Advanced Civilizations in Decline - part 1

If something can't go on forever, it won't.  Simple, right?  And yet, the notion that things will always continue to trend as they are is a common fallacy, and leads to real estate bubbles and the collapse of monetary systems.

Moore's Law

In our times, we tend to think of technological progress as something that only accelerates forward.  First we master materials, then energy (thanks to our improved materials), then information (thanks to cheap, abundant, widely distributed energy), and then, possibly something beyond information. We now casually toss around references to Moore's Law, which isn't a law at all, but simply an observation of how our technology continues to improve by some fairly simple metrics: the number of transistors on a chip, the cost of a gigabyte of data storage, and so on. We expect these trends to continue until we have reached a point beyond which no prediction is even theoretically possible.

However, this is a relatively recent trend, and we forget how many ancient civilizations had sophisticated capabilities that have been lost to us, or that we have had to recreate from scratch. They rose, they fell, they lost the recipe. Historians continue to analyze why the great civilizations declined, but once large, complex internal structures form, they begin to differentiate into interest groups that no longer have it as their principal goal to perform their greater function, but rather to maintain or grow their share of the resources flowing through the machinery. When a system fails this way, we call this "collapsing under its own weight."

Clarke's Third Law

Clarke's Third Law is really just a sage observation, and no one knows if it is truly a law, or just seems to work in the domain we're familiar with.  The most common statement of the law is:

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

If you've ever seen a good magician perform, then you know it just takes a little technology to achieve the effect of magic: something completely unexpected and even absurd happens right before your eyes.  A good illusion makes you laugh out loud, as your realize how incongruous your perceptions are.  You might well experience a moment of humility when it hits you how well and thoroughly you have been fooled.  If the illusion is especially good, you could well experience deep admiration for the skill and intelligence of the illusionist, and in the worst case, you might ascribe supernatural powers to him or her.