Publisher's Synopsis
Before children wore seatbelts, adults instinctively used their arms to protect them during sudden stops, often making injuries worse. This paradox reveals our "temporal blindness," the inability to foresee and value future conditions.
In Time Blind Book 1: Rapid Population Decline or Civilization Collapse, Jack Alpert introduces the most urgent and least understood threat to human survival: ourselves. Through decades of cognitive science and systems modeling, Alpert reveals how our civilization is locked on a path toward collapse because we are blind to motions that determine who gets injured and when.With this book, Alpert explains in physical and cognitive terms why population must decline (drastically and rapidly) or our descendants will face mass starvation, conflict, and pre-industrial survival. Using vivid metaphors, real-world data, and engaging video links, he guides readers through the chain of consequences that make business-as-usual a death sentence for civilization. This is a wake-up call that challenges readers to evolve their thinking and glimpse a viable future on the other side of rapid population decline. In the sequel, Time Blind Book 2, Alpert outlines the only known paths to implement that decline, the cultural and technological shifts required to create a non-injury-producing civilization, and what an 80-year transition to global viability could look like. Rapid Population Decline or Civilization Collapse is the first of five books in the Time Blind series, each offering a deeper understanding of humanity's cognitive limits, systemic dangers, and the extraordinary behavioral shifts needed to avoid collapse.