Somebody made the argument that the rise of civilization is the rise of drill bits. Harder, more durable bits meant more metals mined per hour. More metal meant more durable goods like chariots, pots, spear points, wagons. Durable goods meant more efficient commerce. And on up the food chain. Anyway I remember a graph of bit hardness through history vs city size or some such.

Guess this argument can also be made the other way round - larger communities > more interaction and knowledge transfer > harder drill bits. I doubt that human progress can be boiled down to a few factors but has to be seen as a chaotic system with each node influencing every other.

Decline does not have to follow the scenario in which knowledge, capability, or even access to resources are lost. The scenario of a living hell for most people and a slow, global decline can come about simply by reducing access to the benefits of technology and resources, and by making use of extreme methods of control.

For example: what if the priority of a small segment of the population becomes putting maximum resources into some long-term project which only benefits that group? 90% of the population could be directed toward working on that massive project, by delusion, coercion, or other methods. The pyramids of Egypt and North Korea now are smaller-scale examples of this.

Just an FYI: I've been hearing more and more recently that the Pyramids of Egypt were built by free engineers, not slaves. It has been recently theorized that methodologies they used to hurl great stones across the desert required far fewer laborers. By pouring water in front of the stones, the desert sand would become slippery, and thus much much fewer people would be needed for the task. (Early estimates was that it took ~100k people to build a pyramid. Modern estimates point at only ~10k, based on newly found food consumption records)

IE: The Pyramids were more akin to the Great Cathedrals across Europe: 100 or 200 year projects completed by generations of engineers, architects, and artists. Not necessarily the elites of society... but at least those with free will. Some motivated by Religion, others motivated by simple glory and the joy of building great things.

I think people think that Egyptian Slaves built the pyramids... Sometimes people think they were Jewish Slaves: some time between Joseph and Moses in Biblical times. But if they were simple slaves, why were the workers of the Pyramids buried either near, or even within the Pyramids? This was a great honor that was normally reserved only for Pharaohs!

http://news.discovery.com/history/ancient-egypt/pyramids-tom...

Interesting-- if the pyramids took a long time (as cathedrals did) then the work and resource-use may have not had such a terrible impact on the common people.

Thinking on it, I do hope that the current global lifestyle of productivity, consumerism, and reproduction can be wrought into something truly sustainable. Science and technology will help with this, but then again the same could create new forms of resource-intensive consumerism.

Without changes in how people live, a star trek economy, or large numbers of people choosing to not reproduce, we might over-convert the Earth's resources into finished components of our inane, evolution-driven desires.

Is the end goal with all of this that humanity continues forever? If not, what is the desired far-future outcome?

I say the long goal is "interesting things", but doing so while minimizing destruction.

Perhaps a far-future goal could involve evolving our minds and activities beyond our evolutionary orientation, yet still be able to somehow retain them to respect our history, or just our strange beauty?