Gotta love an open-ended question like this one, but I'll bite.

I like the time spent on non-essential tasks / time spent on survival tasks ratio. Any system that maximizes culture and minimizes the amount of time you need to spend to be clothed, sheltered and fed is great in my book.

you realize that uncivilized cultures aka primitive societies had/have more leisure time than any other culture, especially the one we live in now. they only spent about 2-4 hours a day "working"

That's nice, but you've gone and proved my point. Even if we accept they only spend 2-4 hours a day "working" they don't spend the remaining 20-22 hours doing anything non-essential but productive.

Where is the music? The histories? The architecture? The skilled craftsmen?

Even if you accept the premise that uncivilized cultures involve less "work" it's not "work"/"not work" it's "work to survive"/"work to thrive".

Thats subjective. your hidden premise is that surplus production is a good thing, something I can argue with you about for along time.

Anyway you're working to survive too, to buy your food and pay rent and utilities etc. If you didnt need to work to survive, how many do you think would work? movie critics and football player probably.

primitive cultures have histories, except that their histories are circular while civilizations history is linear.
Your second hidden premise is that primitive cultures have no music or architecture or skilled craftsman, which I think you'll find if you only research a little, is blatantly false

"Any system that maximizes culture and minimizes the amount of time you need to spend to be clothed, sheltered and fed is great in my book"

minimizes time spent clothing etc.? how many hours a day do you work friend? this culture does not minimize time spent for essential needs. you may not be making the clothes yourself but thats what you're working for.

That might depend on what you call work and where you live. In the temperate and artic zones hunting, gathering, storing food, making shelter, and clothing for the impending winter would be time consuming, unless you want to call that art and crafts. But of course you would have the long winter to sit and wonder if you have enoff food for the winter or some animal would raid your stores. Now the tropics would be much better. Than you would just have to be concerned a tropical storm did not wipe you off the map, if you had a map.

I guess no one would appreciate it if I inserted here that I thought it was one of the Best Games and a real breakthrough in computer game display.

I like the mass scale destruction that this one brings. I value its instabilty, and the potential to be a part of the generation that watches large scale extinction.

Ha. But I like Edi's comment more.

Edi how about the old board game?

I'm not working "to survive". I'm working to afford luxuries.

Consider: If I was working to survive, I'd be doing just enough to be able to afford 1500 calories a day, one set of servicable clothes, and a place to sleep. Instead I've got a nice appartment in the suburbs, enough clothing for 20 men, a 2500 calorie diet (not even counting the stuff I throw out because I'm full and didn't consume it), access to communication, a vehicle, a college degree, entertainment, ect.

Plus, I know how to service electronics, making me a skilled craftsman.

Primitive societies do not have advanced tools, they definately do not have architecture or skilled craftsmen, and if you did any research at all, or stopped to consider what those terms required, you'd see you're talking out of your rear end.

I admit that primitive societies have a limited oral history. Is it a writen history? No. Is it a traditional oral history, with the stories being passed on from generation to generation via a "wise man" storyteller who memorized the stories since childhood? No. Music is much the same as history. It's present, but nowhere near the complexity of civilized societies.

And surplus production NOT a good thing? I would love to see your reasoning about this because, and I'll be honest here, I can't imagine a circumstance where having more food than you need is a bad thing.

wait wait, you're excited to be watching the devastation of our planet?

And yeah, Edi has it right. Although I definately didn't value the fact that as soon as you developed nukes and started blowing up every foe real or imagined the UN always voted to ban nukes.

Sure with the best seats. No worse than large astroid strick, or an megavolcano.

what if you were buried under a mound of pineapples? that would be bad.

really though, it is difficult to imagine why surplus food would be a bad thing, and I really cant think of one right now. but food is not what I was talking about. I was talking about surplus action figures and surplus gucci bags and surplus dodge rams and surplus plastic bowls and surplus nikes and surplus pens and surplus everything basically.
I would rather have a forest than a few warehouses full of no.2 pencils but I'm not sure about you.
anyway it doesnt matter, because eventually people wont have the choice, and will peobably be left with neither.

the ultimate point is that this culture is unsustainable, and will eventually collapse. the collapse is inevitable.

I suppose the best answer to this whole issue would be this, however:

More time.

Civilization = Greater Life Expectancy. Try and tell me that's not true.

Tell me how anyone without access to civilization will live past the tender age of "Ear Infection with Complications" or "Apendicitis".

Well, of cource civilzation is unsustainable. Primitive societies were unsustainable. Pre-societal life was unsustainable. Eventually we'll have whatever comes "post-civilization", and we'll have folks complaining that it's unsustainable.

As far as no. 2 pencils, I'd much rather have a wearhouse filled with them that I could sell for a profit of $.50 a box so that I could pay some guy to plant a tree farm or 2 so I could eventually harvest those trees and make more no. 2 pencils.

Actually that sounds like a good business model. Anyone interested in investing in the Helmethead Pencil Co. LLC?

Civilization = Greater Life Expectancy. Try and tell me that's not true.

it's not true.
life expectancy among most american indian tribes was around 75
for amazonians its about 70
for inuits it was closer to 80
the Kung! tribesman are around 75 as well

you see you're obviously wrong, history is full of examples of elderly 'primitive' people.

not only that, some of these cultures are still alive today, in sub-saharan africa, in the amazon, etc. and life expectancies can be directly observed.

also many anthropologists have found remains of 'primitive' peoples who died in their 70's-80's of natural causes

Primitive society is not unsustainable in the least.

they worked for hundreds of thousands of years, and this civilization has devastated the planet in the blink of an eye

you're just plain wrong on that one.
show me one example of a primitive society being unsustainable

in a word: progress.

"progress" is an example of primitive society's unsustainability?

you must not know what unsustainibility means

and I must not know how to spell it haha

And there are people in our own societies that died in their 100s of natural causes. Thus our society's life expectancy is obviously 100+ years.

I'd love to know where you got those statistics. I really would. Did you pull them directly out of thin air, or did someone actually try to publish an academic paper on this?

Primitive society is unsustainable. Let's take a look at a classic primitive society - "The Great Planes Native American".

What did it take to destroy their primitive soceity? One germ. Introduced to their continent. Thousands of miles away.

Throughout history, a pattern emerges: "primitive" societies are wiped out, or civilized, by the more advanced civilized society they come in contact with.

It's rather obvious. Primitive societies are not sustainable, because they are not sustained.

In theory? Oh yes, their high death rate balences out their high birth rate, and the remaining individuals are able to consume just a fraction of the available resources.

The problem is that you're not dealing with an issue of resources alone. You're dealing with an issue of ideas. And the idea of "I like to possess many useful things" always triumphs over "I like to use only the amount of resources I need to survive."

our societies life expettancy is not over 100 years, its in the upper 70's.
for america anyway.


heres what I mean by sustainibility
being sustainable means that you can live on a piece of land indefinitely and not ruin it.
our culture is not sustainable. that is why it will collapse.
disease and such have nothing to do with sustainibility, at least in the sense I mean it. that culture was destroyed by another culture.
if that culture had not attacked, and excluding extraordinary circumstances liek meteorites or things like that, that culture would still be here today, and their landbase would still be capable of supporting them.

And the idea of "I like to possess many useful things" always triumphs over "I like to use only the amount of resources I need to survive."

always? wrong
within the last 10,000 years, to people in this culture? right

Disease has everything to do with their sustainability. Our societies don't exist in a vaccume. It's great to make the arguement that the societies - if they were never influenced by any other outside societies in any way, shape or form - would be perfectly sustainable. Unfortunately, and I hate to burst your bubble, the world doesn't work that way.

The problem is that to be truely sustainable we would need the following:

- A closed system. This means that nothing outside of the system would be intruduced. No other societies, no germs, animals, plants, artifacts, ect. that aren't already present.
- Only the use of renewable resources, and only at a rate such that the renewable resources consumed, over the long term, equal the resources replenished.
- That's it really.

Unfortunately for the proponents of this system:

- The world, and by definition the subsections of the world, are an open system. Things can be added from the outside, via Meteor on the larger level, or via migration on the smaller scale.
- If something non-renewable is consumed and no longer reusable or renewable - even one picogram of iron, or one cubic microliter of water over 100 years... the society is not permanently sustainable.
- The sun (a part of the open system, but we'll ignore that for now) is not an infinitely renewable resource, and will burn out in 300 billion years or so. Thus, using up sunlight (photosynthesis) is not sustainable.

There is no way for any society to be sustainable even from an academic perspective, unless they manage to find an infinite amount of resources.

"Civilization" such as it is, gives us the best shot at aquiring more resources at the cost of speeding up the process of unsustainability.

And with that, I must depart.

I hope you enjoyed our debate, brought to you today by the Internet and Written Language, products of Civilization!

Yes Sicarius, I am excited about watching the planet die from our over consumption and excess. I seriously marvel at the factories of #2 pencils, and hope that we continue as we do for the next forty years to bring about the fall of life as we know it. I think we're due for a good reset.

Three words: infant mortality rate

I generally try to avoid being drawn into these sort of discussions,
however a few points for Valmethead
1. There are numerous cases of the collapse of 'advanced civilizations' such as the Early Mayans who were far advanced compared to their surroundings and were destroyed
2. there are even more examples of the defeat and conquest of 'advanced civilizations' at the hands of the perceived less advanced, such as the Mongol over everyone, the barbarians over Rome, the various over Egypt, the various destruction of 'advanced' societies in China to what they called barbarians. The victories of the Vikings over various and sundry etc.

I now return you to your regularly scheduled screed.