There's never been a shortage of doomsday scenarios. From the dreaded Mayan Apocalypse of 2012 (remember that?) to the havoc wreaked in the movie \"The Day After Tomorrow,\" people have been predicting the end of civilization for as long as there has been a civilization. <\/p>\n
The trouble is, they're sometimes correct: The Roman Empire fell spectacularly, as did the Mayan civilization, the Han Dynasty of China, India's Gupta Empire and dozens of other once-mighty kingdoms. <\/p>\n
But how, exactly, do powerful empires collapse, and why? Researchers now believe they've found an answer, one that has troubling implications for today because we're clearly on the road to ruin. [11 Failed Doomsday Predictions] <\/p>\n
Societal collapse more common than you think <\/p>\n
The researchers' first task was overturning \"the common impression that societal collapse is rare, or even largely fictional,\" as they wrote in their report, to be published in the journal Ecological Economics. [Photos: Life and Death of an Ancient Civilization] <\/p>\n
In fact, they argue, the rise and fall of great social structures is so common a theme in human civilization recurrent throughout history and worldwide in scope that it's more the rule than the exception. <\/p>\n
Most studies of a society's collapse have looked at the specifics of how one civilization declined, citing individual causes such as a disaster (earthquake, flood), loss of resources (soil erosion, deforestation) or human conflict (war, uprising) that led to the particular society's downfall. <\/p>\n
But the researchers (funded in part by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and the University of Maryland, College Park) cast a wider net. They aimed to create a useful mathematical model that could help analyze how any society might fall including our current global, technically advanced, interconnected society. <\/p>\n
The balance of nature <\/p>\n
The model they arrived at takes inspiration from the classic notion of predator vs. prey, sometimes referred to as the \"balance of nature.\" When a deer population grows, for instance, the wolves that feed on those deer reproduce more successfully, too, and so the wolf population grows. <\/p>\n
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Read more: There's never been a shortage of doomsday scenarios. From the dreaded Mayan Apocalypse of 2012 (remember that?) to the havoc wreaked in the movie \"The Day After Tomorrow,\" people have been predicting the end of civilization for as long as there has been a civilization. The trouble is, they're sometimes correct: The Roman Empire fell spectacularly, as did the Mayan civilization, the Han Dynasty of China, India's Gupta Empire and dozens of other once-mighty kingdoms. Continue reading
\nSociety Is Doomed, Say Scientists<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"