Conditions of sustainable civilizations
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Theses on the conditions of sustainable and resilient civilizations
- Sustainable civilizations manage to keep their population within limits, having neither growth nor decrease in the very long term average
- Sustainable civilizations do not consume anything that then is no longer retrievaable from their environment nor do they produce unrecoverable waste. They use what remains available and what is replentished at the same rate. Carbon and hydrogen in various forms would seem prime candidates, while a lot of other materials we now use seem less plausible.
- Sustainable civilizations manage to contain internal threats (e.g., conflicts) from reducing their population below critical lower limits or impeding its ability to pass on knowledge
- Sustainable civilizations manage to avert destruction by external threats (e.g., asteroids, averse climates, reversal of magnetic poles). This would seem to require significant technical capabilities
- Resilient civilisations manage to survive internal and external threats that are beyond its control.
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More a definition than a condition:
- Lasting civilizations manage to preserve knowledge, passing it through generations indefinitely