The suicide machine

Doomsday Selfie - by Mr. Fish

Running out of planet applies as overshoot, now falling on July 28, means the resources of earth have already been exhausted circa 2022, which means ... virgin resources must be plundered yet again in order for society and capitalism to continue ever onward without interuption, right? In viewing this pix, one sees consumerism at it's finest but it also shows, in indirect fashion, how civilizations die when natural resources vanish but this time it's different as we have run out of planet and have no place to go while the specter of the extinction event known as global warming looms ever larger as we move further into the 21st century.

Civilizations die in familiar patterns. They exhaust natural resources. They spawn parasitic elites who plunder and loot the institutions and systems that make a complex society possible. They engage in futile and self-defeating wars. And then the rot sets in. The great urban centers die first, falling into irreversible decay. Central authority unravels. Artistic expression and intellectual inquiry are replaced by a new dark age, the triumph of tawdry spectacle and the celebration of crowd-pleasing imbecility.

“Collapse occurs, and can only occur, in a power vacuum,” anthropologist Joseph Tainter writes in The Collapse of Complex Societies. “Collapse is possible only where there is no competitor strong enough to fill the political vacuum of disintegration.”

Complexity 101

Pre-industrial civilizations were dependent on the limits of solar energy and constrained by roads and waterways, impediments that were obliterated when fossil fuel became an energy source. As industrial empires became global, their increase in size meant an increase in complexity. Ironically, this complexity makes us more vulnerable to catastrophic collapse, not less. Soaring temperatures (Iraq is enduring 120 degree heat that has fried the country’s electrical grid), the depletion of natural resources, flooding, droughts, (the worst drought in 500 years is devastating Western, Central and Southern Europe and is expected to see a decline in crop yields of 8 or 9 percent), power outages, wars, pandemics, a rise in zoonotic diseases and breakdowns in supply chains combine to shake the foundations of industrial society. The Arctic has been heating up four times faster than the global average, resulting in an accelerated melting of the Greenland ice sheet and freakish weather patterns. The Barents Sea north of Norway and Russia are warming up to seven times faster. Climate scientists did not expect this extreme weather until 2050. 

“Each time history repeats itself, the price goes up,” the anthropologist Ronald Wright warns, calling industrial society “a suicide machine.”

 Welcome to Giedi Prime, the home of House Harkonnen. The surface of the planet is a vast sea of black oil, the city lays before you. Many factories, powered by massive furnaces blech fumes through rows of huge black towering steel heads. The produce of these factories are wide and various, some are of a nature so evil they are best left untold ...