Worried about the future?
Here’s the one thing not to worry about: there will always be an inexhaustible supply of people telling the rest of the world that things are going in the wrong direction.
A quick look at the New York Times’ archives comes up with similar thoughts in 1921, 1931, 1979, 1981…
Anyway, present-day “collapse of civilization” fears can be traced back to 1885. I guess at least that bit of “civilization” never collapses..
Maurizio - Omnologos 
I personally argee with the view of Professor Niall Ferguson on this… “history repeats itself”. Not that Professor Ferguson coined that phrase, but in the context of recent historic events. Recent being a couple of thousand years.
Every civilisation crashes.
We may be very clever and successful in our current paradigm, however as Professor Brian Cox points out so succintly, we are constantly moving to a state of higher entropy.
Our current modern social system does have some possible vectors that could result an overt systematic failure.
Along a long enough timeline, every civilisation must crash, in fact the 2nd law of thermodynamics indeed predicts that every single system must crash.
It would not surprise me if there was collapse/catrastrophe meme found in an evolutionary pyschology study and not just 1885.
Like the recent sensation that New Zealand evolutionary psychologist, Quentin Atkinson, has created by claiming that all modern languages have a common root.
Gary Wilson (earthgecko)
2011/Apr/16 at 11:12:58