This is a bit of a vague question…
Where do you think civilisation is heading? Do you think that Nature, and possibly humans, are being outdated by technology? Will technology benefit us in the long term?
What do you think about applying “survival of the fittest” to whole countries?
Do you think anything can be done about it? Or is this process not actually an undesirable thing?
I think civilization is heading where no one has gone before…except Gene Rodenberry!
Good topic. I have been wondering about it myself, but haven’t got all the factors into the equation to really come to any conclusions. One thing I have noticed though is sexual attraction between men and women.
As technology advances, man gets physically weaker, BUT what is appealing in a mate is still primal. We all like/want a mate who is, basically fit enough to survive in a jungle environment.
Civilization seems to be spiralling into chaos. Western civilization is continuing to decline, and it’s at a point where it actively allows 5th columns to develop in it without even putting up a fight. I see an age of tyranny developing and maybe the surpassing of the West by the Far East.
aren’t we already applying survival of the fittest to whole countries through economics and war?
And, survival of the fittest is great, until you’re not the fittest. Especially when you never had a real chance of becoming the fittest.
cheers,
gemty
Without my squiggle mark ( ~ )
I’d go insane…
what will technology do when there is noone left to use it?
It’s just an extension of human work & human desire.
Technology goes where we go.
I think that civilization is going in the right direction.
Dan
I assume you want the answer in 50,000 words or fewer, right?
How about “It’s not heading anywhere”?
It’s one great big thing, this civilisation? One behemoth moving unilaterally in a single direction?
You’d have to be waaaaay smarter than me to even see this.
I will hazard a guess - one day, everyone will have a squiggle after their name.
You heard it here first.
arround the sun a few times.
kill everyone untill they stop the violence, or we can just stay away from the circus and hope everything sorts itself out.
realistically, with the advancement of our educations systems, the progress towards a healthy environment(which we are now realizing is an important issue), the realization that we all in fact have to live together on this planet, an increase in tolerance(religious/ideological) and more stress on education should have civilization as a whole progressing more and more in the future.
I’m not worried, i live in canada and before we see and catastrophic event which threatens civilization i will be long gone. And hopefully scientists will have engineered a habitat which is sustainable underground if it ever comes to that.
Pessimistic answer: Nuclear war, Holocaust, dystopia
Optimistic answer: death, then to heaven
I like the squiggle idea
krossie~
hmmm very sporty - like a reverse tail or a one legged donkey
I might go for 2 tho’
~krossie~
wings - winner
I’m keepin those
Okay, ~krossie~, and I may have to do the same, as I am the first ~Dan~.
Well, I do see some things happening.
Globalization & uncontrolled capitalism are leading to the centralization of resources and power on a global scale. Things are headed towards more and more inequality. A small percentage of the people on earth own all of the money, and this will get worse as time goes by.
Unless we can change it
(who this “we” you refer to “pale face”)
OK I’ll settle for this - flight and armour
~[krossie]~
It’s a pyramid structure which grows gradually and is mainly designed so that the people at the bottom can’t do anything about it.
Only the people at the top can change it.
The people at the bottom aren’t united enough.
Workers of the world didn’t unite…
Dan~ There is now more material wealth than ever before. It is also true that the lot of the poor has changed little - it hasn’t gooten worse for the truly poor - it can’t. Globalisation has been happening since history first began, as transportation and communication has improved.
It doesn’t matter - if your world is a small europen empire and all the resources that matter (thus far) are tied up by the few, you just have a smaller “globe” as context. Most of the world’s resources are still untapped - we just haven’t gotten to them yet.
The ruling class of the Roman Empire was small, compared to the population as a whole. Capitalism is more monkeyed with than ever, as we “know” more. There are more rich and more poor. More change, and more sameness.
Poor people like me didn’t used to have cars, computers and literacy. And there were no Donald Trumps.
And no one, I mean no one, had a squiggly thing.
Look on the bright side.
This is part of a beginning dialog I’ve been having with a friend of mine. First, I’d like a definition of what one considers “civilization”. Everyone is throwing that word around as if there is a common understanding. But that’s just picking at details for the moment.
Nothing is going to change much in perhaps the next century or so, but at some point, a steep decline will set in, caused by two can’t-avoid-this issues:
Over population: The species has the capacity to overrun it’s supporting environment. I mean this in the sense that there will be no shortage of twinkies, but that we’ll destroy the ability of nature to provide the ingredients for twinkies.
Resource destruction: Eventually, resource regeneration will fail. There is a limit on how much capacity for the earth to recover in the face of increased population.
Of course, there will be population die-backs, resource wars, short-term technological “fixes”, but inexorably we will simply populate ourselves into extinction.
There are possible long term solutions such as total world government with enough power to force a limit on reproduction. Perhaps some of our decendants will manage to get off this ball of mud and become the seed of diaspora…
In the meantime, what is civilization is up for grabs, and will undoubtably be redefined any number of times as we approach the crunch of too many and not enough. Whether there is to be doom and gloom or the big breakthrough into paradise is pure speculation. It might be best for everyone to hold on to their squiggles…
tent - we have been hearing about lethal overpopulation for a long time, now. We could put the whole damn world into Africa and use North America as a garden. We’d still have a couple of other continents to spare. Can we overpopulate? I guess, bit it’s so far off that we cannot meaningfully speculate, I think. There is an excess of resources, of food, or the population would not still be growing. If we overdo it, then we will have a dieback. If that’s not enough, then some day we may be talking about a civilisation built by the “next” speicies. We’re talking waaaaaay longterm. The Sun could blow up first.
Hi faust,
I’d like to agree that we’re a long way off, but the problems of population increase exponentially, and therein lies the surprise. I hope you’re right. I want you to be right. My “restrained optimism” comes from a couple of years of population studies, and the so-called managable variables of both reproduction rates and the attendant support mechanisms lag far behind understanding. Or to put it bluntly, we don’t realize we’re standing in shit till it hits our noses…
Dan asked:
I seem to be looking at civilizations from the same spot as faust. The “Roman Civilization” appeared then disappeared but didn’t go anywhere and it existed simultaneously with other ‘civilizations’ that came and went. Now had you asked, “where is humanity headed?” that question might have elicited different responses.
To that question I would have answered, “self-destruction”. On a good day I would mention self-realization as the other possible destination for humanity. I would even suggest that it may not be to late to change direction; but today isn’t a good day. Although a miniscule change in attitude is all that is required the effort to make that change is astonomical and today I don’t believe the individuals of humanity have it in them to make that effort. Who among us is willing surrender our religious/phiosophies. Who will agree to transform our present survival-of-the-fittest cone-shaped vertical economy into the horizontal network that would allow each of us to contribute to the self-realization of humanity?
I got the, “Go to…” but I didn’t get the last word. Your voices were drowned out by the exploding bombs.
Yeah, tent, but you are assuming, I think, that everything can be managed. Earthquakes, flood, pestilence, and storms. And population - which, as you know, can be managed to some extent. I guess I do not do much hand-wringing about the distant future, but some of that is because I am familiar with the handwringing about the “direction of civilisation” that has occurred almost since the beginning of recorded history.
I read the Old Testamant once in a while. If you read “through” some of the religion, which I know you have, you’ll see much handwringing. End of the world, and apocalypse and earthquakes, pestilence and floods ending it all and such-the-like. They didn’t have science, but Malthus was taken as gospel for a while.