麻豆传媒

The end of industrial civilisation

ROME, the Maya, Bronze Age Greece: every complex society in history has collapsed. Will our industrial civilisation be any different?

Probably not. It all comes down to complexity and energy. Societies inevitably grow more complex as they chase prosperity and find solutions to the problems thrown up by success, and that comes at a cost: energy. Civilisations collapse, , when they can no longer generate enough juice to maintain existing complexity and solve new problems.

We got to where we are today because the industrial revolution exploited readily available high-quality anthracite coal. We then used that energy to tap progressively harder-to-access energy sources, driving our complexity to unprecedented heights. But unless we find a bounteous new source, we will one day overshoot what we can afford. Then complexity quickly unravels: political and economic institutions falter, production and trade diminish, global supply chains break. Technologies become impossible. States fragment. Lots of people die.

But there is hope. Except for small, isolated societies in which everyone died, no historical collapse has wiped the slate clean. All retained enough of their technologies and institutions to start afresh, and eventually do better.

So could our descendants take what remains and build a new civilisation?

The problem is that this time, there might be nothing left. 鈥淩ome didn鈥檛 have nuclear weapons,鈥� says at Stanford University in California. Collapsing societies undergo dramatic shifts in power and wealth, which are always accompanied by violence, he says. 鈥淭his could be the final collapse.鈥�

Globalisation could also make our meltdown different. When past societies fell, there were others left to carry on, says at the University of Waterloo in Canada. 鈥淚f our one global civilisation collapses there won鈥檛 be outside resources, capital and knowledge to reboot things.鈥�

For at the University of Florence in Italy, the chances of rebuilding depend on whether we can keep the electrical grid running. This isn鈥檛 just to keep the lights on, but to produce the materials required for industrial civilisation 鈥� steel for machinery, potash for fertiliser, silicon for semiconductors and so on. With easily accessible fossil-fuel energy sources long exhausted, Bardi calculates that after a collapse we wouldn鈥檛 be able to recover enough energy to mine or smelt the materials we rely on unless we retain a working grid.

That means we can future-proof our energy supplies, but only if we act now. Generating fossil-fuel or nuclear energy requires substantial energy up front 鈥� if that system collapses we won鈥檛 have what it takes to crank it up again. Sun and wind, however, are free; we need only maintain the devices that capture them.

Bardi that if half our electricity came from renewables, the grid could generate enough energy to maintain us and, crucially, itself, through crises that would completely collapse our present system. But we would need to build it while we have the silicon and civil order, and that would require investment in renewables to be 50 times its current level.

If not, says Bardi, 鈥渨e don鈥檛 have enough anthracite to reinvent electricity or launch the industrial revolution again. So it will be agriculture: simple tools and dark nights.鈥� Then again, climate instability might hinder farming, leaving hunting and gathering.

To do any better than that we will need to keep our key institutions, Homer-Dixon thinks, but that could be impossible amid severe climate change and conflict. When things settle down, all our records could be gone: even hard drives decay in a century or two.

And in case you think we might be better off forgetting the knowledge that led to our civilisation鈥檚 fall, think again: the . Collapse will be no return to Eden. Time to start installing those solar cells. Debora MacKenzie

The end of聽science

TWENTY years ago, I asserted that science at its purest and grandest, the quest to understand the universe and our place in it, is ending. Scientists will produce no revelations as startling as natural selection, the genetic code, quantum mechanics, relativity or the big bang theory.

Yes, they will keep extending, refining and applying their knowledge, but they won鈥檛 discover anything to force radical revisions of our current maps of reality. Nor will they solve the deepest riddles of existence. Why is there something rather than nothing? How did life begin on Earth, and was it a once-in-eternity fluke? How does matter make mind?

Since my book The End of Science was published in 1996, science has achieved nothing that contradicts my dismal forecast.

Take physics. The discovery of the Higgs boson and that of gravitational waves confirm the foundational paradigms of quantum mechanics and general relativity. Brilliant achievements, sure, but they don鈥檛 fundamentally alter our view of the universe.

In their desperation to go beyond what we know, physicists are still pursuing string and multiverse theories. But such ideas are as lacking in empirical evidence as they were 20 years ago; in fact, they are yet to yield any testable predictions. Stung by this complaint, some physicists have begun to argue that falsifiability 鈥� our best criterion for distinguishing science from pseudoscience 鈥� is overrated. Not a good sign.

Biology has fared better in recent years, spawning countless advances, from cloning and the Human Genome Project to CRISPR, a powerful new gene-editing technique. But all fit neatly within the framework of DNA-based genetics and neo-Darwinism. There鈥檚 nothing revelatory here.

Of all fields, neuroscience has the greatest potential for breakthroughs that could turn our world upside down. Imagine if researchers demonstrated conclusively that bacteria or iPhones are conscious, or have free will. That would shake things up.

The US and Europe are pouring money into giant brain-research projects. But the vexed question of how mental and physical states are related, known as the mind-body problem, remains as baffling today as when Descartes pondered it in the 17th century. Some researchers are so desperate that they are seeking inspiration from Buddhism, a 2500-year-old religion.

So are scientists starting to accept my end-of-science thesis? Hardly. Most reject it as vehemently now as they did 20 years ago. But rather than present reasoned arguments, they usually profess their faith in scientific progress and scoff at any mention of limits.

That鈥檚 fine with me, because my views have evolved since I started teaching at an engineering school. When my students resist my argument, as many do, I鈥檓 relieved. Get out there and prove me wrong, I say. If one of them cracks the neural code or finds extraterrestrial life, launching a whole new era of science, I would be more than happy to eat my words. I would be ecstatic. John Horgan

The end of economic growth

IF IT鈥橲 shrinking or flaccid, you鈥檙e in trouble. You want it large and growing. We鈥檙e talking about gross domestic product 鈥� that vital symbol of a nation鈥檚 economic virility.

On the face of it, the obsession with economic growth is fair enough. A bigger cake means more to share around, and that further increases GDP in a never-ending virtuous circle. Or does it?

The idea that economic growth has natural limits first came to public attention in 1972, with a report calledLimits to Growth from the think tank Club of Rome. It argued that sooner or later, the world鈥檚 economies would demand more resources than the planet could supply.

But things aren鈥檛 that simple, says environmental economist of the University of Oxford. 鈥淲e鈥檝e had scare stories for 40 to 50 years about resources running out. They don鈥檛 come true and they won鈥檛.鈥� Where a resource has a price, he says, using too much forces the price up 鈥� and the economic burn drives us to find alternative ways of making things.

Innovation, then, is the key to sustained, sustainable growth. But innovation might be a finite resource too, says of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, author of . Since the first throes of the industrial revolution, he argues, economic growth has been propelled by consecutive technological revolutions: steam power, electricity and the internal combustion engine, and digital communications. But today it鈥檚 not easy to see where the next big boosts are coming from. That might explain why GDP growth has been slowing in Western economies since the 1970s.

鈥淥ur well-being need not rely on making and consuming ever more stuff鈥�

Hepburn thinks that view is unduly pessimistic. 鈥淚 don鈥檛 think humanity has lost its mojo,鈥� he says. Part of the problem is accountancy, he says: GDP, defined as the total value of goods and services an economy makes, is not a good way to measure economic strength in societies that are finding better ways to make things cheaper. He also sees a big productivity-boosting innovation shimmering on the horizon: cheap solar power.

Anyway, would a world with no economic growth be so bad? The conventional doom-laden answer is yes. Zero growth brings political polarisation, says Gordon: there鈥檚 less money to finance schools and hospitals, and the gulf between the haves and have-nots widens. The growth of populist movements in Europe and the US since the 2008 financial crash gives us a foretaste of what we can expect. Some pessimists even see the beginnings of parallels with political changes in the zero-growth 1930s that propelled the world to war.

The outlook doesn鈥檛 have to be that gloomy, says Tim Jackson of the University of Surrey in Guildford, UK, author of the 2009 book . Beyond a certain level of material development, our well-being need not rely on making and consuming ever more stuff.

In this vision, prosperity does not have to be curtailed in a post-growth world: a sharing economy, greater emphasis on renovation and refurbishment rather than making new things, and more time spent on cultural activities are all ways of increasing value while maintaining social cohesion and without consuming more.

That sounds utopian, and it would require revisiting assumptions that have underpinned economic thinking for a century or more. We might all end up the richer for it, though. 鈥淚t鈥檚 not a trivial thing to achieve by any means,鈥� says Jackson. 鈥淏ut we could have more fun with less stuff.鈥� Richard Webb

Read more about how everything you care about will end 鈥� and what comes after

This article appeared in print under the headlines 鈥淭he end of industrial civilisation鈥�, 鈥淭he end of science鈥� and 鈥淭he end of economic growth鈥�