Niven and Pournelle in The Mote in God's Eye imagined intelligent aliens on a distant planet, stuck in their own solar system for apparently over a million years.
They would build up a civilization in a thousand years or so, then through overpopulation and war, they would collapse all the way back to the stone age, and they would do that over and over and over and over.
I think humanity is headed down a very similar path. Subsequent rises of civilization are going to be VERY difficult for many, many tens of thousands of years because we have done so much damage and used up so many resources in the first climb out of a primitive state. Future rises of civilization will be exponentially more difficult because all the easy energy sources like coal and oil will be used up and cannot reform during the time of inevitable collapse.
They would build up a civilization in a thousand years or so, then through overpopulation and war, they would collapse all the way back to the stone age, and they would do that over and over and over and over.
I think humanity is headed down a very similar path. Subsequent rises of civilization are going to be VERY difficult for many, many tens of thousands of years because we have done so much damage and used up so many resources in the first climb out of a primitive state. Future rises of civilization will be exponentially more difficult because all the easy energy sources like coal and oil will be used up and cannot reform during the time of inevitable collapse.
