Billions of dollars have been wiped from research budgets, almost 8,000 grants have been cancelled at NIH and the US National Science Foundation alone, and more than 1,000 NIH employees have been fired.
Normal people in the US MASSIVELY underestimate the damage that has been done to the US by destroying science as a career here, it is sickening and to be honest makes it really hard to even want to try to be a part of this shit society in any meaningful way.
The US is racing towards collapse and scientific institutions included but the real collapse story here is the fact that everybody seems resigned to just letting science go away as if it was a fun hobby and not an existentially necessary pillar holding society up and bulwarking our “economic productivity” with new tools, new perspectives and new safeguards to prevent natural catastrophe from robbing us of success.
That is what I will remember most about this time, that the average person in my society sees supporting science with actual money as something akin to getting distracted about sending cool robots to Mars because it is exciting (which is cool and I think we should do it, but a different argument fundamentally then say funding basic vaccine research).
No, many many many of us will die because we have destroyed the funding of science in the US, many are already dying and yet in the midst of this wave of violence try talking to the average USian and they will act like it is a detail that science has been destroyed here, not one of the primary emergencies.
“We have to focus on the economy” US centrists say brushing the blowing out of the keystone piece of the US economy and basic cohesion of systems within it completely out of frame to focus on abstract fabricated ideas like GDP or stocks or some other nearly meaningless factor with respect to our daily lives.
Collapse is many things, but it is always a product of a refusal to listen in favor of orbiting a comforting theology without examining it closely enough to be disappointed.
You almost understand my point.
It’s not JUST that it becomes MORE expensive (than before).
It becomes MORE expensive than THE RETURN. Ie, its actually dependent on the host body which it depletes like a parasitic relationship.
Therefore this acts as a collapse acceleration device.
This is not MY idea, I’m telling you what’s in the scientific literature of the study of collapse.
Like in the middle ages, they would have a whole class of clergy and they can build a beautiful basilica while people are diseased and starving. But it didn’t help their civilization survive. Most of these civilizations collapse due to internal damage to their culture of surviving BEFORE they trigger bio-physical scarcity. Its quite sobering. [ * read Peter Turchin and his theory of elite overproduction causing political economic collapse before physical collapse. The more unproductive members of the society are dependent on the society, the faster and more unstable the collapse becomes.)
Like the last Norse in Greenland didn’t outlive the seals. You get it?
This is why the collapse science people focus on complexity versus simplification
Thought experiment for you: Imagine that we cannot go out and look for any new solutions any more. We would therefore have to solve all our problems with what we already know how to do.
Would there be any point in kicking the can on solving our issues? Or would we need to get started right now? If we couldn’t invest in speculative solutions that will solve our problems tomorrow I think that a great deal of what’s going on today would immediately be suspect.
Like, we hold hope that we can find something NEW that will change how hard survival will be and what it will really cost us.
Precautionary principal today simply gets thrown out if we think we can fix our mistakes in the future.
This is how we created our systemic overshoot in the first place. This is why it pushes peoples buttons to even suggest that this is wrong… The illusion serves a purpose. A lot of people don’t really realize that science failed 50 years ago and that it has been propped up as a secular religion/ideology.
If a person came out of a 50 year coma in 1900 they would not recognize their world at all. In 1950 they would have no clue what’s going on. A person waking up from a 50 year coma in 2026 doesn’t see a new world that they don’t have a basis to understand…