Antes del colapso

Collapse is rapid, uncontrolled, unexpected, and ruinous decline. Throughout history, economic collapses have accompanied the decline and disappearance of empires or entire civilizations. Humanity has also experienced collapses caused by famine and plague, and the same has happened with the exploitation of mineral resources, which has wiped out entire regions. Today we are facing the ruin of our civilization and, perhaps, of the entire terrestrial ecosystem due to climate change and the depletion of resources. But what causes crashes? Why do they occur unexpectedly? Modern science, like ancient philosophy, explains that collapse is not an error, but a characteristic of the universe: entropy, the basis of the second law of thermodynamics. But the good news is that what looks like a collapse may be nothing more than a transition to a new condition that is better than the old. Ugo Bardi proposes the "Seneca strategy" as the way to deal with collapse, whose basic idea is that attempts to avoid it tend to make it worse and that it consists in not opposing the tendency of the system to go in a certain direction, but in directing it in a different way. such that it does not occur. The key to the strategy is to prevent the system from accumulating so much tension that it is then forced to discharge it abruptly.