One mildly interesting fact that MANY Christians get wrong:
There is no lead-up to the apocalypse. The Messiah will return "like a thief in the night" and "nobody, except my Father, knows the hour of my return" (I probably butchered those two quotes). Either way, the Bible is pretty clear (as was Jesus): there will be zero indication the apocalypse is coming. None. It'll just... start.
The book of Revelation also cites various signs that are metaphorical enough to be applied to just about anything.
It's pointless to cite the Bible to defend a theological position, because someone else can cite a different part that can be interpreted to say the exact opposite.
That's why the Catholics have a guy in charge who infallibly tells you how to interpret the damn thing. Instead of having every Tom, Dick and Harry have a stab at misunderstanding scripture.
I wish Christians would realize the Book of Revelations is about the past (probably about Nero Caesar and Roman persecution of Christians) and not the future and stop embarrassing themselves.
Stop trying to figure out which scary new technology is the Number of the Beast. Stop trying to figure out which scary new politician is the Antichrist. Stop trying to figure out what any of that shit means, it doesn't mean anything anymore and the only apocalypse that's going to happen is the one we ourselves create, in part because we persist in our delusion that we don't really have to worry about this world because God's going to burn it all down anyway.
The homeless man currently yelling outside my window is an equally authoritative source of information about the apocalypse as the Bible, and he thinks it's coming soon.
A billion people don't believe there's some truth to what the homeless man outside of your window is saying, and someone leading a legitimate-enough revolution that they're put to death by the King of Rome is probably a tiny bit more believable.
But I get what you're saying either way. I just think it's an interesting factlet.
I think they've gotta maybe define what counts as an "Apocalypse." The active "Fourth Turning" hypothesis expects a crisis on the scale of the Civil War. That degree of crisis has happened lots of times. Certainly the Civil War itself was accurately predicted for decades leading up to it.
Agree. You can always claim prescience by being vague enough. "Something really bad will happen" will eventually come true. I suppose the point of this site is to call out the ones who dare to be more specific.
For anyone curious about academic studies of historical societal collapses, check out Joseph Tainter [1]
> As described in Tainter's Collapse of Complex Societies, societies become more complex as they try to solve problems. [...] Such complexity requires a substantial "energy" subsidy (meaning the consumption of resources, or other forms of wealth).
> When a society confronts a "problem," such as a shortage of energy, or difficulty in gaining access to it, it tends to create new layers of bureaucracy, infrastructure, or social class to address the challenge. Tainter, who first identifies seventeen examples of rapid collapse of societies, applies his model to three case studies: The Western Roman Empire, the Maya civilization, and the Chaco culture.
> For example, as Roman agricultural output slowly declined and population increased, per-capita energy availability dropped. The Romans "solved" this problem by conquering their neighbours to appropriate their energy surpluses (as metals, grain, slaves, other materials of value). However, as the Empire grew, the cost of maintaining communications, garrisons, civil government, etc. grew with it. Eventually, this cost grew so great that any new challenges such as invasions and crop failures could not be solved by the acquisition of more territory. [...]
> It is often assumed that the collapse of the western Roman Empire was a catastrophe for everyone involved. Tainter points out that it can be seen as a very rational preference of individuals at the time, many of whom were actually better off. Tainter notes that in the west, local populations in many cases greeted the barbarians as liberators.
Right, but there's no doomsday prophecies around the Year 2038 problem as far as I can tell. I think it falls in the same kind of category of known problems that are certain to happen at some point. Some other things I was thinking of were the theorized ARkStorm, and also an earthquake that could happen in the Cascadia subduction zone.
It's also not impacting _only_ at that time, many tasks involve dates in the future, and a system dealing with a far enough off date _today_ is already impacted.
So it's not as if "everything works" then suddenly "everything doesn't"
And it's only for operations that care about the sign / compute deltas / use signed numbers, otherwise it's 2106-02-07 06:28:16 UTC.
Not quite; the first attack happened at approximately UNIX time 1000210380, which isn't quite as round as "1 trillion milliseconds". (It was about 2 days after 1e9).
The Limits to Growth book is an interesting read. To quote Box, "All models are wrong, but some are useful". I wouldn't take the dates-ranges estimated from the modelling that seriously, but the modelling assumptions are worth reading about and reflecting on. The overall modelling and dynamics seem pretty plausible to me.
From memory, the rough argument was that society depends upon input flows of energy, resources (metals etc) and food. Society needs to allocate resources and energy to extract these inputs. Energy sources such as fossil fuel reserves are finite stocks, some are cheap to extract (high energy return on energy invested). Over time we consume and deplete the high EROEI reserves and have to move on to consuming the lower EROEI reserves. This means that the fraction of energy society needs to allocate for energy extraction increases over time, so there's less energy for other uses. Similarly, we deplete the cheap to extract stocks of metal required to build and maintain industry, leaving stocks that require higher inputs of metal and energy to extract. Similarly for agricultural yields, as we mine and deplete accumulated stocks of nutrients out of the soil.
The business as usual scenario leading to "overshoot and collapse" behaviour is that we have increasing population, increasing industrial capital and increasing demands for energy, food and resource inputs, while the fraction of energy and resources that need to be allocated to energy, resource and food production grows over time. The fraction of remaining surplus energy and resources that can be allocated to things like education, healthcare, research, art decreases over time. At some point the growing fraction of energy and resources that needs to be allocated to energy and resource extraction becomes so large vs the existing population and industrial base that there simply isn't enough surplus to maintain healthcare, education, research, etc at the same level.
The "Overshoot and collapse" dynamic describes stocks of population, industry etc growing to peaks well beyond sustainable levels before the above dynamics catch up and cause them to rapidly decline.
The researchers did a bunch of modelling of alternative scenarios, exploring how to avoid these "Overshoot and collapse" dynamics.
It's interesting that the "Apocalypse Type" is listed as "Civilization collapse", but they take the date of population peak as the criteria for failing the prediction. I personally don't equal "peak" to "collapse".
Do they specify exactly what qualifies as a successful apocalyptic prediction?
In particular they count a US civil war as an apocalyptic event… lots of countries and societies have been completely wiped out, though, which must(?) be more apocalyptic.
Maybe the point of the site is just that apocalypses tend to happen unexpectedly?
Yea im not sure how a civil war in the United States would affect me as an European... It certainly would, but I'd survive. Isn't the whole point of apocalyptic events to not survive them?
And what exactly is apocalyptic? Suppose someone finds a dinosaur killer and there is a successful deflection mission. I would have no problem calling that apocalyptic.
Readit News
There is no lead-up to the apocalypse. The Messiah will return "like a thief in the night" and "nobody, except my Father, knows the hour of my return" (I probably butchered those two quotes). Either way, the Bible is pretty clear (as was Jesus): there will be zero indication the apocalypse is coming. None. It'll just... start.
It's pointless to cite the Bible to defend a theological position, because someone else can cite a different part that can be interpreted to say the exact opposite.
If someone plans to, they should first read Revelation 22:18–19.
And Revelations isn’t the only prophetic work. Try Ezekiel.
> It's pointless to cite the Bible to defend a theological position
Understandable, but citing the Bible is fairly important in theology, though it should be done within context.
Sure, Judaism was word of mouth a long time, and that’s great. I personally can’t remember much, so I think referencing text is fine.
Stop trying to figure out which scary new technology is the Number of the Beast. Stop trying to figure out which scary new politician is the Antichrist. Stop trying to figure out what any of that shit means, it doesn't mean anything anymore and the only apocalypse that's going to happen is the one we ourselves create, in part because we persist in our delusion that we don't really have to worry about this world because God's going to burn it all down anyway.
It is threadsafe. The documentation is very clear about this.
But I get what you're saying either way. I just think it's an interesting factlet.
Dead Comment
> As described in Tainter's Collapse of Complex Societies, societies become more complex as they try to solve problems. [...] Such complexity requires a substantial "energy" subsidy (meaning the consumption of resources, or other forms of wealth).
> When a society confronts a "problem," such as a shortage of energy, or difficulty in gaining access to it, it tends to create new layers of bureaucracy, infrastructure, or social class to address the challenge. Tainter, who first identifies seventeen examples of rapid collapse of societies, applies his model to three case studies: The Western Roman Empire, the Maya civilization, and the Chaco culture.
> For example, as Roman agricultural output slowly declined and population increased, per-capita energy availability dropped. The Romans "solved" this problem by conquering their neighbours to appropriate their energy surpluses (as metals, grain, slaves, other materials of value). However, as the Empire grew, the cost of maintaining communications, garrisons, civil government, etc. grew with it. Eventually, this cost grew so great that any new challenges such as invasions and crop failures could not be solved by the acquisition of more territory. [...]
> It is often assumed that the collapse of the western Roman Empire was a catastrophe for everyone involved. Tainter points out that it can be seen as a very rational preference of individuals at the time, many of whom were actually better off. Tainter notes that in the west, local populations in many cases greeted the barbarians as liberators.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Tainter
So it's not as if "everything works" then suddenly "everything doesn't"
And it's only for operations that care about the sign / compute deltas / use signed numbers, otherwise it's 2106-02-07 06:28:16 UTC.
I've checked https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_formatting_and_storage_bu... and I can't see what I could be muddling it up with, either. Spooky!
Deleted Comment
From memory, the rough argument was that society depends upon input flows of energy, resources (metals etc) and food. Society needs to allocate resources and energy to extract these inputs. Energy sources such as fossil fuel reserves are finite stocks, some are cheap to extract (high energy return on energy invested). Over time we consume and deplete the high EROEI reserves and have to move on to consuming the lower EROEI reserves. This means that the fraction of energy society needs to allocate for energy extraction increases over time, so there's less energy for other uses. Similarly, we deplete the cheap to extract stocks of metal required to build and maintain industry, leaving stocks that require higher inputs of metal and energy to extract. Similarly for agricultural yields, as we mine and deplete accumulated stocks of nutrients out of the soil.
The business as usual scenario leading to "overshoot and collapse" behaviour is that we have increasing population, increasing industrial capital and increasing demands for energy, food and resource inputs, while the fraction of energy and resources that need to be allocated to energy, resource and food production grows over time. The fraction of remaining surplus energy and resources that can be allocated to things like education, healthcare, research, art decreases over time. At some point the growing fraction of energy and resources that needs to be allocated to energy and resource extraction becomes so large vs the existing population and industrial base that there simply isn't enough surplus to maintain healthcare, education, research, etc at the same level.
The "Overshoot and collapse" dynamic describes stocks of population, industry etc growing to peaks well beyond sustainable levels before the above dynamics catch up and cause them to rapidly decline.
The researchers did a bunch of modelling of alternative scenarios, exploring how to avoid these "Overshoot and collapse" dynamics.
"In 2010, Turchin published research using 40 combined social indicators to predict that there would be worldwide social unrest in the 2020s"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Turchin
In particular they count a US civil war as an apocalyptic event… lots of countries and societies have been completely wiped out, though, which must(?) be more apocalyptic.
Maybe the point of the site is just that apocalypses tend to happen unexpectedly?
https://github.com/TimSchell98/PyWorld3-03