My vision NASA's gain!

NASA snap of the Earth's view.

Raju Korti
All truth, howsoever profound, carries little weight when it comes from lesser mortals. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in its new-found wisdom has come out with a "revelation" that I had been shouting from the rooftops ever since I can remember. But who is inconsequential Me compared to a superpower's civilian space program?
According to a scientific study funded by the American agency, modern civilization is heading for collapse within a matter of decades because of growing economic instability and pressure on the planet's resources. The NASA has not clarified how many decades.
Civilization experts from the times of Samuel Huntington have been at pains to explain the rapid corrosion to human civilization. Over the last decades, the planet's dwindling resources riding mainly on human greed and pelf have become talking points with activists and those with a futuristic vision. Nations across the world have reported degenerating economies for more than three decades now.
It is apparent that the NASA has stumbled upon this deteriorating scenario by using theoretical models to predict what will happen to the industrialized world over the course of the next century or so and have come to the unimpeachable conclusion that even with conservative estimates things started to go very badly, very quickly.
Surprisingly, the NASA has leaned on past parameters -- referring to the past collapses of often very sophisticated civilizations -- the Roman, Han and Gupta Empires for example. Its observation that the elite of society have often pushed for a "business as usual" approach to warnings of disaster until it is too late" has come at a time when the inhabitants of this planet have started feeling the heat long back.
Economy and culture cannot be separated. They thrive on each other and without giving the slightest of hint as to my serious lack of knowledge on the issue, I will still take the liberty of saying that the decay of civilization is not a new phenomenon at all. But the humankind probably needs someone as authoritative as the NASA to make that point.
NASA researchers are obviously flogging a dead horse by exploring factors they believe could lead to the collapse of civilization -- from population growth to climate change. Anyone with a sense of history and civilization will zero in -- if one has already not -- on how the two can amalgamate to "stretch resources" and "the economic stratification of society into 'Elites' and 'Masses".
Economists have long back painted that while civilization has been elastic enough for eons, the decline is gradual but sure even at the optimal rate. It is only a natural corollary that although much less in numbers, the Elites eventually will consume too much, resulting in a famine among the Masses that eventually causes the society to  disintegrate.
The NASA earnestly believes that "collapse can be avoided and population can reach equilibrium if the per capita rate of depletion of nature is reduced to a sustainable level, and if resources are distributed in a reasonably equitable fashion." The million dollar question is who will control the population and how do nations arrest depletion of natural resources when the powers that be are the first culpable in this universally manifest crime? And "reasonably equitable distribution" is understood and interpreted by the political and social class on its own terms.
Prophets of doomsday have been painting a bleak picture of the Globe for some time now. Physicist Stephen Hawking has already notified the catastrophic low-risk (but high-impact) events that could devastate the world.
I will cap it now that I have staked claim to my vision coming much before the NASA did. The civilization came because of the humans. They should also take the credit for its decimation.