From: Eleanor McHugh <eleanor@...>
Date: 2009-04-23T08:22:56+09:00
Subject: Re: Goodbye Ruby - Hello Earth

On 23 Apr 2009, at 00:10, Phlip wrote:
>> ok, lets look at history. history is positively strewn with the
>> shipwrecks of failed civilizations.
>
> I'm getting in the habit of reading down to the first  
> misappropriation of
> sophistry and replying...
>
> For every civilization that failed, it grew at a sustainable rate  
> until it
> created a positive population effluence. For example, in the Sacred  
> Valley
> region of the Andes, you can count rows of stones - protypical  
> terraces for
> farming - going all the way from some valley floors to the peaks of  
> their
> mountains. At one time, those valleys were entirely farmed from  
> bottom to
> top.
>
> And every one of those failures happened because of a change in the  
> climate.
> Rome collapsed not because of overpopulation or high taxes or  
> Christianity
> or any historical revisionism like that; it collapsed because a  
> volcano in
> the India Ocean created a series of long winters. The global  
> agricultural
> bases collapsed.
>
> Historically, civilizations did not collapse because they despoiled  
> their
> environments. That's a relatively new phenomenon.
>
> Oh, and the Inka civilization in the Andes collapsed from a smallpox
> plague...

As an aside I can highly recommend both "Guns, Germs and Steel" and  
"Collapse" by Jared Diamond, "The Physics of Immortality" by Frank  
Tipler, "Evolution from Space" by Fred Hoyle and "The Millennial  
Project" by Marshal T. Savage - all kind of relevant to this thread  
but none of them relevant to Ruby. Also David Keys' "Catastrophe" and  
anything by Immanuel Velikovsky (although especially "Earth in  
Upheaval") are interesting explorations of the possible effect of  
global catastrophes on the course of civilisation.

Oh, and remember to take all of the above with a pinch of salt ;)


Ellie

Eleanor McHugh
Games With Brains
http://slides.games-with-brains.net
----
raise ArgumentError unless @reality.responds_to? :reason