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I was watching fall of civilizations channel the other day on youtube, it was indeed eerie to see how most great civs depleted their soils and natural resources

by tough 5y ago

I was watching fall of civilizations channel the other day on youtube, it was indeed eerie to see how most great civs depleted their soils and natural resources, and that with some drought times, put the civilization to its end. I just noticed, before these civs would be geographically separated and isolated, the demise of one, didn´t mean the demise of the other, and the people that had settled and survived, would become nomadic until settling again or something like that. What will happen when this global civ collapses? Where would the survivors be able to go to, to persist? Nowhere? Dark indeed

duped 5y ago
I think that hypothesis needs to be challenged or at least framed differently, since there aren't that many examples of civilizations that "reverted" to nomadism from an agrarian society (it would probably be more accurate that climate change/human activity dampened agricultural output enough that nomadic peoples became more prevalent as the population of agrarian peoples collapsed/migrated elsewhere), at least outside larger contexts like the Bronze Age Collapse where there was a centuries long period of population decline in a large geographic area. And in more recent centuries, "collapse" is almost always synonymous with political turmoil/change while the peoples remain in place. I think that's important too, because we're not seeing so much of a "collapse" of our global civilization, but migrations of peoples across it, and a rise in political turmoil as a second order effect.
pstuart 5y ago
> Where would the survivors be able to go to, to persist? Mars! /s, kinda We have the science and technology to address these issues, the thing that fucks us is our political/economic/religious structures. If we collectively agreed on solving these problems we could, but unity seems to be the scarcest resource of all.
dane-pgp 5y ago
Global society has slightly different dynamics, though, because of emergent properties of that scale. For example, countries or even some continents could suffer ecological collapse without global society necessarily being threatened. The other side of that coin, though, is that global society has introduced global risks, in terms of the amount of CO2 it is able to put into the atmosphere (which is a shared resource we all rely on), and the ability to create weapons or pathogens of global destruction due to technology.

by tough 5y ago

duped 5y ago

I think that hypothesis needs to be challenged or at least framed differently, since there aren't that many examples of civilizations that "reverted" to nomadism from an agrarian society (it would probably be more accurate that climate change/human activity dampened agricultural output enough that nomadic peoples became more prevalent as the population of agrarian peoples collapsed/migrated elsewhere), at least outside larger contexts like the Bronze Age Collapse where there was a centuries long period of population decline in a large geographic area. And in more recent centuries, "collapse" is almost always synonymous with political turmoil/change while the peoples remain in place. I think that's important too, because we're not seeing so much of a "collapse" of our global civilization, but migrations of peoples across it, and a rise in political turmoil as a second order effect.

pstuart 5y ago

> Where would the survivors be able to go to, to persist? Mars! /s, kinda We have the science and technology to address these issues, the thing that fucks us is our political/economic/religious structures. If we collectively agreed on solving these problems we could, but unity seems to be the scarcest resource of all.

dane-pgp 5y ago

Global society has slightly different dynamics, though, because of emergent properties of that scale. For example, countries or even some continents could suffer ecological collapse without global society necessarily being threatened. The other side of that coin, though, is that global society has introduced global risks, in terms of the amount of CO2 it is able to put into the atmosphere (which is a shared resource we all rely on), and the ability to create weapons or pathogens of global destruction due to technology.