Long History: What Comes Next?
The great sawtooth of civilisation
This article is inspired by Human History in 10 Bullets by ANTI-REBEL.ORG. Anti-, as I shall call her, postulates that complexity, i.e. civilisation, is just something that life tends towards, and that is neither good nor bad. It just is.
That is the main point I take from the article. The rest of these thoughts are mine.
⚠️ Trigger Warning: ⚠️ Read this tomorrow, Jim Leftus, when you ain’t channelling Timothy Leary. ⚠️
It’s a great hypothesis. A fundamental physical law of the universe—the second law of thermodynamics— tells us that entropy, roughly an inverse measure of complexity, increases: The cream disperses throughout the coffee; it doesn’t spontaneously form the image of a heart. That takes life, in this case, in the form of a barista. Life decreases entropy, which is to say, it increases complexity. Why wouldn’t that also be true of the complexity of our technology and our civilisation?
(Despite life, the overall entropy of the universe continues to increase. Life’s decreasing entropy is drawn from the energy it consumes. The entropy of an apple is much lower than the entropy of what is left of it after you eat it.)
Even if the complexity of our current civilisation leads to the extinction of humanity, that is neither good nor bad. It just is. I guess it may seem bad to you if you love humanity or if you suffer in its extinction, but that’s on you. You should learn to accept the world as it is, if you ever hope of find peace of mind. But I digress.
The current global climate catastrophe is massively unbalancing our climate and ecology and is inevitably going to crash our civilisation, most likely within one or a few decades. The question that has been a lot on my mind is, what happens after that? Not just the next hundred years, or thousand years, or even millions of years. What happens to us over billions of years? (The planet earth itself has about 5.4 billion years left before the sun runs out of fuel and expands into a gigantic red dwarf, destroying the earth.)
Let’s put civilisation on a graph. The y-axis can be the complexity of civilisation, the earth’s population, or some measure of the sophistication of our technology. The x-axis is time. With linear scales, it sketches out the famous hockey-stick curve:
To make things easier, let’s compress the scales (logarithmic scales, if you would) such that the graph becomes linear:
Now let’s add my civilisational collapse to the graph:
So, what happens next? If we assume that life remains on the planet (“Life, uh, …finds a way,” as Dr. Ian Malcolm said in Jurassic Park), then complexity/civilisation will start growing again:
It will probably be a human civilisation, but it could possibly be a different animal or even Artificial Intelligence. Life finds a way.
Over a long, long time, we would expect to see an irregular sawtooth pattern, roughly repeating what happened before but reaching different heights and taking different amounts of time:
Sometimes the crashes may be human-caused, like our current climate crisis, and sometimes they may be natural events like comet impacts, super-volcano eruptions, or natural climate cycles. In addition, within each “tooth,” many non-global civilisations rise and fall, such as the Roman Empire, the Mayans, and the Aztecs.
This irregular sawtooth could go on forever, until a comet smashes the planet to smithereens or our sun becomes a red dwarf. (This would essentially be the Great Filter answer for the Fermi Paradox.) But more probably, I’m guessing one of three things will happen.
A. Breakaway! In this scenario, civilisation achieves a threshold where its technology allows mankind (assuming it is still a human civilisation) to reach the stars and populate the solar system, the Milky Way galaxy, and, perhaps, eventually, the universe:
This is the techno-optimist future, as frequently depicted in science fiction literature and movies. If we encounter other space-faring civilisations, a variety outcomes are possible, but life, of one type or another, continues to populate the universe.
B. Garden of Eden. In this scenario, mankind learns to live in harmony with nature, the population levels out below the carrying capacity of the planet, and civilisation stops growing:
This scenario is not possible if Anti-’s hypothesis is correct, that growing complexity is the natural, inevitable result of life. On the other hand, the existence of long-lived hunter-gatherer societies such as the Aboriginal Australians, who have lived a largely unchanged lifestyle for 50,000 years, suggests otherwise.
C. Extinction. In this scenario, all life ceases to exist on earth:
One way extinction could come about would be a devastating nuclear war. Another way is that the climate could become so unstable that it is not hospitable to any life at all.
Of course, even an extinction event could just be a very, very long interval on the sawtooth of civilisation, and life could arise again after millions or billions of years:
It is interesting to consider that it is possible that our current civilisation is not the first tooth in the sawtooth of long history! If an advanced technological civilisation rose and fell on earth a billion years ago, would there be any evidence of it that we could discover today? Was life on earth seeded by an inconceivably older civilisation from another solar system or galaxy?
We cannot know where we are on the sawtooth of long history, and, of course, no one alive today will know where long history will take us. But it is interesting to think about, isn’t it?
And be not sad that civilisation is passing away, for it will surely rise again.
Life, uh, …finds a way.
— Lannie Rose, March 2023
preferred pronouns: she/her/hers
Written with NO HELP from ChatGTP or other AI resource
