The number of civilizations

The clash of civilizations?

World politics is entering a new phase in which the great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural. Civilizations, the highest cultural groupings of people, are differentiated from each other by religion, history, language, and tradition. These divisions are deep and increasing in importance. From Yugoslavia to the Middle East to Central Asia, the fault l...

Estimates for the Number of Visible Galaxy-Spanning Civilizations and the Cosmological Expansion of Life

The Archaeology of Ancient Civilizations

Early state societies (civilizations) developed in areas of the world where intensive agricultural systems could be developed to produce food on the scale necessary to support relatively large and dense populations. The centralized structure of these states contributed to the process of intensification and agricultural investment, though in most cases direct state involvement appears not to hav...

Cultural Leaders and the Clash of Civilizations

This article builds a micro founded model of cultural conflict. In this model intrinsically motivated cultural leaders supply and interpret culture. Leaders have an incentive to amplify disagreement about cultural values. This leads to a clash of perspectives between cultures. The population benefits from the supply of culture but suffers if leaders amplify disagreement. The article discusses c...

War: The dynamics of vicious civilizations.

The dynamics of ‘‘vicious,’’ continuously growing civilizations ~domains!, which engage in ‘‘war’’ whenever two domains meet, is investigated. In the war event, the smaller domain is annihilated, while the larger domain is reduced in size by a fraction e of the casualties of the loser. Here e quantifies the fairness of the war, with e51 corresponding to a fair war with equal casualties on both ...