What's the over/under on civilization?

Quote: Evenbob

Nope nope and nope. Rome faded away over
a long period of time. There was no definitive
moment, no invasion, nothing to point to as
the cause. There were many causes, it just
broke apart and slowly vanished.

Are you now trying to make my point? We will not wake up one day and find a collapsed society. It will not take 100 years or more like with Rome, but maybe 15-20 like it did with the USSR. We have several societal problems that are getting to a critical pressure, like an earthquake fault. We have a monetary system that cannot last. And if you look close, we have a growing acceptance of racism towards whites which on the edges is getting violent.

Are you thinking that when I say "collapse" it means people will just disappear and North America returns to wilderness? Because that is not what I am talking about. I am saying we will resemble other collapsed societies such as the USSR or Afghanistan. The USSR is probably the direction we end up.

Quote: zippyboy

I read once, probably from Jared Diamond, that Damascus, Syria is the oldest continually-populated city in the world. Settled around 2000 BC.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_continuously_inhabited_cities

The oldest existing evidence of a kind of town is Jericho (nearly 20,000 year ago), and it is not disputed as the oldest walled city.

I said "cities as we see them today didn't exist" in 1600. At that time only Beijing possibly had a population of over a million. There were cities in the past which had population over 1 million (Rome and possibly Alexandria Egypt) plus a number of cities in China and Tokyo Japan.

There are probably about 500 urban agglomerations with over a million people today.

Quote: AZDuffman

Are you now trying to make my point? We will not wake up one day and find a collapsed society. .

You act like society is a static thing and should
remain the same. It's always changing, whether
we see it or not. What did you think would happen,
the society of the Norman Rockwell Post covers
would last forever? That society never really existed
anyway, for a lot of Americans. The USSR and Afghanistan
were always modern failures, they never thrived like
the US did. They went from bad to really bad. They
became more of what they already were.

Quote: Pacomartin

I said "cities as we see them today didn't exist" in 1600.

Everything changes over time.

The modern city, with car and truck traffic, is a very recent development. Even more recently elevated trains gave way to subways in many cities. Next, who knows. Could some development render the car obsolete? Not likely, but not impossible.

Oh, and one other thing: When one civilization conquers another one, they both remain civilized. So maybe Persia conquers Egypt, yes, but Egypt stays a civilization, albeit not an independent one.

There can even be a great deal of mixing. The Nubians conquered and ruled Egypt for a while. This resulted in making Nubia (aka Cush) more Egyptian-like, to the extent you find pyramids in Sudan today. remember even Alexander styled himself as pharaoh in Egypt, adopted the local mythology for his own story, and, not on his own initiative, wound up being mummified in a sarcophagus in Alexandria

Quote: Evenbob

'The largest recorded geomagnetic perturbation, resulting presumably from a CME, coincided with the first-observed solar flare on 1 September 1859, and is now referred to as the Carrington Event, or the solar storm of 1859.

The storm took down parts of the recently created US telegraph network, starting fires and shocking some telegraph operators.'

In 1836, an American scientist, Dr. David Alter, invented the first known American electric telegraph, in Elderton, Pennsylvania. In 1859, telegraph systems all over Europe and North America failed, in some cases giving telegraph operators electric shocks. Telegraph pylons threw sparks. Some telegraph operators could continue to send and receive messages despite having disconnected their power supplies.

On 22 February 2012, Sweden introduced their first negative interest rate. In 2012 Sweden launched their mobile payment system that would become so popular that cash in circulation could be cut in half. SWISH now has 6.5 million accounts in a country where there are 10 million men, women, and children.


The solar storm of 2012 was of similar magnitude as the Carrington event (September 1-2 1859), but it passed Earth's orbit without striking the planet, missing by 9 days. A 2013 study estimated that the economic cost to the United States would have been between measured in trillions of USD. Ying D. Liu, professor at China's State Key Laboratory of Space Weather, estimated that the recovery time from such a disaster would have been about four to ten years.

Backbone of Europe study. Health Diet Work etc. over two thousand years.

5th to 10th, the so called dark ages were the healthiest.
Survivors of the Plague of Justinian lived better lives than predecessors who had to share resources.