What's the over/under on civilization?

Not a single prediction about the future
of civilization made in the past has even
come close to being true. None of ours
will either.

Quote: kenarman

I didn't know we had ever left that state. Being "wary" of others is how we survive. When you sell a car Mosca you may assume that because he came in he can afford it. However, you still 'warily' do the credit check.

There is that choice up there. And trust is essential; civilization depends on it. Without trust you would never make it through an intersection.

Quote: Mosca

There is that choice up there. And trust is essential; civilization depends on it. Without trust you would never make it through an intersection.

I trust everybody and always cover my back. For your example above it is called defensive driving.

By your definition of civilization we would have no lawyers or cops. That situation does not exist in any country now.

Breakdown on a world scale I believe would be different than anything that has happened before. (except for natural causes which I am not including)

No matter what is happening on one side of the world, there's people on the other side that have their own problems and concerns that are bigger issues to them. Though I suppose there is also some effect. Also depends on what resources are affected and how dependent they are on other people in a catastrophic zone.

Quote: Nareed

A good off the cuff definition is this: a society or nation, or group of societies and nations, which grow, mine and manufacture all or most of what they require for a living, trading for what they can't or don't grow, mine or make themselves. This would be as opposed to peoples who live off the land and necessarily migrate when such living is exhausted, ie nomads. Ergo the first agricultural communities would be civilized by this definition, even if they consisted of nothing but fields, corrals, mud huts and a few kilns.

Quote: Mosca

Myself, I consider civilization the state where our urge to create order overwhelms our propensity for chaos. But I'm also considering the grand scale of governments and trade agreements and cooperation among nations.

I'm going with these as they're broad and simple. And that type of civilization will go on as long as humanity does.

People are social creatures. Pack animals, basically. We are not meant to survive in literal solitude. Even those off-the-grid preppers or the most mountainy of mountain men are using something from the collective. You might hunt your own and grow your own, but you didn't make that rifle, that powder, that shovel, that steel.

If there's people, they will need each other. They in some form will have to work together, to come together. And that's what civilization is.

Quote: Mosca

Time and knowledge will not go backwards, what is now known will not become unknown. But will a dystopian future be civilized? Or will mankind avoid dystopia? Or will we become tribalized and wary of others, will we hoard resources?

We're already tribalized. It's not even human nature, it's just nature. There are many creatures who share similarities with us, be it the highly evolved mammals like porpoise or simple invertebrates like ants. Each are surely civilized, each have a society, and each have enemies and threats. Each strive for dominance, each war over resources. We humans are weird, but we still share the same basic characteristics of groups.

It would take an extinction level event to cease human civilization.

The more specific "civilization" definition is much more fragile. Oddly, it doesn't seem to be the Really Big Things that knock it off kilter. Huge volcano goes up in the Arctic, some planes are rerouted. Tsunami strikes the Pacific rim, some die. An earthquake sets off a level 7 nuke disaster, and nothing really happened. My commute wasn't any longer. Yours? My cheeseburger wasn't drier, my short game didn't suffer,my fishing was just fine. It was us and our silly concepts that are ruining things. You know wtf an economy is? I ain't never seen one, not even in a picture. But a few hundred people poked it once and now tens of millions are hurtin'. Even the rich folk, those who use potable water to wash a car of all things, even they feel it. Some people lost their houses. Some people lost their entire country.

This definition of civilization, our civilization, is not long for the world. We're the parrot at the pet shop. Some see, but most just say "Bollocks!... It's got beautiful plumage!"

Quote: kenarman

Pretty much all the scholars agree that to be a city it must have had, streets, political organization, means of handling sanitation.

The link was an interesting read. Thanks!

But one thing one easily learns when studying history, is that the ancients went through their lives without much regard to the classifications future scholars would use ;) Another thing you learn is they did care about posterity, which is why they made so many stone monuments and carved records in stone (how accurately is a different matter).

Quote: kenarman

You have just shifted my question Nareed. Scholars can't agree on a definition for "ciy". The range for the earliest "city" is 6000 to 2000 BCE.

Regardless civilization then is much different from what we condsider civilization today.

World population estimate in 1600 in millions as Shakespeare was writing Hamlet. Some 5,000 slaves lived in Macau, in addition to 2,000 Portuguese and 20,000 Chinese.
114 Africa
339 Asia
111 Europe
10 Latin America
3 North America
3 Oceania

Certainly "cities" as we see them today didn't exist. If we should ever go back to some 600 million people, perhaps the infrstructure of broadcasting, and long range commuting will still exist. Will we be civilized?

I don't see why infrastructure requires mass population. There's many of our technology advances mean that the work of thousands in the past can be done by tens or even a single person. Civilization will continue in that case. I could see a dark age, a slip backwards of sorts, but not all the way to prehistory. More like the interruption of progress, if there was a sufficiently large global event.

Quote: TheCesspit

I don't see why infrastructure requires mass population. There's many of our technology advances mean that the work of thousands in the past can be done by tens or even a single person. Civilization will continue in that case. I could see a dark age, a slip backwards of sorts, but not all the way to prehistory. More like the interruption of progress, if there was a sufficiently large global event.

It is this way. Gas pipes, water pipes, sewers, and electric lines all need to be maintained. We forget they do, but they do. Technology cannot repair a water main for example. Roads need repair. Back in my PCO days I learned just how many things need maintained and how they fall apart when you do not do that maintenance.

Think if you ever had a big house with a big and fancy yard. The cleaning, the mowing, the weeding. Then factor that up to whole city areas. This is what I am talking about. I do not deny tech makes a difference, but tech has its own issues. The younguns today are not learning how to do the hard skills needed. They can use an app, but the art of figuring things out is dying off.

If I am in the mood later I will add to my predictions on a different level. Really I could write a book/manifesto on what I think is coming.

Quote: TheCesspit

I don't see why infrastructure requires mass population. There's many of our technology advances mean that the work of thousands in the past can be done by tens or even a single person. Civilization will continue in that case. I could see a dark age, a slip backwards of sorts, but not all the way to prehistory. More like the interruption of progress, if there was a sufficiently large global event.

Electricity is the key to all the technology, without it your technology eventually disappears. Centrally distributed electricity would be the first to disappear. Solar would be gone once we ran out of batteries. Small local windmills might last for a quite a while for a mechanically inclined person who could keep finding creative ways to repair it.

Computer skills while valuable quickly become useless without the techs to keep hardware and the connected devices working.

We had relatively advanced societies millenia ago and I think the worst case scenerio is that we end up back there. We just won't have as many advanced tools as we do today, that might even be a good thing.