
Romanian: 
Țărâna în țărână se întoarce, 
cenușa în cenușă.
Oare civilizațiile 
extraterestre phoenixes,
chiar au renăscut 
din cenușa strămoșilor lor ?
PERIOADELE APOCALIPTICE
ASCENSIUNEA ȘI DISPARIȚIA CIVILIZAȚIILOR
ȘI PARADOXUL FERMI
Una dintre temele recurente pe care
le vedem în tradițiile omenirii,
fie că este vorba de vechile mituri,
fie de cele moderne științifico-fantastice,
este noțiunea că
evenimentele tind să se repete.
Acest lucru, desigur, 
are un sâmbure de adevăr.
Soarele răsare și apune,
o generație apare și alta dispare,
Ceea ce este a mai fost 
şi ceea ce va mai fi a fost
și nimic nu este nou sub soare.
Și vedem ascensiunea și căderea imperiilor 
și așa mai departe.
Chiar și termenul nostru
de răsturnare, revoluția,
provine de la acel
proces ciclic, repetat.

English: 
Dust to dust, ashes to ashes -- are technological
civilizations phoenixes,
serially arising from the ashes of their forebears?
One of the recurring themes we see in humanity’s
traditions, be it our oldest myths or modern
science fiction, is the notion that events
tend to repeat themselves.
This, of course, has a certain amount of truth
to it.
The Sun rises, and the Sun goes down, a generation
goes, and a generation comes, what has been
done is what will be done, and there is nothing
new under the Sun.
And we do see empires rise and fall and rise
again and fall again, and on and on, and even
our term for toppling one, a revolution, originates
from that cyclic, revolving process.

English: 
While each one is unique, we see many parallels
and we tend to think all good things must
come to an end.
It’s rather hard to argue that point, and
even here, where we often examine ways in
which life might go on long after our Sun,
and every other star, is gone, we do all inevitably
slam into entropy eventually.
It’s been popular in cosmology too, both
now and in past, that while you can’t beat
entropy there may be a grand reset button,
some cyclic nature to the Universe itself.
We’ll be discussing that briefly later,
but let us begin closer to the here and now.
In the past when an empire collapsed, it wasn’t
really an Earth-shaking event, and there were
many other civilizations who kept rolling
along completely unaware of their downfall
or existance.
So too in the far future, if we colonize the
stars, it’s quite possible that mighty civilizations
may have come and gone long before most of
the galaxy was even aware of their presence.

Romanian: 
În timp ce fiecare este unic,
vedem multe asemănări
și avem tendința de a gândi că toate
lucrurile bune trebuie duse la capăt.
Este foarte greu de argumentat 
această idee
și, chiar și aici,
unde adesea studiem modalități
în care viața ar exista și după 
dispariția Soarelui și a celorlalte stele,
facem, în mod inevitabil,
slalom în dezambiguizare în cele din urmă.
S-a vehiculat în cosmologie, 
acum, cât și în trecut,
că, atâta timp cât nu poți învinge entropia,
poate exista un buton de resetare,
o anumită natură ciclică
a Universului însuși.
Vom discuta asta pe scurt mai târziu,
dar să începem mai aproape de noi.
În trecut, când un imperiu se prăbușea
nu era chiar un evenimet cutremurător
și au existat multe alte civilizații care
s-au dezvoltat neștiind de existența lor.
Și în viitorul îndepărtat,
dacă colonizăm stelele,
este foarte posibil ca civilizații mărețe
să fi fost și au dispărut
cu mult înainte ca majoritatea galaxiei
să fie conștientă de prezența lor.

English: 
We see something like this is Alastair Reynolds’
novel, “The House of Suns”.
Yet at the moment, we do know of every human
civilization currently in existence and when
one falls, everybody notices, and indeed it’s
entirely possible for them to fall in a way
that literally shakes the Earth.
This is one of the categories of Fermi Paradox
solutions we looked at way back in episode
4, Apocalypse How.
That the reason we might not see alien civilizations
out there is that they might wipe themselves
out before they spread out to the stars.
In that episode we looked at ten of the more
common doomsday scenarios, but one of those
was not technically a doomsday at all.
Many had flaws, and some such as Artificial
Intelligence, simply saw humanity replaced
by something else even more aggressive and
expansionist, making them bad solutions to
the Fermi Paradox.
However the notion of a Cyclic Apocalypse,
that technological civilizations fall planet-wide

Romanian: 
Vedem ceva de genul acesta în romanul 
lui Alastair Reynolds "Casa Soarelui".
Totuși, în momentul de față știm 
de existența fiecărei civilizații actuale
și când se năruie vreuna,
o observăm cu toții
și chiar este posibil ca prăbușirea lor
să scuture, la propriu, Pământul.
Aceasta este una dintre
categoriile de soluții Fermi Paradox
pe care am urmărit-o în episodul 4
”Cum va fi Apocalipsa ?”.
Motivul pentru care am putea
să nu vedem civilizațiile extraterestre
este că acestea s-ar putea șterge
înainte de a se răspândi printre stele.
În acest episod, am analizat zece 
dintre cele mai comune scenarii apocaliptice,
dar unul dintre acestea nu se încadra
deloc din punct de vedere tehnic.
Multe aveau defecte,
iar unele, cum ar fi Inteligența Artificială, 
au văzut pur și simplu omenirea înlocuită
de altceva și mai agresiv, și expansionist,
făcându-le soluții
proaste Fermi Paradox.

English: 
and rise back up again only to repeat the
fall, is an okay Fermi Paradox solution, but
obviously not an end, or extinction, as such,
since the species just keeps running along.
However that “running” might be a bit
like a Hamster Wheel, since you never really
get anywhere, and differs mostly in that when
a hamster finishes turning the wheel once,
it doesn’t get kicked in the face.
Cyclic patterns to civilization are, of course,
hardly a new concept nor is the idea that
empires rise and fall, but generally we do
get somewhere, there is plenty new under the
Sun.
We have made vast technological progress no
one ever did before, and that progress could
all be lost in some global cataclysm, which
makes folks wonder if maybe at some point
in the past it already has.
We see signs of this in archeology and paleontology,
which lets us look back in the past and see
many civilizations we never knew existed long
before the era we usually call ‘ancient’.

English: 
Yet it simultaneously shows us that this cycle
did have a beginning.
We know humanity had a beginning, we know
there wasn’t anybody building civilizations
before us, and indeed we know the Earth, the
Sun, and even the Universe had beginnings.
Or we are fairly certain anyway, and we’ll
discuss that more in a moment.
So too, while we know this Universe began
about 14 billion years ago with the Big Bang,
and evidence tilts toward it ending in an
expansive and cold time uncountable eons ahead,
what we call the Heat Death of the Universe,
we don’t know that this is all there is
or that this universe isn’t just the latest
version either.
The notion is fairly simple, humanity gets
good enough at technology to pose a massive
threat to itself, and blows itself up before
getting out to the stars, but it doesn’t
quite wipe out everyone and the survivors
need a long time to rebuild, a time of hardship
and privation during which much of their knowledge
is lost, but eventually they rebound and do
it again, and again, and again.

English: 
From a philosophical perspective, this becomes
a bit of a Groundhog Day civilization, though
not as extreme as some we’ve discussed where
folks are hitting a literal reset button to
begin again for some simulation of the planet
and its people in some era.
Even if civilizations did this every thousand
years for a billion years, you wouldn’t
see much actual repetition, except in broad
strokes, and that is a difference between
a cyclic pattern and pure repetition.
However a problem arises in that after the
first time, the game has changed a lot.
For example, while there are alternatives
to fossil fuels, ones that might even develop
just as good and fast in their absence, they
definitely shaped us and are obviously not
available for a cyclic pattern.
They take huge amounts of time to form and
we use them up a good deal faster than that.
Meaning iteration two of a civilization probably
would not have them nor presumably have to
worry about its dangers for collapse.

English: 
If a planet goes into a big climatic change
from carbon dioxide, and recovers in whole
or part, that’s pretty much a one-time problem,
or at least one that can’t recur for many
future cycles.
The simple existence of such fuels or ore
deposits is a strong indicator we are the
first advanced civilizations to arise too,
or they shouldn’t be around, or at least
they wouldn’t look like they do, as a hunk
of steel that’s rusted in a million years
since someone used it still won’t look like
natural deposits, nor would radioactive materials
have the elemental isotope compositions they
do.
You can make a similar argument about atomic
power sources, Uranium is quite common, as
these things go, at around a part per million
in the Earth’s crust and we expect a fair
amount in the mantle and core too, so it could
be renewed a bit by volcanoes, but we have
to enrich that to get the more rare isotopes
out, as they decay fairly quickly.
On the other hand breeder cycles that take
the long lived isotopes and feed them some
particles to turn them into short-lived ones,
options available to use with Thorium for

English: 
instance, offer far longer supplies.
Indeed, by sheer total, a very long supply,
but for mining purposes, it’s less about
total than totals of concentrated ores.
The oceans contain an estimated 10,000 tons
of gold for instance, just floating around
in the seawater, at a rough value of about
half a trillion dollars, needless to say nobody
is really jumping to extract that.
If a civilization flops over, and has to rise
back up again, it can extract resources from
less ideal deposits and for some materials,
like Aluminum or Silicon, these are next best
thing to infinite, but for others these lesser
deposits aren’t very economically viable.
So we have a notion that perhaps civilizations
that fail to get into space on round one or
two might have exhausted the concentrated
ores needed to get into space on later cycles,
but this one at least can be dismissed fairly
easily.
The garbage heaps and junkyards of civilizations
will tend to be rich mining sites should those

English: 
ores run low, and you’d need at least many
hundreds of cycles before you’d start running
out of those construction materials.
It’s a little harder for things like oil
and fissile materials, or even things like
phosphorus which we find concentrated but
then scatter out in fields to make our crops
grow better.
Concerns about peak oil have been around for
a while, ditto fissile materials, but peak
phosphorus has been getting more attention
in more recent years and more so quite recently
as we found that its production method in
dying stars wasn’t quite as we thought and
might make it far more rare than previously
expected.
We’ll come back to this in a moment but
I wanted to return to how we know nowadays
that we are the first civilization that I
mentioned earlier.
Simply finding bones of dumber creatures in
the past doesn’t prove there weren’t smarter
beings whose skeletons we haven’t found.
However, these days our fossil record is a
lot bigger than it was a century back or even
a few decades ago and there’s fewer missing
links or room for undiscovered large species.

English: 
That said, we still only have a few thousand
good dinosaur skeletons, ones complete enough
for us to be able to get a solid look at that
specific critter, and it is a family of critters
that was around for almost 200 million years,
the fossil spread isn’t particularly even
but that implies for any given million year
period we’ve only got around a dozen good
fossil skeletons, and if you were just sampling
primate skeletons for the last million years
and only had a dozen of them, you could miss
homo sapiens easily enough.
Of course you probably wouldn’t, there have
been way more of us than the other primates
in recent years, exactly because of our technology,
and we tend to intentionally fossilize ourselves
via burial.
If we all died tomorrow and raccoons emerged
as a civilization in ten millions years, they’d
be almost guaranteed to come across a cemetery
and suddenly have a fossil record, just from
one site, vastly larger than our entire dinosaur
collection.
More to the point, we didn’t emerge in a
vacuum, and even the dumber of our primate

English: 
cousins has a skull that strongly indicates
pretty high intelligence.
Dinosaurs were hardly stupid, and indeed some
species had fairly large brains as these things
go, nor is sheer brain volume alone much of
an indicator, but proportion is a better one
and even sperm whales, who have the biggest
by sheer mass, are only about five times heavier
than yours or mine, while the body of a typical
sperm whale outmasses us almost a thousand
to one and a lot of that brain mass is devoted
to running systems that do rise with size.
Proportion isn’t ideal either though, as
the shrew has the highest brain to body ratio
and, while hardly idiots, they’re obviously
not as smart as chimps or dolphins or elephants,
the latter two of which also have bigger brains
than humans.
Similarly crows and ravens are fairly smart
but have rather tiny brains, and cephalopods
like the squid have rather bizarre brains
that are hard to quantify, indeed we found

English: 
a colossal squid some years back with a donut
shaped brain.
So while it would seem unlikely we’d have
missed smart dinosaurs, not finding the bodies
of any who were part of some hypothetical
advanced reptilian species, or even those
ancestors who preceded them with larger brains,
we can’t rule that out just from looking
at fossilized skulls.
It’s hard enough to determine intelligence
in living creatures let alone one dead so
long that their bones are actually gone and
replaced by mineral deposits, and of course
squid don’t even have bones and tend not
to leave many good fossils.
We can look at that cemetery though.
We have them, and we’ve been burying people
for a long time and often with their assorted
prized junk.
Of course we’ve burned them a lot too, and
while modern cremation incinerates even the
bones to ash, early ones at lower temperatures
usually tended to get the job done fairly
effectively too for the purpose of making
them rather hard to identify.
Every civilization is going to have a process
for dealing with dead bodies, be it burial,

English: 
cremation, or even cannibalism, as you can’t
just leave those lying around where they died
even if your culture regards corpses as irrelevant
inconveniences.
But those methods don’t necessarily leave
much, even in their primitive forms, that
would help us identify them, so we can’t
rule out ancient precursor civilizations like
dinosaurs just from this either.
Though it does let us rule out previous human
ones since we have tons of corpses we did
bury sporting plenty of low-tech stuff, and
it would be unlikely that those existed alongside
high-tech human civilizations that coincidentally
engaged in universal cremation.
However as mentioned, if you did find a cemetery
you know you’ve struck gold on a civilization,
and not just from the many bodies in concentrated
form but everything that accompanies that.
Even if they aren’t buried with overt signs
of technology on them, everything about such
a place screams they did have technology.
You’ve got the remnant fibers of the clothing
which could include synthetic materials and

English: 
metal buttons or zippers, you’ve got the
box itself, which is pretty artificial in
design, and most of these things are built
with endurance against decay in mind too.
And you’ve got the simple plots themselves,
people don’t die in neat orderly rows six
foot underground at a depth which would be
confusing in terms of sediment layer dating.
And those are the two big ones.
Civilizations may leave a lot of junk around
but we also leave it in patterns that will
stick out like sore thumbs.
Whether or not they dispose of their dead
in an enduring way, even our fields look obviously
artificial from orbit, plants don’t naturally
grow in nice rectangular fields.
A skyscraper might fall over given time, but
its foundation is going to last a very long
time as a big, obviously geometric chunk of
rock.
Freeways might crack and crumble and end up
as the base of a future river where they cut
deep, but it’s going to be very hard to
miss running into those even millions of year

English: 
later and not seeing them for what they were,
let alone just centuries or millennia later.
We leave right angles and geometric patterns
all over the place.
Add to all that, we can see anomalies in sediment
layers and more so in ice cores, and same
as you can spot a big volcano or asteroid
strike in those, we should have left a pretty
big footprint on those if we ended tomorrow,
even discounting that ending, which might
leave tons of nuclear fallout in those geological
layers.
So we’d know if we weren’t the first to
be doing high technology on this this planet,
and indeed we leave a footprint off planet
too.
Stuff left alone in the higher orbits or on
the Moon can last a very long time and be
noticeable, and our footprint in that extraterrestrial
theater should only grow the longer we last
and in some fairly predictable ways.
There’s only one geostationary band around
this planet, it is very useful, and its graveyard
orbits are the obvious places to push decommissioned
satellites.

English: 
Similarly the Moon is a big place and dust
could cover over things to make them hard
to see over enough time, but there are craters
where a technological species would be almost
guaranteed to visit or build at.
Down on Earth, rivers and coasts can change
even on fairly short timespans, but the highest
peak on the planet isn’t going to change
much, and you’d be able to visit a place
like that expecting to find signs of someone
climbing it for prestige and that’s a fairly
small place to hunt for signs of prior expeditions,
ditto the north or south pole.
This is only in the long term again too, you’d
have to be blind and idiotic to miss signs
of prior human civilizations any time in the
next million years from any doomsday scenario
that would leave any survivors short of a
bizarre grey goo scenario that just happened
to have safeguards against eating people or
maybe living organisms, like a terraforming
design, wrecking all our tech down to the
bedrock so only us and our memories survived,
and that would certainly leave a peculiar
geological layer behind.

English: 
And you’d kind of expect the survivors to
make sure they recorded that event.
So it’s easy to lose lots of history but
pretty hard to wipe out the whole picture.
Of course someone has to be the first in a
given cycle and as we said earlier, after
the first couple there would be some key materials
that were pretty much gone.
There’s still a lot of coal and oil left
over, but we have obviously grabbed virtually
all the ones that were easiest to spot and
use.
Here’s the problem though, a collapsing
civilization and those who live in its ruins
are not an actual repetition of prior civilizations.
You might need to be a genius to invent an
internal combustion engine but it’s a very
different story when millions of them are
lying around rusting everywhere and you’ve
got memories and records of how they worked
and what they were for.
So you don’t get civilizations falling back
to hunter-gatherer level of technology even
if you’ve fallen back to those population
densities.
You could also fit just about every important
bit of technology discovered prior to the

English: 
twentieth century into one shelf or chest
of books, but even such time capsules or protected
archives are overkill, because to rediscover
atomic fission only requires one mention in
a book or tale considered trustworthy that
describes the process even in vague terms
to give emerging scientists a huge head start
or target.
We’ve printed millions of periodic tables
down the years, many of them laminated or
otherwise made sturdy, and you are going to
come across tons of those in a fairly recognizable
layout that you can piece back together for
a complete table, even if most copies decayed
so this or that element was damaged or the
text faded.
Every corroded battery discarded, every appliance,
every magazine, every trash dump carries instruction
manuals for rebuilding our civilization.
Just one semiconductor, disposed of in a way
that makes it clear it was a vital component,
is a huge clue to all of our electronics and
solar power, and they’re ubiquitous in all

English: 
of those too, so it’s hard to miss them.
And you don’t need fossil fuels or fissile
materials to launch spacecraft either, heck
one of our most common rocket fuels is liquid
hydrogen and oxygen, or water that’s been
separated.
You don’t need oil to run a car, ethanol
is good enough and we’ve been making biofuels
for a very long time, longer than we’ve
been digging that stuff up.
It takes land, land you could be growing crops
on, but not so much you couldn’t have engines.
It could be a problem if they did actually
have to build up from square one again, since
they’d likely be using all their good land
already for growing food.
But, first of all, you could still make a
fair amount of the stuff even if not as cheaply
and abundantly as you need for lots of automobiles,
and second, you are not starting from square
one.
Even a deliberate and systematic attempt to
purge all records of technology, a process
that would be nigh impossible, can actually
only be done while using a fair amount of

English: 
technology.
How would anyone coordinate a global purge
all the way down to our trash heaps and isolated
cabins or outposts without a lot of technology?
How would someone mangle your history so thoroughly
that it didn’t leave instructive clues without
also eliminating the warnings of why not to
invent certain technologies?
You’d have to have a compelling reason that
virtually everyone agreed with, that could
be enforced long enough to remove the traces
to make them hard to find, and which also
warned people why they must not do it again.
That, obviously, is where the cycle comes
in, people forget why technology was bad and
re-invent it.
The problem is, the only way to do this requires
such a systematic and coordinated approach,
rather than it accidentally occurring from
a natural disaster or manmade catastrophe,
that it’s implausible to believe the folks
doing it didn’t take that cyclical problem
into account.
I’m very pro-technology but I also know
the dangers of it, and if presented with compelling

English: 
evidence that a given level of technology
is inevitably catastrophic, say artificial
intelligence, I could turn against it.
You know, you barely survive one machine rebellion
and decide it can never be risked again, but
that if you keep your technology around it
will happen again, you decide what the safest
level of technology is and aim to build that
in as the cap.
Again though, that’s the problem, that’s
a decision and one that requires coordinated
and well-thought out efforts.
It’s not a committee of wild-eyed zealots
leading a purge and torching everything, because
they’ll ultimately fail with that approach
long before they ruin enough stuff to knock
us down more than a few generations of recovery
time and they’ll miss books, many hidden
or just lost.
You need something sustained and coordinated
and that’s going to be a committee that
is carefully formulating a plan.
They may even keep doing research in order
to create things which end roads of inquiry.

English: 
Genetically engineering a plant that can be
eaten to cure cancer, or act as birth control,
or be ground up and distilled and stuck between
glasses to act as a solar panels or an algae
that makes for a great and easy biofuel.
They may even create ways to make very simplified
computers you need to grow and assemble, or
flat out code information into redundant bits
of DNA.
How would we react if we started finding obvious
math coded into our DNA and that of other
organisms and broke that code only to find
a warning that said “Do not engage in genetic
engineering”?
All the while they’re sending teams out
to erect ultra-durable monoliths with detailed
Rosetta stones engraved on them and warnings,
the exact opposite of the ones from Arthur
C. Clarke’s “2001: A Space Odyssey”,
trying to dumb down cultures rather than push
them along.
They may even genetically engineer humans
to be a little worse at math or produce fewer
savants and outliers, slowing progress so
that longer consideration of the impacts of
technology can occur.

English: 
They’re not trying to destroy history, they’re
trying to preserve it to pass along the warning,
and they’re trying to create the highest
living standard at the safest technology level
they can, both because it’s humane and to
minimize the desire to disobey the rules and
re-invent the stuff.
They’re playing the Wisdom of the Ancients
card for everything they can, by leaving some
giant graphene obelisk on top of mountains
and the poles and so on so that anyone getting
to those places can’t miss them and is confronted
by an ancient and wise and knowledgeable society
warning them about Pandora’s Box.
And remember, that warning is one we all take
to heart, and we’ve never actually been
bitten by it.
There are no fallen empires killed by their
own technology in our past.
Our ancestors tended to worship their ancestors
as founts of wisdom, and we know now they
mostly weren’t, but we still take their
advice a lot, and would more so if we had
evidence confirming that desire that they
were more knowledgeable than us.

English: 
Now that could break down eventually, though
if your Rosetta stones are made enduring and
numerous enough they can’t be missed it
might not, especially if you are accompanying
that with a sustained technological level
that can keep good records and history.
In this regard you could end up with a cycle,
where things got forgotten enough to encourage
tinkering again, but as you did you found
more and more warnings about the dangers of
it and either backed off or approached it
cautiously enough and forewarned of some dangers
that you saw the trap in time and repeated
what they did, complete with making new warnings.
That’s not terribly apocalyptic but it could
create a long cycle.
As to how likely this is, that’s just hard
to say.
We can make jokes about curiosity being dangerous
and humans often acting in suicidal fashions
to satisfy that, poking the big red danger
button just to see what happens, but that
joke is funny, rather than grim black humor,
because we don’t do it much.

English: 
Or rather we do, but as little kids, we all
learn not to stick our hand on the stove and
remember that when we grow up, the desire
to stick our fingers into light sockets is
wired into us so we all know the compulsion
and can smile at it but we do resist it, and
we do stick danger signs on stuff and pass
on warnings to other people and down the generations.
We also do learn from our history, albeit
often not as quickly as one might hope, and
we do address dangers to our civilization,
though again, often not as quickly as one
might hope.
So it’s an interesting case because there
is something plausible about it, again not
so much the constant repeating doomsdays but
more the notion that we might see a danger
and conclude it’s too risky and codify that
warning, see it start to degrade, and then
get reinforced once more after another close
call makes it obvious there’s a problem.
In that regard you could get cyclic civilizations
easily enough, and they’re not really repeating,

English: 
it’s not Groundhog Day any more than a farm
is that’s been passed down for ten generations,
I don’t like the idea but it’s preferable
to me over extinction, and while I don’t
think technology is going to result in that,
I’m also not unwary of its dangers nor utterly
and dogmatically devoted to the idea that
more technology is automatically a good thing.
And I think that describes most of us, technology
is mostly good, but makes some more problems
too, and more technology also probably good,
but could expose us to some problems that
might be more trouble than it’s worth or
flat out suicidal.
Again, not a big fan of cyclic civilizations
even if it isn’t actually repetitive, but
there are worse options.
I don’t want our Universe to ever end but
since we seem stuck with entropy, I don’t
mind the idea that it might reset someday,
as better to ending and taking us with it.
We’re pretty sure the anti-Big Bang, the
Big Crunch, is off the table, with the Cyclic

English: 
Bang option that it expands, contracts, and
then bangs out a new Universe again, but it’s
not completely ruled out yet, nor is a Big
Crunch the only option for a universal reset.
Even under the extreme expansion scenario,
the Big Rip, it’s possible that when that
got to the point it was ripping quarks apart
that might regenerate things.
After all the weird thing about quarks is
that they come in pairs and to pull them apart
means investing so much energy that when you
break them, it’s by creating two new pairs
of quarks instead, potentially providing a
sudden massive new wave of matter.
You could also maybe see new Universes popping
out of near-vacuum states as the Universe
thins out too much or new Universes spawning
on the other sides of black hole singularities.
Or even the supply of Dark Energy, wherever
it comes from if anywhere, run out and the
Universe stops expanding, either crunching
again or just settling into a set size where
all the extreme-timeline reset scenarios like
Boltzmann Brains or a Universe-wide Poincaré

English: 
Recurrence, the equivalent of shuffling a
deck of cards so many times it eventually,
and randomly, returns to its previous state
or one close enough to make no practical difference.
Over infinite time, anything which can happen
will happen, and that includes complete repeats
of events, endless places so identical to
Earth that you could never tell the difference,
and this probably has to be considered a Cyclical
Apocalypse if it’s happening because nobody
seems to be around from previous universes
to tell us about them, so presumably there’s
no way to escape those endings or at least
travel into a new one.
Though perhaps you can but nobody did.
So such cycles aren’t just limited to hitting
about our technology level and collapsing
back down again, for instance you might have
a civilization effectively committing suicide
by simply not caring anymore and getting rebuilt
by the handful of survivors who did care and
perhaps felt that way of life was essentially
a poison that should not be drank from and

English: 
peeled back to a lower-technological level.
We’ll be contemplating that some more next
week when we go back to the Post-Scarcity
Civilizations series to look at Purpose, and
ask what folks living in effective utopias
do with their time and to give life meaning,
if they even need such a thing, and what the
consequences might be if it were absent.
One of the key themes today though, and in
that episode on Purpose, is the idea that
folks could lose skills, and might have to
relearn them on their own from records.
For basic survival or core science, I don’t
see that being a problem, but it’s hard
to imagine folks retaining how to make a website
or do a 3D model, which can be pretty daunting
to learn even nowadays.
It’s something I spend a lot of time thinking
about while I work on this show, constantly
trying to improve myself and the videos to
better communicate ideas.
Like so many of our modern skills, especially
the technical ones that are constantly changing,

English: 
it’s not something you learn in school or
can pick up an authoritative textbook on,
but it’s obviously important to running
a channel like this.
There are some options though.
Lately I’ve been enjoying this great course
from Kurzgesagt on motion graphics and animation
over at Skillshare.
Skillshare, is an online learning community
that focuses on assembling classes on technology
and has courses on everything from making
animations and graphic design to web development,
so you can improve your skills, unlock new
opportunities, and do the work you love, and
a Premium Membership give you unlimited access
to those.
Join the millions of students already learning
on Skillshare today with a special offer just
for my listeners: Get 2 months of Skillshare
for free.
To sign up, go to S-K-L-dot-S-H slash Isaac.
Again, go to S-K-L-dot-S-H slash Isaac to
get 2 months of unlimited access to over 20,000
classes for free.

English: 
Act now for this special offer, and start
learning today.
As mentioned, next week we’ll be look at
Purpose and Meaning for high-tech civilizations.
One of those might be exploring and colonizing
the cosmos and we’ll look at that more the
week after that when we return to the Outward
Bound series to look at settling asteroids,
in Colonizing Ceres.
For alerts when those and other episodes come
out, make sure to subscribe to the channel.
And if you enjoyed this episode, please like
it, and share it with others.
Until next time, thanks for watching, and
have a great week!
