What's the over/under on civilization?

I asked my 25 yo daughter this question last night, her answer was ten thousand years.

My guess is 300 years; I figure it's about 50/50 that civilization will last that long, what with rising sea levels and global warming, fossil fuel depletion, that nut job in North Korea itching to set off his new fireworks, religious, ethnic, and economic strife, disease resistance, the cauldron underneath Yellowstone park, asteroid near misses, etc etc etc.

I found the different perspectives interesting. When I was younger I would have probably said something like ten thousand years, too. Now wiser, I'm not so optimistic.

Need a definition of civilization before I can answer it Mosca. Civilization changes all the time. I think worse case scenerio is we end up like civilizations of several thousand years ago. If you mean extinction of the human race I do not subscribe to that scenerio.

Ah, a thread I can really get into!

I give it 1000 years. Population will peak the next 100 years and even the next 50, then will start to decline. But it is more than just that. The decline is happening in the stable, advanced societies at a faster rate than the less advanced, poorer, and unstable areas. We really have just a few societies driving the world. When their advancements stop, the world's advancements stop.

Japan is in population decline, the EU is at or near it in most member countries, the USA is only increasing due to immigration, Mexico of all places will soon stabilize, and even China is facing rapid aging. Expect this to continue. Demographic experts who get paid to study this stuff will notice, but society at large will not. It will take 50+ years of decline for reality to set in. By that 50 years much of the infrastructure will really start to fall. Cities made for 2 million will have lost up to half that amount and fall apart. Look at Detroit and other ghost-cities. Losing population for over 50 years and just now deciding to tear housing down because it will never be used again. Nations will be Detroit squared. Entire places might have to be deserted.

So you get to 100 years out and this will be the thing. But it will still be "normal" to have at most 2 kids. Kids cost money and it is now more and more acceptable to just not want any at all. 50 years ago to have just 1 was not normal. It took 50 years for this to change, it is therefore logical that to decide you should have more will take as long to sink in. Even longer as people had fewer kids because of cost. Pre-1900s kids generated income, later they were a cost.

So, having to go to work now and finish this post up, by 200 years we may lose 1/3 of what we have now. But that will be enough for a terminal decline. Too much infrastructure to feed by too few people, living standards keep falling and other things fall around that.

"We can't give up just because the universe does." Isaac Asimov.

Quote: kenarman

Need a definition of civilization before I can answer it Mosca.

The stage when cities are built and they dominate politics.

The literal meaning is citification.

Quote: Nareed

The stage when cities are built and they dominate politics.

The literal meaning is citification.

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.

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.

And the first cities very likely didn't even have streets!

But that's not germane. we can easily classify the great cities like Ur, Babylon, Assur, Memphis, Rome, Athens, Troy, Alexandria, etc. as cities which dominated politics. In fact, the term "politics" ultimately derives from the ancient Greek "polis" meaning "city."

So I guess civilization can be best defined as the stage when cities are built and they dominate city affairs :)

Quote:

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

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.

Back to the question at hand, and avoiding distractions like secondary meanings of "civilized," we can begin with the fact that Egypt, and others, have maintained a civilization, in varying degrees of wealth, continuously for over 5,000 years. Longer, even, if we consider primitive farming tribes as civilized.

In the interest of getting interesting answers, I want to leave the definition of "civilization" vague. Define it how you want to.

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.

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?

Quote: Mosca

Or will we become tribalized and wary of others, will we hoard resources?

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.

Quote: Nareed

And the first cities very likely didn't even have streets!.

Pretty much all the scholars agree that to be a city it must have had, streets, political organization, means of handling sanitation. The scholars all add more items than that to their list but can't agree on all the various items that might be required. Those defining items take us back at least 5000 to 6000 years. The definition might take us back further but hard conclusive evidence gets pretty tough to find older than that.

Here is a link to an interesting article on the on various defining characteristics of ancient cities. Ancient City Definitions