News this week from a NASA sponsored study on the possibility of civilization collapse and how it might happen. The study was led by applied mathematician Safa Motesharrei and looked at five factors leading to historical collapses of past civilizations such as the Roman empire: population, climate, water, agriculture, and energy.

To paraphrase the study, which you can read more about at The Guardian, civilizations collapse when these five factors combine to create two social issues:

1. Too much strain on our ecological context to the point where our natural habitat fails under the load of our consumption.
2. Increased stratification between the rich (Elite) and the mass of the civilization (Commoners).

I find this very interesting as I have just begun reading Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler's Abundance: The Future is Better than you Think. I haven't finished the book, but their premise is how our advancements are outpacing the diminishment of our resources. According to the book's Wikipedia article, there are four main points:

1. Technologies in computing, energy, medicine and many other areas are improving at an exponential rate and will soon enable breakthroughs that today seem impossible.
2. These technologies have allowed independent innovators to achieve startling advances in many areas of technology with little money or manpower.
3. Technology has created a generation of "techno-philanthropists" who are using their billions to try to solve seemingly unsolvable problems such as hunger and disease.
4. The lives of the world's poorest people are being improved substantially because of technology.

As the founder of the X Prize Foundation, not to mention his background as an engineer and physician, Diamandis is certainly a technologist. So his viewpoint that our technological advancements can and should help us are probably not as objective as they could be. Still, I find what I've read so far to be engaging and promising.

Is it possible to use technology to head off a collapse? The NASA study responds to these "technology as savior" assertions with:

"Technological change can raise the efficiency of resource use, but it also tends to raise both per capita resource consumption and the scale of resource extraction, so that, absent policy effects, the increases in consumption often compensate for the increased efficiency of resource use."

I'll give more weight to the team of scientists that worked on this, but is there more information we can consider? According to Bill Gates most recent report, improvements in third world health systems - especially with a focus on infant care - decreases the average family size, in some cases from 8-10 down to 2-3. Parents who know they will depend on their children to care for them as they age are more likely to have a greater number of children if the chance of each dying before reaching adulthood is over 30% enough. (This is quoted in Abundance as well).

Will slowing population growth solve this issue? It will help a great deal by slowing how quickly we might arrive at civilization collapse. Yet, China is a great concern to ecologists as the rising middle class requires more resources to fill their homes with Western style appliances and their driveways with cars. Will the same happen in Africa? If it does, the resources become even more strained under the weight of rising average needs, not just the Elite's growing consumption.

The NASA study offers another quote focusing on how we can avoid collapse:

"Collapse can be avoided and population can reach equilibrium if the per capita rate of depletion of nature is reduced to a sustainable level, and if resources are distributed in a reasonably equitable fashion."

Is this true? According to Abundance:

"...the value of the ecosystems services our environment now provides (for free) has been calculated at $36 trillion a year - a figure roughly equal to the entire annual global economy."

I'm no economist, but it seems if we can find a balance between what we use and what the Earth offers we can negate damage to our existing ecosystems (On page 19, Abundance uses the example of providing two burner cook stoves to rural Africans as a way to decrease deforestation by up to 90%). Metals, petroleum (until solar and nuclear provide a majority of what we need), and rare elements will need to be harvested, but perhaps we can find better ways to recycle from used materials. Can we reach a global point where what we take is equal to what the planet provides?

This is one of those topics I find endlessly detailed. There are just too many moving parts. Are we headed towards man-made calamity? I certainly believe we are. Can we avoid it through connecting the last billion as Nicholas Negroponte plans to accomplish? There are several examples in Abundance of how cell phones in Africa have offered substantial increases in the quality of life through access to medicine, employment, trade and communication. If it's that simple, lets set Nokia to max production.

Let's toss one more expert into the mix and consider his thoughts on history through Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, Jared Diamond's work on why and how societies collapse and one of my favorite books. In his work, Diamond provides the context of various historical societies and the factors leading to their eventual collapse. He identifies a five point framework of issues that can lead to collapse:

1. Climate change - "...warmer or colder or dryer or wetter..."
2. Environmental impact - Human destruction of their natural resources.
3. Hostile neighbors
4. The collapse of essential trading partners.
5. Failure to adapt to environmental issues - "Political and economic and social and cultural factors of a society that make it more or less likely that the society will perceive and solve its environmental problems."

To get a quick overview of this work and these five points, you can watch 18 minutes of his TED talk introducing his five point framework on why societies collapse.

It's an eye opener and the book offers some chilling evidence paralleling what we hear about the global impact of human consumption today. I'm still mulling it, trying to figure the most important trends and whether they are sustainable. Sadly, I know of three human sins that have remained consistent through time: greed, envy and wrath. Can we overcome these weaknesses at the social level? If not, I fear the NASA study is right and too many of our cultural accomplishments will fail from environmental failure and our systemic inability to adapt.

Maybe we should start with this: what can we give up to provide our children with better chances? Your car or phone or large house? Or do you believe advancements just over the horizon will make these sustainable?