Well, if you've seen any recent episodes of Here Comes Honey Boo Boo or Keeping up with the Kardashians, this news may not come as that big a shock, but a team of NASA-funded mathematicians, who apparently haven't been watching a lot of reality TV, have come to the conclusion the collapse of human civilization will be "difficult to avoid" if society continues on its current path.
The mathematicians ran a specific set of numbers through a set of four equations representing human society. The study reduces human civilization into four major factors: Elites, Commoners, nature and wealth. Each of those factors was then placed in what the team of mathematicians called a HANDY (Human And Nature Dynamical) model.
The NASA-funded team then calculated these factors within a number of different types of societies, including one they refer to as an "unequal society" as this is the one they feel most closely represents the one we are living in today.
The paper actually focuses a great deal on the trending economic inequality in the world because the researchers claim "ecological strain" and "economic stratification" are the two major factors that consistently plague collapsing societies.
In two separates scenarios the papers claims this predicted collapse could take anywhere from 500 to 1,000 years from now.
While many may find the study steeped in dramatics, current statistical breakdowns of wealth distribution in the U.S. aren't pretty. A few statistics that certainly provide food for thought are:
- According to research done by Oxfam - (a research and humanitarian organization that works toward helping the poor) - the 85 richest people in the world have as much money as half the world's population.
- Almost half the world's wealth - $110 trillion - is now owned by 1% of the population.
- The small group of world's multibillionaires, numbering around 25, have accumulated fortunes (a total of approximately $1.7-trillion) equal to the wealth of the world's poorest 3.5-billion people.
The study was funded by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and among the mathematicians on the research team were Safa Motesharri, an applied mathematician from the National Socio-Environmental Syththesis Center.
The only proof we needed was one look at June "Mama" Shannon and Mike "Sugar Bear" Thompson - the proud parents of Honey Boo Boo - for our proof society was clearly in decline.
The fairly grim findings on the aforementioned study are set to be published in an upcoming edition of Ecological Economics.
