Rory Carroll is wearing the robes this week, exhorting us to look to the Mayans for an awful reminder that nothing lasts for ever and that we ignore the signs of imminent doom at our peril: much of the article is a recapitulation of Jared Diamond’s argument in Collapse:
According to Diamond’s thesis…the ancients built a [...]
Living in the present doesn’t make us exceptional. Sometimes history is a better source of clarity than present-day claims that this time is different.
Listening to the MP3 of a LongNow seminar given by Forcaster Paul Saffo, he explains that the best, indeed the only tool for forcasting is a mirror. A way of looking at history to make informed explorations of the future. In particular, he suggests looking for inflection points.
