The End of Civilization As We Know It Is Nigh, According to NASA

-> The End of Civilization As We Know It Is Nigh, According to NASA
Well, it’s official: We’re doomed. A study sponsored by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center says so — and according to the accompanying report, we’ve only got a couple of decades left before the end of civilization as we know it occurs. That’s right: It’s happening in our lifetime.


This is why the whole “Eh, let future generations deal with our problems” philosophy is a bad, bad idea.

The report, which was written by applied mathematician Safa Motesharrei of the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center, states that every single societal collapse for the past 5,000 years happened as a result of two occurrences: “The stretching of resources due to the strain placed on the ecological carrying capacity” and “the economic stratification of society into Elites and Masses (or ‘Commoners’).” Analysis of five major risk factors — population, climate, water, agriculture, and energy –—shows that we’re almost at the breaking point when it comes to both of those occurrences. Sooooo… we’re essentially living in the precursor to The Hunger Games’ Panem. Great.

. Rifkin extrapolates the observed trend into the future, predicting that Internet and mobile technology along with small-scale renewable energy commercialization will create an era of distributed capitalism necessary to manage the new energy regime and a heightened global empathy that can help solve global problems.