Unfortunately, there's more for us to learn from the fall of Earth than I would like. A look at it invites a look at our modern Fundamental Meritism--itself modeled on a scarcity, a resource of Sophont talent.
So long as talent is rare, we are fine. Unfortunately, now as before, automation threatens it. Between the rise of robotics, the growth of the Banners, and us being on the cusp of solving the cloning problem, we may tip the scales into a failure of Meritism at any time.
Perhaps we are in our own twilight.
Causes of Death
An interconnected web of symptoms and failures
The Return of Skeptics
The growth of information technologies such as the internet brought with it a rise in skeptic thought. It became difficult to discern truth from fabrication when sensational opinions garnered more attention than complex facts, which resulted in a culture of suspended judgement—skepticism.
In modern times it is generally accepted that a growth in skepticism in a society is a red flag of propaganda and social engineering. It is a weapon used to deadlock public decision-making by polarizing and prioritizing opinion and delaying judgement. The societies of Earth grasped the notion only when it was too late to act on it.
This skepticism lead to the growth of several problematic antiscience groups, which I will detail ahead.
Climate Change
Every healthy world goes through a climate cycle, but an explosion of unchecked industrialization in a very small time reduced the timescale of climate shift by a considerable factor. Greenhouse gases damaged the ozone layer, raising the average global temperature by several degrees and triggering a massive meltoff of glaciers and ice-shelves.
This meltoff resulted in massive desalinization of Earth's oceans, resulting a period of violent storm activity that left coastal populations destitute and unsupported in the wake of record hurricanes, while inland dwellers saw unprecedented tornado activity.
The process also interrupted the Gulf and Labrador streams, allowing polar temperatures to edge south. Continents with more vertical shape than horizontal saw a high disruption and die-off of life in their climate bands, including widespread crop death and entire segments of the food chain going extinct in just a generation.
Some regions of the Earth saw booms in crop growth due to longer growing seasons and shorter frost seasons. They became the economic powerhouses of their time and funded speakers who supported skepticism of climate change.
Worldwide, coastal populations were massacred by storms and sea levels rising. Many were pushed inland, forcing a sudden growth in communities in regions better suited for the long, hot summers and frequent storms and flooding.
Disease
Anti-medical sentiment saw a return of disease which took Earth multiple generations to fix once exacerbated by lack of health care and the emergence of super-bugs. Tight communities formed in increasingly crowded cities, drawn often along economic lines and walling (sometimes literally) the healthy from the sick. Countrysides, largely abandoned after repeated economic downturns drove people to the city, became a haven for the communes of wealthy promedicals.
The Twilight of Capitalism
While the whole world did not openly embrace capitalism, it did have to partake in it due to the prevalence of capitalistic systems in First World Countries.
Capitalism drove change and growth, leading to the development of its own obsolescence by way of automation towards post-scarcity. Capitalism, which relies on scarcity to survive, turned to new tactics such as fabricating new forms of scarcity or holding random things which today are a fairly basic right under most models of Fundamental Meritism.
This, of course, lead to the exacerbation of rights issues by promoting financial disparity. This caused it to ignore many of the other issues in this list.
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Author's Notes