Crisis, collapse etc
All your base are belong to dust
October 15, 2018 — July 31, 2023
How do civilisations pack up and call it a day? What happens then? How? And why?
See also big history.
1 Interesting collapses
1.1 Greenland Norse
Colliding crises lead to collapse thesis: Tim Folger, Why Did Greenland’s Vikings Vanish? quotes Tim McGovern: “You can do a lot of things right—you can be highly adaptive; you can be very flexible; you can be resilient—and you go extinct anyway.” Blames economic collapse due to plague, climate change affecting the harvest, increased rates of drowning in sea storms, and the loss of trade with Europe, because their extractionist economy was brittle (Dugmore et al. 2001; Dugmore, Keller, and McGovern 2007).
Alternative stressor: Greenland’s Vikings may have vanished because they ran out of water (Zhao et al. 2022).