Are we going to the end of our civilization?

The same conclusion reached historian Arnold Toynby, in his volume book “A study of history”, where it analyzes the rise and fall of 28 different civilizations. He was right in some respects: civilizations, often responsible for their decline.

However, their self-destruct usually helps. For example, the Roman Empire was the victim of a lot of “wrestling”, including excessive expansion, climate change, environmental degradation and poor leadership. But she kneeled when Rome was conquered, and was robbed by the Visigoths in 410, and the Vandals in 455.

Kolapsy is often quick, and greatness does not provide any immunity. The Roman Empire extended to an area of 4 million square miles [4.4 million sq km] in 390. Five years later, it was wrinkled at 2 million km2. By 476, the expansion of the empire was zero.

What can the rise and fall of historical civilizations tell us about our present civilization? What are the forces that accelerate or delay a decline? Do we see similar models today?

The first way to analyze past civilizations is to compare their life span. The decline could be defined as a rapid and sustainable loss of population, identity and socioeconomic complexity. Public services break apart, chaos comes, and the government loses control of its monopoly on violence.

Nearly all past civilizations have faced this fate. Some have been reincarnated and transformed, such as the Chinese and Egyptians. Other declines have been permanent, as was the case of Easter Island. At times, cities on the scene of the fall are resurrected, as was the case in Rome. In other cases, such as Maya civilization, cities were abandoned as mausoleums for future tourists.

Associations of the past and the present are simply complex systems made up of humans and technology. The theory of normal “axidents” suggests that complex technological systems are failing constantly after some time. Thus, the decline can be a normal phenomenon for civilizations regardless of their size and position.

Today, we can be more advanced technologically. But this does not give many reasons to believe that we are immune to threats that our ancestors have thrown down. Our newly formed technological skills also bring new and unprecedented challenges.

Our economically united and globalised system is more likely to trigger the spread of the crisis. Since there is no single accepted theory about why civilizations collapse, historians, anthropologists and others have proposed various explanations, including:

Climate change: When climate stability changes, the results can be catastrophic, resulting in crop decay, massive hunger, and desertification. The decline in the Anasazi civilizations, Tiwanaku, Akkadian, Maya, the Roman Empire, and many others have all coincided with unexpected climate changes, usually drought.

Environmental degradation: Kolapsy can happen when societies exceed their environmental capacity.

Inequality and oligarchy: Wealth and political inequality can be the central promoters of social dissolution, as can oligarchia and centralisation of power among leaders. This not only causes social concerns but undermines a society's ability to respond to ecological, social and economic problems.

Composer: Historian Joseph Tainter has proposed that societies eventually collapse under the weight of complexity and their accumulated bureaucracy.

Current shocks: wars, natural disasters, hunger and wounds. For example, the Aztec Empire was occupied by the Spanish. And most of the early agrarian countries disappeared because of deadly epidemics.

Chance or Fate: Statistical analysis of empires suggests collapse is random, and independent of their age. Evolution biologist and data scientist Andre Zliobaite and his colleagues have noted a similar pattern in evolutionary recording of species.

A common explanation of this obvious coincidence is the “effect of the Red Queen”: if species are constantly struggling for survival, in an environment that differs with numerous competitors, extinction is a stable possibility.

Despite the abundance of books and articles, we do not have a final explanation for why civilizations collapse. For modern civilization, these four potential metrics, measured over recent decades: The temperature, is a clear metric for climate change, GDP is an aid to complexity, and ecologicality is an indicator of environmental degradation.

Inequality, it's harder to calculate. The typical measure of the Gini Index suggests that inequality has been slightly reduced to a global level, while it has increased within countries. More importantly, the inequity of wealth is even greater. The kind of soothing news is that collapsion metries don't make up the whole picture.

Social resistance may be able to delay or prevent decline. For example, economic diversity is greater today than in the 1960s and 1970s. However, the world is deteriorating in areas that have contributed to the collapse of previous civilizations.

The climate is changing, the gap between the rich and the poor is expanding, the world is becoming increasingly complex, and our environmental requirements are exceed the planet's host capacity.

Today, social collapse is a more treacherous prospect. Weapons available to a state, and sometimes even groups during chaos, now range from biological agents to nuclear weapons. Nuclear war itself can result in an existential danger: either the disappearance of our species or a permanent catapulmation again in the Stone Age.

In our case, the decline would be a snare of progress. The decline of our civilization is not inevitable. History suggests that it is possible, but we have a unique advantage of being able to learn from the mistakes of past societies.

We know what needs to be done: greenhouse gases in the atmosphere can be reduced, inequalities narrow down, degradation of the environment stop, so that innovation has the next boom, and economies can be disqualified. The concrete proposals are on the table, only political will is missing.

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