How long can a civilization survive before it collapses? ‘Stable utopias are the least likely scenarios’

In the mid‑20th century, when humanity discovered it had the ability to wipe itself out, Albert Einstein and Robert Oppenheimer imagined a symbolic clock measuring how close we were to disaster. But the threat was never limited to the nuclear realm. A recently published paper shows as much. Resource depletion, institutional fragility, and potential technological crises have all served as key variables for a group of researchers trying to determine how long a civilization can remain active before collapsing. In that effort, the authors sketched out 10 possible futures a thousand years from now.

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