[barbequeer]

this line got me:

> under what conditions do you believe the civilization you're living under will collapse? [...] Oh, you just haven't made that list yet? [...] Or you could take the question from the other side and list the conditions that are necessary for your civilization to continue to exist. That's an interesting list too.

I've always dismissed collapse talk as "batshit crazy" as the author says. but he raises good points here. maybe I'm not batshit crazy enough.

[stevenAthompson]

It still seems pretty crazy to me.

In the wired article the author says he thinks climate change will disrupt trade routes, but obviously society would route around the damage as long as it remained profitable to do so. The only scenario in which this hypothetical makes sense would be mass causality events like pandemics or wars that prevent travel and trade.

So we're talking about a hypothetical situation in which global trade has halted almost completely for some reason, and has been stopped for a very, very long time. This means that the majority of the worlds population are either dead or dying, which means that YOU will be either dead or dying as well.

Even if we accept the premise (a tall ask) AND we assume you will happen to be one of the survivors because you're "special", wouldn't it make more sense to prep by building a cargo ship so trade can resume sooner than it does to build apocalypse proof micro-controller code?

[vdupras]

Trade routes as we know them today are made possible by Pax Americana, which is fading as we speak.

[sunrunner]

> mass causality events like pandemics or wars

Luckily neither of those things has happened in the last few years.

[hnthrow90348765]

It is mostly handwringing about unrealistic scenarios as these types generally assume that all militaries, emergency response groups, every book, factory, and source of expertise completely disappears and it's up to you, the lone hacker on a farm or something to become the source of expertise through a squirrel-cache of carefully curated information. That's very unlikely to happen simultaneously for every single country and if it does it's probably an extinction event.