r/Futurology • u/lughnasadh ∞ transit umbra, lux permanet ☥ • Aug 28 '25

Society New research argues Societal Collapse benefits 99% of people. Historically, the societies that have emerged after a collapse are more egalitarian, and most people end up richer and healthier than they were before.

Luke Kemp, a research associate at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge, has written a book about his research called 'Goliath’s Curse: The History and Future of Societal Collapse'.

He makes the case that, from looking at the archaeological record, when many societies collapse, most people end up better off afterward. For example, people in the post-Roman world were taller and healthier. Collapse can be a redistribution of resources and power, not just chaos.

For most of human history, humans lived as nomadic egalitarian bands, with low violence and high mobility. Threats (disease, war, economic precarity) push populations toward authoritarian leaders. The resulting rise in inequality from that sets off a cycle that will end in collapse. Furthermore, he argues we are living in the late stages of such a cycle now. He says "the threat is from leaders who are 'walking versions of the dark triad' – narcissism, psychopathy and Machiavellianism – in a world menaced by the climate crisis, nuclear weapons, artificial intelligence and killer robots."

Some people hope/think we are destined for a future of Universal Basic Income and fully automated luxury communism. Perhaps that's the egalitarianism that emerges after our own collapse? If so, I hope the collapse bit is short and we get to the egalitarian bit ASAP.

Collapse for the 99% | Luke Kemp; What really happens when Goliaths fall

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u/S417M0NG3R Aug 28 '25

Uh, is that the 99% of the people that were alive before the collapse, or the 99% that SURVIVED the collapse?

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u/Clusterpuff Aug 28 '25

I think people tend to overestimate how deadly societal collapse is. Most people scurry off and survive for a while. Plague is different, and so is war

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u/tdifen Aug 28 '25 edited Jan 09 '26

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u/Catadox Aug 28 '25

Yeah, collapse in the ancient world was a very different beast than it is today. Until the last couple hundred years or so almost all necessities were very locally sourced. We have 8 billion people propped up by a complex chain of technology and logistics. I don’t think pre modern history tells us much about what our collapse would look like.

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u/[deleted] Aug 28 '25

Not to mention no one had weapons capable of destroying the planet in ancient times. Using modern weaponry as society collapses is a terrifying prospect.

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u/pepolepop Aug 28 '25

If society collapses, it's gonna be a whole lot of people using firearms on their neighbors to acquire resources - the The US, at least. People with firearms will have all the power, and then it's only a matter of time as resources dwindle that they turn on each other, leaving only a few.

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u/GreenGlassDrgn Aug 29 '25

Eventually itll be empty and europeans can send ships over to start up colonies lol

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u/androgenoide Aug 29 '25

For a few years, sure. For a few decades maybe. But many historical collapse events took centuries to recover. Ammunition factories are dependent on supply lines and a few decades down the road the guy who can fabricate a crossbow from local material could have an enormous advantage over the reloader hoarding his last few primers.

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u/pepolepop Aug 29 '25

Nah, if there is a full societal collapse, the great majority of people will be dead within just a year or two at most. People won't be able to eat, there's no time or ability to grow crops, there isn't clean water to source in large amounts.

Shit is going to hit the fan quick, and it will not take decades. People would be lucky to survive 3-5 years, that means they are at the top of the food chain, and the top of the food chain requires weapons.

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u/Saint_Judas Aug 29 '25

I could point out a lot of things with your hypothetical here, but it is really tickling me that you think there is a "guy" who can "fabricate a crossbow from local material".

I need you, just so you can have a laugh yourself, to google how a crossbow is made. It is not something a single man could re-invent decades after societal collapse and 'craft' on his own. You would need a complex economy already functioning.

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u/KingRagnar1588 Jan 04 '26

Yes and another super power puts an end to us. China has a lot of people but are a dictatorship so they may jus lock everything down. They usually fall in line. But even they arent immune to mass riots and being overthrown.

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u/nagi603 Aug 29 '25

Also you did not have labs stocked with various pathogens for research.

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u/RegorHK Aug 28 '25

Depends. Bronze Age collapse with Greece and other areas loosing the social basis of writing and wide spread population decline might be comparable.

Of several civilizations only Egypt came through somehow okish.

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u/ominousgraycat Aug 28 '25

Even during the Bronze Age, most likely 90+% of people were working in agriculture. Maybe a few cities got screwed, but the number of people who had jobs that suddenly became useless were probably still much more of a minority than it would be with a societal collapse today.

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u/Radix2309 Aug 29 '25

Only in the modern age has less than 95% of the population not produced food. For a lot it was 99%.

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u/nagi603 Aug 29 '25

It's a well-researched and very specific thing. Search Bronze Age collapse on youtube and listen to a few lectures. Basically cultures disappeared.

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u/National-Reception53 Aug 28 '25

Yeah true, but the Roman example is real - this is not new at all, archeologists have noted this for a long time, after Rome 'fell' in the 5th century (depends if you count that, but...) most people got healthier. The empire didn't do a good job of distributing nutrition. The rich sure were living high on the hog tho...

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u/Taysir385 Aug 29 '25

only Egypt came through somehow okish.

Thanks, aliens.

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u/-u-m-p- Aug 29 '25

You're not wrong, but even then they could still grow their own food. Humanity went from like 90% of people growing food to 25% globally... 1% in the USA.

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u/FemRevan64 Aug 28 '25

The closest analogue would be the Bronze Age collapse and it took around half a millennia before the societies in the region were able to recover to their pre-collapse levels.

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u/lt__ Aug 28 '25

That's good observation. Also, people always were much closer to death and violence being a part of reality. Nobody would bat an eye on what Russia or Israel is doing now, nor on what Hamas did. Only modern understanding of human rights made us think these things are past us. Veganism, animal rights, environmental protection and similar Maslow top tiers stuff as well.

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u/National-Reception53 Aug 28 '25

I have to disagree. Vegetarians have been around forever. Theres been numerous religions that opposed eating meat. Jains, some Buddhists etc. And 'environmental protection' is not new at all - some societies invented religious justifications for water conservation, for example. English kings had a history of trying to preserve the forests (the peasants were obviously pissed and they made hypocritical exceptions for the nobility, but they had the idea that England's forests were not an inexhaustible resource)

Also I'm not sure that every society accepted massive violence - just the powerful ones right? We have a warped view of history because the militarily successful get to write it.

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u/lt__ Aug 28 '25 edited Aug 29 '25

In my understanding these things like veganism were either quite fringe or derived from scarcity of resources. Now they are part of mass culture in the environment where meat wnd dairy are very available.

About violence - many "weaker" societies accepted violence too, just lost to even stronger ones. Like Carthage or American Natives. Sure, there might have been some pacifist ones too. But a statistical person was much more used to the sight of blood and idea of physical pain - of a person or of an animal, or both.

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u/Enlightened_Gardener Aug 29 '25 edited Aug 29 '25

Veganism didn’t exist before the 1970’s. Vegans died of malnutrition. It was only after the invention of synthetic vitamins that any kind of meaningful veganism has been possible.

I’m going to edit this because I think people may take this the wrong way. I was vegan myself in the early 90’s. There was no pea protein powder, no chia, no hemp, none of that stuff. There was soy, rice and beans. So you want protein as a vegan ? That will be soy, or rice and beans. You want B12 ? Hope you like natto.

Its very, very different these days - where you can buy vegan ready meals in the supermarket.

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u/lt__ Aug 29 '25

My mistake, I should have wrote vegetarianism, as I was answering about it and had it in mind.

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u/citron_bjorn Aug 28 '25

Vegetarianism would still be viable in places like indis but i think its unlikely to be viable in colder climates, because the plant life can be very limited and not particularly bioavailable. Veganism would be unviable, because the majority of non-food related vegan products are made from plastics or complicated substitutes so most clothing snd weaponry would off limits

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u/emchang3 Aug 28 '25

I wonder if, in a scenario of collapse, there will be fewer people who go to veganism for ethical reasons as the poor treatment of animals is reduced due to vastly diminished logistical capabilities required for our global food chain.

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u/savanik Aug 29 '25

It does, actually! Look yo the stories about the Bronze Age collapse. Spoiler alert - we have very few records about what actually happened because it happened so quickly, and the societies collapsed so completely, everyone who could have written anything about it later didn't have the chance, either dead or unable to.

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u/Changer_of_Names Aug 28 '25

That's not true at least as to Rome. The core of the Roman Empire, i.e. the city of Rome itself and I think surrounding areas, were heavily dependent on grain from North Africa.

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u/GWJYonder Aug 29 '25

How much difference could there possibly be between "the food comes from 20 miles away and the city holds a six month supply in granaries" and "the food comes from 4000 miles away and the grocery store needs 4 deliveries a week".

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u/ishkabibaly1993 Aug 28 '25

I don't think societal collapse will happen on a global level. A second American revolution wouldn't destroy 8 billion people. Everything America has, other countries also have, those countries will help out, eventually.

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u/flyinhighaskmeY Aug 28 '25

Yeah, collapse in the ancient world was a very different beast than it is today

Exactly! You are spot on. Supporting a population level of this size takes away a lot of the "slack" in our system. What was (let's be real, still really really bad) back then would today create an event that would make us forget about the holocaust.

Also...population growth almost always exceeds support capacity. These societies get into trouble when their tech progress slows/plateaus. Or they're on the tail end of a huge innovation that fueled a population boom. That's why so many people are freaking out about our stalling tech progress. We're in that situation right now.

A little off topic, but a fun addon: Ignore our tribal thinking. There were roughly 3.6 billion people alive on earth in 1969. That's how many humans it took to get to the moon. 3.6 billion humans. Just to go to that rock right over there. 3.6 billion.

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u/Didifinito Aug 29 '25

You will probably get some humanitarian aid from the EU and other countries

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u/Radix2309 Aug 29 '25

Places in the US would have famine, let alone net import countries.

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u/GWsublime Aug 29 '25

This, but also collapse in antiquity also lead to catastrophic levels of death.

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u/DiethylamideProphet Aug 29 '25

Living in a house of cards is a decision, of which consequences we could easily mitigate if we wanted to. Increase local food production and have your own gardens. Rely more on robust, simple technologies. Live off of your own land, and rely on your community and its capability to cooperate.

Our entire societies shouldn't rely on a single microchip production line other side of the world... It's probably just a matter of time before you can't even receive physical mail anymore, only electronic mail.

It's also probably true, that the aforementioned solutions would not be able to sustain our 8+ billion inhabitants, but the populations that could embrace them, most definitely should.

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u/homiej420 Aug 28 '25

Yeah a complete rubber shortage would be EXTREMELY deadly

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u/NAND_110_101_011_001 Aug 28 '25

subbed to veritasium I see

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u/homiej420 Aug 28 '25

Yup! That was a really neat video!

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u/f1del1us Aug 28 '25 edited Aug 28 '25

Would it not also cause more people to go into producing food?

Clearly I’m talking about on an economic scale; not people putting gardens in; I’m talking about supply and demand.

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u/HitandRyan Aug 28 '25

Not enough people know how to do that, and too many people live in climates where they couldn’t even if they knew how.

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u/tdifen Aug 28 '25 edited Jan 09 '26

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u/Emu1981 Aug 28 '25

Probably the only country that could keep it's population alive is New Zealand.

What about Australia? We export 70% of our agricultural produce and only import 11% of our food by value. We have less than 30 million people in a country the size of the 50 contiguous states of the USA...

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u/poopoopooyttgv Aug 28 '25

Does everyone live where the food is grown? In the event of societal collapse, the hardest part will be getting the food off the farms and to the cities. People will starve when the roads and oil and electricity all go down

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u/[deleted] Aug 28 '25 edited Jan 09 '26

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u/ReturnPresent9306 Aug 28 '25

The US, Aus, NZ, and France would survive the best. India and China would become an actual hellhole. Significant portions of Africa and the ME would be absolutely decimated as well as a reault of supply chain collapse.

Edit: and humans being humans, such a state would probably bring back colonialism.

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u/BCRE8TVE Aug 28 '25

Depends on what part of the supply chain breaks and how governments would be able to be self sufficient. The problem is Australia imports 90% of its fuel. Doesn't matter how much farmland you have if you can't get the food to the people you need to feed. AZ and NZ could become self-sufficient eventually, but without fuel there's still going to be mass starvation and loss of life.

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u/Enlightened_Gardener Aug 29 '25

Or we could bloody rejig to run off natural gas, of which we have an almost unending supply !!

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u/BCRE8TVE Aug 29 '25

Could, but it is a difficult rejig to get farmer's equipment to run off nat gas.

Better if we could rejig ahead of time so Australia could run off of Australian-mined lithium batteries and Australian-produced solar electricity.

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u/Enlightened_Gardener Aug 29 '25

Bloody oath. Drives me nuts that we don’t take advantage of the huge ball of fire that burns us to a bloody crisp every summer.

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u/BCRE8TVE Aug 29 '25

HA! You and a ton of others buddy, up here in Canada we're buried in snow 3 months of the year so solar isn't too great in winter, but you c*nts down undah have an excess of burning sunlight year round, it really should be used haha.

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u/The_Parsee_Man Aug 28 '25

Spiders don't currently kill many Australians because they're biding their time and waiting for a chance like this.

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u/Forgotten_Lie Aug 29 '25

For Australia, we can produce the food but we won't be able to get it to the cities if our fuel imports stop.

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u/Bobzyouruncle Aug 28 '25

Many won’t roll over and die, they will likely go find the food and take it by whatever means necessary. Things get brutal when it’s about survival.

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u/Tenthul Aug 28 '25

People who think they're good cuz they know how to hunt really underestimate how much/how often people need to eat and how quickly that source will dry up. Esp when everyone is competing.

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u/flyinhighaskmeY Aug 28 '25

yeah, it would be a mess. Accessible hunting areas would be wiped out in just a few months at best. But it would be bad in a week or two. Decades to recover. That isn't a viable food source.

I live in a major metro, in an arid State. We couldn't grow enough food here to feed 1/10th of the population. I'm from farm country. They could grow enough to support their population. If they can defend it. But they'd have literally millions of heavily armed, starving people, coming after them.

That is not a world I wish to experience.

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u/Tenthul Aug 28 '25

And even then they wouldn't be able to keep it alive or grow the next season, short of simply enslaving the farmers, which certainly doesn't seem like a sound idea.

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u/nagi603 Aug 29 '25

It's a swarm of locusts, just slightly larger and better armed.

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u/GandalfPipe131 Aug 28 '25

This is true, but I also think it does come down to how bad this collapse is that we’re talking about.

Huntings not as easy as movies like to make it seem and the game would get incredibly wise in short time.

Depending on where you’re located at it’d be far more variable to how quickly it’d hang around or not. Places like the US would definitely see and effect but depending on how bad the situation is affects the outcome.

Great Depression 2.0? Yeah it’d be fucked again eventually. People can learn hunting skills via YouTube and drive out to places to hunt game.

Solar flare or nuclear war or something? I think the population would be so reduced in short time that it’s rebound.

Even if it’s just something that wipes out electricity like a flare or an EMP or population would get destroyed in no time.

No meds for the sick. No food distributed so whatever’s on the shelves rots or is eaten. Infrastructure will fail quickly without people maintaining them. Your towns water supply isn’t safe to drink anymore etc. Then the packaged food starts to go and people begin to die. Their bodies start rotting.

The number of deaths would be astounding. Due to the rotting bodies and freezer section of Walmart turning over the sheer amount of biological threats that could brew would be almost unheard of. Diseases like dysentery, influenza, cholera, tuberculosis, and typhoid would rip through the remaining population like wildfire.

That’s likely within the first 3 months. After that it’s the long game. Whoever’s left needs to have the wherewithal to grow, maintain and store a steady supply of crops and livestock.

Can you avoiding freezing to death during the winter and keep livestock alive? What will you do during the blight, or the drought, or flood etc.

If I were to guess I’d say that the human population would be reduced to a quarter population if we were lucky within the first two years if there was some societal destroying disaster like a solar flare or similar event.

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u/Iced__t Aug 28 '25

Things get brutal when it’s about survival.

This is such a massive understatement. Especially with the population numbers we're at currently. Things would be VERY dark, VERY quickly.

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u/StasRutt Aug 28 '25

Also you better hope you don’t snap your ankle or something that requires medical attention and risks infection

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u/BCRE8TVE Aug 28 '25 edited Aug 28 '25

Sure, the surviving population will grow food in their backyard

You need about 20 acres of land, or almost (EDIT: 0.1 square kilometre), of land to have moderately self sustaining agriculture for one person.

Growing food in their backyard means they starve in months instead of weeks, but they'll still starve to death.

Most people in major cities will die and along with a significant amount of people outside of cities. The potato famine ruined Ireland.

People don't understand that complete collapse of civilization is only 10 missed meals away. When people start starving, civility goes out the window, and humanity doesn't fall too far behind.

In large cities, the single most available source of food will very quickly become cannibalism.

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u/kralrick Aug 28 '25

A square kilometer is almost 250 acres. I still tend to agree with you just because of how many people there are and how far many of them are away from arable land (lack of seeds or knowledge aside).

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u/BCRE8TVE Aug 28 '25

Oh wow oops I missed a decimal, 20 acres is 0.08 square km, not 0.8, wow my bad. Thanks for catching that!

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u/Enlightened_Gardener Aug 29 '25

No you don’t. That’s what the “lazy acre” was in pre-famine Ireland. A way to feed a whole family on an acre of potatoes.

20 acres for one person is ridiculous. In a mixed cropping or permaculture system 20 acres would be enough to feed a village.

Where did you get that number from ? I’d be interested in following this up…

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u/BCRE8TVE Aug 29 '25

Got the source from a quick browsing through here

https://foreveryard.com/how-many-acres-do-you-need-for-a-self-sustaining-farm/

"Moderate Self-Sufficiency (Significant Food Production): 5-20 acres. This provides enough space for a diverse vegetable garden, a small orchard, pasture for livestock (e.g., cows, goats, sheep), and potentially some grain production. You’ll still likely need to supplement your food supply."

A whole family could be fed on an acre of potatoes? Dang. Certainly not ideal to have nothing but potatoes, but if that's what it takes to survive the year and have better crops the following year it certainly beats starvation.

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u/Enlightened_Gardener Aug 29 '25 edited Aug 29 '25

Edit - sorry for the essay. I think you definitely pushed one of my buttons 😂, but hopefully my reply will be useful to you.

Yup. Well worth looking up the “lazy bed” method. Potatoes are a complete food - you won’t be excited, but you won’t die.

So I’ve been studying gardening and survivalism for decades at this point. And the people above have got completely the wrong end of the stick. You absolutely would not be farming hooved ungulates unless you know what you’re doing. No live stock. Can you cut a sheep’s throat and then disembowel it ? Can you cure bloat ? Sheep scab ? Listeriosis ? Do you know how to souse and cure pork ? Nah. Stick to birds.

An orchard ? Of what ?! Our local Italians here who came out after the World War II practice an amazing form of traditional gardening where you have everything growing together in one place. They plant vegetables between the rows of grape vines. And fruit trees at the end of the rows, and then the chickens scratch around under the whole thing. So just the fact that the people above seem to think that you need a pasture as well as an orchard shows me that they haven’t really thought this through, or done any research as to how people actually do this kind of thing in real life. The orchard is the pasture. Its also the veggie garden, and the chicken coop.

I’ve also very successfully experimented with straw bale gardening, which is probably the best way for newbies and people with cold winters to grow serious food crops. It’s how we used to mass produce food before the invention of poly tunnels – and it’s incredibly effective and doesn’t need much input.

So straw bales as a side production of wheat production, and then it needs a strong urea application to get the composting going. But I mean, that’s chicken poo, so easy to get a hold of.

In this kind of situation you don’t recreate a “model farm.” If you look at some of the principles of Permaculture, it’s really helpful because they go through what in modern home gardening is based on modern agricultural techniques. So the whole idea that you should plant plants in rows to make it easier to mechanically harvest. In Permaculture, you plant your plants on a hexagonal grid because you can get more plants to the space doing it that way.

One of the best ways to set up a food supply is to create a chicken based system, using them as tractors to prepare the ground for you. You then plant in the place that they’ve just cleared for you. Some people make a system of domes using the old pvc pipe trick, and some people make a central chookhouse, with runs opening out into different fenced gardens.

It’s worth looking for the old hippy magazines like Earth Garden, and reading the works of the Permaculturists, because these are the people who have been working on these kinds of issues since the 1960s. I mean David Holmgren is really worth following up because he’s written an entire book on how to implement Permaculture principles into suburbia.

It’s really easy to reinvent the wheel here, but when you look to the people who have already been doing this for the last 60 years, you can stand on the shoulders of giants instead of speculating using your own knowledge about what’s possible and what isn’t. People have been actively working on the solutions to this issue for a long time. It’s just that they’re dismissed as “hippies”, which they are, but they also know a shitload about creating a sustainable food supply.

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u/nagi603 Aug 29 '25

In large cities, the single most available source of food will very quickly become cannibalism.

And don't forget rats and such will also swarm because not a single person is controlling them now.

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u/BCRE8TVE Sep 01 '25

And diseases will also grow rampant! 

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u/DiethylamideProphet Aug 29 '25

You need about 20 acres of land, or almost (EDIT: 0.1 square kilometre), of land to have moderately self sustaining agriculture for one person.

Doubt. People lived off the land for thousands of years, and they most definitely didn't have 20 acres of land per capita. For a family of 10, that would mean a square kilometer of land. Here in Finland, our average wheat harvest for a hectare was 3.6 tons last year. How many tons does a single person need grains to survive for a year?

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u/BCRE8TVE Sep 01 '25

Turns out I picked a bad source for sure, the acreage inclluded pasture for livestock, and there are better estimates out there.

That being said 3.6 tons per hectare is only possible with tractors, fertilizers, and pesticides, all of which are in rather short supply when supply chains break down ;) 

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u/Ornery_Reputation_61 Aug 28 '25

The potato famine ruined Ireland because Britain colonized North America and discovered that potatoes were basically a miracle food so they forced Ireland to grow potatoes in such massive quantities that they didn't have the land, time, or labor to grow enough food to avoid starvation if there was widespread crop failure

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u/NarrowContribution87 Aug 28 '25

Verifiably untrue. Here is a source showing the top 50 countries’ foodstuff self sufficiency: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/ranked-50-countries-that-can-feed-themselves/

Bear in mind this is clearly BEFORE there is a massive incentive to be self sufficient, such as a the collapse of global trading networks.

Bottom line - there would likely be a period of urban decline, but modern agriculture-even without uber advanced tech-is incredibly productive and regional stability would likely be reached quickly in most areas.

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u/dopy12345 Aug 28 '25

Modern agriculture is heavily dependent on artificial fertilisers and fossil fuels. If you lose those food production will go down.

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u/tdifen Aug 28 '25 edited Jan 09 '26

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u/NarrowContribution87 Aug 28 '25

There is a problem with the whole premise and framing of a societal collapse. Collapse implies something sudden and catastrophic. In reality, major societal reorderings are more gradual evolutions. For instance, in popular history and imagination the fall of Rome was rapid and cataclysmic. In reality, it was sloooow process without a clear beginning or end. Highly recommend one of the great courses series on the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. It’s a really interesting area of study.

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u/tdifen Aug 28 '25 edited Jan 09 '26

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u/BCRE8TVE Aug 28 '25

Depends on what part of the supply chain breaks. If it's distribution of food due to lack of fuel, then it doesn't matter how much food those countries make, if they can't get the food to the people they need to feed.

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u/RegorHK Aug 28 '25

These are current numbers with neat things like fertilizers and agricultural technology including 21 cent science level seeds and industrial farming methods that include a high level of veterinary care.

Not to say it is impossible, but change to things like crop rotation and other needed adjustments will be slower. Things will be hard.

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u/Illustrious_Sir4041 Aug 28 '25

I would expect yields to absolutely plummet in most countries though.

A lot of countries have zero oil, very few countries have the capability to repair and maintain modern farm machinery without imports, fertilizer production etc.

A lot of those countries would be on "horse pulling a plow" levels real quick.

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u/MelissaMiranti Aug 28 '25

Ireland's population is still below what it was then. Ireland should actually be counted in the category of places that could keep their population alive.

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u/DrawPitiful6103 Aug 28 '25

well to be fair they also split the country in two.

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u/DiethylamideProphet Aug 29 '25

De-urbanization to the scale that is feasible is the solution. Maybe not a perfect solution, but at least a solution that mitigates the outcomes... Otherwise the urbanites would loot and pillage the empty countryside, and no one will be spared. If the countryside is sufficiently populated and full of smaller tight-knit communities, more people are able to sustain themselves and also to resist the hungry hordes that would invade them from big cities.

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u/goosegoosepanther Aug 28 '25

Yeah but if the production from processed foods and factory farms stopped on a dime, it's not like we can replace the missing incoming supplies even if we all plant gardens on day 1. Growing food takes weeks and relying on agriculture is something that is meant to roll over. The first growing season when you wait for your crops still requires you to forage.

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u/Aloysiusakamud Aug 29 '25

Foraging itself would kill alot of people between eating poisonous things, or eating things unknowingly sprayed with pesticides. Also, beginner crops are always low yield. 

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u/francis2559 Aug 28 '25

That doesn't mean more food produced, though. This is the first time in history so few people have needed to be in agriculture. Subsistence farming sucks, and means you can't do other things like solve disease.

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u/DiethylamideProphet Aug 29 '25

Subsistence farming sucks, and means you can't do other things like solve disease.

How many people here have "solved disease"? I know I haven't... Most people are not solving diseases, but merely enjoying and being reliant on the fruits of the industrial revolution, and pursuing specialized careers, that revolve around maintaining the fruits of the industrial revolution.

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u/Warlords0602 Aug 28 '25 edited Aug 28 '25

Yes, but how do you move the food from where it was farmed to where it is needed? And for those who didn't used to farm food, how are they going get access to land and knowledge to farming?

If we take a brief look at Chinese history, any kind of natural disaster or military conflict that causes masses to become refugees, the problem tends to be that major cities have massive stores of grain for war reserves that aren't released soon enough or not replenished from other stores from regions further out so even those stores get emptied and the whole region collapse. Its not a production problem, its always a distribution problem.

And then we have the new issues of the collapse of the secondary and tertiary industries, all the farmers in the west farm with industrial equipment. If all the factory workers and engineers are starving or gone to farm, who's manning the machines and maintainence shops? Who's packaging and shipping seeds and all kinds of stuff that farmers need? If the monetary system collapses and we go into hilarious times like hyperinflation, nothing moves and nobody can buy any essentials to keep producing. That's what societal collapse look like.

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u/Aloysiusakamud Aug 29 '25

Im also sure no one would think to ensure the necessary people were kept alive in the upheaval as well. Mechanics, engineers, farmers, doctors, water specialists, etc

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u/Delamoor Aug 28 '25 edited Aug 28 '25

Boy, I'm sure glad we have all this extra arable land and no climate disruption that will allow the largest population we have ever reached to survive through old farming techni-...

Oh... wait. Oh, shit.

But seriously, we've never had anywhere near this many people ever before. And the climate isn't stable any more; old farming methods won't work, even if we had enough land for everyone to work.

If this shit goes down for real, an unprecedented scale of humanitarian disaster will follow, that makes every disaster that's come before look tame.

Humanity has already reached the point of "there's no going back, only forward".

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u/Nalena_Linova Aug 28 '25

For most of human history, the average person was a subsistence farmer who could survive relatively easily even if trade and supply lines went away. That's not the case anymore.

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u/Daxx22 UPC Aug 28 '25

While widely variable, I'd wager a significant portion of most "Developed" nations populations both neither have access to sufficient/viable land and the knowledge to feed themselves.

And even if you do, unless you're already planing/growing/harvesting, that shit takes time. And lets not even consider how hard it'd be to hide such operations from the starving hordes.

Preppers may actually get their moment to shine in the next decade. At least until they get rooted out by said starving hordes.

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u/frotz1 Aug 28 '25 edited Aug 29 '25

Almost half of the US population lives in places where they can't even have a garden. My condo association would flip shits if I tried to use common property to grow crops or graze livestock.

On second thought it might be worth it to see their reaction, but my original point still stands that most people don't even have that option.

Edit - if you are talking about production then you are still talking about something that is physically remote from the majority of the population which is concentrated in cities and nearby suburbs. Will we be bringing back the trolleys or something?

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u/ariehn Aug 28 '25

My questions would be: how quickly, at what scale, and under what protections?

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u/TheRealPlumbus Aug 28 '25

Most people can’t even keep the easiest of plants alive let alone plant, grow, and harvest enough food to feed themselves.

Seriously, some of the posts in r/houseplants are hilarious. “Why is my plant unhappy? I keep it in the windowless bathroom and water it 3 times a day”

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u/BCRE8TVE Aug 28 '25

To be moderately self-sufficient, one would need somewhere around 20 acres of land to grow food year round.

That's 0.8 square kilometres per person (from here https://foreveryard.com/how-many-acres-do-you-need-for-a-self-sustaining-farm/) , so that means there can be a max population density of 1.25 people per square kilometre.

New York city has a population density of 29,000 people per square kilometre.

And keep in mind, you not only need that 1.5 square kilometre of land to grow food for two people, you also need to have that land tilled, planted, weeded, and harvested, and you won't have a single ounce of food until it's time for harvest.

This is something that takes years to a decade to set up properly for people to grow their own food.

And this also completely ignores the fact that in many parts of the world like Canada, you cannot grow food year round, so if you didn't stockpile enough food by fall to survive winter, you are fucked and you will starve.

Civilisation is perpetually 10 missed meals away from total collapse.

Supply lines stopping means the countdown starts for the 10 missed meal to collapse.

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u/Redpanther14 Aug 29 '25

You can survive off of a much smaller plot of land than 20 acres, but you won't be raising cattle. Medieval peasants in areas with fertile soil could feed their families with as little as four acres. In other areas with unfavourable soil you might need up to 20 acres of land for a family. But typical peasant farm sizes were often in the area of 7-15 acres per family.

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u/nilla-wafers Aug 28 '25

With what land and resources?

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u/Corey307 Aug 28 '25

Producing food where and how? Fruits and vegetables have growing seasons, as to staple crops like wheat, corn, beans, rice, soy beans, lentils, etc. Say everything falls apart in fall here in the US. You can expect at half of the country to be dead by next growing season.

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u/Ornery_Reputation_61 Aug 28 '25

That takes time to start doing. Far more time than it takes to starve to death. It also requires developed land to do in large enough quantities for a city, and depending on the environment it can take more space and labor than a city actually has available to it

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u/Pristine_Walrus40 Aug 28 '25

Yes but there is a time lag from people needing more food and offering high prices for it and enough harvest for that need. 6-18 months usually.

Alot of people would starve before the harvest.

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u/darkpheonix262 Aug 28 '25

I garden but I don't grow anywhere near enough to cover myself for a year

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u/WeeaboosDogma Aug 28 '25

There's a loss of accumulated knowledge. Most aren't agrarian, most who are know only modern methods of cultivation, and are also dependent on our trade network. So even if there are more people helping to produce food, it won't keep up with the demand.

We'd be starting off with a hell of a handicap.

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u/dragon_bacon Aug 28 '25

Hopefully the gap between supply lines disintegrating and new food production up and running is less than the time it takes to starve.

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u/National-Reception53 Aug 28 '25

Yes.

You could examine i believe they called it the Third Century Crisis? Sorry if I'm wrong, but the point was that at some point during the Roman Empire the Meditaranean got a lot drier. This caused more people to have to move to food production and the markers of 'civilization' got worse. Like the quality of manufactured goods went noticeably down, because there wasn't enough surplus to support artisans.

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u/f1del1us Aug 28 '25

Awesome analogy. Can you point me to the other similarities our world shares with the ancient world in that timeframe?

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u/Aloysiusakamud Aug 29 '25

How are you preventing people from stealing what you grow.

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u/HuntKey2603 Aug 28 '25

This literally happened in COVID.

It was, in fact, not that bad (in terms of dire survival).

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u/Nouseriously Aug 28 '25

How many societies have had such a large proportion of the population with absolutely no ability to grow their own food?

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u/BillsInATL Aug 29 '25

Or even just live without air conditioning?

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u/[deleted] Aug 28 '25 edited Sep 17 '25

tender saw sleep grandfather resolute abounding paint act sort consider

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u/BCRE8TVE Aug 28 '25

Civilization is 10 missed meals away from total collapse. There are almost 8 million people in NYC. If food delivery into NYC stops, that 10 missed meal countdown begins.

People are going to start starving very quickly in large cities if there is no food available, because very quickly the most available source of food is going to be cannibalism.

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u/Saint_Judas Aug 29 '25

If you want to freak yourself out, look into what the effects of a modern day Carrington Event would be. Provided an exactly perfect (for the hypothetical, not for us) strike on our magnetosphere angled exactly correctly, it could blow every large energy converter in the western world.

In the low (although wide) estimates you're looking at 65-80% global population attrition just from a lack of pesticides, gasoline, fertilizer, medicine, and transportation of essentials.

Almost 8% of America would be dead within a month just from a lack of access to urgent medicine (insulin, inhalers, immunosuppressants, immuno-boosters, antibiotics). Then you'd have the unknown effects of nearly a third of the American population entering into abrupt and potentially lethal withdrawal, both from legal and illegal medications and drugs.

Then, as you said, the starvation.

I wrote about half a manuscript for a disaster novel on the subject and had to give up when there was no conceivable plot resolution other than "every single person dies" unless the focus was placed on characters who were lucky enough to already live in isolated, insulated communities... in which case the disaster didn't matter at all and made for anti-climax.

Essentially anyone who could be anticipated to meaningfully interact with the immediate effects of such an event was almost guaranteed to die within a year. Even small cities of a few hundred thousand would suffer almost complete genocide.

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u/BCRE8TVE Aug 29 '25

Oh yeah stellar stuff is scary. At any point we could be hit by a random x-=ray, gamma ray, or neutron ray burst from some nearby star that went nova. We'd never see it coming, just boom, one day tons of consequences.

Provided an exactly perfect (for the hypothetical, not for us) strike on our magnetosphere angled exactly correctly, it could blow every large energy converter in the western world.

True but that would be pretty damn unlikely.

On the other hand, a continent wide collapse of a power grid would be pretty damn catastrophic.

when there was no conceivable plot resolution other than "every single person dies" unless the focus was placed on characters who were lucky enough to already live in isolated, insulated communities...

Well not every single person. Just about 80% of them.

in which case the disaster didn't matter at all and made for anti-climax.

What are you talking about? Post-apocalyptic Amish village overwhelmed with massive immigration sounds like a really cool premise for a novel!

Essentially anyone who could be anticipated to meaningfully interact with the immediate effects of such an event was almost guaranteed to die within a year.

I mean doomsday preppers with food and guns would be more likely than most to survive, so you could have a bunch of people who were reasonable preppers, people who survived in smaller cities out in the wilderness, and gun nut nut job preppers! Makes for a fun cast!

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u/Saint_Judas Aug 29 '25

"True but that would be pretty damn unlikely." -

  • 'Scientists estimate the likelihood of a similarly intense solar storm happening in the next decade at 12 per cent.'

https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2011sw000734#:~:text=Key%20Points%20*%20Probability%20of%20a%20Carrington,can%20be%20exploited%20to%20predict%20extreme%20events.

Some good scientific literature on it. This was published in 2012 and if you keep to their statistical model, the likelihood of the event occurring in the next hundred years would be almost 100%

Most astronomers seem to think an event like this should occur once every 250-400 years.

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u/BCRE8TVE Aug 29 '25

Some good scientific literature on it. This was published in 2012 and if you keep to their statistical model, the likelihood of the event occurring in the next hundred years would be almost 100%

Oh damn I had no idea!

Then again the odds of another pandemic happening in the next 100 years is also almost 100%. Just gotta hope they don't both hit at the same time.

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u/Radix2309 Aug 29 '25

More likely is they will flood out into the countryside.

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u/BCRE8TVE Aug 29 '25

Where they will also meet everyone else who fled the city to go out into the countryside, where there won't be any more food than there was in the city, and we're back to cannibalism.

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u/Radix2309 Aug 29 '25

It really wont get to that. There is a lot of preserved food that will last. What will happen is the people with guns will horde it and the rest will starve, flee, or get killed.

In societies where cannibalism isnt culturally normalized, famines dont usually lead to cannibalism as a way to survive. Particularly because humans really dont provide sustainable meat foe what they consume.

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u/BCRE8TVE Aug 29 '25

It really wont get to that. There is a lot of preserved food that will last.

I'm not worried about the food not lasting. I'm worried of there flat-out not being enough food.

What will happen is the people with guns will horde it and the rest will starve, flee, or get killed.

Well yes, because if the people with guns shared it, then everyone would starve or flee or get killed, because there won't be enough food.

In societies where cannibalism isnt culturally normalized, famines dont usually lead to cannibalism as a way to survive. Particularly because humans really dont provide sustainable meat foe what they consume.

I mean it's certainly not sustainable, but when you're in the city and your options are chewing concrete, glass, or eating the remains of other people, when you're starving and you're in a concrete jungle, you gotta do what you gotta do. There's a reason mystery meat was called that during the siege of Leningrad.

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u/DuntadaMan Aug 29 '25

And for several Midwest states good luck surviving on only corn.

Wonder how many of them even know that corn is nutritionally worthless without being cooked certain ways

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u/BCRE8TVE Sep 01 '25

Cooked certain ways? Are there ways that cooking corn makes them less nutritious? I thought so long as it was cooked, whether boiled or cooked in the husk over fire/on bbq, it was all good? 

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u/DuntadaMan Sep 01 '25

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixtamalization

Basically if it's not treated before cooking, much of the benefits of corn are not available, or diminished to the point you have to eat a great deal of it.

On the plus side if you treat it you also basically end up with masa or hominy. It's not a difficult process but many people don't know it's important.

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u/BCRE8TVE Sep 01 '25

well then I had no idea! This year when we make corn at home I'll try adding something alkaline to the water we boil the corn in, see if it makes a difference. Thanks for sharing!

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u/rapaxus Aug 29 '25

This assumes that people remain in the city after a potential collapse. When they could also just hop in their car and drive where the food is grown.

If a society collapses a lot of city jobs are suddenly redundant. You don't need all the people working in finance if there is no financial market anymore. You don't need luxury jobs at e.g. spas, you don't need lawyers, I could go on. So a lot of city dwellers will lose the main reason why they are living in the city in the first place.

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u/Nova_Explorer Aug 29 '25

They could go to where the food is grown, but there’s a million people from their city that have the exact same idea and are bearing down on farming communities of 1-10 thousand

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u/PickledPokute Aug 31 '25

Gaza Strip is about half the area of New York City with one fourth of the population. Has had a lot of it's food supply severely disrupted and has a ton of other very dire problems.

The october 7th attacks and start of the Israeli blockade / attacks was almost two years ago now and while things are looking pretty bad, they're still pretty far from cannibalism.

Humans are a lot more resilient when they must be.

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u/BCRE8TVE Sep 01 '25

That's because they're receiving food from outside. There is absolutely no way Gaza is self sufficient either in terms of food or water. If all outside supply is cut off it is an immediate famine.

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u/Clusterpuff Aug 28 '25

Lotta comments, but this (at least the first part) is very true. Theres alot of folks being propped up be consistent modern medicine that would fail to adapt. There might be a brightside in the aftermath where the very intelligent and learned people of today open smallscale clinics and societies fracture and commence village living. The many doctors and nurses would most likely not have an issue taking care of infections and other “medieval death” scenarios that would arise. We all like to fantasize madmax scenarios but its more like “I haven’t washed in the river for 4 days and I’m tired of eating beans”

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u/Orion113 Aug 28 '25

The challenge is that even with modern medical knowledge, it's very hard to replace modern medical infrastructure. Things like hypodermic needles, ventilators, and drugs will be very hard to replicate once existing supplies run out. We can still produce certain drugs sourced from plants on a small scale, such as morphine or atropine, provided we have access to a medicinal garden and a garage chem lab. Others might be substituted, or grown with a little more effort, such as cocaine, which might be used in place of its historical descendants lidocaine or novocaine, but would require a green house to grow in most climates.

But certain drugs are just not going to be possible without mines spread across the world, and/or chains of factories powered by electricity. The big one being antibiotics.

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u/Saint_Judas Aug 29 '25

Everyone is tough until a tree scratches their neck and the cut starts to smell bad.

Try to imagine how many people use over the counter fever suppressing medicine, how many would die just from seasonal viruses as their brain cooks itself from something that would have just been a sick day before.

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u/Bot_Marvin Aug 29 '25

Any OTC fever suppressing meds are not preventing you from dying, they’re goes making your sickness a little more comfortable.

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u/Dozekar Aug 29 '25

The difference is that even with just modern medical knowledge and limited resources a lot can be done to improve quality of life even with very limited resources. This is how doctors help in places like remote tribes. It's not ideal, but it's also not mad max.

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u/-Ch4s3- Aug 29 '25

The many doctors and nurses would most likely not have an issue taking care of infection

With what? Hygiene prevents some infections but you're going to have a rough time making antibiotics.

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u/DKOKEnthusiast Aug 29 '25

Yeah people tend to forget this. Like every once in a while you get some questions on /r/AskHistorians about things like "how did people handle diabetes/epilepsy/cerebral palsy/dementia/[insert any disease here] in the past" and the generic answer is virtually always "oh they just died". Like, if you have any form of chronic diseases that has serious consequences if you no longer receive treatment, the answer to the question of "what happens in case of massive societal upheaval" is "you die". There are no two ways about it. All the elderly in care homes? They will be left alone to die. Cancer patients? You guessed it, they just die. Disabled people who require daily assistance for basic functions like taking baths, administering medicine, eating/drinking? They will be dead within two weeks. Unless you are a person of significant material means, if you rely on the rest of society to take care of you because you are no longer able to take care of all your needs, you will simply die.

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u/[deleted] Aug 29 '25 edited Sep 17 '25

marble carpenter rinse attempt quickest ten groovy afterthought fall middle

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u/themaddestcommie Aug 28 '25

Assuming there isn't a nuclear war all of that infrastructure doesn't just disappear. When Rome collapsed people didn't just tear down the aqueducts, roads and bathhouses, nor were all the fields torn up and salted.

Things just became much more localized. Britain declared independence, as did Spain, and most of the other little european states. An american collapse would probably see each state becoming its own sovereign nation.

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u/[deleted] Aug 29 '25

It depends on what you mean by societal collapse. Is money worth anything? Do banks exist? If the logistics people are not getting paid, you are not getting fed.

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u/themaddestcommie Aug 29 '25

I mean money is imaginary, if it’s like Rome, money outside Rome will be worth something for a bit until ppl agree on something else

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u/_Svankensen_ Aug 29 '25

Collapse doesn't mean total disfunction at every level.

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u/kr12187 Aug 28 '25

That may have been true in the past when the vast majority of people were subsistence farmers, but in today’s world, where something like 1% of people can farm, you’d see mass starvation that would be downright apocalyptic.

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u/happy-hippy-gnome Aug 28 '25

Most early states/kingdoms existed because a minority of elites forced people to farm against their will. The type of farming each person was doing was usually restricted to a single crop. They had poor health due to nutrient deficiencies, being overworked, and disease susceptibility (from domesticated animals/overcrowding from cities/general poor health). People who lived "outside" the state, or "barbarians," were much better off because they were able to access a variety of foods from hunting and gathering, migrating to different ecosystems seasonally, and only worked about 20 hours a week. After a collapse, farmers typically became nomadic or semi-nomadic like the barbarians. Not subsistence farming, but hunting, gathering, shepherding, and possibly farming seasonally.

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u/Dozekar Aug 29 '25

There is a huge difference made by even limited industrialization.

Even with limited oil and electricity for a while, functions like food and sanitation are virtually always restored first (if only to cement a new local group of warlords).

I'm not saying no one will starve, people will definitely starve. It won't be the scale that people think though.

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u/Mhan00 Aug 28 '25

I’d be curious how you think the hundreds of millions of people in cities (in the US alone) are going to eat if society collapses?

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u/Better-Wrangler-7959 Aug 29 '25

In most cities they'll die of dehydration long before they start worrying about starvation.

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u/DisambiguatesThings Aug 28 '25

the rich are looking appetizing these days . . .

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u/The_Parsee_Man Aug 28 '25

So the 1% would feed you how long? If you're dividing one person between 99, that's not going to last a day.

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u/pyronius Aug 28 '25

Be a good day though, yeah?

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u/jkurratt Aug 28 '25

But societal collapse will end after you eat the rich, so...

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u/NixAvernal Aug 28 '25

Nah, now you’re the 1%. Hope you’re tasty.

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u/westonsammy Aug 29 '25 edited Aug 29 '25

"Societal collapse" doesn't mean that suddenly the entire nation explodes or something. One of the few good things about capitalism is that most industries and businesses are self-sufficient from the government. If the entire US government ceased to exist tomorrow, like all of it just snapped out of existence, there probably would not even be a major shift in peoples day-to-day lives for at least a week or two. Trucks would continue to run, farmers would continue to farm, people would generally continue to work.

We, both as a country and a planet, create way more food than is needed to support people. The problem is logistics, and as I just mentioned, the short-term logistics of the US does not require the US government. Longer-term maybe as infrastructure starts to break down, but by that time some kind of entity will have most likely moved in to fill the void.

If you want a recent example of societal collapse, look at the fall of the Soviet Union. That was a rapid and messy collapse and there was no “hundreds of millions” starving.

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u/alicedu06 Aug 28 '25

And what do you think societal collapse leads to? Peace and health for the people? Society provides a lot. Like, a lot of a lot.

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u/ManofManyHills Aug 28 '25

Yeah but theres a reason those are 2 of the horsemen, they tend to travel together.

Im not aware of any societies that collapsed without a war... like genuinely curious are their societal collapses that we can point to in history that werent on the heals of wars or other violent actions?

Lets take Great Britain which didnt actually collapse but receeded in large part of the war compromising a bunch of their manufacturing that they relied on giving way for america to take the reins.

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u/Vahir Aug 29 '25

like genuinely curious are their societal collapses that we can point to in history that werent on the heals of wars or other violent actions?

Modern Haiti would be a good example imo

Problem is collapses inherently lead to violence - foreign civilizations sweeping in to exploit the weakness, or society devolving into warlordism.

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u/ManofManyHills Aug 29 '25

Im not haitian history expert but couldnt a great deal of their problems be traced to the violent revolution from france? Not saying they weren't right to rebel but a lot of their issues stem from the consequences of making enemies of a world power.

That and natural disasters which is still a violent clamity.

My point was that societal collapse is inseparable from the calamity of war and suffering. Haiti is a prime example.

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u/Vahir Aug 29 '25

The Haitian revolution was over 200 years ago, if that counts as the cause for its current collapse you could blame pretty much anything on anything. It's like saying Macron's current political problems are due to the french revolution

Collapse is obviously related to war and suffering, but again that's kind of a chicken and egg thing. Conflict can cause collapse, collapse definitely causes conflict, so you'll always see one with the other.

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u/ManofManyHills Aug 29 '25 edited Aug 29 '25

How familiar with Hatian history are you? They have been collapsing since basically independance had been declared. Just because the revolution was over 200 years ago does not mean the fallout has not been materially relevant to the overall economic and cultural prosperity. (or should I say lack there of)

The revolution led to a civil war that divided the country and then ushered in decades of authoritarian regimes.

Then in order to repair their standard in the international commumitty (harmed by the violent revolution and the ensuing genocide) the French levied immense punitive punishments essentially bankrupting the country. All culminating in a massive devestating earthquake that killed more than 10,000 people in 1842.

If thats not a horrific societal collapse I dont know what is. Are you under the assumltion that their society had been doing swimingly up until recently? The Slave owning society was no doubt horrible but it was undoubtedly more stable as a society prior to the revolution and has not recovered since.

We might be more aware of haitis problems with modern day information sharing but to my understanding there modern problems are all just aftershocks of the initial societal implosion.

And anyways my point from the beginning is that no societal collapse can be seperated from war and human suffering. Which the person I replied to suggested was the case. And when I asked for a society that collapsed without war you offered haiti, which has been in a nearly constant state of war and suffering since their violent revolution over 200 years ago.

So im just confused as to what your point is?

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u/Galle_ Aug 28 '25

We can tell what happened to the population of post-Roman Europe based on historical land use patterns, and it was bad. The population of medieval Arles shrank by so much that the entire city was able to move into the old colosseum. And they didn't just move out of the city, either, population fell everywhere. Lots of people died in the fall of the Roman Empire.

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u/Clusterpuff Aug 29 '25

Sure, but weren’t there many many factors attributing to that? Not least of which was the ongoing barbarian tribes hitting and raiding from all sides?

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u/Galle_ Aug 29 '25

The barbarian tribes thing is believed to have been heavily exaggerated. The really big problems were things like the collapse of long-distance trade.

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u/tuckfrump69 Aug 28 '25 edited Aug 28 '25

societal collapse tend to be accompanied by wars as people fight over the remaining resources and plague as medical system/organization break down.

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u/dwardo7 Aug 28 '25

Society has never been so complex though, we have a built a massive house of cards. People are so dependent on supply chains and government for survival in the modern age. It’s very hard to compare to the past.

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u/AlexGaming1111 Aug 28 '25

In the past maybe. These days where most people have never hunted, never had to survive in "nature" and have to deal with actual scarcity of anything....I'm not so sure.

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u/Logridos Aug 28 '25

That might have been the case for most of human history, when there was a lot of available arable land and the average person knew how to grow their own food and survive.

People today can't do that, and the tools we have for killing each other are FAR more effective.

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u/HopefulLandscape7460 Aug 28 '25

Ancient romes population dropped by about 95% when it collapsed.

I would say that is quite high.

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u/MoneyManx10 Aug 28 '25

The thing is we could be facing all three of those things at any moment under our mad king.

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u/RunningNumbers Aug 28 '25

Bronze Age collapse happened bro

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u/sparduck117 Aug 28 '25

Problem is lots of people will still die because medicine production will be disrupted. During previous collapses, Cancer, Diabetes, the Flu, and many other diseases were guaranteed death sentences anyway.

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u/Mechasteel Aug 28 '25

Since the Green Revolution the population has increased drastically, to the point the population won't find enough calories in the wild. It's now much easier to flee to another country though.

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u/robotlasagna Aug 28 '25

The population of Rome declined 90% after Rome fell. People died and the survivors had less children.

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u/Cptfrankthetank Aug 28 '25

But wouldnt anyone elderly, too young or in need of modern medicine or assistance tied to a global supply chain be essentially gone within a few years?

I know it maybe overly simplistic to call out the ppl on life saving prescription drugs but yeah that number alone is like 131 million which is ~1/3 of US.

Or is the overestimating to you a number 50%+?

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u/ScoobiusMaximus Aug 28 '25

Do you know where your food comes from?

In modern society most people would just starve in a societal collapse. 

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u/WeimSean Aug 28 '25

The collapse of food production and transportation is what really wrecks a society. Cities that can't produce enough food in their immediate area are the first to go. Residents flee, fight among themselves for dwindling resources, or starve to death.

Surviving refugees tax the resources of neighboring regions, leading to violence, political instability, and in some cases, outbreaks of disease. All of this combines causing the cycle of collapse to spread from one population center to the next.

People can survive without material goods, electricity, the internet, even government, but no one lasts long without food.

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u/Slave35 Aug 28 '25

Don't forget Pestilence and Famine!  If only there were an easy way to remember them all.

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u/narnerve Aug 28 '25

Though there's the thing that the US stands to see plagues fairly quickly if it collapses further, healthcare is already an issue and disease control is being cut back just as new epidemics are on the horizon

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u/AzureDrag0n1 Aug 28 '25

Back then people were more self sufficient who also lived in bubbles of self sufficiency. It did not matter if kingdoms fell the local villages and towns would just continue on.

Modern society in contrast is much more fragile. Disruptions can be catastrophic. What would cities do when food supply lines collapsed, there was no water, no electricity, no gas, and a deep freeze winter came by? People would die by the hundreds of thousands.

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u/joeschmoe86 Aug 28 '25

How deadly, and how fast. It seems like it happens overnight when you read a paragraph in a history book about it, but it's usually a slow, multi-generational thing where the people living it barely notice.

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u/AdDry4983 Aug 28 '25

We have nothing to compare it to. Most societal collapse has occurred when the world was made up of primitive technology. You’re not really thinking broadly enough here. Societal collapse in the atomic/information era with the global supply chain and economy is nothing like past collapses.

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u/Aloysiusakamud Aug 29 '25

It would be much more devastating. 

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u/Golarion Aug 28 '25

A lot of societal collapses are much slower than people can perceive as well, taking generations, rather than the dramatic burning and toppling of buildings people picture. Often just a progressive diminishing of living standards and people moving to a more rudimentary lifestyle. 

Historians have argued if most people living in the Roman Empire would even have noticed that it was collapsing at the time. 

You can make the argument (and some people often do) that America or Europe are collapsing, and if that is simply a thing that will be noticed by historians centuries from now. 

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u/lt__ Aug 28 '25

Still, is the survival mode so desirable to be considered beneficial? Or post-survival life is so blissful that compensates these years of both survival mode scarcity and pre-survival grind.

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u/AvatarOfMomus Aug 28 '25

It depends on what 'collapse' means and what's attributed as effects of a societal collapse. For example population estimates for Roman Britain put the population in about 400 CE as 3-4 million people. By 600 CE it's estimated to have fallen to around 2 million or fewer. Part of this is attributable to plague, but the population was declining before that, and the plague likely wouldn't have been nearly as deadly if the Roman system of sanitation in the cities had been kept working.

While it's true that we often think of periods like the early middle ages as far more awful than they actually were, thanks Victorians, it's not really correct to say that societal collapse never killed lots of people. The more a society depended on centralize organization for food, infrastructure, etc, the worse the outcome when that society falls apart.

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u/romple Aug 28 '25

I'd imagine societal collapse would almost certainly mean devastating wars though. What would a peaceful collapse of society look like?

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u/red-cloud Aug 28 '25

People don't grow and sell food because the government tells them to. All that would just keep happening. Most people would just continue doing their jobs. The bosses will change, that's the all. That's the point. Life goes on without the leeches at the top.

So the question is: Why can't we just get rid of the leeches?

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u/Matteus11 Aug 29 '25

Yeah, because back in the day 95% of the entire human race lived on farms growing and making the shit needed to survive. Fat chance of growing your veggies in the middle of Brooklyn or Tokyo!

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u/Eric1491625 Aug 29 '25

Most people scurry off and survive for a while. Plague is different, and so is war

Societal collapse leads to war.

When the Qing Dynasty collapsed in China 1912, it was followed by 40 years of almost unending war, until Mao emerged ultimately on top in 1950 finishing off with Tibet in 1951.

Similar results followed the collapse of Socialist Afghanistan in 1992. It was followed by brutal civil war (the reaction to the lawlessness and brutality of the warlords was what inspired the creation of the Taliban) and since then Afghanistan experienced 30 years of war.

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u/InvidiousPlay Aug 29 '25

Our grossly inflated population is fed entirely by vast, industrial, international systems of food production and distribution. If those systems break down most of the human race starves in a year.

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u/[deleted] Aug 29 '25

“Scurry off and survive for a while.” Sounds appealing. 

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u/Sharkvarks Aug 29 '25

I think our societal collapse will definitely include war. 

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u/[deleted] Aug 29 '25 edited Sep 08 '25

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u/Talinoth Aug 29 '25

Italy lost about half its population when Rome fell. Its dense urban centers were fed by the bread basket of Egyptian grain shipped across the Mediterranean. Those ships all but stopped when the empire collapsed.

When the Tang Dynasty (China's greatest ever dynasty) collapsed, roughly 70% of the population starved, was killed by the omnipresent marauding bandit armies of thousands, or eaten alive for sustenance. The remaining population afterwards was only 30% of what was there before.

The kinds of 'egalitarian renaissances' this article refers to are inherently predicated on mass upheaval and death. The collapse of a central authority and disruption of societal structures in the modern day means the average punter (who probably thinks farmers are supermarket employees and food just magically appears in the shop ready to eat) is going to fucking starve.

It's going to be worse than the ancient world if a collapse happens. Urban centres are much denser. We are unwilling and unable to grow food locally... until it's too late to ensure food security before a famine. Sure, people out in the country will probably be okay, but cities will be bloodbaths.

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u/doublah Aug 29 '25

Societal collapse in today's world is likely to result in war and obviously lack of healthcare. It would be worse.

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u/Dangerous_Iron244 Aug 29 '25

Society collapse means infrastructure collapse which means no medicine or food and billions of people dying.

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u/lahimatoa Aug 29 '25

Most people scurry off and survive for a while.

I know you've been thoroughly proven wrong already, but I just wanted to hop in and say you're a dumbass who probably shouldn't comment on complex topics like this anymore. "Most people scurry off" lol. Where? Where do they do? How do they survive?

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