Robert Metcalfe Quotes

Almost all of the many predictions now being made about 1996 hinge on the internet's continuing exponential growth. But I predict the internet will soon go spectacularly supernova and in 1996 catastrophically collapse.

When your whole system, your whole civilized system goes down, this is pretty much what you get left with. We have no communications, no running water, no electricity, no real help.

Catastrophes come when some dominant institution, swollen like a soap-bubble and still standing without foundations, suddenly crumbles at the touch of what may seem a word or idea, but is really some stronger material source.

Expansion means complexity and complexity decay.

We may get to the point where the only way of saving the world will be for industrial civilization to collapse.

Information from destructive activities going back a hundred years right up until today is being incorporated into the system. And as that happens the underlying framework of industrialism is collapsing and causing disintegration.

Now, our Sun will not collapse to a black hole. It's actually not massive enough.

For something to collapse, not all systems have to shut down. In most cases, just one system is enough. For example, the human body is a system of systems. If just one system, such as the cardiovascular system, shuts down, death follows.

Civilization in its present form hasn't got long.

State and federal studies indicate that thousands of water and sewer systems may be too old to function properly.

Whoever places his trust into a system will soon be without a home. While you are building your third story, the two lower ones have already been dismantled.

I am convinced that we are in a terminal process.

The more the history of the World War and what led up to it is studied, the more clearly those tragic years become revealed as a vast collapse of civilization.

If the financial system collapses, it's really, really hard to put it back together again.

The internet will catastrophically collapse in 1996.

Several highly improbable and therefore unforeseen failures.

The Turkish Empire has just committed suicide.

The old system collapsed before a new one could be created.

I yield ... to the conviction that our Constitution cannot last. The Union has been prolonged thus far by miracles ... they cannot continue.

France is perilously close to its final moments.

I think we could very easily suffer a seriously catastrophic cyber event.

The military part of our information network - which we were accustomed to rely on for exact information - was the first part of the network to fall apart

The most rigid structures, the most impervious to change, will collapse first.

Once thing goes wrong, then the whole house of cards collapses. And there's no way you can extricate yourself. Until someone comes along to drag you out.

The more populous the world and the more intricate its structure, the greater must be its fundamental insecurity. A world-structure too elaborately scientific, if once disrupted by war, revolution, natural cataclysm or epidemic, might collapse into a chaos not easily rebuilt.