Nasa-funded study: industrial civilisation headed for 'irreversible collapse'

[finehoe]

A new study sponsored by Nasa's Goddard Space Flight Center has highlighted the prospect that global industrial civilisation could collapse in coming decades due to unsustainable resource exploitation and increasingly unequal wealth distribution.

Noting that warnings of 'collapse' are often seen to be fringe or controversial, the study attempts to make sense of compelling historical data showing that "the process of rise-and-collapse is actually a recurrent cycle found throughout history." Cases of severe civilisational disruption due to "precipitous collapse - often lasting centuries - have been quite common."

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2014/mar/14/nasa-civilisation-irreversible-collapse-study-scientists

[Jason]

This should be interesting.  Gotta bookmark this one for later.

[carpnter]

Why is NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center sponsoring this type of study?  Does it have something to do with space flight research?  If we are going to give tax money to NASA, they should be using it for research related to space.

[spuwho]

Why is NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center sponsoring this type of study?  Does it have something to do with space flight research?  If we are going to give tax money to NASA, they should be using it for research related to space.

I am kind of wondering myself.

After some digging, it wasn't Goddard that funded the study, it was the National Science Foundation (NSF).

The professor must have spoken at a British based conference on socio-enviromentalism because only the British press reports this study (and they all say NASA).  He actually developed and presented the model last year (October 2013) according to the think tank Facebook page.

The think tank is called Sesync.

http://www.sesync.org/events/motesharrei-minimal-model