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I was looking at some of Egypt's history. Kind of interesting the Old Kingdom figured out pyramids, built the biggest only around 100 years after the first, the

I was looking at some of Egypt's history. Kind of interesting the Old Kingdom figured out pyramids, built the biggest only around 100 years after the first, then it was all downhill from there. Makes me wonder if we hit a high point landing people on the moon, and everything's just going to go downhill for the next few thousand years.

garmaine 8y ago
How was it “downhill” from there? The great pyramid is rather simple as far as art and cultural complexity goes. I would actually say it is quite crude, and later middle and new dynastic period works are much more impressive, even if they are less gargantuan in scale.
- joecool1029 8y ago
  > The great pyramid is rather simple as far as art and cultural complexity goes. That may be so, but it remains as a feat of project unmatched in their history, the one great wonder that survived. I am not sure how many would be able to name the pyramids that came after. There's a huge amount of precision involved and a huge amount of effort required of the culture to complete. Similarly you could argue that with space exploration we've become significantly more advanced, our probes and instruments can do things the ones in the 60's couldn't. Yet, we haven't sent anymore humans past low earth orbit. In a sense we've advanced, the individual efforts remain great, but our cultural efforts have retreated, the weight of humanity is not where it once was. What's most going to be remembered of our culture in 5000 years?
  - dorfsmay 8y ago
    The International Space Station gas happened since, which has been continuously lived in. That's an achievement compared to a short trip on the moon kicking a few rocks.
    - sixstringtheory 8y ago
      And we’re getting more efficient at launching vehicles to transit. We have the same boosters being reused!
  - max76 8y ago
    > What’s most going to be remembered of our culture in 5000 years? There is a good chance that computers will have an uninterrupted existence for the next 5000 years, and we’ll be remembered for creating the first network with 1billion+ users, similarly to how the Romans are remembered for their roads and aqueducts. This is a particularly exciting case because large amounts of data we generate could survive! In the case that history is largely forgotten, similarly to how we have a heavy fog around knowledge of society 5000 years ago, I can imagine future archeologicists being very surprised to find large piles of fissionable materials. This has the potential to be very sensational in future pop culture.
    - UweSchmidt 8y ago
      It has been suggested that since we have exhausted the easily accessible ressources on this planet, human civilization would have a hard time restarting from scratch. Either this society continues (and solves huge environmental challenges along the way), or we have a scifi scenario, where a group of humans on faraway planets forget about old Earth, or no one will be able to remember or rediscover us.
      - max76 8y ago
        We could have pre-industrial civilizations that arise on Earth if we exhaust the natural resources. I imagine that we have enough scrap metal lying around to not prohibit post-disaster civilizations from working with metal. It’s really a matter of how bad the ecological disaster is, I can imagine a point where it’s bad enough to cause a collapse of our current civilizations but not bad enough to prohibit smaller less technologically advanced civilizations.
angel_j 8y ago
Maybe they undertook pyramids too fanatically altogether, and that that was their downfall. The thought-leaders thought pyramids were the best investment, instead of astronomy. The downfall may have been an effect of the great thing. Pyramids, sweet! There's a drought coming. I wouldn't go for the moon landing, not because it wasn't great, but it wasn't an all-consuming investment by civilization. There are a lot stronger modern candidates.
redahs 8y ago
If the thesis of Progress & Poverty is correct, then the cyclic nature of civilization is due primarily to the tendency of the labor cost of acquiring unimproved land for productive workers to increase faster than the rate at which wages can be accumulated to acquire it. If this is the case, then the decline of our present phase of civilization may have begun in the 1930s, when state governments in the United States begun replacing property taxes with sales taxes, as the share of total government revenues raised from property taxes has now fallen from 40-50% to less than 10%, and the share is even lower in other countries. However while the Roman Republic relied primarily a 1-3% annual property tax on wealth to fund its early expansion from 509BC, it had abandoned public assessed domestic property taxes by 167BC at the latest, yet the the Roman Empire reached its height in 117AD. So the point in time at which a country eliminates domestic property taxes on landed wealth in order to maximize the private capture of rent for its political class is unlikely to represent the peak or maximum of the civilization, but rather an initial inflection point, in which case a peak of our current phase of civilization during the 1960s may have been possible, with the inflection point occurring earlier.
- sonnyblarney 8y ago
  "acquiring unimproved land " When land + labour is the primary means of product, maybe, bu since that hasn't been the case for a while and may not either have been the case in aboriginal territories, I'm not sure it applies.
- hevi_jos 8y ago
  You are mixing things that don't have anything to do with each other. Two empires separated by more than a thousand of years. While talking about an Empire expansion you omit the biggest factor: You expand or grow conquering-stealing-destroying others and the limit for this is geographic, not taxes. In the particular case of the Roman Empire they needed to communicate all the provinces, and they did that by sea, mainly using the Mediterranean Sea. There was no train, like there is today(which is a tremendous difference as it is several orders of magnitude of difference transporting things). Once you conquered all the Mediterranean Sea, there was nothing else to conquer, communicating by land was super expensive. Today it is the size of the world, until we get out to other planets. Also in today's world there are weapons of mass destruction like nuclear weapons. If you try to grow at the expense of others you could get destroyed.

garmaine 8y ago

How was it “downhill” from there? The great pyramid is rather simple as far as art and cultural complexity goes. I would actually say it is quite crude, and later middle and new dynastic period works are much more impressive, even if they are less gargantuan in scale.

joecool1029 8y ago
> The great pyramid is rather simple as far as art and cultural complexity goes. That may be so, but it remains as a feat of project unmatched in their history, the one great wonder that survived. I am not sure how many would be able to name the pyramids that came after. There's a huge amount of precision involved and a huge amount of effort required of the culture to complete. Similarly you could argue that with space exploration we've become significantly more advanced, our probes and instruments can do things the ones in the 60's couldn't. Yet, we haven't sent anymore humans past low earth orbit. In a sense we've advanced, the individual efforts remain great, but our cultural efforts have retreated, the weight of humanity is not where it once was. What's most going to be remembered of our culture in 5000 years?
- dorfsmay 8y ago
  The International Space Station gas happened since, which has been continuously lived in. That's an achievement compared to a short trip on the moon kicking a few rocks.
  - sixstringtheory 8y ago
    And we’re getting more efficient at launching vehicles to transit. We have the same boosters being reused!
- max76 8y ago
  > What’s most going to be remembered of our culture in 5000 years? There is a good chance that computers will have an uninterrupted existence for the next 5000 years, and we’ll be remembered for creating the first network with 1billion+ users, similarly to how the Romans are remembered for their roads and aqueducts. This is a particularly exciting case because large amounts of data we generate could survive! In the case that history is largely forgotten, similarly to how we have a heavy fog around knowledge of society 5000 years ago, I can imagine future archeologicists being very surprised to find large piles of fissionable materials. This has the potential to be very sensational in future pop culture.
  - UweSchmidt 8y ago
    It has been suggested that since we have exhausted the easily accessible ressources on this planet, human civilization would have a hard time restarting from scratch. Either this society continues (and solves huge environmental challenges along the way), or we have a scifi scenario, where a group of humans on faraway planets forget about old Earth, or no one will be able to remember or rediscover us.
    - max76 8y ago
      We could have pre-industrial civilizations that arise on Earth if we exhaust the natural resources. I imagine that we have enough scrap metal lying around to not prohibit post-disaster civilizations from working with metal. It’s really a matter of how bad the ecological disaster is, I can imagine a point where it’s bad enough to cause a collapse of our current civilizations but not bad enough to prohibit smaller less technologically advanced civilizations.

angel_j 8y ago

Maybe they undertook pyramids too fanatically altogether, and that that was their downfall. The thought-leaders thought pyramids were the best investment, instead of astronomy. The downfall may have been an effect of the great thing. Pyramids, sweet! There's a drought coming. I wouldn't go for the moon landing, not because it wasn't great, but it wasn't an all-consuming investment by civilization. There are a lot stronger modern candidates.

redahs 8y ago

If the thesis of Progress & Poverty is correct, then the cyclic nature of civilization is due primarily to the tendency of the labor cost of acquiring unimproved land for productive workers to increase faster than the rate at which wages can be accumulated to acquire it. If this is the case, then the decline of our present phase of civilization may have begun in the 1930s, when state governments in the United States begun replacing property taxes with sales taxes, as the share of total government revenues raised from property taxes has now fallen from 40-50% to less than 10%, and the share is even lower in other countries. However while the Roman Republic relied primarily a 1-3% annual property tax on wealth to fund its early expansion from 509BC, it had abandoned public assessed domestic property taxes by 167BC at the latest, yet the the Roman Empire reached its height in 117AD. So the point in time at which a country eliminates domestic property taxes on landed wealth in order to maximize the private capture of rent for its political class is unlikely to represent the peak or maximum of the civilization, but rather an initial inflection point, in which case a peak of our current phase of civilization during the 1960s may have been possible, with the inflection point occurring earlier.

sonnyblarney 8y ago
"acquiring unimproved land " When land + labour is the primary means of product, maybe, bu since that hasn't been the case for a while and may not either have been the case in aboriginal territories, I'm not sure it applies.
hevi_jos 8y ago
You are mixing things that don't have anything to do with each other. Two empires separated by more than a thousand of years. While talking about an Empire expansion you omit the biggest factor: You expand or grow conquering-stealing-destroying others and the limit for this is geographic, not taxes. In the particular case of the Roman Empire they needed to communicate all the provinces, and they did that by sea, mainly using the Mediterranean Sea. There was no train, like there is today(which is a tremendous difference as it is several orders of magnitude of difference transporting things). Once you conquered all the Mediterranean Sea, there was nothing else to conquer, communicating by land was super expensive. Today it is the size of the world, until we get out to other planets. Also in today's world there are weapons of mass destruction like nuclear weapons. If you try to grow at the expense of others you could get destroyed.