Experts have warned that the world as we know it could be doomed to suffer ‘irreversible collapse’ in the coming decades.
And no, this is not another conspiracy theory cooked up by the Mayans – this time the warning comes from a study funded by Nasa.
Led by applied mathematician Safa Motesharri, a new study made possible by the Goddard Space Flight Centre warns that global industrial civilisation is doomed to catastrophe because of the overstretched demand for resources.
‘The process of rise-and-collapse is actually a recurrent cycle found throughout history,’ explains the academic paper set to be published in the Ecological Economics journal.
A combination of unsustainable resource exploitation, unequal wealth distribution and overconsumption could lead to the collapse of industrialed society within a few decades, it warns.
The study suggests that even well-established, advanced civilisations can be ‘both fragile and impermanent’ – citing the fall of the Roman Empire as a prime example.
Patterns of wealth stratification (such as increased disparity between rich and poor) and the stretching of resources have played a role in collapses throughout history and are prevalent today, the report said.
In order to avert disaster the academics recommend policies to improve a fairer distribution of resources, dramatically reduce resource consumption and slow population growth.
That’s right, experts funded by Nasa have spent months (and presumably many, many dollars) to conclude that the theory set out by 18th century scholar Thomas Malthus was correct after all.