MichaelA🔸 comments on What is the likelihood that civilizational collapse would directly lead to human extinction (within decades)?

[MichaelA🔸]

Regarding conflict and/​or WMDs

this piece focuses on whether civilizational collapse would lead more or less directly to human extinction without additional catalyzing conditions, like a second catastrophe (either soon or long after the first) or centuries of economic stagnation that eventually end in human extinction.

But elsewhere, you seem to imply that by “fairly directly” you just mean “within a generation”. And you do discuss (rather than setting aside) the possibility that collapse would trigger conflict, and in Case 2 you discuss WMDs.

So I feel unsure whether:

1. This post’s conclusions are meant to be interpreted as conditional on there being no major conflict and/​or WMD usage after the collapse

2. This post’s conclusions are meant to hold even if we account for the possibility of there being major conflict and/​or WMD usage after the collapse (perhaps because you think such conflict or WMD usage are quite unlikely or quite survivable)

If (1) is the case, then I think I’d roughly share this post’s bottom-line conclusions. (But then the discussion of conflict and WMDs leaves me confused about precisely what is being set aside—e.g., conflicts above what threshold?)

If (2) is the case, then I think:

• I’d be much more uncertain than this post seems to be

  • And that uncertainty would effectively make me more pessimistic (though still not necessarily seeing extinction as likely, even in relatively extreme collapse scenarios)

• I’d feel confused about why WMDs aren’t mentioned in Case 1 or Case 3

• I’d feel that more detailed discussion of the odds and consequences of various types of conflict is warranted

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[One group of survivors having access to and deploying WMDs] seems unlikely to me, first because it seems hard to imagine a group of survivors incapable of recovering critical infrastructure — and barely capable of meeting even their basic needs — would be able to successfully deploy weapons of mass destruction (though I’m not very confident about this).

I think I’m (even) less confident about that than you are, for two main reasons:

1. Groups currently lacking critical systems doesn’t mean they are incapable of recovering them. Groups will likely later recover some critical systems. (If they don’t, that means this was already an existential catastrophe.)

   • So critical systems initially being down probably only provides a few months, years, or decades of protection from WMD usage (assuming that that does offer protection from that at all).

   • It seems pretty plausible that many groups would recover whatever systems are required to access and deploy WMDs before people recover things like a balance of power in the international system, international norms and treaties, established command hierarchies, or local law and order. And that scenario seems concerning.

     • I also think it’s plausible that the latter sort of things will never be recovered even if things like population levels and technological progress are recovered—but that topic is probably better discussed in relation to your planned followup posts on things technological stagnation or unrecoverable dystopias.

2. You defined a civilizational collapse as “an event in which approximately all of the entire world’s critical systems are collapsed simultaneously for over six months.” But defining it that way was just a choice you (understandably) made to help narrow the scope.

   • I think it’s probably much more likely that there’d be a somewhat less extreme collapse—in which some systems remain online, systems remain online in some places, and/​or the collapse isn’t totally simultaneous across systems or regions. And in that sort of a scenario, it seems easier to imagine that some groups at some times would be able to access and deploy WMDs.

     • Which (as an aside) suggests that a “less extreme” collapse might actually be more risky?

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I expect this period of violence to last until the survivors reach some sort of equilibrium, where they perceive there to be sufficient food, water, and shelter. The reason for this view is that it seems very irrational for groups to keep fighting if there are enough resources to go around. Of course, humans aren’t always rational, so I imagine some fighting might persist. But I think it’s very likely that many survivors would correctly conclude it would be more dangerous to fight each other than to accept a relatively low risk of not being able to meet their basic needs because of resource scarcity, if resources weren’t in fact too scarce to support the population.

[...] But as discussed, I expect any violence would mostly subside once some equilibrium had been reached — at the point where ~all of the surviving population could reasonably expect to be supported by the available resources (in other words, at the point at which the population dropped to or below whatever the Earth’s carrying capacity was).

I’d guess conflict is generally driven less by a desire for basic subsistence, more by leaders’ desires to gain lots of resources and power, and more by non-material concerns (e.g., vengeance) than you seem to think is the case. (Though my guess isn’t based on much focused research, and I might be misinterpreting your stance anyway.)

Here, two things seem particularly worth noting:

• People could “correctly conclude it would be more dangerous to fight each other than to accept a relatively low risk of not being able to meet their basic needs because of resource scarcity”, and yet still fight.

  • So the above passage seems to implicitly contain the strong assumption that the sole reason groups fight is because the people in the groups believe doing so will increase their safety in expectation.

  • (I imagine you didn’t actually intend to imply that, though, and maybe this is just a nit-pick.)

• Both history and the present seem to contain a lot of conflicts driven at least partly by desires for revenge or retribution.

  • And you’re envisioning a scenario in which over 4 billion people have been killed in the initial catastrophe (which might have been an act of aggression, e.g. a nuclear war), and then an additional 3 billion people have been killed by further violence, by being forced to starve to death, or by starving to death without being assisted.

    • (This is based on the fact that you write “My best guess is that this violent competition would whittle the number of survivors down to the hundreds of millions or fewer”.)

    • So I’d guess there’d be a lot of conflict driven by desires for revenge or retribution in such a scenario.

(All that said, I do still agree that further conflict that doesn’t involve WMDs seems unlikely to directly drive the population to 0 or to below the minimum viable population.)

[Marcel D]

I was surprised to not see any mention of security dilemmas: one of the facially-plausible and otherwise commonly-mentioned scenarios/​reasons I’ve seen for fighting or just wasting resources on combat preparations is a fear that “they might think that we think that they think… that someone wants to harm them, so we have to prepare/​strike first.” In fact, security dilemmas are frequently suggested in conflict studies as reasons why two rational actors with 1) a preference for peace instead of violence, 2) realistically-bounded information about their adversaries, and/​or 3) some imperfect ability to interpret evidence about intentions/​capabilities, might still end up fighting despite neither side wanting to fight. (If this has already been covered, my apologies, but I didn’t find it after some ctrl+f’ing for “security”, “dilemma”, or “fight”)