Posted: 8/24/2005 8:05:52 AM EDT
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Are we automatically going to progress with more and more technological innovation, better medical care, faster computers, building more and newer buildings etc? Or could we have an event that is not a setback but a turning point where our conditions deteriorate. To the extent that future generations live in conditions we only know if from history? ETA: Rodents thread about transitioning from oil got me wondering how many people simply don’t believe we could blow it and screw up modern civilization. |
| History has shown that society has fluctuated in its progress .It all depends if there are factors or influences that will temporarily stomp out the progression of knowledge. Today that sort of thing would include a worldwide nuclear war, in the past it meant simply the collapse of the dominant society that drove intellectual progress. Imagine if the Roman Empire had not fallen and the Dark Ages had not occured, where society would be today without several hundred years of learning and progress hanging on by the merest thread. I would guess that we would have been in space centuries ago, for one thing. Imagine where we'd be if the societies of Egypt that were able to build the Pyramids had continued in their intellectual superiority and not collapsed. The examples abound. |
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No. We are NOT going to automatically progress. Did the Romans "automatically" progress? The Roman Empire decayed as it was assaulted from all sides by barbarian hordes. Result; one thousand years of economic, political and cultural reversals and stagnation. The thing that's really scary is that during the Middle Ages there were educated people who knew damn well that the average Roman citizen enjoyed a standard of living much higher than the standard of living of the average vassel, but no one could "get back to the Roman way of life". We are confronting a very real danger today. If the God damn Islamists ever get their hands on nuclear weapons I really don't think they would have to destroy our entire country to initiate a chain reaction of negatives that could send the developed world into a tailspin that would make the Dark Ages seem like the Enlightenment. |
Your post inspired me to pick up an extra roll of duct tape! |
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The sum total of human knowledge was greater at the end of the Dark Ages than at the beginning. Progress was made scietifically. Socially it was backwards as your average serf knew far less than a Roman citizen, but knowledge itself was advanced and recorded. Thus in any even short of something eliminating all sources of records on the planet, mankind will never loose the knowledge he has. We might stagnate for a while, but we will pick up where we left off at some point. We're not going to have start over from square one. |
As long as society does not have something that retards the growth of knowledge, yes, it progresses. The Romans certainly progressed technologically, and their domination of the known world allowed those concepts to spread further than ideas or knowledge that might have been developed elsewhere.Same with the Egyptians and who knows how many other societies that have since been lost in pre-history. You are right about our technology being very tenuous. It wouldn't take the Middle East to do us in; simply losing a per centage of our population well into the double digits would do it to us. Go hang out in the survival forum a while and you'll get a sense of just how barely our level of civilization hangs on. |