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In reply to the discussion: Amazon to Cut E-Book Prices, Shaking Rivals (making Amazon a Monopoly) [View all]Fumesucker
(45,851 posts)There's any number of scenarios that could topple modern civilization without killing the human race entirely, we are actually pretty hard to kill off completely but modern civilization is much more fragile. Rise and collapse is pretty much the story of civilization.
Environmental collapse, meteor strike (particularly an ocean strike), a more energetic version of the Carrington event, even disease.
I'm on the last few pages of Kim Stanley Robinson's "Sixty Days and Counting", he posits a modern FDR who comes in and saves civilization through swift and radical action when environmental collapse begins in China, I'm not so sure that we have another FDR in us, our political system is too venal and corrupt now, worse even than the gilded age. In the book the N Atlantic has already been artificially salted to restart a failed thermohaline cycle, Europe is in a deep freeze that would have headed to at least a mini ice age and they're just starting to pump seawater back up onto the East Antarctic plateau to freeze and into dry basins worldwide to counteract seawater rise from the melting and sloughing of the West Antarctic ice sheet.
I don't think it could happen the way Robinson puts in the book, he posits too much cooperation, we're just too fractious a species for that level of kumbayah-ness. Just look at DU if you doubt how divided we are..