Bet this will be the gloomiest report you read all year:
A new study sponsored by Nasa's Goddard Space Flight Center has highlighted the prospect that global industrial civilisation could collapse in coming decades due to unsustainable resource exploitation and increasingly unequal wealth distribution.
Noting that warnings of 'collapse' are often seen to be fringe or controversial, the study attempts to make sense of compelling historical data showing that "the process of rise-and-collapse is actually a recurrent cycle found throughout history." Cases of severe civilisational disruption due to "precipitous collapse - often lasting centuries - have been quite common."
Of course this is from NASA, the same institution that gets so hysterical over global climate change, so maybe I won't panic just yet. "Unsustainable resource exploitation and "unequal wealth distribution" are very familiar villains, aren't they? Sure enough, later on we find:
Currently, high levels of economic stratification are linked directly to overconsumption of resources, with "Elites" based largely in industrialised countries responsible for both:
Those damn Elites, ruining it for everybody. Bring in the United Nations redistribution police to set things right, and somebody get my cave ready for me.
