Forget planet-busting asteroids, earth-frying supernovas and assorted other doomsday scenarios, predicted or not. A study funded by NASA from Goddard Space Flight Center says that industrial civilization could collapse from within. The causes will probably be unsustainable resource exploitation and increasingly inequitable wealth distribution. Goddard is hardly on the fringe of the US science establishment, so its study predicting collapse deserves more than dismissal with a wave of the hand. Any person with a passing familiarity of human history knows that civilization has cycled through the past in a series of rise and fall. The study attempts to quantify this historical data using a cross-disciplinary computer model. The model identifies the most salient interrelated factors contributing to a civilization's decline: population, climate, water, agriculture, and energy. The influence of these factors can converge to produced two social features present when civilizations enter a stage of decline: severe economic stratification into elites and masses, and exceeding the ecological carrying capacity by overexploitation of natural resources. Currently, over consumption is primarily by elites who dribble out a disproportionately small portion to the masses who produce the accumulated surplus. Sound familiar?
The mathematicians and social scientists using the HANDY computer model are not too impressed with the argument that technological advances will rescue modern man by increasing his efficiency. They say that to a point technological improvements can raise the efficiency of resource use, but it in turn also raises the per capita rate of consumption and resource extraction. Under the current parameters in the world today the scientists "find that collapse is difficult to avoid" in a range of scenarios. Elite wealth monopoly protects them from the first detrimental symptoms of demise, but eventually because of mass famine, violent social upheaval, or resource depletion the elites follow the masses into the dust of history like the Romans and Mayans before them. 'Business as usual' is no way to conduct business if you want civilization to survive into the next century.