Collapsecon Level 1 – The beginning of the end

WARNING : I DO NOT THINK THIS IS GOING TO HAPPEN IT IS JUST FOR INTERLECTUAL INTREST PLEASE READ ALL PREVIOUS BLOGS BEFORE COMMENTING

So what would the  start of our civilisations collapse look like, well like every complicated system we would start to see warning signs around the edges before failure, but what would these failures look like and how fast would they occur?

Well let me talk to you about two concepts that have been very important to my intellectual understanding over the years, the first is occam's razor which simply states that “all things being equal the simplest explanation is normally the correct one”; this rings true in so many areas of life and science its not even funny; the reason why this is important is that in a failure situation a system(i.e. civilisation) will not function at a high level(i.e. rationally) it will function at a very simple level(basic instincts), and failures in the system will not be caused by complicated issues but very basic issues, such as non access to food or communication.

The second is that complicated systems fail in a cascade formation, cascading is actually again a very simple concept it just means that a bunch of small failures can lead into a catastrophic failure, a good example of this is in plane crashes; plains have many many backup and redundant systems; but a number of small failures normally lead to a big one.

So what do these have to do with the failure of our civilisation, well primarily if our civilisation fails I believe it will fail because a few very simple disruptions could cause cascade event that could bring down civilisation far more rapidly than most people can imagine.

So what are these simple factors that keep a civilisation running?

Well you can split the fundamental requirements of our civilisation into the following main areas of need:

-Food
-Water
-Transport
-Communication
-Broadcast Communication
-Security
-Electricity
-Access to money

These main factors(I am sure I have left one or two out but you get the idea) keep our civilisation together; and any one failure in itself would not cause a wider failure of civilisation. The problem stems with this simple belief I have:

The more complex a civilisation becomes the more likely and the more quickly it will fail.

The internet could be the single most destructive force in our civilisation by the very fact we rely on it so much, not just as users but the very systems we rely on to keep us functioning everyday. So you only need a few pieces of the puzzle to fail to cause a catastrophic failure.

So lets take an example lets take out for instance transport; maybe a big oil company goes bust, or drivers go on strike because one of the transport companies goes bust; but anyway suddenly(and we have seen this to some level) people start panicking about fuel, start panic buying and before long access to fuel becomes impossible, at this stage it is fine there are still many things that can be done to resolve it but lets just say this is un-resolvable within a short time span say 7 days.

The first thing is that many cars and trucks start failing on roads and highways, initially the police will clear them but it will hit a critical mass where you cannot drive and transport comes to a halt, this causes two major problems first even if a resolution is found to the initial problem, the distribution becomes impossible in its own right because the fuel cant move anywhere.

The second and more serious problem is firstly food cannot be distributed and nor can some  energy products(such as coal as trains rely on diesel) even though food will cause civil unrest in days(supermarkets have something like only 3 days of food before they become empty) the energy product distribution is far more troublesome.

But we have many sources of energy I hear you say, nuclear, gas – yes but lets look at coal, an energy source that accounts for 50% of the energy production in the US, the problem is as we will see with the internet later on, is that these systems are intrinsically connected, a failure of a few coal plants puts so much strain on the electricity grid the whole grid will collapse, even if parts of it collapse the ripple effects will be huge especially with communication.

Ah communication this is where we were leading, for those unlikely few that don’t know our internet communication system was built by the military just for a failure like the one we are talking about, if parts of the internet protocol(TCP/IP for us techies) fail the system is suppose to redirect through any other node automatically, therefore the failure of one part of the system will still let the rest of the system work. And it would have done, if we did not use it for everything; you see what will really happen if a few major nodes(because of power failures) go down is we will effectively launch a massive denial of service on ourselves, the system will get so clogged up with people and systems trying to pass information through it that it will become so slow that no meaningful data will be able to be transferred.

At this point we have a real problem, you see most people these days cannot work without access to the internet, but more worryingly most critical systems cannot work, a major failure in the communication structure would probably bring to their knee’s  everything from mobile networks to banks.

I believe this could happen in less than 21 days from a major failure of one or two parts of the sytem.

What happens now? I will tell you in my next post....

BTW I have not talked about things like military, government, police, civil unrest, differences between urban and country as I will cover those aspects in later posts.