Such a collapse or very sharp decline of human civilisation on Earth is inevitable.
We know that Earth will not survive the Sun swelling into a red giant in five billion years time. So that is the upper limit on the time left to us but there are too many other challenges which we are faced with, even right now. Apart from local cosmic catastrophes such as major asteroid collisions, the prospect we face looks like being one of over-population, disease, nuclear war, rising global temperatures, fire, drought, flood, religious zealotry and disrupted food chains… 😨
The population cannot keep increasing for ever; and Earth’s resources cannot last indefinitely. How many people can this planet sustain and how do we feed everyone when the the present fast increasing 7.8 billion world population reaches 10 billion in a decade or two?
How could our descendants live if the world population grows to 100 billion? 200 billion?
Our political leaders can rarely agree on sensible plans for anything beyond their own election cycle - even during the existential crises we currently face.
There are so many reasons to believe, pessimistically, that one day civilisation will peak and enter a decline long before the Sun becomes a red giant. Democracy, compromise, knowledge and critical thinking will be replaced by the dark forces of anarchy, extremism, ignorance and superstition - historic human traits which we have never been able to fully shake off.
Will we survive the covid pandemic and climate change? Will our society recover from these events? If so, what is the next disaster that will threaten our species and when will the graph of human civilisation and prosperity flatten and take a downward nose dive? In a thousand years? A hundred years? Ten years?
As my children used to ask: “are we nearly there yet”?