re: #246 Sol Berdinowitz

We make progress, then we fall back…we already had the dark Ages and the Renaissance, I expect the cycle to continue.

I have a pessimistic view of the near future. I fear that we have grown too dysfunctinal to face a real crisis, and any major strain on our ability to make sound judgements and react to a catastrophe will plunge us backwards again, and we will spend decades/centuries recovering from it.

if you study prehistory, you find that there are a number of dark ages

first, after the end of the ice age, the people of europe, who had a mighty big game hunter culture for 30 thousand years and established the first great artistic culture known to us through the cave paintings, become scattered mesolithic people, and europe becomes a backwater

then, thousands of years later after agriculture has come to europe, in about 4000 bc there is an invasion of people resembling the later vikings, except that they come from north of the black sea, who burn villages and set back neolithic europe

and then there is the chaos at the end of the bronze age and the beginning of the iron age, during the centuries around 1000 bc, sometimes called the greek dark ages, during which also the mysterious ‘sea peoples’ attempted to invade egypt

we sit on top of a a fragile structure of technological society, in a time where most people no longer know how to clear a field and grow their own food personally, or make a weapon and kill dinner

when the electricity stops, or the oil is no longer there, or some other more unforseen disaster overtakes us - how will we get by then?