"How can you believe civilization will fall completely when civilizations fall all the time and nothing happens?"

"How can you believe civilization will fall completely when civilizations fall all the time and nothing happens?"

I get this question a lot.

I have given this question actual thought. It is an interesting question, but I will have to say that the question itself poses a problem.

That problem is the definition of civilization. How do we view it?

I got into an argument a year ago just because we had two different views of what civilization is.

So here is my definition before going further with this question.
Civilization is what we live in and what we have always lived in since we learned how to farm a surplus to feed the cities.

Now, the question is: "How can you believe civilization will fall completely when civilizations fall all the time and nothing happens?"

Simple. We haven't seen civilization fall.

How can I say that after so many "civilization falls?" Simple: they were merely falls of culture. Did civilization itself collapse? No. It kept going. People kept living in the cities while farmers brought in their food, but the culture was different.

Nobody has ever said Chinese civilization fell yet if you look at the cycle of how dynasties are formed and compare them to the " civilization falls," they're the same thing. Another culture comes in and dominates the other.

In order for a civilization to collapse completely, you would have to see the technology and farming ripped up from under them. But what really happens? Foreigners come in, take over the land and either kill the dominate culture that was there or assimilate them into their culture. They still use the city and farm lands that are available in that region so how can it be called a "civilization collapse."

We have never seen a civilization collapse; only cultures collapsing. We've never seen a time without farming to produce a surplus to feed a unit. We've never seen a time without technology or

We've only seen what happens when a culture gets dominated by another culture. That is the culture that gets dominated is reduce to either nothing or is assimilated into a completely different culture.

Simply put: There is a difference between an empire falling and a civilization falling. Human civilization has yet to fall and we have yet to see the impact it will cause on a global scale. Especially now since all of civilized life is connected. This should be pretty apparent in the fact that the global markets have not been doing well as of lately. All civilized people [who live in a European culture, so if the US is bumped down to number 2 while Europe is pushed to number 1 the dominate culture will not change] depend on the same outsourced farm land and factories to survive. What will happen when technology is gone and we no longer have farm land?

Only time will tell really, but I don't think we'd be ready for a mass Firefly evacuation of the Earth when it does happen.