The Science of Collapse

What 10,000 Years of History Reveals About How Civilizations Fall—And Whether Ours Is Next

Here's something that should bother you: every single civilization that's ever existed has, at some point, stopped existing. Not most. All.

The Sumerians. The Romans. The Maya. Byzantium. Easter Island. Norse Greenland. The Khmer Empire. Ming Dynasty China. Every one. Different continents, different climates, different gods, different languages. All gone.

This isn't pessimism. It's pattern recognition. And the pattern only became visible recently—when archaeologists, complexity theorists, and ecologists started comparing notes. They found something uncomfortable: collapse isn't random. It has a structure.

This series explores that structure.

The Core Insight

Over the past four decades, a strange coalition has been assembling answers. Archaeologists quantifying ancient tax records. Ecologists modeling forest fire cycles. Complexity theorists running simulations of fictional societies. Historians building databases of every state that ever minted coinage. Different fields, different methods, different data.

They keep arriving at the same conclusion.

Complex societies aren't just vulnerable to collapse. They're structurally predisposed to it. Not because leaders are corrupt or populations are lazy, but because the very logic of problem-solving creates a trap. Each solution adds complexity. Each layer of complexity costs energy to maintain. Eventually, the solutions cost more than the problems they solve.

Joseph Tainter called it diminishing returns on complexity. Charles Hall quantified it with EROI—Energy Return on Investment. C.S. Holling showed it's not even unique to human societies—ecosystems go through the same cycle. Growth. Conservation. Release. Renewal. The "collapse" phase isn't a failure. It's a phase transition.

And here's the part that keeps people awake at night: the present moment matches the historical profile more closely than most people realize.

In 2010, complexity theorist Peter Turchin used his database of 10,000 years of societal patterns to predict that the United States would experience major political crisis around 2020. The prediction aged uncomfortably well.

The Frameworks

This series introduces the major theories of collapse and shows how they converge on a single picture.

Every Civilization Thinks It's Special — The opening case: why "this time is different" is always wrong. The Romans thought they were eternal. So did the Maya. So did you. The math doesn't care what you believe.

Tainter: Diminishing Returns on Complexity — How societies become problem-solving machines that eventually solve themselves into paralysis. Why adding more bureaucracy never fixed bureaucracy. Why Rome's "solutions" became what killed it.

Jared Diamond: Why Societies Choose to Fail — The self-destruction thesis. How Easter Islanders watched the last tree fall. How Norse Greenland starved while refusing to eat fish. Rational actors, catastrophic outcomes. The question isn't "didn't they see it coming?" It's "why did they keep going anyway?"

EROI: The Number That Runs Everything — Energy Return on Investment: the ratio that determines whether a civilization can afford complexity at all. Early oil: 100:1. Modern shale: 15:1. What happens when you cross the minimum threshold? History has examples. None of them are encouraging.

Seshat: Quantifying History — Peter Turchin's database of 10,000 years of human societies. Machine learning applied to historical collapse. The patterns that repeat. The predictors that actually work. The projection that points at now.

Resilience Theory: The Adaptive Cycle — C.S. Holling's ecology framework applied to societies. The four-phase cycle every complex system moves through. Why "collapse" is just the release phase before renewal. And why that doesn't mean it's painless.

Case Studies: Rome, Byzantium, Maya — Three civilizations, same pressures, different choices. Rome fell in 200 years. Byzantium lasted 1,000 more—same geography, same threats. The Maya collapsed, then reformed, then collapsed again. What did Byzantium do that Rome didn't? Why does it matter?

Synthesis: Are We Next? — The convergence. When all the frameworks point the same direction. The checklist of collapse predictors and how many boxes we're ticking. The difference between inevitable and likely. The margin for different choices.

The Uncomfortable Implication

This isn't nihilism. It's structural analysis.

The frameworks agree: complex societies optimize for efficiency and lose resilience. They become brittle. When a shock comes—climate shift, epidemic, invasion, resource depletion, political fragmentation—the system can't absorb it. It cascades.

But here's what keeps this from being deterministic: Byzantium survived Rome by a thousand years. Same empire, same pressures, same enemies. Different institutional choices. Different outcome.

Collapse isn't inevitable. But the patterns are real. The warning signs are identifiable. And they're not subtle.

You're not reading this for ancient history. You're reading it because you've noticed the topsoil eroding under your feet and you want to know whether the ground is actually shifting or whether you're just anxious.

The science of collapse won't tell you what to do. But it will tell you what the pattern looks like when a civilization is entering the release phase. And whether the systems around you are optimizing for resilience or just adding more weight to a structure that's already cracking.

Begin with Every Civilization Thinks It's Special, the case for taking the pattern seriously.