Quote:
Originally Posted by sendler
It won't be centuries. Three decades at the most. Maybe one if world currencies start to fail one after the other due to debt overhang.
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"Therefore, when we constructed our formal world model, it was not to make point predictions, but rather to understand the broad sweeps, the behavioral tendencies of the system. Our goal is to inform and to influence human choice. To accomplish these goals, we do not need to predict the future precisely. We need only identify policies that will increase the likelihood of sustainable system behavior and decrease the severity of future collapse. A
prediction of disaster delivered to an intelligent audience with the capacity to act would, ideally, defeat or falsify itself by inducing action to avoid the calamity. For all those reasons we chose to focus on patterns rather than individual numbers. With World3 we are engaged, we hope, in self-defeating prophecy.
To achieve our goals, we put into World3 the kinds of information you might use to understand the behavioral tendencies of thrown balls (or growing economies and populations), not the kinds of information you would need to describe the exact trajectory of one particular throw of one specific ball.
Because of the uncertainties and simplifications we know exist in the model (and others that we suppose it must contain, though we have not yet recognized them), we do not put faith in the precise numerical path the model generates for population, pollution, capital, or food production. Still, we think the primary interconnections in World3 are good representations of the important causal mechanisms in human society. Those interconnections, not the precise numbers, determine the model's general behavior. As a consequence, we do have faith in the dynamic behaviors generated by World3."
(Meadows, Donella, Jorgen Randers, and Dennis Meadows.
Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update [White River Junction: Chelsea Green Publishing Company, 2004], pp. 140-141)
It's the trends that are important, and the trends are worrying. When we venture to predict collapse in a specific year or range of years and it doesn't happen, we risk generating the attitude of a significant number of posts on this thread, and one displayed by a shockingly high number of otherwise intelligent humans: past predictions of calamity didn't happen, so why should we believe the doomsayers this time? It's the trends that are important, and our response should be the same anyway--to reduce the ecological footprint of our species, yesterday.
But therein lies the problem: unless humans come face-to-face with the consequences of our actions, we won't change because our system behaviors are driven by our instincts (and even then, I don't believe our behaviors would change significantly). I fear the
Limits to Growth authors will fail in their goal.