I Find This Sad, But At The Same Time…

…strangely reassuring and well worth a few minutes of your time to read in full.

Western civilization will completely collapse in the next 200 years

Hari Seldon is a fictional character in Isaac Asimov's Foundation series who studied broad patterns of human behavior, and through that study was able to predict the collapse of civilization. The general principle is simple: large masses of humans are similar to large masses of atoms in a gas. Predicting the behavior of any individual atom is nearly impossible, but the prediction of the behavior of a gas–how it will react to changes in temperature and pressure, for example–is simple and deterministic. You don't need to know how each individual atom will behave, because in the aggregate masses of atoms show statistical properties that are invariant. Isaac Asimov's premise in the Foundation books is that large masses of people are predictable for the same reason: the large-scale flow of action is driven by statistical factors that will cause predictable patterns to emerge, even if the behaviors of individuals cannot.

So call me Hari Seldon… because I've been looking at some patterns recently, and I'm convinced Western Civilization will completely collapse within the next 200 years.

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