| John Baez's blog has a series on how civilizations collapse, first looking at the Anasazi, and then how one might model it using agent-based modeling and also looking at general collapse through differential equations: https://johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com/2013/01/20/anasazi-amer... https://johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com/2013/01/24/anasazi-amer... https://johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com/2014/03/25/civilization... https://johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com/2019/08/26/civilization... James Burke is a science historian and BBC documentarian, and in his first episode of "Connections" a series on the nature of innovation, he talks about how fragile our complex infrastructure can be, and, much like this article, how hopeless individualist survival skills would be once we "leave our technological womb". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XetplHcM7aQ In his later series, After the Warming, a 1988 documentary which imagines what it would look like in 2050 if we failed to act on climate change (in which it predicted refugee crises, wars, hurricanes, mass flooding), and looks back on thousands of years of climate shaping civilizational rise and collapse, from the Ice Age to the Nabataeans to today and beyond. It gets most things scarily right, with the notable exception of failing to see Japanese economic bubble popping in 1991. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qa4aWFDCMqQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YxJLyPSRusc |