A mass extinction of life on Earth as a result of willfully generated climate change is certainly one of the most daunting outcomes that civilization currently faces. But it is certainly not the only danger.
Nuclear war, killer asteroids, coronal mass ejections, artificial intelligence, pandemic, super-volcanoes, and many other events of lessening probability have the potential to end civilization as we know it before all of the honeybees die.
Leaving aside the certainty of climate catastrophe, what other events could occur that have the potential to destroy our civilization?
The really boring dystopia of unsustainable production. We’ve been producing a culture tied to unsustainable labour practices, fossil fuels and materials. We’re racing down the road toward a dead end and calling it progress.
Unsustainable means “cannot be sustained”, rather than the more commonly accepted “not hippy-dippy green enough”.
Cheap technology, plastic everything, big box stores full of food and products from overseas, etc. These will all go away, because they cannot be sustained.
With luck, it can be a slow wasting away of the things we’ve taken for granted. We may have time to pick and choose which technologies to save that could help maintain a similar quality of life (plastics for healthcare, permacomputing, renewable energy infra, advanced agricultural techniques).
Without luck… we could lose a sizable percentage of the population is a very short period of time.
This is inseperable from political collapse, though. It’s hard to imagine our societies losing a hundred years of “progress” without a ton of people embracing authoritarian and reactionary politics, civil war, genocide, etc.
This view seems to intersect with complex system failure, whereby it is observed that the more complex a system, the greater likelihood of failure.
Most likely, humanity is going to exterminate itself through political instability (haves versus have-nots) and with political collapse, end its ability to have functional economies, returning us to subsistence hunter-gatherer with small holding farms level.
