In Search of Lost Civilizations

THOUGHT EXPERIMENTS IN CIVILIZATION: In Search of Lost Civilizations

In the second thought experiment of this series, I speculate on the problems that would be involved in searching for extinct agricultural (non-industrialized) civilizations on alien worlds. I consider three climatological scenarios that have forced the extinction of civilizations—snowball worlds, water worlds, and desert worlds—through the disruption of settled agriculturalism. To set this up I discuss some methodological preliminaries on satellite archaeology, and I finish with some of the methodological lessons learned.

Quora: https://philosophyofhistory.quora.com/
Discord: https://discord.gg/r3dudQvGxD
Links: https://jnnielsen.carrd.co/
Newsletter: http://eepurl.com/dMh0_-/
Podcast: https://open.spotify.com/episode/7xvj7pmafJCOJvDtWNWlZ1?si=EpWqgxqfT3-gYkrfjn7PmQ
Episode: S02EP20

#civilization #ThoughtExperiment #SpaceExploration #archaeology #ExistentialRisk #RemoteSensing #Snowball #slushball #waterworld #desertification #aridification