OT Interesting read - lifespan of civilisations - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: Homer J Simpson
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 11, 2019, 05:45:07 pm
content: http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20190218-the-lifespans-of-ancient-civilisations-compared

author: nctnico
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 11, 2019, 06:03:12 pm
content: But none of them had (book) printing or internet or could even count as a global civilisation.

author: CatalinaWOW
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 11, 2019, 06:10:13 pm
content: So what would you define as the start of our current civilization? Is our civilization different from the British (or French or German) Empire? Or when did Roman civilization end? Was it with the fall of Rome, or the the fall of Byzantium? Or was the fall of Byzantium the end of Greek civilization? Lots of arbitrary choices in a chart like this.

author: nctnico
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 11, 2019, 11:53:56 pm
content: In Europe you could probably mark the Renaissance in the 1500's and the start of the industrialisation in the 1800's.

author: TerraHertz
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 12, 2019, 01:40:15 am
content: Our current technological prowess tends to blind people to the inherent fragility of civilization in general. Makes us think we are so powerful, so smart, so advanced, that the historical pattern of societal collapse can't happen to us.Actually, technology makes a societymorefragile, not less. Because the primary deciding factor is COMPLEXITY.Relevant:https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?sts=t&cm_sp=SearchF-_-home-_-Results&an=tainter&tn=collapse+of+complex+societies&kn=&isbn=New Studies in Archaeology: The Collapse of Complex Societies by Joseph A. TainterNow we have also painted ourselves into a corner, in that we've used up all the easily available mineral and energy resources. All the good quality easily mined ores and oil etc, are all gone. Now we rely on high tech and energy intensive industrial ability, to keep the system going.IFF we can transition to working fusion power before depleting fossil fuel resources fall below breakeven EROEI, we'll be fine. Otherwise that was it. One shot and then done for.Also if we don't make it past this transition, it won't be a case of just slipping quietly back to low tech, low energy pre-industrial society. Because such collapsesalwaysproceed chaotically. And we have created a vast amount of high level, long half-life radioactive waste. A low-tech society, even absent a chaotic collapse, could not maintain containment on the thousands of nuclear sites world wide. With them leaking to the environment, over hundreds of years the background radiation level would rise. Very likely to a level incompatible with all higher forms of life. General ecological collapse, atmosphere O2 level declining, etc.Edit:Btw, the BBC article above links to another:http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20190218-are-we-on-the-road-to-civilisation-collapseWhich is on the right track, until they (predictably for the BBC) start focusing on global warming (using a graph based on fake data) and the ever-evil 'carbon'. Ha ha, how did I know the BBC was going to take it in that direction?Actually, the entire indeology-based 'CO2-driven catastrophic climate change' hoax is a perfect example of the kind of destructive complexity overload that kills societies. A kind of collective madness, that is making our global civilization increasingly incapable of recognizing and sanely responding to real issues.

author: coppercone2
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 12, 2019, 01:49:35 am
content: its less nowLook at Nazis and Commies. Both short lived civilizations. Might as well be dead, bunch of old statues of shit no one cares about or makes fun of. Stupidly corrupt countries will go under. Those regimes were so different then the rest of the world you can consider them separate civilizations. Different culture, politics, values.,

author: coppercone2
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 12, 2019, 01:54:37 am
content: and I don't see it that way. Look at how half of europe was run remotely even though it was occupied with radio broadcasts and stuff. The goverment managed to survive despite the country being dead.and you have things like exile fighters, etc that stay connected and make it more robust.

author: wilfred
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 12, 2019, 05:16:28 am
content: I found the book by Jared Diamond "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed" interesting. I recommend it for anyone interested in this topic. At the very least it motivates thought about our own trajectory.There is an article on WP about it.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse:_How_Societies_Choose_to_Fail_or_Succeed

author: nctnico
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 12, 2019, 10:33:57 am
content: Quote from: TerraHertz on March 12, 2019, 01:40:15 amBut none of those societies where technologically advanced on a global scale. If Europe collapses the technology will still be in the US and China. Nowadays there is redundancy and the sub-societies (countries / areas) aren't run by one government. IMHO it would be foolish to map ancient societies on the current situation the world is in.

author: Nominal Animal
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 13, 2019, 01:56:43 am
content: After the Roman Empire fell, it took over a thousand years for battlefield medicine to reach the same level (survivability of e.g. amputations), in very late 1800s. (Essentially, Roman battlefield medics were roughly at the same level as their WW I counterparts.)The technology behind the Antikythera mechanism was completely lost at some point.Clickspringmakes a solid argument as to why it does not look like it was a one-off mechanism, but represents quite a deep understanding of mechanisms in general.You might think our current civilizations are global and everlasting, but all that is needed is for people to find better stuff to do, for things to utterly change. It has happened before, and will happen again.

author: apis
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 13, 2019, 12:29:10 pm
content: Ancient Rome had a peak population of about 1 million, it wasn't until the 19th century that another city reached that size (Paris in 1850 I believe). It was no fluke; they had freshwater piped in from outside the city, sewage systems, multistory apartments with central heating, and so on. During the democratic period things constantly improved, if slowly. But the after the dictators took over, gross mismanagement and religious fundamentalism (Christianity) eventually led to a collapse.

author: SilverSolder
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 13, 2019, 03:12:25 pm
content: The thing that the "decline of empire" theories tend to forget is that old empires usually don't simply implode... they actually evolve to the next organisational framework.E.g. did the Roman Empire disappear, or did it evolve into modern Europe - including decentralised decision making and all kinds of other modern concepts?

author: coppercone2
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 13, 2019, 04:08:30 pm
content: Quote from: apis on March 13, 2019, 12:29:10 pmYou can also say that figuring out how to run those systems with out draconian dictators and massive opression of giant civilizations and multitheism took a while.Those guys had seriously deep pockets and efficent goverment by way of overwhelming force and opression.The same thing happened in the dark ages and after but you did not have insane god emperors pillaging so much. Documents like the magna carta, the allowance of documents like the concordat of worms (rather then supression and secrecy) and other primitive multinational agreements slowed things down.I always thought off rome as a super moscaw. They stole and heavily taxed everything in order to put their money in one city and one army.I do not think even the worst european kings were quxite as agressive as roman emperors.Christianity actually gave some democratic like power to locak preists and stuff. It was more distributed. And some power was transfered to god (which tricles down to the will of the people) rather then ultra tyrant emperors. The worst popes still had some accountability to relatively strict literature rather then a currupt senate. Not to say it was handled well in either case.Like rome was ultratyrant and centralized and it ran well because of its super conquest status. Middle ages were tyranical but some power spread to religious people and followers and power was distrivuted to various fiefdoms. More freedom because you can choose different tyrants to live under with similar power levels and reliability but way less efficent infrastructure and hampering of education.

author: TheNewLab
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: March 14, 2019, 12:50:02 pm
content: Quote from: apis on March 13, 2019, 12:29:10 pmTrue. All quite accurate. There is an interesting side note. The Roman Empire did not actually collapse until..1912? 1916? It was when the Ottoman Empire ended with the last sultan stepping down. The Eastern Roman empire was just a continuation, and The ottoman empire took on the Emperor of Rome title...thus continuing the Empire. Alternatively, You can also say the Empire still exists, as the early Roman Emperors were also the Pontiff. a title that the Vatican assumed as the Church took over the power of the Western Roman Empire.Edward Gibbon,The Decline and Fall of the Roman EmpireChina stills counts their empire to it's end with Sun Ya-Sen establishing a short lived Chinese Republic.. By the Chinese calendar we are now in the year, 5,000 plus..and the wheel turning king keeps rolling his wheel

author: coppice
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 14, 2019, 01:01:36 pm
content: Quote from: apis on March 13, 2019, 12:29:10 pmBeijing has a long history of a large population. It also has a long history of personal cleanliness. Japan also developed quite large population centres as it developed a culture of personal cleanliness. In Europe only a few cities ever aspired to be large, and their populations were generally as large or small as disease permitted. However, culture seems to play a part. Even after good civil engineering wiped out things like cholera in Europe, London and Paris remained the only really big cities.

author: apis
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 14, 2019, 03:25:47 pm
content: Quote from: coppercone2 on March 13, 2019, 04:08:30 pmWell, the European kingdoms that came after tried draconian dictatorships and massive oppression but didn't have the same success, so the romans were doing some things right. I'm not a fan, their economy was slave based and they killed people for entertainment, but cant help but admire their skills at civil engineering. They also didn't destroy cultures they conquered for being "inferior" but rather assimilated them into their own empire and valued other cultures achievements. There's the famous story about the death of Archimedes. The roman general who conquered Syracuse considered Archimedes death his biggest failure and the soldier who killed him a murderer. Christians and others that came after would have just chopped off everyone's head considering them heathens or subhuman. It took more than a thousand years to get to the same level of civil engineering, medical knowledge, mathematics, etc. Mainly because the church liked to burn books, people and wage crusades against the infidels. The church was no better than IS during some periods.

author: coppercone2
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 14, 2019, 04:11:38 pm
content: They did not try to the same extent because Christianity and even Islam was more civilized then the Roman religions IMO. You did not have a god of war to worship for instance.You start mixing glorification of violence and the after life (vs thou shall not kill in the basic law set) your generals are gonna be more vicious and your gonna get more from peopleRoman public entertainment was feeding people to lions.....They killed plenty but it was still a step up from worshiping Mars IMO. God of war AND agriculture. Awesome conquest god. Kill and farm on their land to expand. To get the good life too. With say Christianity at least you needed a fairly complex justification for such behavior to avoid sinning. With roman gods it was just like openly encouraged. Took like 1000 years to fix at least some of the loop holes though lol

author: Rick Law
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 21, 2019, 06:00:51 am
content: End of our civilization starts around 2070, that's the predicted start of the end - According toHelmuth Nyborg(former professor of developmental psychology at Aarhus University, Denmark) in an interview with Stefan Molyneux on youtube. Helmuth was talking about his coming book which I think probably will never be published since it is so politically incorrect. He traced the IQ drop in Denmark and by 2070, it will average below 90 where in his assessment will bebelow what is necessary to sustain a western democracy. You can search for that interview in youtube since I think it would be a lost course looking for that book.If you accept his argument, Demark being typical enough with other "western culture" developed nations, they too will be on a similar trajectory. So, around 2070, we the "western culture" will begin to breakdown. He predicts that it will be increasing corruption, fractioned by different peoples of different cultures each with strong-man dictatorships as we decline. (This point forward, the words are not from him directly, they are my logical extension to a conclusion given what he said). Eventually, we the "western democracies" are returning to tribal governance. Japan, China, Korea, and a few others may be saved because they are largely homogeneous. The world as we know it today would not be remotely similar.[ My congesture here: ] Unless - before crossing 90, we found a solution:(A), We gene-edit so everyone can have a high enough IQ to sustain and even improve developed nations.(B), We move our living into silicon. We equip every new born with a new CPU to take over or to supplement our biological brain.When we are cyborgs with silicon brain, are we still human? That would be an interesting question indeed.

author: CatalinaWOW
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 21, 2019, 04:37:44 pm
content: I don't know how Nyborg assigns his dates, but he seems generally on to something. But it is pretty fuzzy. I personally would say that the IQ drop is due to good living. When things are very comfortable a huge percentage just aren't motivated to learning. This falls on both the sending and receiving end. Here in the US the image of parents demanding their children do well in school is largely localized in immigrant populations. Kids drift through school. So only the small fraction of hungry and/or self motivated develops intellectually. There may be a contribution from environmental contamination, but that seems unlikely since that reached its peak in the 1950's and has been steadily (if slowly) getting better ever since.It appears similar dynamics apply in Europe.What will happen as a result is unclear. There are large regions where the drive to improvement is still strong. Most of Asia, Africa and South America. Spots elsewhere. Also large regions which are culturally opposed to individual development due to religion or political forces. All anyone can say for sure is that the future will be different.Doomsayers are always around. How many people in the 1950s and 1960s would have predicted that half a century would pass with no nuclear wars and no immediate prospects of one? The popular view then was that it wasn't a matter of if, but when, and when was perceived as weeks or years away, not large fractions of a century.

author: Rick Law
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 22, 2019, 03:03:19 am
content: Quote from: CatalinaWOW on March 21, 2019, 04:37:44 pmHe evaluated the rate of drop from historical data to when he did his work, and he projected that forward to where it crosses 90. [RL note: It is unclear to me how he choose 90. I infer from his comments that he analyzed different democratic nations to find the line below whichhewould not accept those as "real" democracies.] Thus, he arrived at where the trace crosses 90 is when the developed world would fail once it is below that. I underline "western democracies of the developed world" since in his talk he distinguishes between democracies of less developed world where it is less operated based on law but instead based on personality, money/corruption, and other factors.This is to the the extend I want to talk IQ/democracy within a thread on civilization.What is more interesting are two things:I suppose you do know we are creating zombies, right? Knowing someone with alzheimer's symptom, it got me thinking. While I don't have "professionally done" statistics at hand. But, reading articles and news about medical progress,our ability to keep people alive is not kept up by our ability to keep our brain working. With exception to the brain, our medical science are helping people get healthier, surviving cancer, heart attacks, stroke, so forth. But, it appears that our ability to regenerate our neurons and our brain functions are improving but way slower. True that recently we managed to regenerate neurons from stem cells, but it appears to me that mostphysicalillnesses in the brain are still not treatable. How long can we keep this going before we have "Walking Dead" in our neighborhood instead of in a TV show?Which leads to the second thing:Eventually, we would go gene-edit and/or artificially created electronic brain to make it fast/better/more durable. Gene-edit is probably transitory - we still die. So, there will be an attraction to electronic brain.If/when we move to electronic brain, we are now an electro-mechanical being instead of a bio-mechanical being as we are today. The question then becomes: why not just virtualize the whole darn thing? When we do virtualize, we are "living" like as portrait in the movieThe Matrix. A group of "individuals" in this virtual habitat will be "working for the government" - they run robots in the physical world keeping the "mainframe" running so we can live in it. Is that a civilization if/when we are just a bunch of electronic signals?Are we still a civilization then?May be I've found the explanation for theFermi Paradox. They are there! Perhaps near by, but they are not physical so we physical world people are not going to find what is really bits in RAM storage somewhere a few star systems away.

author: Nominal Animal
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 22, 2019, 06:59:58 am
content: Quote from: Rick Law on March 22, 2019, 03:03:19 amFor background info, look at e.g.Hunter, J.E.Cognitive ability, cognitive aptitudes, job knowledge, and job performance.Journal of Vocational Behavior, 29, 340-362 (1986). This is a metastudy that shows that job performance correlates very, very strongly with general intelligence. (It seems to me it correlates even more tightly at the lower scores, as the different "facets" of intelligence only appear at the higher scores.)I'm obviously not a psychologist, but in my cursory interest in the matter, 85 to 90 seems to be the commonly-agreed lower bound below which it is unlikely that the person is capable of doing any productive work in a complex society, like those in western countries. (That is, without dedicated support and supervision, like for developmentally challenged people.)Essentially, the US military are forbidden by law to recruit anyone with an IQ less than 83. Their own recruitment preference is 93, because their own data collected over decades shows that you need an IQ of about 90 to be able to perform tasks in the military without active supervision. If I recall correctly, an IQ of 85 or lower meant that statistically, the person would be unable to performany task without being an active hindrance.If I've understood correctly, the Journal of Vocational Behaviour is one of the most respected journals on this subject. I've seen abstracts of articles that deal with the changes observed in intelligence and problem-solving ability in western countries in the last hundred years or so, and while I am not exactly sure what the changes mean (specifically, that while intelligence scores seem to have risen, the general problem-solving ability has reduced, according to high-school-aged students tests), there definitely is change afoot.

author: SilverSolder
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 24, 2019, 02:05:28 am
content: By definition, the average IQ of a population is 100... if the average intelligence is dropping, everyone's IQ remains the same!

author: Nominal Animal
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 24, 2019, 12:36:53 pm
content: Quote from: SilverSolder on March 24, 2019, 02:05:28 amThat's why the literature actually talks aboutg factor (Wikipedia), not IQ per se.