Comment by marcosdumay
10 years ago
You know, as tautological as that sounds, it does not seem to happen a lot.
Yes, if you wait for long enough, everything fails. If it didn't fail yet, it's just a matter of waiting a few more centuries. But those failures are getting shorter and shorter in duration, while the periods societies are "failing to fail" get longer and longer.
It's a question of scale. Small groups will go through the same stages of civilisation as a much larger group, but more rapidly. There's a "rotten spot" between very small groups and very large groups where things are particularly unstable, which we have stayed largely abreast of through telecommunications, but it doesn't make us immune to those forces, just more easily dented and less easily broken.