Focus collapse

 Luke is a research associate at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge, and has spent the past five years studying the collapse of civilisations throughout history. He joins me to explain his research, detailing the difference between complex, collective civilisations and what he calls “Goliaths”, massive centralising forces by which a small group of individuals extract wealth from the rest through domination and the threat of violence. Today, he says, we live in a global Goliath. In this astounding conversation, Luke takes us from the Ancient times to the modern day, revealing the root causes of collapse and paralleling them what we’re living through today. He explains the egalitarian nature of our species, and shines new light on what a future could look like free from today’s global Goliath. He reminds us all that we tend to view collapse through the eyes of the 1%, those who have the most to lose, and gives startling accounts of how populations bounced back after thei

For the first 300,000 years of human history, hunter-gathering Homo sapiens lived in fluid, egalitarian civilizations that thwarted any individual or group from ruling permanently. Then, around 12,000 years ago, that began to change.

Dr Luke Kemp is a Research Associate at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, University of Cambridge. He has a PhD in international relations from the ANU and previous experience as a senior economist at Vivid Economics. This episode explores catastrophic and extinction risk, why the topic is understudied, and how we can weigh out the catastrophic risks of climate change and solar geo-engineering.

Today, Nate is joined by Luke Kemp, a researcher whose work is focused on existential risks (or X-risks), which encompass threats of human extinction, societal collapse, and dystopian futures. How can we begin to understand the likelihood and gravity of these ruinous events, and what kinds of responses from people and governments could further undermine social cohesion and resilience? What roles do human biases, hierarchical power structures, and the development of technologies, like artificial intelligence and geoengineering, play in X-risks? How can we collaborate across industries to protect our modern systems through effective risk management strategies? And in what ways do our institutions need to become more inclusive to better democratize decision-making processes, leading to safer futures for humanity?

“We’re losing 120 calories per person, per day, for every degree of global warming.” That stark data point from a 2025 Nature study signals more than a threat to food security, it points to a growing risk to global financial security. Food system instability exposes markets to cascading shocks: inflation, trade disruption, insurance losses and sovereign credit stress. Yet these risks remain largely unaccounted for in core financial systems.

Societal downfalls loom large in history and popular culture but, for the 99 per cent, collapse often had its upsides

New research is warning that the most likely outcome is that human civilization is poised for collapse. As The Guardian reports, a sweeping new historical survey that analyzes 5,000 years and the collapse of more than 400 societies makes the case that we're in for a rude awakening.

The unspoken truth about humanity's frightening future.

An epic analysis of 5,000 years of civilisation argues that a global collapse is coming unless inequality is vanquished

A subreddit tracking apocalyptic news in a calm, logical way comforts users who believe the end The threat of nuclear war, genocide in Gaza, ChatGPT reducing human cognitive ability, another summer of record heat. Every day brings a torrent of unimaginable horror. It used to be weeks between disasters, now we’re lucky to get hours.

Ten kinds of possible collapses examined.

What are the most significant groups in this complex network of our emergent ‘collapse culture’? These groups don’t cohere into a single unified culture that understands itself as singular. Instead, the are thinly connected inside the complex of contemporary culture, a set of linked clusters. Between them, ideas do circulate, but the links between them, as I will return to, are more often established through intermixing in the heads of their proponents, however chaotically this takes place.....

Now that the collapse of our political, economic, social and ecological systems is accelerating, the signs of this collapse, including scapegoating, corruption, and social disorder are becoming more obvious. This is the seventh of a series of articles on some of these signposts.

It is said that George W. Bush Jr. decided to invade Iraq in 2003 because he had read some papers on oil depletion by the Association for the Study of Peak Oil (ASPO). Of course, it may be just a legend, but I don’t see it as impossible, and perhaps not even improbable. Politicians make decisions on the basis of vague ideas, often on the spur of the moment, and in many cases making terrible mistakes. But they normally understand some of the critical elements that keep alive the system. For the US, the critical resource was, and still is, crude oil. So, it is possible that Bush thought that it was necessary to compensate for the decline of the US oil production by seizing the Iraqi resources. That didn’t necessarily imply to start a war, just like filling the tank of your car doesn’t imply shooting dead the service station operator. But that’s the way some people’s minds work.

The governing ideology of the far right has become a monstrous, supremacist survivalism. Our task is to build a movement strong enough to stop them

What if the rules of the game have already sealed our fate? This is a brutal mathematical reality: an unstoppable, self-reinforcing chain reaction in the Earth’s climate system is now underway.

Do civilizations have tipping points that determine their rise and fall? Untangling how and why civilizations fall could, in theory, help humanity avoid a future calamitous collapse. “The reason why complex societies disintegrate is of vital importance to every member of one, and today that includes nearly the entire world population,” Tainter wrote. “Whether or not collapse was the most outstanding event of ancient history, few would care for it to become the most significant event of the present era.”

Lenton, the founding director of the Global Systems Institute at the University of Exeter, was the lead author of the 2008 paper that formally introduced the idea of tipping points in the Earth’s climate system.

In this book Adam Greenfield, author of Radical Technologies, recovers lessons from the Black Panther survival programs, the astonishingly effective Occupy Sandy disaster-relief effort and the solidarity networks of crisis-era Greece, as well as municipalist Spain and autonomous Rojava, to show how practices of mutual care and local power can help shelter us from a future that often feels like it has no place for us or the values we cherish.

For years, climate scientists have warned us of rising temperatures, extreme weather, and ecological breakdown. Now, the very people who calculate financial risk—actuaries—are sounding the alarm. Their latest report projects a 50% collapse in global GDP within decades. That’s not a recession. That’s economic devastation on a scale we’ve never seen.