Also just because others thought similar things doesn't mean it isn't true now. The progress since sometime in the 1800s has been insane. If in 100,000 years a super smart civilization, unimaginably advanced, looks at an estimated world population time series, they will be objectively impressed that those guys figured out / stumbled upon some impressive things to manage that. It's really interesting to think about just how desolate the world was even a few hundred years ago. Almost all our big cities today were little towns, except for like 1 or 2 globally. The change is undeniable. It's not all subjective and "they said X, we say X, nobody can decide if X is true, what is truth anyway, etc"
I wonder if there is academic study comparing past-focused, future-focused, and cyclical views of human progress in literature.
I think the mistake comes from something common to a lot of sci-fi, which is mistaking the scale of a planetary setting. It takes a lot of energy to disrupt life on a global scale (we're managing it, but it's taken hundreds of years). "At some point" is carrying a lot of weight in that observation.
Completely agree with your points, but I think it’s worth mentioning that the collapsing populations may not have been aware of this depending on their level of isolation and cultural view on outsiders.
In the story, "at some point" generally involved technologies we are currently incapable of; the greater technology actually facilitating the greater collapse. Which at the most obvious included nuclear catastrophe.
North America, for example.
Progress towards what, exactly?
I don't know if it's a laudable goal, but I think it'll eventually be possible.
If you asked me several years ago I would have said "yes, the star trek future is at least partially attainable", but that requires a lot of optimism in technological advancement that I don't have. I do think that with the technology and resources available to us today (or the near future) we could support 10 billion people working safe labor in air conditioning, full stomachs, free time, and on a planet that is still hospitable.
If you want to know how to actually get there: I have no idea, but I do know if we don't agree on the direction and make steps towards it continuously for many generations that we'll never get there. For now I'm voting with my feet and contributing my labor to a cause I think pushes us in the right direction.
Also, I'm setting aside the battle with natural death. Preserving brains and their contents indefinitely is not impossible, but transhumanism is as much philosophy as it is technology.
I grant that not all care given to aged is a kindness, but not fighting aging is not virtuous.
But no one really knows what future we are heading towards, or what would happen to us in 100,000 years. No one really cares to think that far ahead I guess.
Take the example from another thread today. In the 60s we were worried about food shortages to support the exploding population, but it turned out that we solved that problem way before the population number was at that assumed “breaking point”.
We can theorize now about the problems we will face in 100k years, but what about the problems we can’t ever foresee? Aliens with hyperlight laser beams? Rogue asteroids? We have no answers for those types of problems, but they are probably more likely than anything we can dream up today.
Don't be too optimistic... This isn't just a question of physics but also about the probability of the emergence of complex technological intelligence. Since we only know about a single case, we can't determine this probability. We can make various guesses but these all involve assumptions about things other than physics
unless you are appealing to 'God can do anything' - but since God wouldn't do that we can ignore that he could.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wormhole#Traversable_wormholes
Even if all travel is limited by lightspeed, without knowing the probability of emergence of intelligent life, we don't know how far away or how long ago such life is likely to have formed.
Even if we did have a better idea about this probability, we still couldn't rule out that intelligent life had by chance formed relatively nearby, relatively long ago, thereby allowing them to reach us by now. Nothing in physics forbids this as far as I know.
Personally I don't think an advanced alien civ would attack us anyway, because we'd be no threat. Since intelligence seems to imply curiosity, they might want to observe or experiment with us instead, but that's speculative
What is "now"? Within the next 100,000 years? In human terms, that's an eternity, and in galaxy term, that's an insignificant amount of time. In other words, almost certain not to happen. Even if it does, do we even notice? Chances are they either immediately kill us all, or they just observe and will stay hidden. A face to face interaction is scifi, not reality.
Tbh, on the list of things that humankind should worry about, an alien visit isn't even in the top 100.
It's understandable that it's a great topic to muse about, especially among tech folks. It's been part of scifi lore for generations and one can spend a lot of time discussing technical aspects. That's by far less messy and depressing than dealing with actual real-world problems (like wars, drift to dictatorships, oppression of minorities, inequality, climate crisis, human-made ecological disasters, heritary or contagious diseases, etc etc). Though when it's about devoting actual societal resources, it would be a waste to spend them on alien visitor questions beyond writing novels and making movies. Even if it's more fun to nerd out on intergalactical travel rather than preventing school shootings.
"by now" means at some time before the present.
I'm just pointing out an alien encounter is not ruled out by physics. I'm not advocating for societal resources to be diverted to prepare for it.
You mention some well-known, difficult problems. Does their existence mean no one should ever talk about anything else?
I'm not sure why you get involved with a conversation just to point out that wars and climate change are happening. Everybody already knows that. I'm taking a little time out to comment on various topics here, as you seem to be doing too.
Anyway, if you're trying to encourage people to spend time on finding solutions to those problems, I'm listening. What's your proposal?
Of course you're right about the physics.
And I don't have solutions to the hard problems either. They are hard for a reason.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excession#Outside_Context_Prob...
"For most of human history, around 1 in 2 newborns died before reaching the age of 15. By 1950, that figure had declined to around one-quarter globally. By 2020, it had fallen to 4%."
The question of course is 'how'. For the last few centuries, the answer has been technology.
Well, those were the Dark Ages which objectively represented a decline of society relative to what came before them.
Besides that, agreed to all you wrote.
On a related note, I think the whole mystery of the Bronze Age collapse becomes fairly obvious once you consider the nature of Bronze Age societies and the way they'd be affected by a technology [iron] that allows a village with a can-do attitude to resist the predations of the local god-king. (Or to become predators themselves, perhaps by taking to the sea.)
This in spite of the tendency of said Dear Leaders to keep their charges in famine conditions, something absent even from most modern systems that are close to chattel slavery, for example in the Gulf states and in human trafficking operations.
Ea-Nasir's buddies were experimenting with adding hematite flux to remove slag from copper. They wanted to improve their copper, and wound up giving us IRON. https://phys.org/news/2025-09-year-copper-smelting-site-key....
As I understand Bret's last post about the life of peasants[2] regarding how they saw life,
> the lives of these peasants work in a series of cycles. There’s a reason agrarian societies of these sort often do not think in terms of time as a linear progression, but instead as a set of ‘ages’ or ‘cycles,’ with the present, in a sense, endlessly repeating in a static sort of rhythm. For these societies technological and social progress, while real is often so slow as to be almost or entirely imperceptible on a normal human lifespan.
[2] https://acoup.blog/2025/10/17/collections-life-work-death-an...
Even if these people aren't well recorded in history you can take a pretty ironclad estimate as to what they thought in aggregate by looking at the clergy, the administrators, etc, etc and what they were preaching, saying, etc.
How one sees their individual life doesn't have direct bearing on the society they live in.
Let's take for example a farmer on the outskirts of some village in southwest England. His bloodline may have been occupying the same land for Millenia. Their feelings about doing so may not even change over that time. But depending on the century you put him in he and everyone else in the society he lives in think of the way they fit into the larger world very differently.
I think they were much like us in many ways. They probably imagined that things could get better (even if they didn't imagine electricity or computers).
Debatable. Proponents of "original affluent society" argue that agricultural civilization was a major step back in terms of quality of life.
Many many people today tend towards ecologism, thinking we are now just ruining the planet, and should go back in time.
E.g. if you were a petty kingdom emerging in the centuries after the Romans left Britain, you'd be fairly sure that you no longer had the technology to build aqueducts, baths or villas. And for centuries after that, a large element of learning was trying to recreate / understand the classics - e.g. the influence of Galen and Aristotle.
Doesn't the modern idea of inevitable human progress really come in with the enlightenment?
It's not to say that the early medieval period couldn't eventually built magnificent edifices or build on the knowledge, but for many centuries, Rome and Greece was seen as something to aspire to.
Depending on where you are talking about there may not have been local resources to make waterproof concrete, which back to my point: they didn't have the resources if they wanted to. Though we have plenty of buildings (most obviously Cathedrals) dating to well before the rediscovery of roman concrete to prove that isn't needed. Those Cathedrals only exist because they had a few resources and so they could build them over time. Those cathedrals also were in use for church services - usually in the first year of construction - to fuel the dream.
They also only exist because they used architectural techniques that the Romans never developed, namely the flying buttress, which could support massive relatively thin wall without hundreds of columns and arches everywhere.
I don't think it's simply a matter of lack of resources, though – some of the early kings had the manpower to do things like build an 80 mile rampart between Mercia and the Welsh states.
In thinking about what you've written, I started to look for more detail on any research into why there was such a drastic change in architecture post the collapse and you're right, it clearly is more complicated than just lost knowledge. I didn't look far, only https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Saxon_architecture, but that's enough to suggest that it's now accepted that conscious cultural choice had a lot to do with it as well (if not more…). So I learnt something and will dig into it more - thanks!
But I'm not sure that specific (Anglo Saxon architecture) point really negates the proposition that for a thousand years people looked back to Rome (and later Greece) writers to legitimise their knowledge. This knowledge was sought after and preserved (and amended to fit in with religious dogma, of course). There were innovators, of course, but there's a reason that writers like Galen and Vitruvius, held so much sway for so long, isn't there?
In the political sphere, there were countless (real and figurative) battles to be seen as the heir to the Roman Empire because that was what success looked like… Yes, all these states would have torn each other to shreds anyway, because that's what states do if they're not stopped, but isn't it telling that they did explicitly so in terms of being the inheritor of Rome?
Of course it's all more complicated than that, but it does seem fairly clear that the ancient world generally was seen as something to aspire to, to get back to, in a way that's probably foreign to us now.
Unless you're Mussolini, of course…
Tell that to 600s Western Europe. They were fully aware that there was a society before them that had the capacity to do things they could not.
To use metaphor, you made a "haha 69" joke in a context where you needed at least a double entendre.
If this were a comment section for an article on a subject of modern political relevance (i.e. a poo flinging match) you probably would have gotten away with it.
You could/should have crafted the comment with more words and hit some other topics (maga isn't unique, there's other historical and contemporary movements that follow the same trend) to obfuscate it and appeal to the people who fancy themselves pseudo intellectual but that would have taken effort you didn't expend and so those people are offended by your low effort.
I think the Romans were right to believe that, and so are we today.
But the ride wasn't sa clean, steady slope up. For example there's a reason the dark ages are called dark. Most people of the time (except the few educated) didn't know there was something better in another time and another place. They probably thought that's as good as anyone's ever had.
Now we live in the first period in history where knowledge of history is accessible to almost any person. So as a regular guy you can have a good sense of where to place these times on the scale of civilization.
I am pretty sure you are wrong on multiple counts there.
1. The "dark ages" were called dark because of a lack of written records, after the collapse of the Roman Empire and its centralised systems and imperial bureaucracy.
2. A lot of people did know there had been a different age before. Even if not literate they would regard the literate as the source of knowledge and every village would have some literate people.
3. Life was better for many people. An obvious example was the decline of slavery ( a huge proportion of the population of the Roman Empire) but the descendants of slaves were not the only people who benefitted from the removal of imperial power, and heavy imperial taxes, etc.
E.g. a century after the Romans left Britain, it would be fairly obvious to everyone that whoever built the aqueducts, villas, fortresses etc had vastly superior technology.
And much of the literacy was aimed at preserving what knowledge had survived from the classical period – in the service of religion in the monasteries, of course, but also in what we'd know call 'science'. E.g. wasn't Aristotle taken as the go to authority in scientific matters for the scholastics?
Yes, but
1. Britain was where there is the best case for a serious regression. 2. Building those systems was also a matter of imperial priorities and imperial centralisation. Smaller kingdoms did not need it.
> And much of the literacy was aimed at preserving what knowledge had survived from the classical period
Much was, and Aristotle was taken as far too much of an authority. There were probably not many advances in science during the early middle ages, but there were in high and late medieval. Even in the early middle ages there were advances in architecture and agriculture and some amazing art produced.
More generally, some technology was lost everywhere (well, in the Western world anyway): nobody knew how to make waterproof concrete again until a manuscript reappeared in the fifteenth century.
Roman Britain is just one example, but it does disprove the general thesis that people always think they are the pinnacle of civilisation – and it's by far from the only example, of course. For much of the next thousand years (and beyond) Classical Rome, and later, Ancient Greece were seen as a lost golden age, something to learn from and aspire to (and adapt to religious dogma in a fallen world which was going to end fairly shortly anyway…)
Of course they had their fair share of brilliant people and they made significant advances and it's facile to disparage them ("Dark ages") but it does seem like a very different mental view of the world.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_technology
There were serious scientific advances including the beginnings of the scientific method which goes back about 500 yeas earlier than the renaissance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_science_in_the_Middle...
My favorite is the gothic arch because it basically decomposes into the math of man hours, calories and the work of moving stone. They didn't have the surpluses the Romans did so they were forced to invent a more efficient arch.
The Dark Ages refers to the 2-3 centuries immediately after the fall of the Western Roman Empire. The Medieval era / Middle Ages extend all the way to the start of the Renaissance.
On #1, do you see the lack of written records as cutting down bureaucracy? Because historians see it as a period of civilization downturn and turmoil. No focus on things outside the necessities which were mostly about survival. The enlightenment or renaissance didn’t have these names for the return to documenting thoroughly. It was because of everything in between.
#2 “A lot of people” says nothing. The average person in the year 900 had no formal education so would probably know at best some stories or legends about what came 500 years before. But let’s not pretend this changes the meaning of what I said.
#3 Many people today are slaves so were the dark ages more civilized?
Look at how a lot of those societies were structured. Were those people really doing "better" or are we just assuming that because of the biases our modern culture brings?
Being not a slave across the rome-middle ages boundary is like having a degree in liberal arts. It might've meant something at first but the back slide basically watered it down to nothing for a lot of people. That's why it went away. There was no point in maintaining it as an institution generally after Rome fell.
More broadly, there's a reason nobody really cared about slavery, rights, freedom, etc, etc, until the 1600s+ (i.e. the beginning of the off ramp toward industrialized societies). Prior to then so much of society was enslaved by the literal physics of the work that needed to be done to keep a roof over everyone's head and food in their stomachs that it didn't really matter. Almost nobody was in a place to exert more influence upon their life arc than the wind does upon the path of a stone thrown through the air (which is to say some but not much) so society didn't expend effort to hash out the details of something that wasn't relevant. Only once there were more surpluses the various shades of freedom become something that society could benefit from defining.
Writing and learning retreated to a relatively small group - the clergy. The cities that had thrived under the empire - and the public works that supported them - disappeared.
There has been a historiographical tendency to downplay the significance of the fall of the Western Roman Empire and to euphemistically refer to it as a "transformation." But we're talking about a massive decline in literacy and economic activity, and there are all sorts of indicators (like average human height) that show that people were dramatically worse off.
The art and culture was very often echoing an imagined past of yeoman landholders + citizens.(very similar to the invocation of 'Real America' today). And their foundation myth imagines that they are a continuation of the trojan civilization.
For everyone who was not at the top of the imperial hierarchy it's pretty easy to imagine that they thought civilization could be improved! Aristotle writes a defense of slavery - which implies that someone was attacking the institution. It's not a big leap to think that enslaved people could picture a world where they weren't enslaved, or that women could imagine having political/civil/property rights.
I think maybe something you are getting at is that those structures felt indestructible at the time, that in christianity associating the end of the roman empire with the apocalypse. Needless to say we aren't posting this in latin.
I bet ancient people saw themselves as the pinnacle of civilisation, much like we do now.
I'm sure Romans were sitting there with their cities and aqueducts and street vendors and Colosseum and huge empire thinking this is as good as society had ever been.
Nobody was sitting there saying "we don't even have electricity" or "of course light doesn't come out of our eyes to see, that easily fails the scientific method" because they didn't know those things existed.