Civilisation hurtling towards its doom at a speed that is beyond human comprehension
According to Stumpf-Bíró, we are living in the Age of Great Acceleration, which we call the Anthropocene. It is an era in Earth's history in which humanity is already leaving the biggest footprint on the planet. It's happening at an exponential rate, and "that's going to be one of the reasons we are all screwed."
because we cannot emotionally and intellectually grasp the speed and scale of the process.
The world is facing a polycrisis, which is a systemic set of problems, i.e. a combination of several crises. On the one hand, human civilisation is consuming resources at an unimaginable rate. Renewables such as water, soil, plants and animals. As their name suggests, they renew themselves over time, but if they are used up too quickly, they are not sustainable. There are also non-renewable resources that cannot be reproduced on a human scale.
- Water: 97% of it is salty, 99% of the remaining three percent is locked up and only a fraction is drinkable. If the Earth were a sphere 1 metre in diameter, all the fresh water would fit in a thimble.
- Topsoil: if the population grows at this rate, we will need to produce 75% more calories by the end of the century, so there will be virtually no arable land.
- Flora: agriculture is responsible for 75% of global deforestation, with 10 million square kilometres of forest to be cleared by 2050.
- Fauna: the animal population has declined to 75% in the last century and 96% of land biomass is now made up of humans and their livestock.
- Raw materials: if we exclude copper, which is needed for renewable technologies, only 18% of it is available on Earth.
- Energy: 97% of the energy consumed globally is used just to maintain the system, and 80% of this comes from fossil fuels.
Waste is another global problem: 80% of plastic ends up in the ocean, 20% is dumped underground. Garbage buried underground emits just as much carbon dioxide as the entire airline industry. Plastic dumped in the ocean causes other harm. Some scientists have estimated the average person might eat 5 grams of microplastics in a week—about the weight of a credit card. Another study breaks that down to up to 52,000 particles annually from various food sources.
If this goes on like this, we will be barren by the middle of the century.
In total, 467 impacts of climate change were identified (in November 2018) that will affect all aspects of our lives. The World Bank reports that at a global average temperature increase of 3 degrees Celsius per year, human civilisation will begin to disintegrate.
It is hard to imagine that a collapse on this scale would not be used by world leaders with authoritarian tendencies to increase their power.
In conclusion, Balázs Stumpf-Bíró outlined the dystopia of a techno-autocratic society, which he personally fears the most.
Cover photo: Ákos Stiller / Portfolio
