I have been researching this issue for several months now. Right now I am fairly convinced that we will see a radical change in the society if not a toal collapse. The issue I would like to see addressed right now is the effest of the break down in our power structure on the medical community. Recently the Renton Valley Medical Center experienced a complete shut down in their power supply system. The result was frightening. What would happen if a majority of our medical system went down? Has any one looked at this aspect of this problem? If we loss the medical system we will see a increase in percentage of death possibly equal to the plague of the dark ages. If so we could see a total collapse of our society. No power, reduced medical treatment, reduction in medical treatment increase in death toll, higher death tolls reduction in population and loss of production, increase in demand on medical system vicious cycle resulting in wide spread panic and destruction of society. It took 500 years to recover from this in the middle ages. Am I way off base here?

-- Anonymous, May 21, 1998

Answers

reply to loss of medical system

You raise two interesting points. One is the idea of a negative chain reaction feed back loop in the state of civilization. The other is the comparison to The Dark Ages, wich by the way were not caused by the plague but by the collapse of the Roman Empire. It seems to me that 'the collapse of the Roman Empire' was equivilent to the loss of coherent control, damaged infrastructure, and the consequent loss of information availability to the greater population. The Dark Ages are called the Dark Ages because of the loss of enlightenment, the loss of knowlege. These days we do not have a lot of knowlege, we have a lot of the next best thing; information. When the mainframes and telecomunications crash a sizable chunk of that information is going to implode into oblivion. Add to this damage ot infrastructure caused by power outages, and the loss of controll caused by panic, and we have present the three main ingredents of social collapse just mentioned.

The good news is that all the libraries won't burn, so a new civilization could come back in say 50 years instead of 500. ( But as my Dad used to say "50 years from now who is gunna care?") It seems that hitting an iceburge in mid ocean can lead to a certain amount of inconvience in some cases. The ice is indeed dead ahead. The "Titanic" is going to suffer some "sheetmetal damage". But is it actually going to SINK? Nobody knows. Pray. Pray really, really hard.

-- Anonymous, May 27, 1998

Hello, Robert - You are not way off base. The only question I have is how bad will it be? Howard, you mentioned the Plague. Check The Great Wave - Price Revolutions and the Rhythm of History by David HAckett Fischer. 1315 AD was about as bad as it gets.

-- Anonymous, June 14, 1998