[pjc50]

> Technology has continually progressed across human history

This is the so-called "Whig view of history", and while it looks superficially true it ignores those cases where technologies have been lost, abandoned, become uneconomic to maintain, or given up for political reasons (e.g. China abandoning its exploration fleets).

How do you account for the European "dark ages", for example?

Collapse is possible: supply chains may be extremely vulnerable to certain risks, such as a war in Korea or an earthquake in Silicon valley. Decline is also possible: life expectancy is starting to fall in the US, as it did in Russia in the post-Communist period.

[trisimix]

People need to stop comparing the fall of pre aircraft civilizations to the fall of a post Internet civilization. You wouldnt compare the fall of the roman empire to the extinction of the dodos. We've made enough strives in technology to where it may be fun to say oh history repeats itself, but at this level of unexplored territory you're going to need facts to prove your point.

[ben_w]

Why? The technology being better does nothing for human nature. The very things that give us so much for so little also make us vulnerable to very small attacks. We have a police force that’s defeating out opponents for the time being, but as the IRA told Thatcher, the defenders need to be lucky every time, the attackers only need to be lucky once.

[magpi3]

>How do you account for the European "dark ages", for example?

The lack of a printing press? From what I have read, the creation of the printing press is what helped lift Europe out of the dark ages and presumably prevented it from ever returning to another one.

[mobilefriendly]

The latest thinking on the European dark ages is that they occurred because of the Huns-- they pushed hordes of other barbarian tribes into and overwhelming Rome, and brought Black Plague which killed half of Europe.

[domevent]

And we all know that mass migrations and plagues can’t happen today! No really, if anything the technology we have makes both of those things much harder to control. Climate change leads to drought and famine, which leads to political and social instability, war, and mass migration (as we’ve already seen recently). Those same forces, along with people loving cheek to jowel, with access to rapid mass transit, is a risk for plagues. The current “solution” is runaway spending on the military, and wars that seem to never end.

[sverige]

Where is climate change the root cause of mass migration?

[pjc50]

Also, resource collapse. Yemen is in the process of running out of water; either some large expensive solution needs to be deployed in a very poor country, or a million or more people need to move or die.

https://thinkprogress.org/yemen-humanitarian-crisis-water-54...

[nrb]

Where will climate change be the root cause of mass migration?

[domevent]

Here’s one recent example: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/03/science/earth/study-links...

And this: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/climate-change-alr...

And: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S003043870...

And: http://time.com/4024210/climate-change-migrants/

... https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2017/09/analysts-warn...

[sverige]

I don't see anything in these articles that proves that climate change is either the primary proximate cause or a necessary cause for the migration from the Middle East to Europe. It is still more simply explained by political expediency than it is by climate change.