[shortonoil]

"Nah it will never get that bad. Even a totally illiterate red neck can count up to twenty one with his shoes off and his pants down."

lol

Religions of the antiquity, and ancient civilizations have been a hobby of mine for; well more decades than I want to admit to. I even wrote a book about it one time that only sold to Evolutionary Psychologists. It was sort of like preaching to the choir. Anyway, one of its take a ways was that technological complexity is a function of population size. If human populations fall back to a maintainable level of say 1 billion we'll be back to 1700. At 20 million we'll be back to pounding the rocks together. At that level that Red Neck won't even have pants.

[shortonoil]

"Thanks, vox. I didn't realize those new world collapses were about the same time as this one. Weird."

One of the components of mass world wide collapses may be cometary strikes. The reason is that they are rarely recognized. Strikes by icy comets don't leave much of a crater, and can even leave a mound. One of the best examples is the Carolina Bays. There are over a million of them in the Eastern part of the US, and no one even noticed them until 1930. They remained pretty much a mystery until the last couple of decades. Even though Indian legends referred to where they came from, geologists just weren't going to take the stories of a bunch of ancient savages seriously. If anyone is still around, they'll probably have the same attitude toward us in 500 years. "The ignorant ancients thought the oil age was never going to end. Their civilization collapsed, they died off, and never understood why!"

[Synapsid]

dohboi,

I just noticed the thread title. It should be 1177 not 1777.

[Tanada]

Thread title changed to be more acurate.