[skissane]

> What makes us think our society is special?

What is “our society”? A particular country or group of countries, or global society?

Certainly any country or even group of countries could go downhill. But, historically, usually when one country is in decline, somewhere else on the globe another is rising. For global society as a whole to collapse, across all countries and continents - that would be something that has never happened before. I don’t even know if we can put a probability on it - how do you determine the probability of something happening if it has never happened before?

[6510]

Everything is very tightly connected now. Products and food are produced very far away and does an impressive bit of traveling during assembly. It's a supper efficient approach but not very robust. It is hard to get an idea of the knowledge hidden/locked in proprietary property but one can expect it to be truly advanced. It would take decades to replicate for other companies.

[tonyedgecombe]

One of the things that has surprised me about the pandemic is how well these systems have held up. There are shortages of some goods, PPE in particular but on the whole our systems have continued working. We haven't been raiding our neighbours for food, if anything it's been the opposite.

[Wowfunhappy]

In the grand scheme of history, the pandemic just isn't that bad. You can imagine a scenario—a much deadlier disease, or a war—in which we lost 5% of the world's population.