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Tag Archives: Civilization
Searching for advanced civilizations in other galaxies: 50 possible candidates found?
At first, this article seems like a bit of a downer: Search for advanced civilizations beyond Earth finds nothing obvious in 100,000 galaxies — ScienceDaily. After searching 100,000 galaxies for signs of highly advanced life, a team of scientists has … Continue reading
The rise of the west and civilization collapses
Phil Plait recently announced that he was starting a new series of Crash Course videos on astronomy. After watching it, I noticed the really cool Youtube channel that it’s on. I suspect that I’m going to end up wasting dedicating a … Continue reading
How Farming Almost Destroyed Ancient Human Civilization
Annalee Newitz has a fascinating article at IO9 on early neolithic societies: How Farming Almost Destroyed Ancient Human Civilization. Roughly 9,000 years ago, humans had mastered farming to the point where food was plentiful. Populations boomed, and people began moving into … Continue reading
How should we communicate with aliens? Should we communicate?
Seth Shostak has a post up at HuffPost asking what we should say if we ever find ourselves in conversation with aliens. Apparently this was the topic of a recent conference at the SETI institute. Before commenting on Shostak’s main … Continue reading
The decline of religion in western societies
Huffington Post UK has published the results of a survey showing that half of Britain thinks religion does more harm than good, and that you don’t need it to be a good person. This seems to be a trend in … Continue reading
Posted in Religion
Tagged Atheism, Christianity, civil religion, Civilization, God, History, Islam, Judaism, Religion, Science, Society, traditional religion
46 Comments
Collapse: How Societies Choose To Fail Or Succeed, a brief review
After my post the other day on what fields I thought someone needed to be familiar with for coming up with credible theories about why civilizations collapse, a number of people recommended I read Jared Diamond’s book, ‘Collapse‘. I finished … Continue reading
On theories of why civilizations collapse and our own times
After my post on the Bronze Age collapse and resulting discussion, I looked at other material about the collapse of civilizations, but after doing that, realized that I have some thoughts about what might be necessary for developing a theory about … Continue reading
Posted in History, Society
Tagged Ancient History, Archaeology, Bronze Age collapse, Civilization, Civilization Collapse, Economics, History, Roman Empire
17 Comments
Cosmos and civilization collapse through climate change
So, this note might be met with skepticism, but I had no idea when I composed my Bronze Age collapse entry this weekend that Cosmos would discuss how climate change had affected various civilizations throughout history, notably the Akkadian empire … Continue reading
Posted in Zeitgeist
Tagged Akkadian Empire, Bronze Age collapse, Civilization, Climate Change, Environment, History, Mesopotamia
12 Comments
The collapse of the Bronze Age civilizations
A while back I did a short post on the collapse of civilizations, noting that history pretty much shows that all civilizations, sooner or later, end. (I also expressed skepticism that ours is necessarily anywhere near this point.) The quintessential example … Continue reading
Posted in History
Tagged Ancient History, Archaeology, Bronze Age, Canaanite, Civilization, Civilization Collapse, Egypt, Eric Cline, Greece, Hattusa, History, Hittite, Sea People
20 Comments
Will civilization collapse in the coming decades?
Apparently, there is a NASA funded study which says so. If history is any guide, our civilization will eventually collapse. Every other society in human history has ultimately done so: Sumer, Egypt, Rome, etc. There’s no good reason to think … Continue reading
Posted in Zeitgeist
Tagged Civilization, Ecological collapse, Egypt, Environment, human history, Nasa, Overpopulation, Population, population growth, Roman, Rome
11 Comments
