quoting Rhetorica:I guess it requires a very over-broad definition of "civilization", one that includes any adiabatic system of resources... which basically means that the entire world, excluding uncontacted peoples, is now one civilization.
quoting Rhetorica:(It has been done.)
When I decided to criticize the paper for that, I meant to suggest specifically that other things can cause the collapse of a civilization—surely, for example, the Eastern Roman Empire is generally regarded as a victim of invasion and political decay rather than resource exhaustion.
quoting Rhetorica:Indeed it is—but it is nowhere nearly as useful for conworlding.
would u nevertheless provocatively suggest that it would be interesting if this were the case?quoting Torco:I *might* explore these ideas further in writing... like, i like the basic thought but i'm not terribly sure what it would look like. i think it unduely flatters the discussion to say that it means that all conworlding until now has been wrongly done, like this was a revolution or something.
quoting Hallow XIII:It is p much a certainly that conworlding is always being done wrong, mainly because our silly simulations generally cannot hope to capture the full complexity of whatever system we are making up. The fact that you cannot possibly know enough about ALL THE SCIENCES feeds this, of course
Not accurate.quoting Torco:studies for decades
*insert picture*
dies before doing any actual conworlding
Accurate and in fact what I'm actually doing.quoting Izambri:Lol. Studies for decades and, while doing it, also conworlds.
And doing that discovers that many of her1 original teenager-era ideas are crap and the ones she discovers learning, based on actual facts, are much much better.