PJMedia: by John Hawkins

X-Events: The Collapse Of Everything is not a cheery book. In essence, it argues that the complexity required to underpin modern living is making it increasingly unsustainable.

The crunch comes when we recognize that societies must continually solve problems in order to keep growing. But the solution to these problems requires ever more complex structures. Ultimately, a point is reached where all the resources of the society are consumed just in maintaining the system at its current level. At this point, the society is experiencing a complexity overload; no further degrees of freedom exist for coping with new problems. When the next problem appears, the system cannot accommodate it by adding more complexity. So it collapses quickly through an X-event that rapidly reduces the complexity overload.

You’re probably wondering what sort of “X-event” could create so much havoc that our society would have trouble coping with it for months or years at a time — if ever. Here are a few possibilities.

1) Death by Physics: Destruction of the Earth through the Creation of Exotic Particles!

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