From the “garbage in, doomsday out” department.
Apocalypse by 2040? Shock as MIT computer model predicts END DATE for civilisation
An apocalyptic computer model, processed by one of the world’s largest computers in 1973, has predicted the end of civilization by 2040.
The prediction came from a programme nicknamed World One, which was developed by a team of MIT researchers and processed by Australia’s largest computer.
It was originally devised by computer pioneer Jay Forrester, after he was tasked by the Club of Rome to develop a model of global sustainability.
However, the shocking result of the computer calculations showed that the level of pollution and population would cause a global collapse by 2040.
This shows that the world cannot sustain the current level of population and industrial growth for more than two decades.
Australian broadcaster ABC has republished its original report from the 1970s, since there is just two years until a major change is expected according to the computer model.
The model based its predictions on trends such as pollution levels, population growth, availability of natural resources and quality of life on earth.
The eerie calculation has been remarkably accurate in certain predictions, such as a stagnated quality of life and diminishing pool of natural resources.
A fascinating forecast shows that the quality of life is expected to drop dramatically right after 2020.
At this time the broadcasters addreses the audience: “At around 2020, the condition of the planet becomes highly critical.
“If we do nothing about it, the quality of life goes down to zero. Pollution becomes so seriously it will start to kill people, which in turn will cause the population to diminish, lower than it was in the 1900.
“At this stage, around 2040 to 2050, civilised life as we know it on this planet will cease to exist.”
Source: Express UK
Along the lines of Deep Thought in a Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: so we got an answer to when civilization will end, but did nobody think to first ask Australia’s largest supercomputer to define what “civilization” is?
” The model based its predictions on trends such as pollution levels, population growth, availability of natural resources and quality of life on earth.”
Let us take these things 1 by 1.
1) Pollution levels- Even the Chinese are starting to clean up their act on pollution. Even though there are 5 trillion pieces of plastic in the world’s oceans and we are all eating and drinking plastic, there doesnt seem to be any explosion in stomach cancers.
2) Population growth- The World Bank and WHO project world population to be 9.2 billion by 2040 based on current downward trend in the growth rate. Our societies can easily survive with that many people provided we don’t kill ourselves with nanotechology and /or nuclear weapons.
3) Natural resources- The world has never run out of any natural resource ever. Even mahogany is still being harvested albeit illegally in many countries. Whenever a resource starts to get scarce the price goes up and people substitute. The ivory trade has been banned and replacement plastics and resins are used instead. Peak oil has been debunked so many times , I wont even bother to explain it.
4) Quality of life- Ask any African over 60 whether his kids are better off then he was? Quality of life has never been better on the planet even though a billion people are still without electricity. 35 years ago it was over 1.5 billion without electricity. People are living longer and are getting more medical aid to cure medical problems that 100 years ago, they would have had to live with. Today with the internet most of the planet has a library at their fingertips. As Willis Eschenbach would say WHATs NOT TO LIKE?
Meh
Computer simulations
http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html
Yeah. Right!
Quality of life goes to zero? Even the apocalyptic movies show life persisting after a collapse. That is clearly not zero. Broad generalizations always lead to largely stupid conclusions. If the wonderful computer model presented here had reasonable assumptions based on the history of failures predicted resource failures and included the apparent ingenuity of humans, it would have shown different results, unless, of course, their goal was to show apocalypse regardless. Then, it’s a done deal—they got what they wanted.
What most of these people seem to ignore is that, whenever some resource becomes scarce or too expensive, we have yet to fail in finding a cheaper and more abundant replacement. That’s what we do. Humans. As we miniaturize our devices, we are actually using less and less of the component elements. Yep.
So, I guess we cn stop investing in elite universities then …
Jay Forrester died just 2 years ago at age 98.
He was smart. I wonder how much he made off such fools.
An interesting review of a book I remember, Urban Dynamics, is here: LINK
Leftist eco-warriors are so hilarious…
Whenever my Leftist friends start bemoaning the imminent demise of all life on earth from manmade pollution, I show them EPA data on the incredible DECLINE of REAL pollutants in the US just since 1980:
https://www.epa.gov/air-trends/air-quality-national-summary
Just since 1980, REAL pollutants have been slashed as follows:
Carbon Monoxide: DOWN 84%
Lead: DOWN 99%
Nitrogen Dioxide: DOWN 63%
Ozone: DOWN 32%
Particulates (2.5 microns): DOWN 41% (just since 2000…)
As Leftists say, “Pollution is getting more worser and more worser.”…..
Yeah, we’re all gonna die by 2040 from evil fossil fuel pollution–not so much…
Leftism is a mental disease….
To the contrary, Stephen Pinker’s latest, an exhaustively documented tale of the ongoing improvement of the human condition.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35696171-enlightenment-now
(Excerpt from linked article below,)
“If there’s anything the Enlightenment thinkers had in common, it was an insistence that we energetically apply the standard of reason to understanding our world, and not fall back on generators of delusion like faith, dogma, revelation, authority, charisma, mysticism, divination, visions, gut feelings or the hermeneutic parsing of sacred texts.”
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/feb/11/reason-is-non-negotioable-steven-pinker-enlightenment-now-extract
Note that the editors of The Guardian have abandoned rational standards, for spelling. Or either fired all the proofreaders.
I read downwards quickly expecting to see the result of the rerun but there was none.
42 remains unproven. 😀
Could it be ABC scrapping the bottom of the barrel on a’slow newsday”?
Repent! The End is Nigh!
Now where have we heard this before?
Ah yes, from that bearded, wild-eyed, nutter shambling along the street.
When did they move April Fool’s Day to the middle of August?
Actually this sounds very much line the Club of Rome “Limits to Growth” projection, which of course was updated in 2005, and was an early attempt to project the future of the Earth but failed to take into consideration possible changes in technology and behavior.
Possibly a semi-useful forecast of what may happen if we don’t take action and what action we need to take but not very accurate as a prediction.
Like saying your car will hit a wall if you don’t change direction or slow down.
What wall are we going to hit?
strewth!
almost fell off the chair laughing
as soon as i saw Club of Rome…..
I stopped reading at “Club of Rome”…
This proves that you can make any model predict what you have been tasked to predict.
No need to set the alarm clock anymore.
oh well, I’ll be 85
So? I’ll be 87. Whippersnapper.
I think this is great news!! Since the CoR consider themselves to be the “civilized”, their own computer predicts they will be gone by 2050. Ding dong … the witch is dead.
Then the rest of us can go about life as usual.
If the model said that the world would come to an end due to a major conflict between modern radical socialists and liberty loving free market capitalists I might put some faith in the prediction. Yet it doesn’t appear that they even include political conflicts. Oh yea, all political conflict and present day wars are because of CAGW, sorry I forgot (sarcasm).
Funny thing, the population has kept growing, while the environment has been getting cleaner.
As always, they program the models with what they want to happen, not what will happen.
“one of the world’s largest computers in 1973”
You realize that the phone in your pocket is faster, and has more data storage than that 1973 computer, don’t you.
I was a grad student at the University of Michigan in the early 1970s. The US Air Force had just bought a shiny new IBM 360/67 for the University. It was housed in its own building and the mechanical bits took up a good portion thereof. It had 1.5 megabytes of RAM. It cost $14 million (~$85 million in 2018 money).
The $225 phone in my pocket has 2GB of RAM., and 8 core 2GHz processor a separate graphics process or and 160GB of fixed memory. Your phone is better than mine.
I wonder how accurate the predictions would be if you applied the program to say an individual city or country?
Beijing and Paris are both heavily polluted.
Venezuela, Greece, and Italy are failing economically.
Brazil, Africa and a couple of other countries have various population problems.
Overall, the world isn’t going to fail in the next couple of years, but it wouldn’t surprise me if some more “isolated” areas do fail.
Yeah, it was the population bomb in the 70’s, nuclear winter in the 80’s, running out of oil in the 90’s, Y2K, Global Warming, Climate Change, Climate Disruption (when Climate Change wasn’t scary enough), SMOD, and on and on. Being a “scientist” and predicting the end of the world doesn’t seem any more accurate than a guy with long hair and a sandwich board sign. I’m sure the solution, as usual, is to place a small group in charge of EVERYTHING, and dramatically alter the way of life of everybody else.
Sarcasam is a . . .
The world’s largest computer in 1973 had less memory space than a laptop has today, so its predictions were probably worse than today’s climate models, which have also proven to be inaccurate. Weren’t the “experts” predicting an ice age back in 1975?