Why Civilization Can Never Collapse

There has never been a civilization that collapsed.

I used to be among the people who speak cavalierly about a coming collapse of civilization and technology. We will drop back into the stone age, we used to say.

But is there any basis for this belief? And even more important, is there an argument why it is not actually possible. Is this myth based on a misconception about the evolution of civilizations themselves.

Let's start with a history lesson.

The Greek Civilization did not collapse. Rather, after Alexander the Great died without assigning a successor to his Macedonian empire, his generals divided the territories into different regions they governed. Then over a period they fought for supremacy, and the winner turned out to be Italy. Hence we call that the Roman Republic, which in turn became the Roman Empire. At no time did anything collapse. The religion, ideas, art, and architecture all survived, albeit the language of Greek was replaced with Latin. The Roman Empire then ruled the Mediterranean for another 500 years.

The Roman Empire never collapsed either. Only the weaker, less relevant, less prosperous, western half, which by the time of the barbarian hordes was mostly an outback of the Roman Empire, collapsed. By then the capital of Rome was not Rome, but Constantinople in (today's) Turkey. No Roman emperor had set foot in the city of Rome for 100 years when it was finally sacked for the last time. After the western regions of the Empire fell to the various northern tribes, the more prosperous eastern portion of the Roman Empire continued to flourish for another thousand years, until its capital of Constantinople fell to the Ottomans in 1453. The Eastern Roman Empire was later named Byzantium by British historians, but in its time it was known simply as Rome. See Lost to the West: The Forgotten Byzantine Empire That Rescued Western Civilization, by Lars Bransworth.

Now this leaves us to ask if the Eastern Roman Empire (Byzantium) civilization collapsed. The answer is no. While Constantinople fell to the Turks in 1453, the art, architecture, and ideas (succeeding still from the Greek civilization) survived in the newly founded Russian Empire, as they do to this day.

OK, maybe civilizations didn't really fall in the past. But what is to prevent them from doing so in the future?

The notion of societal fall has to do with various factors such as nuclear war, world economic depression, natural disasters (man-made or otherwise), or a combination of such which result in a loss of modern technology.

Here's why this is not possible. It has to do with how technology evolves, and what prevents human beings from getting rid of it.

As technology evolves, new ways of accomplishing aims replace older ones. At no time is any viable technology actually lost, unless it is replaced with an easier less expensive or less labor-intensive alternative. So while it is true that we no longer remember the methods the Egyptians used to create the Sphinx, we have newer methods that accomplish the same thing better with less effort.

Did you know that the head of the Sphinx is only a third the size of the head of George Washington on Mt. Rushmore?

The head of the Sphinx is 18 feet high, while the head of George Washington is 60 feet high. Yet we 'lost' the technology by which the first was made.

It's not so much people 'lost' the technology of the hand drill (brace), as carpenters happily surrendered such devices for their newer replacements, that save time and money.

So much for the travesty of 'lost' technology.

Now, there was a time in history when people lost memory of past advancements. This is because the books that held this memory had few copies. Rather there were a tiny number of copies that we duplicated by hand over and over as they decayed. So when a travesty like the burning of the Library of Alexandria happened, many books were simply lost to time.

Men traveled far to libraries for there were few copies of books in the world

But this cannot happen today. Books are made in large numbers and copied and preserved in more than one place, in thousands of university libraries if they are important. This is to say nothing of the digital versions. Did you know there is a digital record of everything that appears on the internet and it is kept in the new Library of Alexandria in Egypt? It's called the Wayback Machine and it is mirrored at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina. Look it up. It's interesting.

Now let us take the core technology of our time, electricity. What would it take for all of mankind on the Earth to "lose" the memory of how to make and use it?

In reality, it would take a unanimous agreement, by all the various peoples of the world, in all languages, to get rid of the memory of electricity and all record of how to make it. A massive book burning, and imprisoning of dissident academics and engineers who opposed the repression of knowledge. This would require the killing of millions of people and the burning of millions of books in literal house-to-house searches.

Now even that would not be enough, for this mania would have to be on every corner of the Earth, for even if a small island nation were to preserve it, they would soon rule the world.

Now you have to also understand that as this technology is scrubbed from memory, the ones scrubbing it would have to have no electricity. This would give the resistance fighters, those who prefer to preserve technology, mastery over their persecutors.

Now ultimately, even if mankind, as the result of a universal movement, managed to purge his world of all electrical equipment, all books about technology, and succeeded in murdering or brainwashing all the people with knowledge of it on Earth, you would still have a problem.

In the midst of all this insanity, there would be great incentive for small towns, domiciles, hamlets and states to pretend to give it up, and yet preserve it. The incentive would be that once everyone else got rid of theirs, when they uncovered their own hidden copies and equipment, they would rule the Earth. So that even if the entire Earth managed (by its own effort) to return itself to a stone-age existence, that one mischievous nation --- say Mongolia or Tunisia, or a town in Wyoming --- would simply reveal the joke that they still had the advanced technology, and the world would be their colony. They would be like aliens with advanced technology on a stone age planet. They would rule it.

Now there is a big myth that a radiation storm from space, either created by man or natural, could wipe out all digital equipment. It fails to recognize that much is underground, in faraday cages, and that a gamma storm would only effect one hemisphere of the Earth, leaving the rest untouched. Also, the space required for data is so small that it is extremely easy to protect in a single faraday cage. The notion that it would require space is backward. As of June 2015, the dump of all pages with complete edit history in XML format at English Wikipedia was about 100 GB compressed, and 10 TB uncompressed. Such a slice of data, comprising over five million articles and their edit histories, could easily be stored on a single device.

There's another claim that devices used to store digital information wears out. While this is true (everything physical does), it is cheap, quick, and easy to move such information to updated platforms as quickly as they become available, and becoming more so by each year.

The notion of a collapse of civilization and its technology is, at best, the relic of earlier stages of human history, such as the Library of Alexandria. But in truth, modern circumstances are such that the only way that any civilization could disappear without a trace is with the consent of man himself. And yet there is too much incentive to cheat and hide it till the smoke clears. And let the others go the way of tribal paint and drums if that's what they want to do.