this post was submitted on 12 Apr 2026
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I mean, yes and no. Rome didn't have military bases around the world when it collapsed and Germany didn't have reserve currency status. But their currency DID become worthless. Stories like people burning money cuz it was cheaper than buying firewood.
I know that it won't be "exactly the same" but maybe we could glean some valuable insight. Like physical items held value way better than currency. What did people do? Did families all return home and live with their parents/siblings since costs were too high alone?
Having an idea of where things might go or what could happen just makes me feel better about it I guess? Like I know if the dollar collapses no amount of prep will really make it better and society as we know it in the U.S. will not exist for a bit.
The global economy is new, so much has changed
4 generations ago most of the food that people ate grew within 20 miles, now a good chuck of my food is grown on four continents in dozens of countries.
This and every single thing in my house and car has supply lines stretching over a million miles when the travel of every single item, and their materials are added up. Literally, tens of millions of people helped make my items
Banking is literally hundreds or thousands of times more complex than in my grandfather’s time.
And my entire career is based on technology and infrastructure I read only hints about in science fiction books as a kid.
Back in the early XX century - when Germany had hyperinflation and America had the Great Depression - most people still lived in the countryside.
You can weather a lot of shit if you can grow your own food.
Nowadays, at least in the West, most people live in cities and food is something they HAVE to buy and in order to be able to buy food they HAVE to have jobs - most people can't simple shrink their lives down to a point were they're pretty much independent of the rest of society, farming their little plot of land and raising some chickens using traditional techniques to just keep on going.
If shit properly hits the fan, I suspect things are going to be way more desperate.
To be a little more precise, people have studied this question carefully at a planetary scale.
The total agricultural production possible in the absense of artificial inputs like fertilizers, pesticides, diesel tractors, cold storage and refrigerated supply chains etc is around no more than 3billion people running off solar inputs and natures nutrient cycles and the amount of land and water available.
Pretty shocking number if you don't have the context, but here is a place to get started on the information this is based on.
So for example, in the green revolution, land and agriculture technology increased a modest amount, but artificial fossil inputs into the existing technology system increased 90-fold. Most of the gains in food production are because it's now based on fossil energy and nutrients rather than natural sources.
Currently, today ~40% of all the human food supply molecules come from fossil fuels and are incorporated into the plants and animals we eat.
So it's not "just" a land management issue, or urbanization. Humanity is literally on artificial life support. There is no simple, survivable way out of this commitment. Fundamentally this is far, far from penciling out any other way we know how to survive. Humanity population passed some threshold for change around 3-4 generations ago.