It has been going on for well over 200,000 years.

We have eventually solved every single one.

I swear people can't think back more than a few hundred years. We have been here a LONG time, solving massive evolutionary problems along the way. Do you understand the trials we have gone through to reach the point in evolution where we are today? It's mind-boggling.

And this stupid OP is trying to set a date for our demise within a century? It's naïve and completely pointless.

We've managed to get to this point as a species, mostly through brute force, as might(and not just physical) really does make right.

Agriculture gave us access to mountains of more food, but it didn't solve the physical act of being hungry. Then there are the countless number of issues that have resulted from something like agriculture.

When you're using the word solved, I'm picturing a situation where we no longer have to actually do anything to keep things the way they are, like a mathematical equation. Once you solve for X, that's it, you're done. As you know with the trials, evolution and adaptation don't work that way. Things are constantly moving. You're never done.

voting fools into office and accepting status quo as great there well might not be a collapse, they will just see it as life all the way to the bottom to extinction ... and then say toward the end, WTF, how did this happen.

If you mean the highly-structured system of nation-states reliant on advanced technology and easy world travel/ That's got two centuries at best, and is already visibly crumbling.

if you mean "civilization" in terms of "any ordered human society" well, that'll last until the end of our species. Which, barring nuclear Armageddon or playing footsie with large asteroids, still has at least another hundred thousand years left in it.

some of the 'old guys' from when I was a kid. They often talked about how the country/world was going to 'hell in a hand basket'; things were better when they were young.

I'm not sure if I'm just an 'old guy' that today's kids will think the same of or if I'm really smarter than the 'old guys' from my youth.

... as the next generation moves to the fore, but I think that it might actually be right this time for this era's generations to think that way. This is especially the case when you consider that the impacts of Global Warming are becoming ever more present, the polarization of the political process, (and the increase in religious and ethnic hatred) not just here in America, but across the globe accelerates, coupled with the continued concentration of wealth amongst fewer and fewer people, certainly suggests that things are coming to a head at some point in the not-too-distant-future...

What will be the tipping point? Food riots? Water riots? Governmental collapses due to the high cost of rebuilding after several back-to-back mega-weather related disasters? Civil unrest due to climate-change refugees? Or something along the lines of a massive cyber-attack bringing down the internet and crippling the infra-structure of a super-power? Ebola? Bird-flu?

Who the fuck knows...but I think it'd be best to buckle up, it looks like it's going to be a bumpy ride..

I recall the common graffiti seen around the Lower East Side of NYC during the late 1980's of an inverted martini glass and the text "The Party's Over." To my young activist eyes of the time, this looked prophetic. Surely the excesses of Wall St. in the 1980's and the inequality and environmental destruction wrought by capitalism and militarism then had reached a logical endpoint, and society would either correct course or fall-apart. Boy, was I wrong. The Gordon Gecko days and the S&L Bailout were just dress rehearsals for Jamie Dimon and TARP.

Now, don't get me wrong; things have surely gotten worse, and at some point the chickens will come home to roost. Infinite growth and consumption CANNOT keep going on this oh so finite planet of more than 7 billion people. But 'the system' (however you define it) is enormously creative in how it keeps going. Powerful people have a strong interest in continuing patterns of exploitation, and they have been largely creative and successful in sustaining their own wealth and power, at the expense of the planet's ecosystems and common good.

Are things going to hell in a hand basket? Almost certainly, by nearly any measure. And yet the endpoint of 'collapse' has not arrived.

I will not tempt fate or show my own ignorance by predicting a set time for 'collapse.' But I will express my true amazement that it has not arrived at some point during the past three decades.

-app

Very pessimistic poll. I will never give up hope for the future of the human race.

That date began the downturn of our country.

I don't think it will collapse. I think it will change.
Hi! This is my first post, ever.

Welcome to DU

Welcome aboard.

Welcome to DU! It's great to have you with us!

That's just a rope o'smoke. Old Uns got the Smart. They mastered sick and seeds, they make miracles and fly across the sky.

But civilization itself? We'll find a way to survive even climate change.
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Hope we change course.

I think of it now more as a cleansing, the planet is going to choke us up like a hairball.

If we survive as a species, we'll be better off for the experience.

They don't, really.

And quite extraordinary relative to the era before the Universe and time existed.

So, I disagree. We will always live in extraordinary times.

I guess at some point in the next 1000 someone will probably be right, but I doubt it will be in our lifetimes.

Doesn't something have to exist in the first place before it can collapse?

I'm tempted to ask them what's going to happen in 7 weeks?

so if the Eagles are going to win the Super Bowl this has got to be the year...

OTOH I believe that the Eagles winning the Super Bowl is itself a harbinger of the apocalypse...

You wouldn't believe just how resourceful humans could be; more than likely, it will change, rather than fall apart altogether.

But on the off chance it *DID* happen, barring some truly bizarre circumstances, it would have to be after 2100.

The rich hoard all the wealth, the middle class has all the guns. The police are heavily armed and very dangerous. I could go on and on. It started with Bush V. Gore, by the way.

It would suck to be an orangutan or a rhinoceros or an elephant in most places.

For some, civilization is collapsing now. There are people all over the world, even here in the United States, living in conditions of unimaginable misery.

The collapse of any civilization is generally a slow motion thing.

I'd probably determine the point of "collapse" from the perspective of a population biologist. It's the point where the population begins to decline for adverse environmental reasons and violence rather than voluntary birth control. But I don't like to measure "civilization" by gross human population either. We have to include other species in our definition of civilization, most especially natural populations of other social species -- the wolves, whales, condors, elephants, etc..

Extrapolating from certain trends re fossil fuel depletion, global warming, climate change and ongoing and possibly permanent drought conditions in the US Southwest I'd say that the collapse of capitalism as we know it, and of the USA as we know it, are very likely within a century.

I think there are too many have-nots and not enough people that have all the wealth.


Class warfare will start the collapse - revolution?

There has throughout history been a rise and fall of different civilizations.

Europe and North America is pretty self sufficient. Africa does not look good long term. Russia is failing. South America will be ok. China will always be China.

We're in the early stages, and it won't happen overnight. Just in bits and pieces, regional areas crumbling (around the edges at first), rule of law falling apart, more and more frequent economic "collapses" propped up and papered over with bailouts that kick the can a little further down the road, local collapses where decisions are made to make paved roads into gravel roads (already been happening for some years), areas never quite rebuilt after more frequent natural disasters (New Orleans) or local economic collapses (Detroit), crumbling infrastructure, etc. over the course of some number of decades.