It's not the end of the world.

Bjørn Lomborg - You probably recently heard that a Nasa-funded...:
"...a Nasa-funded study found that Industrial civilization was headed for ‘irreversible collapse’? It sounded almost verbatim like Limits to Growth in the 1970s. And it is almost entirely wrong. One of the paper's most quoted authors says: "Overall I found the paper to be trivial and deeply flawed. It is amazing that anyone would take it seriously, but clearly some people do (at least in the media).""

About that Popular Guardian Story on the Collapse of Industrial Civilization - Collide-a-Scape | DiscoverMagazine.com:

"...headlines included: The National Journal: “Here’s How NASA Thinks Society Will Collapse”; The Times of India: “NASA-Funded Study Warns of Collapse of Civilization in Coming Decades”; and Popular Science: “NASA-Sponsored Study Warns of Possible Collapse of Civilization.” Do you notice anything familiar about those headlines? NASA did and was pretty steamed. It recently issued a statement saying that the collapse paper was not solicited, directed or reviewed by NASA. 'It is an independent study by the university researchers utilizing research tools developed for a separate NASA activity. As is the case with all independent research, the views and conclusions in the paper are those of the authors alone. NASA does not endorse the paper or its conclusions.'"

Judging the Merits of a Media-Hyped 'Collapse' Study - Collide-a-Scape | DiscoverMagazine.com: 

"It is interesting how collapse theories mirror broader societal issues. During the Cold War, we had theories ascribing collapse to elite mismanagement, class conflict, and peasant revolts. As global warming became a public issue, scholars of the past began to discover that ancient societies collapsed due to climate change. As we have become concerned about sustainability and resource use today, we have learned that ancient societies collapsed due to depletion of critical resources, such as soil and forests. Now that inequality and “the 1%” are topics of public discourse, we have this paper focusing largely on elite resource consumption...

Models depend on the assumptions that go into them. Thus the first four pages of the paper are the part most worth discussing...

Contrary to the authors’ unsubstantiated assertion, there is no evidence that elite consumption caused ancient societies to collapse. The authors simply have no empirical basis for this assumption, and that point alone undercuts most of the paper.

...there is no empirical or substantiated theoretical basis for this paper’s model."

Curse Emporium:

Well, that's not good.

 Clark Gregg Wins.

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"Religion is a technology, it's just a primitive technology."

"Inspiration is the antidote to existential despair."

'Sneaky Zebra' makes the coolest Con cosplay videos.

Bjørn Lomborg on The Limits to Panic - Project Syndicate: 

"The genius of The Limits to Growth was to fuse these worries with fears of running out of stuff. We were doomed, because too many people would consume too much. Even if our ingenuity bought us some time, we would end up killing the planet and ourselves with pollution. The only hope was to stop economic growth itself, cut consumption, recycle, and force people to have fewer children, stabilizing society at a significantly poorer level. CommentsThat message still resonates today, though it was spectacularly wrong. For example, the authors of The Limits to Growth predicted that before 2013, the world would have run out of aluminum, copper, gold, lead, mercury, molybdenum, natural gas, oil, silver, tin, tungsten, and zinc.

Instead, despite recent increases, commodity prices have generally fallen to about a third of their level 150 years ago. Technological innovations have replaced mercury in batteries, dental fillings, and thermometers: mercury consumption is down 98% and, by 2000, the price was down 90%. More broadly, since 1946, supplies of copper, aluminum, iron, and zinc have outstripped consumption, owing to the discovery of additional reserves and new technologies to extract them economically. CommentsSimilarly, oil and natural gas were to run out in 1990 and 1992, respectively; today, reserves of both are larger than they were in 1970, although we consume dramatically more. Within the past six years, shale gas alone has doubled potential gas resources in the United States and halved the price. CommentsAs for economic collapse, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates that global GDP per capita will increase 14-fold over this century and 24-fold in the developing world."

Australia/NZ trip coming up in about a month.  Hence...