this post was submitted on 29 Apr 2025
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Collapse

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This is the place for discussing the potential collapse of modern civilization and the environment.


Collapse, in this context, refers to the significant loss of an established level or complexity towards a much simpler state. It can occur differently within many areas, orderly or chaotically, and be willing or unwilling. It does not necessarily imply human extinction or a singular, global event. Although, the longer the duration, the more it resembles a ‘decline’ instead of collapse.


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[–] [email protected] 1 points 32 minutes ago

Just for fun I decided to make a map of what I think a post Union American might look like

  • Free America: Collection of Liberal forces mostly backed by California, they have become so successful that they conquered traditionally conservative territory
  • Republic of Texas: Self explanatory, undemocratic Oligarchy and relatively successful
  • Union of American States: Loose union of agricultural states, highly unstable. Each state basically acts in their own intrests at the expense of the union.
  • United Confederacy of America: Ruled by a strongman dictator, economically semi-liberal, politically authoritarian, religiously fundamentalist (under the new United Church of America). Contains elements of Fascism, oligarchy, theocracy, classical fascism, liberalism, and corporatism. United States of America: Compromise centrist Democrat attempts to reconsolidate the nation, he fails. Whats left of the US is just shadowy forces consisting of the military (or parts of it), corporations, intelligence, and unkown government personal. Nobody knows who the president is, nobody knows whos in the senate, all people know is that resistance is illegal and so is resisting. They have no clear goals other than unification, they have no clear government policy, they recognize nobody, and they are held together exclusively through force and emergency wartime powers (the constitution is officially still in place but an amendment is passed that efficiency disables it indefinitely).
  • Republic of Canada: Liberal Canadian government but highly unstable due to influx of American refugees and war
  • Republic of Alaska: Its called Alaska but thats just the name, in reality its more of a broad coalition. They establish a classical liberal government but suffer from extreme instability. They also sell guns to Free America (smuggled from Russia)
  • Republic of Hawaii: Hawaii but an Independent Republic, parliamentary and vaugly social Democratic
  • Free Canada: Collection of Canadian troops who lost contact with the main army. They are actively working to reestablish contacts and reunite.
  • Confederation of Canada: Following Liberal rule the Canadian Conservatives formed a far-right authoritarian state.
[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 hours ago

Tanks firing on the white house?

Is Boris Yeltsin still alive? Can we get him to stand on a tank again?

[–] [email protected] 9 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

The US will nuke itself to defeat its internal enemies.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 hours ago

You can't have traitors if you kill anyone who could be a traitor (everyone)

[–] [email protected] 9 points 5 hours ago

it was slow collapse much like the USSR, have been going on since republican started taking over election rhetoric.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

TL;DF. Is there a timeline that shows how long we get to suffer under this mess before it gets better?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 hours ago

Well the USSR fell 34 years ago and they are being ruled by the same autocrat dictator that they first elected 25 years ago, whether he's in the presidency or pulling the strings as prime minister.

Buckle up, the bigger they are the harder they fall, and the U.S. has been the biggest of them all. Best you can do is take care of you and yours and try to build relationships with your local community, that's what I'm doing. We're going to be on our own, D.C. will leave us with nothing but still expect total obedience and tax revenue. It's going to be rough.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

You guys really need to start rebelling.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 hours ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 hours ago

Burn shit, lie to cops, do a Luigi.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 8 hours ago

Any minor world that breaks apart falls together again.

[–] [email protected] 38 points 11 hours ago* (last edited 11 hours ago) (3 children)

Uhhh pretty sure we didn’t have a nuclear reactor meltdown.

…but we were in Afghanistan until a humiliating withdrawal a few years ago…

Shit

[–] [email protected] 41 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

Oh, we've long outdone Chernobyl. Industrial pollution, oil spills, microplastics, regular plastics, PFAS, overfishing, habitat destruction... The modern ecological disaster caused by the US alone, before you even add in the rest of the planet, is so unfathomably large in scale that honestly it doesn't even warrant a comparison to Chernobyl.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

Chernobyl was such a uniquely singularly destructive event that also contributed to financially cracking the USSR - Russia is still spending enormous amounts of money on it to this day. The nuclear incidents in US history and many other energy related disasters were terrible and have had major consequences, but Chernobyl, again as a singular event, is without parallel.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

The US releases more radiation entirely uncontrolled over every five year period than the Chernobyl event.

Chernobyl is over exaggerated. Coal power has done more damage, and continues to do more damage than the totality of all nuclear incidents, and it does so every 7 years.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

Chernobyl is exaggerated

Ask the dead from Pripyat what their opinion on that is

[–] [email protected] 14 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

Ask the 20-50x more cancer patients downwind (up to 50 miles) from any coal mine or plant what they think of a few thousand dead.

More people have died from coal related radiation related cancers than lived in the entirety of pripyat.

Nuclear, by the numbers is the safest power source next to solar. The rmb reactors of Chernobyl, per mWh, are safer than any implementation of coal that has ever existed or will ever exist.

[–] [email protected] -5 points 6 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago) (1 children)

Dude I explicitly acknowledged the US has had energy disasters - I said they were “terrible” and resulted in “major consequences.” Don’t pull this bullshit

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 hours ago

I'm not talking about disasters, that's just coal operation. Nominal operation.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 11 hours ago (3 children)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accident

Not counting nuclear reactor accidents and other man-made disasters like Bhopal.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 10 hours ago

Three mile island isn't comparable to Chernobyl, particularly not in the context of how it impacts a nations stability.

Chernobyl cost around $900 billion, inflation adjusted, and the cost is rising because it's controlled, not resolved.

Adjusted for inflation, three mile island cost around $5 billion.

To put it in scale, it'd be like the US having a disaster that cost around $7.5 trillion to resolve today. It's the type of economic shock that can make nations fail.

Bhopal, while a terrible disaster, cost the US nothing beyond the cost of not extraditing someone.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 hours ago* (last edited 7 hours ago)

A poof of radioactive steam got loose at Three Mile Island. To this day, no studies have found a correlation of higher cancer rates, neither among the people on the ground, nor among the people living in the area. And no one was hurt on Day 1.

Know why the incident is top of mind for folks thinking on nuclear disasters? The China Syndrome, a movie about a catastrophic plant meltdown came out less than 3 weeks before. People shit kittens. I was only 8, but I still remember the panic.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 11 hours ago

These incidents were decades ago. Awful, but as such don’t parallel the relationship between Chernobyl and the collapse of the USSR.

[–] [email protected] 34 points 11 hours ago (2 children)

The billionaires buy up everything they don't already have and we become a shithole Oligarchy like Russia?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 hours ago

Already ahead of schedule, I see

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 hours ago* (last edited 7 hours ago)

That'll just be the East Coast. The rest of the US will balkanize and advance while isolating trumplandia which will obviously stretch from Florida to New York.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 hours ago

Next they start trying to make homosexuality illegal

[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 hours ago

Another Beatles song will show its age?