I think we're at a transition point. People talk about our entering a post-scarcity economy but what you don't hear so much about is exactly how would that happen? Human nature being what it is those at the top who are accustomed to consuming the most civilization has to offer are still playing by that same old playbook - but in a post-scarcity economy that consumption is obscene and it's becoming clearer to more and more people that the old playbook needs to be thrown out. But that "old playbook" has been around for 6,000 years (actually more)!

I remember the old Police song having the line "there is no political solution for our troubled evolution." They say we live in the Anthropocene epoch, an epoch dominated by man. The problem is that's not the world we evolved in and for humans evolution isn't just a matter of physical adaptation but social adaptation as well. Our social structures we've built over the millennia no longer work the same in this new world we've built. We have to evolve, but social evolution typically involves violence and upheaval and would appear that everything is falling apart.

Nothing lasts forever, but some things last a really long time. Like life on this planet (several billion years). Or possibly advanced alien civilizations out there. Question would be why can't humans find a way to last a really long time?

The last hundred years? So electrifying rural areas, civil rights, vaccines, space exploration, Medicare (US), public medicine (first world countries), and more are all the downturn?

I thnik he just wanted to throw "ancestros" somewhere in there without specifying what that former glory exectly is.