So those couple of years where society collapses...

When I first learned about the Roman Empire in school, I spent a lot of time wondering why they didn't do something to save themselves. Years later, I picked up a newspaper and found my answer.

Shut up and play your video games.

People often draw analogies between the United States and the Romans. We have many advantages over the Romans, though. The greatest of these that I see is: we have a tremendous amount of historical data on a level far beyond what the Romans appear to have had. You asked whether the Romans were aware of what was about to happen. Some of them were, but it appears to me that public awareness of the problems confronting America is far more widespread than awareness in the Roman civilization was. That being said, I'm not a history major yet, so you probably know more than I.

Of course, just being aware of the problem does not necessarily mean that the problem will be solved. I have read that Isaac Asimov predicted that, when a civilization became history-savvy enough to be "self-aware" or aware of it's own historical direction and momentum, new and previously unseen (and therefore unpredictable) trends would be introduced. Asimov may or may not have been right.

To me, the ability to maintain electricity nationwide is more important than personal travel. More and more jobs can be done from the home; more and more of our public discourse and research is conducted with the assistance of the Internet.

I am hoping that our civilization will reach the "networkable" point before we really lose transportation ability. By that I mean that I hope our civilization will have become more dependent on control of strategic resources and locations than on actual physical contiguity. In the end, as our society (hopefully) works further and further towards treating everyone equally (regardless of race or gender or whatever) -- and as the world as a whole moves forward technologically -- then I hope that the divisions between nations will become less based on economic power or physical differences and more based on ideology and governmental form.

I do not know if my hope will come to pass, but the possibility seems very real to me. A civilization no longer being people who look similar or speak a similar language or live in the same place -- but rather becoming a group of people united in purpose or ideology or choice regardless of the physical factors that have previously divided us.

If we reach a certain point along that path prior to reaching the point where oil is too expensive for private transportation, I don't think it will matter whether or not we have an alternative fuel source. People won't need to be so close to their jobs or population centers in general, so there may be some flocking to the cities -- but not too a catastrophic degree. Of course, it would still be nice to have an alternative energy source before running out of easy oil.

If worse comes to worst, we can utilize rail systems to bring food to the cities. Although why exactly we would need cities anymore...

Rhelamos... your talents are wasted here, you really should write a book.

You make some excellent points but I feel I must disagree on your estimation of the importance of transport vs, in your example, supplies of electricity.

Electricity is crucial, this is true and undeniable, but there are actually alternatives in this area that cannot be turned towards transportation. Herein lies the problem. Nuclear power, for example, is enough to supply that kind of "home base" need for the time being. The issue at hand, however, remains supply.

Any military historian, hell any military anybody, will tell you that supply is one of the single most important aspects in maintaining an effective military force. This isn't limited to the military, of course; societies at large follow a very similar set of rules: The larger and more complex a society, the more difficult it is to supply. A single soldier can forage for food, as can a single civilian. Ten million of them can ATTEMPT to, but the result is what I highlighted before, war and violence.

I recently graduated and began in my chosen profession as a High School history teacher. I bring this up to highlight the region wherein I live and teach, an urban area of relatively low socio-economic status. My neighbors have 8 people living in their house, there are about three hundred feral cats living in my alley, and my primary mode of transportation is a bicycle.

The people I work with are not part of any network, there are some who are unaware that any such network exists. While your idea is indeed pleasant, and in a perfect world would be the case, the simple fact remains that too much of the population simply isn't ready for that.

Now, of course, i'm speaking of low income urban areas despite my original argument which concerned suburban lifestyle, which is doubtless very much aware of the "network", but I believe my arguments hold true. Suburban society must still be supplied and those supplies must still be moved. Many middle income families support themselves through service-type jobs or jobs that don't require the physical manifestation of their efforts (which is to say, jobs not like a farmer, butcher, construction, etc.). These jobs are tertiary, unnecessary, and exist only owing to the complexity of the society which we have created. "Production" jobs, farming etc., will continue to be viable as they always have been. However, these production jobs cannot be placed within the utopian network which you described. You can't dig a ditch from the comfort of your computer (barring technological innovation) and, as the saying goes, you'll always need someone to dig a ditch.

All input appreciated for the discussion, of course. No thought is a wrong thought.

Hmmm... It is indeed interesting to note that "moral decay" arrives in a civilization just before its fall: Akkadia in the fifteenth, Greece in the fifth, Rome in the second A.D., the Church in the fifteenth, France in the Seventeenth...

America in the 20th...?

I wouldn't say it's just the US that's going to fall... more like western civilization as a whole. I'm from Canada and I can see where things are headed. Believe me... it ain't pretty.

We may be in store for some serious calamities. If we suddenly run out of fuel, we might have trouble getting food, staying warm and transporting the many supplies that keep our society running smoothly.

Electric motors have been improved greatly in recent years. They no longer need full power to operate. Batteries are improving rapidly and batteries are the biggest problem in electric cars. Up til Katrina there wasn't any need to replace gasoline, but as gas prices go up, electricity and batteries look better and better. Maybe you've heard of the Nanosafe battery which uses carbon nanotubes to store electricy. It charges in fifteen minutes or less. The cars it powers are fast and heavy and they have a range of about 200 miles. The problem is that the nanosafe battery is very expensive. They expect that to change quickly, as in five years or so. Why wouldn't you want to drive a car with a 200 mile range, no emissions or noise, great acceleration, and that charges in fifteen minutes? I don't society will fall apart if we have vehicles like that.

So where will this electricy come from? Wave generators are one possible source. Water is a lot heavier than air so it's movement represents tremendous amounts of energy and we all know there are lots of waves on the planet. Then there's geothermal. Drill a hole 5000 feet into the earth, pour water down and it turns into steam instantly because of the heat down there. The steam expands, and with tremendous force rises to the surface where it can be harnessed to power turbines. This can be done near any city in the world. Huge, unlimited amounts of energy. Nothing like windmills. Earth: The Sequel by Fred Krupp.

Bacteria and ants can quickly turn the toughest, nastiest stuff on earth into energy at room temperatures. Fiberous things like wood and so on. Of course they use it to power their own bodies. They don't give the energy away, but scientists are trying to figure out how they do it. That'll probably take some time.

A more pertinent solution is the fats produced by Algae when used in biodiesel. Algae can be harvested daily (like milking a cow). They grow so fast. The produce a tremendous amount of usable oil in comparison to the fuel produced by corn or soybean crops. And they use carbon dioxide to grow so a coal plants emissions could be pumped into an algae farm and the algae will clean the emissions while creating biodiesel.

Even now cars could be equipped with the batteries we have today. They'd take up a lot of space and we couldn't go very far without switching them out, but we could run electric cars today. We'd have to stop at stations where, probably some robotic arm would take the spent batteries out and replace them with charged and then we could go another 40 miles to the next station. Somebody would have to build all those robotic stations and equip them with countless, huge batteries (full of lead). People would have to buy cars with much shorter range, but emissions would be zero (not counting what the powerplant's emissions are). It would have to be the law of the land. The government would have to impose this sort of transportation on us and that would probably be unpopular with many. For most of these things, the governments are going to have to step in. Gas needs to be even more expensive so that people are more accepting of this sort of idea, but I think it could work. It wouldn't be without it's downside.

Government, like US government is kind of ineffective at handling problems. Take the dust bowl situation in the thirties. The government ignored the problem. They had caused it by giving away the land and encouraging people to farm the area even though bankers knew the land was not suitable for crops. The sod busters moved in, cleared away the special grasses that had evolved over a hundred thousand years into something that could survive with almost no water. The sod busters tore up the sod which held down the topsoil that took eons to form and... crops were great for a couple of years and then it all blew away. People and animals died of dust pneumonia. Sometimes you couldn't see your hand in front of your face because the dust was so thick but nobody in charge cared until the dust was carried to the east coast during some freak storms. Roosevelt then launched ambitious plans to save the prarie, but only small areas succeeded. A vast, delicate but fertile area (where the buffalo used to roam) was turned into totally inhospitable desert, probably the biggest environmental calamity in the United States. WW2 took attention away from the problem just as today world events distract us from global warming and our other problems. Nasty, expensive problems are put off. People hope they aren't real or that someone else will solve them. So there is a strong likelyhood that we will run out of fuel even with all this promising looking stuff. It would be a huge, almost unthinkable disaster. Starvation, maybe invasion by foreign powers taking advantage of our weakness. Doomsday stuff. Unpleasant things that gnaw at me a little while I while away my time with the latest computer game.

Even if we do find very suitable substitute for our energy needs we have many other problems. New technologies offer a lot of hope, but also many dangers. Nano science, self replicating nano machines, modified bacteria. What if some hostile, somewhat crazy world leader gets hold of some technology that lets loose self replicating nano machines that eat topsoil or maple trees or something like that? How can you guard against that kind of invasion? Then there are the mistakes in making life better. Things aren't tested out. Cars for instance. When they were invented, people immediatly saw they were useful, fun and so forth, but not much thought was given to the dirt they produced or how they'd make us more sedentary. Same with TV, all our machinery, the internet. None of it is extensively tested out to see how it affects society and life on earth. If it was tested, it probably wouldn't be legalized. "You've got some new toy that turns my kids into zombies that want to stay up all night playing while ignoring his parents and schoolwork? Get out!"

We're running out of antibiotics. The germs are evolving and we might not have anything to kill them. That could be a bad thing.

Several books I've read recently suggest that the drugs that are routinely given to kids for their ADHD cause them to become indifferent and permanently stunted, unable to deal with life's challenges. This is probably the ancient worry of every aging generation. "Them younguns aint right like we was!"

Plastics release pthalates when warmed. (spelling) They mimic female hormones. Girls are reaching puberty sooner. Malformation of male genitals is supposed to be more common.

Al Gore says that there has been an assault on reason (in his book "assault on reason". That tv has turned every important discussion into a thirty second commercial that just doesn't get into the complexity of things. He says that many still believe the 9-11 hijackers were working for Saddam and that they were Iraqi when actually they were mostly Saudi and Egyptian and Saddam had nothing to do with it.

India is building a lot of highways and four wheel cars. China doing the same. Both countries have huge populations in comparison to the USA which was the greatest polluter not long ago. These newcomers will soon put us to shame with how much filth they can produce and just when the we are becoming convinced of the threat of global warming. Global warming is getting ready to step up it's assault on the human race. Ice reflects heat. Water absorbs it. When the ice is gone up north, the earth's rate of heating up will increase.

I could go on for pages. Yea. Things can go very wrong. I think if we enter a new dark age, there will be staggering loses in human life. All for the best though

I am extremely glad you brought this up, it adds to the discussion.

I find myself of the opinion that morality and certain other facets of a given civilisation are merely constructs of the society at hand. When the society begins to perceive its own decline it does what human beings are typically wont to do when faced with such hardship: it finds a scapegoat. It's the "fault" of barbarians, moral decline, Godlessness,or any number of perceived outside threats. In truth its a combination of factors, both within and outside the control of the people in question.

You mean like the Spartans who lived mostly separate from their women and used little boys for sexual pleasure and companionship? They went a long time that way and I guess it was an accepted part of their morality. Also, I hear their food was awful.

I think that yes, and no. Only a small portion of the citizens knew and/or understood what was coming and happening. But for certain, the ones in power were ignorant to the matter. But then again, the Empire in 450 a.d. had been undisputed supreme for like 300 years, and even if they knew something was wrong, they might not have had the "knowlegde" to know what to do. Do what their ancestors did?? The Legions in those time were not as strong and well trained as the ones that Caesar lead into Gaul. And the collective "wisdom" of the senate was gone, and the emperor(s) knew nothing of running a empire through war.



The name comes from, I beleive, that under the Romans the goverment was highly centralized, when the Empire fell, there was complete anarchy and all forms of organizations collapsed. And people were left leaderless for the first time in like 400 years.



Comfortably? Never. Be able to create alternative fuel source? Definitely. In time? It all depends on when we decide to stop the clock.



Doomsday scenario. Highly possible that is not what going to happen. An exodus is not likely, a relocation is more likely.

I am not worried about the rising cost in gas. Yes it does hurt, but it hurts because I have to cut costs of commodities.

Remember, the pricier gas is, the cheaper solar/wind/etc. energy is.

I am not seeing our doomsday anywhere near our lifetime. Only a change in priorities.

Start getting used to the idea you won't be able to buy the latest and expensive phone or LCD or car or camera or computer gadget every year.

Your comments concerning batteries and their possible use are heartening, though your sentiment that the government will ultimately be ineffective at shifting us over to them is a fear I also share.


I believe that we're coming to a point where society is too complex, too pushed in a certain direction to change smoothly from one track to the other. I think of it a bit like this...

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What you see here are what I am going to call "Arrows of Development". The first line is us right now; we're going along a track where much of our technological advances have been bred and are dependent on one another (including oil) in something of a symbiotic relationship. As you can see, we're capable of continuing on our current track but only for a limited time before we reach a dead end of sorts and a "collapse" occurs. The bottom line represents where we need to be, which is to say "going in a different direction". In order to go along this alternative track of advancement we need to "unlearn" some of what we have learned. Parts of the society we have constructed, be it suburban lifestyle or otherwise, must be done away with and replaced with creations symbiotic with the NEW path of advancement. We can't simply hop over to the bottom line because too much of our society is dependent on maintaining the old path of advancement.

Plastics, for example, are too integral to our society right now and we can't exactly change to another material, let's say rubber for sake of argument (regardless of feasibility), because we don't possess the technology required to create what we need with rubber instead of plastic.

To use a rough RTS game tech comparison, you can't research something like advanced lasers 4 or whatever then expect that this gives you the ability to just start researching ballistics 5.

I have to admit, this post has gotten pretty interesting. I can't help but agree with the majority regarding the fate of the nation due to ECONOMIC collapse. I do however find fault in the "moral argument". As a matter of fact I find it damn near insulting that every time someone brings up the state of our nation "moral decay" is the first thing to fly out of some peoples mouths. Truth is the majority of those people are older citizens who view the past through rose colored glasses. Sex on TV didnt invent the gas guzzler. As a matter of fact that particular, "bigger is better", wasteful mentality was developed by their generation. Gay marriage didnt cut up the Middle East and Africa into pretty little squares regardless of who hated who. That gem of an idea rests with the europeans post WW1. The backlash against Jesus in government didnt create a huge economic differential between the "have" and "have nots". The foundation for that calamity lay in the very founding of our nation. So before people start throwing around "moral decay", consider whos morality is truly to blame for the decline of our nation and most of western society.

Heat is a problem? You prefer an Ice Age? Even if the norht pole melts, filthy low lands like New York City will be submerged, the water will clean it, and in a few (ten) thousand years it will be fertile and usable again. And fertile cold lands like Canada, Alaska, Sibera will get warmer to the point where they can be used to farm. And of course the Tropics will remain as fertile as ever.

That of course is a doomsday scenario, and its not going to happen like that.

Don't get caught up in the panic wave people, be smart. Scientist have been (and usually are) wrong.

Trust Engineers.

"I think that yes, and no. Only a small portion of the citizens knew and/or understood what was coming and happening. But for certain, the ones in power were ignorant to the matter. But then again, the Empire in 450 a.d. had been undisputed supreme for like 300 years, and even if they knew something was wrong, they might not have had the "knowlegde" to know what to do. Do what their ancestors did?? The Legions in those time were not as strong and well trained as the ones that Caesar lead into Gaul. And the collective "wisdom" of the senate was gone, and the emperor(s) knew nothing of running a empire through war."

The legions were less effective because of the nature of the expansion: more and more they were being replaced by auxiliary forces recruited from local regions that they ceased being a "legion" and became, instead, simply an extension of local rule. Put simply, they overextended themselves and ran the treasury dry. As to the senate being "wise", well I think that's wishful thinking. They were no wiser than any other human beings placed in a position of power.


"The name comes from, I beleive, that under the Romans the goverment was highly centralized, when the Empire fell, there was complete anarchy and all forms of organizations collapsed. And people were left leaderless for the first time in like 400 years."

The centralisation of Roman rule was questionable, in particular considering such far-off regions as Brittania (and the pleasant Pictish rebellions my ancestors so loved to instigate there). There was ABSOLUTELY NOT "complete anarchy". Anarchy would define the area as having no or an extremely limited form of governance. This is just not true, there was government and it was tribal and later feudal in form. It's actually an effective form of leadership, very strong, if limited in its range. This form of government doesn't tend towards Empire, for example. People were by no means leaderless. The time period is falsely called a "dark" age because of the predominant belief that it was notable only for a loss of civilisation. culture, and technology. This is absurd; the Saxons, and later the Scandinavian peoples who went a-viking, are often looked upon as the symbol of the great "fall". In truth they were some of the most advanced civilisations of all time, in some ways superior to the Romans themselves.

"Doomsday scenario. Highly possible that is not what going to happen. An exodus is not likely, a relocation is more likely.

I am not worried about the rising cost in gas. Yes it does hurt, but it hurts because I have to cut costs of commodities.

Remember, the pricier gas is, the cheaper solar/wind/etc. energy is.

I am not seeing our doomsday anywhere near our lifetime. Only a change in priorities."


While YOU may not see any trouble in rising cost of gas, I have suprising news for you: many other people do. A very large part of the population can't afford to cut costs, they barely survive as it is, what exactly will they cut from their budget to pay for fuel?

Also, I would like for you to describe "relocation". The government will step in and help? Otherwise I feel you are just repeating what I stated/ I did not mean to say that one night everyone will pack up and make a trip to the cities, my apologies if I gave that impression, but people won't be able to live in suburbia if the supermarkets are no longer carrying food. If businesses can't make a profit then they stop doing what they are doing. How life be when the cost to move the food to suburbia shoots the price of bread to 75 dollars a loaf? It can't be maintained like that. The exodus won't be overnight, it won't even be total, but it will happen and its effect on the urban environment will strain an already strained system.


I must reinforce my opinion that none of this is DOOMSDAY envisioning, there is no such thing. Societies never collapse, they simply change. Sometimes people die when they change. The more complex the society, the more people, the more difficult to change and the more people that die. It is a fact of human existence and has been proven more times than any of us can imagine.

I'm tempted to argue that we are morally superior to our predecessors. I'll limit myself to talking about the USA for this. We no longer have routine lynchings. Blacks can vote and get elected to office, hold any job, etc. Is this not a moral advancement? In the twenties they were still getting lynched for looking at white girls. Women have also seen great improvement in their station. We no longer openly call our enemies Japs or The Hun. Slurs are not allowed in civil society. All this was rampant up til the sixties. So again, moral advancement.

When we fight wars we try to be less brutal. Look at Vietnam or WW2 and then look at Iraq. The country was taken over with minimal casualties to civilians. All that has gone though with the insurgency. Then there's Abu Ghrahib. Who knows how much of that there was in the old days before everyone had a cell phone camera in their pocket. That may be a sign of decline. Authorizing torture - another decline, but I think there was some torture in the old days. It wasn't openly authorized by top officials like it is now. Pressures these days are greater. There had never been an attack on the USA like the 9-11 attack. It was carried out by what were essentially spies. Japan's attack back in WW2 was official and military. Today's threats are from cults that are difficult to associate with recognized country.

Americans in 1900 didn't have to deal with distractions like cars, tv, internet, porn available 24 hours a day in the house, games, excessive amounts of food, etc. There were lots of jobs involving physical labor and people didn't look down on menial labor like they do today.

People were dumb back then compared to now. They may have read more, but they were less educated and scientific knowledge was less advanced. They might have had a better appreciation and interest in intelligent argument, but then again look at forums. You can go to political forums and meet some very bright people as well as stupid or close minded people. Brilliant information is available on the internet and in common libraries, much more than in 1900.

Sex is a lot more open. The pill freed it up so of course sex was given away more freely and an active woman is not looked down on as much as in the old days. Back in the old days though a loose woman would almost certainly get preganant many times, leave lots of uncared for kids, carry diseases that couldn't be cured and so forth. Today we have AIDS.

People drank more and certainly smoked more years ago. Is that a moral advancement?

Kids carry out rampages in schools, but death by school shooting is really fairly insignificant compared to death by car accident or suicide. It's shocking and one feels the threat because of the terror it causes. Probably all the school shooting in the USA in the last ten years wouldn't amount to more than 300 dead in a nation of 300,000,000, literally one in a million. Not worth worrying about.

Drug abuse comes and goes as it always has.

Hydrogen fuel calls are not far beyond our technological ability. Hydrogen fuel cells are a storage mechanism, not an energy source.

The amount of people that don't get this is amazing.

Everyone is entitled to their opinion but there is one thing in the above post that I really must disagree with:

"People were dumb back then compared to now."


"dumb" is subjective. I bet many of those people you spoke of as ignorant were capable of hunting and skinning animals to survive, or farming enough to feed their families, or doing any number of other tasks with any number of other skills.

Lack of scholastic knowledge or knowledge of current events, etc., does not equate to "dumb". I don't know about nano-technology or bio-engineering in comparison with some people, does that mean i'm dumb? Not at all. A hunter that doesn't know what we would consider "basic information" is also not dumb, he simply specialises in other knowledge and skills.


Our predisposition towards saying that certain things make up "basic" knowledge is a dangerous slope. What defines "basic"? My mother thinks that penmanship is "basic" knowledge and should be taught to everyone lest society fall into a pit it can never recover from. Honestly, how many of you would agree with this now? A hundred years from now? It's absurdity. We must be very careful with what we define as "basic". What is basic is defined by society and society is evolutionary by nature.

Yes but the system, as a whole, is considered as a possible fuel source. When I said it was beyond our technological ability, I mean that we do not possess the means of turning it into a viable alternative to batteries or anything else out there.

I'm no engineer and I won't pretend I understand the way any of that works, but the point remains the same: H fuel cells can't be used the way we wish them to be used.

I think I balanced out my "dumb" statement when I originally posted it. I don't know why you'd take offense to it. Are you from 1900? Do I have to worry about offending old timey mountain men and trappers? Read the whole paragraph and put it in context instead of just looking for phrases like "people were dumb back then".

My apologies if I came across as being offended, I wasn't at all. I just wanted to bring to light the subjective nature of that which is considered brilliant. You did, after all, say that people were dumb back then compared to now and, context or not, there are only so many ways to interpret that.

When you said that brilliant information is available now to more people than in the 1900's, I merely wished to make the claim that equally brilliant information was available to a wide range of people then as well, if available through very different sources.

Again, my apologies if I came across as offended, I did not mean it so. Everything here is open to debate, I make it a personal mission to look at any information as applicable to discussion and revision. Everything can and should be questioned, it's how we advance as human beings. How can someone learn something if they never allow alternative viewpoints, after all?

Hmmmm...? You find it insulting that my aforementioned examples were virtually identical to us in their veritable worship of pleasure and money just before their fall...? I do not know whether that was a cause of their fall or simply another symptom, and I do not attempt to say which it is, but either way it is something that appears to show up in civilizations just before their fall... Which is to say that I do not wish to say definitively that moral decay is the thing which must be stopped to "save" our nation, but I am merely attempting to point out yet another symptom (or possibly cause, but again I do not definitively assert that) of our civilization's decline.

And one thing I don't particularly want to point out, but I think ought to be pointed out is that the only civilization that managed to right itself even temporarily is Rome under Octavius. And shortly after Octavius' death, it slid right back to where it was... In other words, we have very little hope for saving our civilization...

I was just pointing out that it isnt our current generations moral decay that caused these issues. I would even venture toi say that it wasnt Romes either. The "morally corrupt" and "decadent" romans werent the ones who expanded the empire to the breaking point. They merely inherited a dying civilization from their forefathers. I merely contend that the same thing is happening to us. The only parts we have left to play as a generation is whether or not we are intelligent and adaptive enough to fix their mistakes. As far as I'm concerned its the "good ole days" people who are truly to blame for the jacked up state of the nation. They fostered in the age of consumerism we all live in today.

Well, as I said, I do not venture to say whether it was a cause or an effect, but it is, at the least, another symptom...

Barely survive as it is?? People in Haiti, in North Korea, in Somalia, etc. are barely surviving as it is. The USA in comparison is rich.

Besides, you started talking of people in suburbans areas. People living in suburbans areas are not hungry poor people who barely have money to pay for food.

Pay for fuel? As I said, and you missed, the pricier gas is, the cheaper solar/wind/etc. energy is. So your scenario of super expensive fuel is almost fantasy. So there will always be afordable fuel, even if it is expensive, it will still be afordable.



I do not believe that is going to happen in our lifetime.



Dumb/ignorant is exactly that, lack of scholastic knowledge or knowledge of current events. Yes, many of those people were dumb.



yes, they can be used like we want to use them and we do posses the means of using it. It is not cheap, but again, the pricier gas is, the cheaper this technology becomes.

Again I say to you, be smart. Do not trust what scientists say, truts what ENGINEERS say.

If you can not distinguish between an Engineer and a Scientist, then you are dumb and should start looking to learn more about everything.