Quarantine is not an option any more. These days, no country is self-sufficient”

Osterholm warns that most medical equipment and 85 per cent of US pharmaceuticals are made abroad, and this is just the start. Consider food packaging. Milk might be delivered to dairies if the cows get milked and there is fuel for the trucks and power for refrigeration, but it will be of little use if milk carton factories have ground to a halt or the cartons are an ocean away.

"No one in pandemic planning thinks enough about supply chains," says Osterholm. "They are long and thin, and they can break." When Toronto was hit by SARS in 2003, the major surgical mask manufacturers sent everything they had, he says. "If it had gone on much longer they would have run out."

The trend is for supply chains to get ever longer, to take advantage of economies of scale and the availability of cheap labour. Big factories produce goods more cheaply than small ones, and they can do so even more cheaply in countries where labour is cheap.
Flawed assumptions

Lay points to recent hurricanes in the US and the 2005 fire at the Buncefield oil depot in the UK as examples of severe disruptions to the normal supply chain. In all of these instances, he points out, supplies from refineries were maintained. But those disasters were localised, and help could come from unaffected places nearby.

Disaster planners usually focus on single-point events of this kind: industrial accidents, hurricanes or even a nuclear attack. But a pandemic happens everywhere at the same time, rendering many such plans useless. "There are numerous assumptions behind our conclusions," Lay admits. "If they prove to be flawed, we could struggle."
“Planners focus on single-point events like the Buncefield fire, but a pandemic happens everywhere”

The main assumption is how serious a pandemic could be. Many national plans are based on mortality rates from the mild 1957 and 1968 pandemics. "No government pandemic plans consider the possibility that the death rate might be higher than in 1918," says Tim Sly of Ryerson University in Toronto, Canada.

Even a rerun of 1918 could be bad enough. In a 2006 study, economist Warwick McKibbin of the Lowry Institute for International Policy in Sydney, Australia, and colleagues based their "worst-case" scenario on the same death rate as in 1918. The result, their model predicts, would be 142 million deaths worldwide, leading to a massive global economic slowdown that would wipe out 12.6 per cent of global GDP.
Death rate

This scenario assumes around 3 three per cent of those who fall ill die. Of all the people known to have caught H5N1 bird flu so far, 63 per cent have died. "It seems negligent to assume that H5N1, if it goes pandemic, will necessarily become less deadly," says Sly. And flu is far from the only viral threat we face.
“It is negligent to assume that H5N1 bird flu, if it goes pandemic, will become less deadly”

The ultimate question is this: what if a pandemic does have huge knock-on effects? What if many key people die, and many global balancing acts are disrupted? Could we get things up and running again? "Much would depend on the extent of the population decline," says Tainter. "Possibilities range from little effect to a mild recession to a major depression to a collapse."

Read the companion article about the complexity of civilisation
From issue 2650 of New Scientist magazine, 05 April 2008, page 28-

Are you familiar with EMP scenarios?

I assume when you say "civilization" you mean the present state of affairs; obviously as long as a critical mass of people survive the pending zombie contagion, civilization can live on, just not how you mean it.

Anyway, when you talk about organizational nodes getting knocked out, there are plenty of people around who can step in and take charge. But if you die from plague and you live in a big city, well, you were kinda asking for it.

always kind of been an EOTWAWKI junkie

all the obvious horrors aside, trying to figure out how to rebuild sounds enjoyably challenging.

I sure as hell would miss the internet though

Very cool article. I will be working with Bar-Yam quite soon through NECSI, actually. Check out Josh Epstein's stuff if you find this interesting, ATB.

that's interesting, thanks.

I was thinking of an analogy earlier I quite liked - Our society reminds me of a network of pandas living in a land supported by a network of zookeepers.

The Panda bears have evolved to profit from their system complexity. Each panda relies on liquid glucose and cannot eat anything else. It no longer has the capacity to digest anything else.

The glucose is supplied near the pandas by a zookeeper who must drive from a distributer on the island. This glucose comes from another land that the zookeeper has no direct contact with, except by the internet, and is manufactured in specialised factories at their production limit. On top of this, the world is struggling to feed all the pandas with their specific energy supply and a number of other zookeeper unions are concerned with defending supplies for their own population. As the bears feed on more and more glucose, they become more dependent on it. It affords rapid growth and simpler stomachs.

However, the orhganism that is dependent on specific energy supplies is obviously more dependent on that supply chain and can innovate in the event of catastrophe, much less effectively without an energy supply, in a worst case scenario forced into a rapid decline and collapse of bear society, with only specialist (mutant) bear survivors that can eat the other bears and the now redundant zookeepers and gradually evolve to obtain new food supplies (like tree bark, but this greatly slows the bears, turning them into metabolic sloths)! Before this a ruling heirachy based on strict moral values and old-testament like rage takes over to defend the cooperatives who remain. The analogy os extreme, because in human networks, there would still be adapting 'zookeepers' who would try to innovate alternative supplies and thus lead to fitter groups, despite their diversity and different roles.

The analagy in human society is social division, war and economic and technological depression lasting many generations.

Ireland is a good model. Following the reliance on potatoes, and the potato famine caused by a bacterial mold, the Irish were then reliant on an early international supply line imposed, rather than naturally evolving, by the British control on trade. The resulting mix ups led to terrible famine, and this may be viewed as an early consequence of 'system complexity' and a co-evolution of narrowing of nutrient supplies. Today this effect is manifested by corporate effects (not that I am anti-business in anyway) and market monopolisation of particular solutions and related technologies..

The result in Ireland was interesting. Communities of Protestant and Catholics originally united against British landowners.

They later ended up fighting each other in a perpetuem known as 'the troubles'.

Today paramilitaries still operate and in many cases, they operate in a heirachial-fundamentalist way which is very similar to Islamic sects in certain areas. It is more really about patriotism and the welfare of the group against other groups. Whereas there would be no political support for paramilitaries elsewhere in the UK, in parts of Northern Ireland they are the mainstream and hold open rallies the way perhaps the KKK did in the deep south. How did this culture predominate? Longterm effects of conflict, broken dependency on other networks for wealth, leading to economic marginalisation, resulted in the IRA needing to act as reformed supply networks for their communities, and their threat acted to motivate 'defense associations' that protected neighbourhoods on the other side, who felt the backlash. People in between were forced to take sides, and those who did not cooperate were 'group selected' out of these tough neighbourhoods - something being seen in Iraq right now. One can see Iraq as a prime example of the effects of system complexity - despite local oil, rebuilding was for sometime jeopardised by in fighting induced byt trauma and other destrabilising factors, as well as lost supply lines vital to sercurity and hope.

The situation in Iraq is induced by many factors, but the strategic bombing may act in a similar way to a sudden pandemic, except that a global pandemic could disrupt the rebuilding operation that offers at least some of Iraq a better future.

When supplies and economic investment are knocked out, the rise of paramilitaries and sectarianism seems automatic. The economic changes from a once successful landowner imperialism in America may have induced the spike in racism against blacks that seemed to peak after the depression(?) in which poor whites flocked back from the cities to relations in the rural economy (my impression of things coming to ahead). The same economic pressures in Germany - which were a result of global influences and one could view as related to complexities, led to the rise of Nazi's.

In Northern Ireland paramilitaries are normal. But it has been depressed a long time. And it was imposed into a supply complexity which later failed. So now 'men in hairy faces' are bedrocks of the community, and justify their actions because they are needed to police the streets (better than the police in their eyes) and protect communities from external pressures and competitors and its supplies.

This gives an idea as to how we will adapt - a return to paramilitaries, following long criminal gang war, and the rise of related empowering religion. The religion survives through the power of the group and its uniculturalism, and group selective properties, in a world with external competitors rather than security gain by internal innovation and wider trade - at least these would be religions operating in a more fundamentalist way. In my view retention of 'old testiment' morals in a religion is because groups that have such freedoms to morally act in this way are fitter during difficult environments. It is an empowerment of the very power and success of the group in conflict with other groups, internal and external, when trade is not so profitable (which can be potentiated by mortal collapse) and any internal competition is bad (diversity and specialisation less proffitable, as leading to grounds for conflict, and being perhaps less likely to succeed). Paramilitaries and religions also act to in extreme scenarios stabilise trade by taking the perspective of top traders.

This suggest a natural self limitation to economic and cultural liberation because it may critically weaken the group in tough economic and supply environments, and lead to its societies destruction by war or enslavement or out-competition at an individual level (what the Germans sensed).

All these traditional conservative societies have evolved in tough environments in which trade was only sustainable within the group, and energy too limited for the group to survive by being too selfless to other groups. I believe that instincts for this persist because they are such strong evolutionary pressures during the tougher times towards those who fight for the group and fit in. This leads to uniculturalism. I believe that political inclinations reflect early wealth and a tendency to fascism/socialism is primed, epigenetically, by child poverty and the adaption to a tough environment. Thus society will react to supply line breakdown by drastic urban population collapse, and a survival of a rural, territorial and unicultural (nationalist unicultural) dispersed population, which will survive and recolonise by paramilitary (or religious) means.

I think the article has some valid points. What is meant by the collapse of civilization? Does it mean we lose all our electric power? That would seem like the end of the world to me. Does it mean the government is overthrown and all the bureaucrats lose their jobs? That might be an improvement.

The most likely scenario is the energy crisis getting worse and the price of oil going to $1000 or so. Even coal prices have gone through the roof and will go higher. Energy costs are passed on to all products and food. The weak will die off and the strong survive.

Are we still going to send handouts to Africa and other needy areas while our own poor starve? That's the part I could never understand. Charity begins at home. I can see the quality of life becoming much worse and many dying off unless something like fusion power becomes practical. That would save us for a while at least until environmental degradation rears it's ugly head. Global warming means less food produced.

Well, it means that Western civilisation, as a 500 years of cultural and economic evolution, could collapse and be lost forever, and civilisation may have to regrow pretty much from scratch. In my view it will look the same again, but because it regrows from the margins where rural economies are safely shielded from the worst disease and supply themselves. From that population growth, eventually influxes to new urban areas are driven by technological progress and restoration whilst as food supplies increase there is probably a baby boom coming from the rural environment then the success of new supply dependent urban populations. It is difficult though to say what drove the huge population growth in Europe in the 19 century, but I think economic progress had something to do with it along with migrant populations in cities perhaps I think shagging more in stressful urban conditions(!), with a gradual reduction in infant mortality with industrialisation. In the past I think urban populations would die of disease unless they could gain economic opportunities in the trading network, which could only be supported technologically by a relatively much higher ratio of rural workers on less productive systems. But I'm not sure.

An interesting point here. If we are dependent on regrowth of the rural population, and its supply capacity, then we are dependent on things like tractors.

Tractors need diesel, diesel would collapse in the above scenario. But land labour would come from a new underclass of poor desperate urbans migrating out of shattered cities.

I cant help but think that the success of white Northern European people may have something to do with their tendency to rural land ownership and fierce willingness historically to (nationalistically) defend supply lines and interests and a tendency to systemising.

Are you saying what will be, will be?

Do you have children? If so, do you love them? You would do all you could do for them?

Then, you cannot possibly have the attitude, "Let it be."

I think its situations like this why men evolved to be so distinct (well fairly) from women. But even women can be aggresive alphas as well, there are observable limits to female cooperation, and that is probably linked to competition between mothers for nutrients and resources.

So get a gun and live near the hills! When time comes sheppard thy family and shoot at the town as you're leaving it.


Be a man goddammit

Actually that would get you dead quick, so I guess be a well connected man with a good gun and a lot of flexibility.

Near hills.

I'll hide out in the lakes, unless I can find strong woman for pull plow.

Anyway enough speculation. I raise cultural adaptations as I model human society as a bit like molds and funguses, with the greatest possible respect. I see different strategies of different species, different dissemination, territorial and innovative abilities. At one level I conceive of western society as traditionally right wing, its success is also linked to a great behavioral tollerence, I believe, of diversity within its community, provided that a degree of trust and common principles are attained, though the behavioural diversity seems to have been historically reserved to mad inventor characters and other group-dedicated subspecies of 'genius', often also of higher wealth and security. An acceptance of internal diversity has probably contributed to the technological and group fitness of past societies and especially present ones, which explains their trends towards multiculturalism (driven it seems by a boredom with familiar things, or a need for novelty but not the impulsive variety in ADHD, which is actually associated with the opposite genetic tendencies relating to MAO).

Although I also think that there are pressures back the other way, in extreme circumstances. Civilisation seems to be about relative long sustained growth interupted with local catastrophic events which I think explains the spread of conservative and liberal genetic tendencies, as they appear to exist.

I also think that there is a genetic exaggeration of male and female stereotypical phenotypes in certain races. This is apprently shown in other racial studies of neurobiolgy and genes. As I recall, certain races have less physical distinction between the genders. One may expect such societies to be, without putting any moral value on such tendencies, more cooperational and the males selected for loyalty and bonding to the females, and a strong moral code predominates in conjunction with particularly high population density and a trend towards urban conditions. In other societies I think that there may be different genetic distribution of traits and a more exaggerated male/female phenotype, leading to different cultural behavior, along with a stronger territorialism and a strong internal group structure, isolated from other groups especially those that the group finds less similar to themselves (a trait though which is pretty universal). This would seem to classically describe certain national tendencies, which I am exploring purely from a biological perspective. In more female dominated groups, the women may in fact be more aggressive, leading to very strong moral codes internally to the community, leading to marginalisation of those that dont fit in and selection of cooperational family orientated males. Historically I believe western culture has favoured a male dominated political realm and a highly feminine home culture which was almost left to thrive independently, whereas I think if a generalisation can be made Asians specifically east Asians have a tendency to power share more between the genders and have still very high group cooperation, and possibly less diversity or heterogenicity. I think they also demonstrate a clear need for less space. Different cultures and races also have very different reproductory behaviours for example, some tending towards harems and multiple partners and others towards strict and humble pair-bonding - this is just a factual observation. These sexual-selective and cultural splits may have even led to the diversification of the races from their common origins. It would also explain the differences in penis size between races. This is very controversial but these thoughts interconnect, and are based on generalisations and more extreme examples NOT value judgments. I think they are interesting possibilities for enquiring minds to explore cultural variations, but we stray into this territory, because poor especially growing nations of all races tend towards genetically excluding the races of other territories, as can be seen all over the world, and this is why different races persist despite proximity. It is a product of the kind of conditions I think result of locally limited supply systems and other catastrophe based conditions.

I believe differences in genetic predisposition to schizoptypal personality and similarly depression may be driven by a selection for those who better anticipated worse-case scenarios, and a tendency for society to reward those worriers as arch planners and leaders. The MAO link to cultural distinctions between individuals is revealing also because deficits in MAO also change behavior relating to response to abusive childhood environments and external stresses, with increased impulsivity and extroversion of aggression, I believe that in addition to the relationships this is seen to causing criminality, I think it also relates to tendency towards nationalism and territorialism - that is, I think there is a relationship between stress, extroversion of impulses, criminality, and gangs with group behaviours like nationalism tribalism and paramilitaries. Thus there are wider meanings and drivers behind these behaviors, some of these selfish, some for the fitness of the group, which is why they are so universal and persistent.

All strategies however have survived past catastrophe and some specific genes I think may be more down to growth during profitable times rather than times of conflict, thus various personality and behavioral genes have been favoured in different conditions, and there is bound to be some differences in the way that these will be dispersed geographically, without adding any value judgements to any traits if this were to happen.

Anyway, if we can get past these controversial subjects, back to the original topic that of imminent vulnerability of any civilisation, we should remember when we switch the light off tonight, that many of us enjoy a back-up energy supply of nuclear power, and this was very hard won by lobbyists largely on grounds of national energy security. This defensive posture may be derided in todays liberal-economic culture, but I believe it is missunderstood in todays wealthy climate - some people naturally expect these kinds of catastrophe - its afterall what war is designed bring about.

So in that spirit, I would welcome more nuclear reactors. But I think we need each reactor to have several years supply, and we need to modify our electrical grid so that any one point can be supplied from more than one network, by a criss crossing of long distance HVDC transmission cables. This allows basic power supply to all server farms and factories. It would allow basic system to operate, especially if goods went by electrified rail and this was linked direct to ports and industrial centres (as it was).

We hope that battery trucks predominate, and a new generation of nuclear succeeds for security. The nuclear reactor can also thermally supply hydrogen and since CO2 can technically easily be extracted from air, and thermo-chemically converted to CO, it can readily make methanol, if your trucks were mandated to be able to squirt this into the combustion chamber.

Nuclear is the best choice because nuclear can facilitate an energy supply that could survive through temporary supply breakdown, and because it has the potential to replace other sources within all developed economies. However, existing and near nuclear capacity would only be able to work assuming that electricity could be severely rationed. A smart government would build such a robust distribution system, change planning to favour rail, support electric vehicles especially on key supply systems and energy infrastructure and install smart meters that can also control electricity usage perhaps as part of a rationing system. Coal to liquids might be an example of how a nation may continue to support farms and armies and distribution systems - but you need the trains that ship the coal working on that fuel supply, and it needs to go into your merchant navy, and it will probably need a navy to support it.

I love it - brings out the war time spirit - but only is this enjoyable when you are part of an altruistic community and you can cooperate within it.

Civilization would not "collapse" so much as it would change, and will change. Knowledge will not be lost. There are too many books and other records for all our learning to be lost, or even much of it. The loss of energy supplies means a change in lifestyle. If you want to call that a collapse, go ahead. The wealthy will still live a nice lifestyle but we may go back to feudal ages in terms of a few haves and many have nots.

Are we still going to feed the bums of the world until we die off too? At what point will we cut them off?

the sky is always falling at New Scientist. it's a shame. they had so much potential but can't seem to break away from the whining.

yes they do whine alot.

But I think a collapse would be long and hard.