Comment by O__________O
4 years ago
Attempted to find critical counter points to the “seneca curve” — but was unable to find any via Google, Wikipedia, etc.
As is, worth noting that human’s analysis of complex systems is very limited and likely will never realistically be of any truly significant state prior to the collapse of humanity; no formal proof of this myself, but to me, it is clear relatively speaking humanity’s cognitive capacity, observations of universe large, small, over time, etc — are extremely finite.
While it’s possible I have misunderstood the claims made by the seneca curve, the core issues I take are that:
— most man made complex systems likely do follow the seneca curve, though in my opinion, so do most man made systems, not just complex ones.
— many organic systems though do not follow this pattern. For example, the human body reaches peak complexity, that is full development, early in the average life span, then slowly decays and is very resilient to failures within its system.
Guess not having read the original research, to me the seneca curve feels like both literal & semantic cherry picking.
________
As it relates to the narrow topic of civilizations covered by the article. Yes, humanity has created & labeled various civilizations, but if an alien race was observing humanity, would they really see any meaningful use to these labels in understanding humanity? If not, I would argue neither should humanity and that the true concern should be the collapse of humanity, Earth as we know it, etc.
Isn’t Rome itself a counter example? It peaked in expansion and size in 117AD but didn’t really collapse until hundreds of years later (or a thousand of you consider Constantinople through Istanbul).
My recent example is Novell Networks that peaked in like 1995 but didn’t die until 2014. It took almost two decades to actually collapse.
You have noticed the problem with humans. They don't like modeling decay. So decay is simply ignored and assumed away. Meanwhile biological systems model decay. There is no obsession with growing forever. People's height is limited by nutrition and genetics, nothing else really.
If humans actively modelled decay in their society, their civilizations would last as long as ancient Egypt. Ancient Egypt was conquered by Romans aka outside forces. Meanwhile the Roman empire collapsed from within.