[HN Gopher] Collapse of Liangzhu and other Neolithic cultures in...
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Collapse of Liangzhu and other Neolithic cultures in response to
climate change
Author : Hooke
Score : 43 points
Date : 2021-11-29 06:09 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.science.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.science.org)
| carabiner wrote:
| Reminds me of the Finno-Korean hyperwar. We could be exploring
| the stars...
| thisiswater wrote:
| A period of extreme flooding is mentioned in Chinese myth,
| lasting multiple generations and resisting massive flood control
| efforts (particularly earthworks of magic , self-reproducing
| mud). Efforts to date the floods of myth tend to land around the
| 2000BC mark, approximately 4000 years ago. Interesting to see how
| this might line up with the archaeological record!
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Flood_(China) for the
| curious.
| christkv wrote:
| I always recommend this channel if you are interested in the fall
| of civilizations
| https://m.youtube.com/channel/UCT6Y5JJPKe_JDMivpKgVXew
| lazypenguin wrote:
| Great podcast, I also recommend it regularly to others. The one
| thing that gives me comfort is that in modern times we have an
| unprecedented ability to manipulate our environment unlike
| those previous civilizations. Not enough rainfall to water the
| crops? Fear not, we can pipe water in from other places,
| synthesize it from sea water or extract it from extreme depths.
| I believe our civilization will have extreme challenges in the
| future but our current technological abilities are really quite
| staggering.
| christkv wrote:
| I think the Greenland one was fascinating as it's not
| something I would read about myself. Like a relative quick
| raise and fall due to climatic change.
| vkou wrote:
| I too felt this way, until two weeks ago, when a little
| unexpected rain wrecked supply lines and transportation
| networks across British Columbia.
|
| The time it took to get them barely-functioning, and the time
| that it's going to take to get them fully restored is
| concerning. I believe that we may be able to adapt to long-
| term, slow-moving catastrophes, that we can all see coming,
| and have all agreed are important to deal with.
|
| Unfortunately, the interests of the people who will be doing
| the work/paying for people to do the work rarely align in
| that direction - or stay aligned for the years and decades
| that it takes to get these solutions built out.
| ksdale wrote:
| I mean, it was a _ton_ of unexpected rain, and as far as I
| know, the only danger was caused by the flooding itself
| rather than any sort of supply shortages. I suspect that
| rather than serve as a warning of our inability to solve
| problems, it will turn out to have been such a non-problem
| (relative to the amount of damage that happened) that it
| will be completely forgotten in 10 years.
| vkou wrote:
| > the only danger was caused by the flooding itself
| rather than any sort of supply shortages.
|
| There was no danger to Vancouver. It's a port city, that
| could always be supplied by I-5. There was a lot of
| danger to Chilliwack, if Highway 1 could not be saved
| (Which, thankfully, did not turn out to be the case).
|
| My parents live in Chilliwack. It was a really scary week
| for them, between their need for prescription medication
| and animal feed.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| >I mean, it was a ton of unexpected rain,
|
| I thought that was the point of climate change, that
| there will lots of 'tons of unexpected' climate events
| happening?
| landemva wrote:
| Our ability to develop and utilize energy is amazing. We now
| use energy consuming machines, instead of human labor, to
| produce abundant food.
| thisiswater wrote:
| It's not our ability to survive as a species that concerns
| me, it's the imminent period of contraction as previously
| abundant resources become expensive, technology-dependent,
| and competed over.
| rvense wrote:
| Here in Denmark, almost none of the food that the actual
| people here will eat _next week_ is in the country yet. It
| 's on its way in from overseas or further south.
|
| Now, about 60% of the surface area is cultivated. Most of
| that (80%, so half of the country all in all) is used to
| grow pig feed. A lot (most, I think) of that meat is
| exported, in exchange for money - which was always very bad
| sustenance for pigs and people alike, and, these days, is
| digital, so in the sense that it "exists" at all, does so
| in the imagination of sand that was tricked into thinking.
|
| There are many adjectives one could use to describe this
| situation. "Resilient" isn't one of them.
| Amezarak wrote:
| Conversely, in modern times we are capable of building
| increasingly complex and fragile systems to manipulate our
| environment that are subject to even more disastrous
| collapses when they eventually fail.
|
| Further, increased hyper-specialization means fewer and fewer
| of the population is capable of engaging in productive
| behavior when the systems fail. (Twitch streamers cannot
| rapidly be recruited to help with electrical maintenance,
| whereas the average neolithic flood victim is approximately
| as useful as any other.)
|
| _Further_ , our social technology appears to be barely
| chugging along, with people more atomized and the social
| fabric fraying, meaning falling levels of trust and fewer
| connections, so coordinating responses to...anything is
| becoming increasingly difficult.
| worik wrote:
| Interesting.
|
| That is exactly what scares me most.
|
| > Not enough rainfall to water the crops? Fear not, we can
| pipe water in from other places, synthesize it from sea water
| or extract it from extreme depths.
|
| Leading to greater collapses with worse consequences
| jjoonathan wrote:
| You know what scares me? The rise of learned helplessness
| and its pseudo-enlightened relative, "we should do nothing
| because anything we do could go wrong."
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > in modern times we have an unprecedented ability to
| manipulate our environment unlike those previous
| civilizations. Not enough rainfall to water the crops? Fear
| not, we can pipe water in from other places, synthesize it
| from sea water or extract it from extreme depths.
|
| Two of those approaches are about as old as agriculture. In
| the modern day you have people saying that (1) variable
| rainfall in California is an emergency, but also (2) we
| shouldn't build aqueducts because that would be expensive.
| egberts1 wrote:
| Aquaducts? What are you driveling on about?
|
| Romans made them look cheap, reliable, and ornate enough to
| last for hundreds of decades.
| perfunctory wrote:
| > Fear not, we can pipe water in from other places
|
| And then you find out that another country wants to pipe
| water from that exact same place.
| headsoup wrote:
| And that these 'other places' are not just infinite
| fountains of reliable water, if they exist at all...
|
| It seems modern expectations suggest that the solution
| always exists, we just need to be clever enough to find it
| (or 'technology' will just solve it somehow)
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