What is “complexity?”
If we are more complex than anything ever, and vastly so, haven’t we disproven the theory / broken the curse?
What is the baseline / threshold / limit for complexity before a society collapses?
Is it just human nature to destroy itself?
You should probably know that historically societies collapsing has typically resulted in improved health of the lower classes as judged by skeletons in the archeological record.
We should not really understand societies collapsing as a violent or spectacular thing. It’s usually just growth slowing, people move away, the ability of states to enforce taxes and provide services weakens and people work out their own stuff.
I’m not saying society is collapsing, just that if it does it’ll probably look more like declining birthrates and movement away from cities and advanced manufacturing to more agrarian lifestyle. Also that for the poor and downtrodden this will probably, on average, be an improvement.
Do you suppose the collapse will be next week, right when he arrives?
We’ll find out next week in the next thrilling episode of He-Man ™
meaningless. what does it mean for a society to be complex? what does “collapse” entail? if a certain amount complexity makes a society collapse, why are we more complex than ever? shouldn’t society have collapsed before this point?
just a bunch of nonsensical words strung together to mean nothing more than “i don’t understand some things and it makes me afraid”. literally the mindset of people who think trans people existing will lead to the downfall of society.
On top of that assuming societies get more complex over time, of course a collapse would always happen when they are the most complex.
When people get too old, the next step is death. We are now older than we have ever been!
Party pooper here - https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/4923/was-this-quote-on-a-clay-tablet-about-unruly-kids-written-by-an-assyrian
Quoting the answer from there:
In summary:
- I have not shown whether or not this is a quote from an ancient work.
- I’ve shown that the quote, and its provenance has survived largely intact since the 1920s at least.
- In particular, it has been traced far further back than Sir Isaac Asimov’s book (as suggested by others here).
- However, I have shown it was not both Assyrian and from 2800 BC. It may have in Akkadian, a related language, from 2800 BC, but that is earlier than any references I found so I find it unlikely. It might have been Sumerian.
- IMHO, given the dubious provenance of the source, a more likely scenario is that it is either a true quote, oddly translated, from a much later date, or invented in the early 20th Century.
Oh man if it is Akkadian and not Assyrian then it ruins the whole joke!
It was never over 🤯
We are so back 😎
it being over is over
Sounded fake as fuck to me, but I appreciate the hard data to back up my hypothesis.
There’s no doubt whatsoever that people thousands of years ago expressed these things, but yeah, it’s too bad we don’t have an actual surviving example.
Proof? What is “book” a modern translation for, also?
The difference is that we went from “the world as we know it” to “the entire world.” The planet is finite.
And nobody wants to work anymore!!!
It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of the Asyrian Empire.
It’s a tale as old as time, just like the “noone wants to work anymore” tale.
I so badly want a source for this.
It’s in the picture, just read the tablet
I read the tablet and it’s more about the quality of copper ingots delivered than the general decline of civilization.
I don’t know where the best quality copper ingots could be found in Ancient Mesopotamia, but I’ve definitely learned not to bother dealing with Ea-nāṣir!
Found Nanni’s Lemmy account.
There’s a lot of references to this, but it looks like there’s not a known source. Interestingly, the first reference to this tablet was from 1908. https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/10/22/world-end/
It’s annoying that they referenced several times the quote appeared since the early 1900s, but didn’t take a single step to determine if such a thing was written down in a museum in Istanbul.
So it’s a fake story from 1908
Writing books ? Despicable
big frosted miniwheat
Important
Maybe it never began
His favourite movie was probably Idiocracy
Or bodies are in a constant state of getting older and undergoing collapse. I think that believing in the good old days is a reaction to getting old. I think that believing in some golden past is it reaction to our own bodily degeneration. Fear of our mortality is a powerful force, and I think that a large amount of people externalize/project that fear onto their perception of society.
I think it’s more that you get taught the “right” way of doing, speaking, etc. and people are geared to dislike challenges to that idea until they learn to accept change. Another example would be people who’ve learnt how to do a particular task at work being shown a better way of doing it but having a niggling sense that the way they’d learnt first is ipso facto better.
Saving this comment. It’s a fantastic observation you’ve made, you convinced me.
The end of the world hasn’t happened for everyone yet, but the world does end for some individuals every day.
Reminds me of the poem the florist has in Grim Fandango that goes something like: it may be years, it may be hours, but sooner or later everyone pushes up flowers.
Man that game is a damn masterpiece
I don’t see a problem viewing our current predicament a post apocalypse
The bronze age collapse happened ~1600 years after that tablet was written, i guess that could count as an end of the world(that they knew)
I understand the point. But it misses an extremely important factor: technology.
Yes, humans have played pretend we were this world’s owners/masters since civilization began.
But our toolbox is filled with tech that can literally reverse terraform the climate against us, and we’re using it with abandon and without restraint. Add to that AI, CRISPR derived bioweapons, etc. We’ve gotten to the point where we cobble together yet another means of world wide destruction every decade or two, and we all know we’re too stupid and selfish not to for the prospect short term, individual gain.
They were monkeys with spears and swords, a threat to rival monkey tribes, but in no way the entire species. We are monkeys with nukes.
“It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity”
-Albert Einstein
