NASA Study finds that collapse of industrial civilization may be imminent

A new study recently commissioned by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center found that increased and extensive exploitation of world resources and an increasing divide in the distribution of wealth may contribute to a collapse of industrial civilization within a few decades. The reaearch project was undertaken by a multi-discipline team of researchers from the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center and a paper describing its various conclusions will be published in the Elsevier journal, Ecological Economics. Researchers modeled a variety of variables, including Population, Climate, Water, Agriculture, and Energy to look at how each created and contributed to stresses which could cause systemic collapse. The research project is based on a the ‘Human And Nature DYnamical’ (HANDY) model, and was led by applied mathematician Safa Motesharri of the US National Science Foundation. A .pdf copy of the paper submission can be found here: A Minimal Model For Human And Nature Interaction

 The researchers make note of the fact that warnings of civilization wide collapse are perceived as "fringe" and controversial, but note that disruption of civilization due to precipitous collapse lasting centuries, is not uncommon, pointing to the Roman and Mayan civilizations as examples. Studying simulations on a variety of civilizations, the research showed that with the civilization most like our present day system, collapse was almost unavoidable.