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The Rise and Fall of Civilization and Other Fun Games
by Raymond M. Coulombe

Ah, civilization: art, music, culture, hot showers, cold beers, what's not to like?

Humanity has been in the civilization business for a thousands of years. How long, exactly, is a matter of some debate. Part of that debate stems from the definition of civilization. How does one measure it? No matter, let's keep it simple and say we've been at it for a long long time.

It has its perks. People are social animals. We like to get together, whether it be in some smoky inn lit by burning whale blubber or in the warm glow of our computer monitors as we "chat" on-line. Civilization, the theory goes, gives us a little wealth and a bit of time off. Since we aren't spending all of our time competing with the wolves, we have time to listen to National Public Radio beg for money.

Civilizations fall. Happens all the time. Why, if it wasn't for that simple fact, archeologists wouldn't have hardly any ruins at all to play in. Fortunately for that field of study, a lot of great civilizations did a swirly down the tubes.

The fun is in the why of it. Sure it's not all that hard to put together good arguments on the fall of the Roman empire, but we have a lot of original records and piles of handy ruins to go on. The fall of other civilizations aren't always so tidy. For example, the jungles of Central and South America are littered with the trash of lost civilizations. A lot of them were gone long before Spanish entrepreneurs got into the act.

Even better are the lost empires that once existed along now flooded coastlines or buried under volcanic ash. A lot of civilizations were done in by natural disasters. It wasn't even always the big stuff that did them in. Germs did in at least a few.

Maybe I was a weird kid, but growing up, I loved reading all those Science Fiction disaster stories. For those of us of the "duck and cover" generation, books like On the Beach were not all that far fetched. Literature was flooded with tale after tale of nuclear disaster. They ranged from mutant-zombie silly to thoughtful tales of the human spirit dealing with an inhuman world. Some tales took place as civilization died under radioactive clouds. Other tales told of humanity's long climb back up the ladder.

In fiction, civilization wasn't just done in by nuclear war. Oh no, there were plagues of natural origin, man-made, and even alien spawned. There were asteroid strikes, droughts, earthquakes, volcanos, global ice ages, global floods, solar flares, alien invasion, mad scientist's experiments gone wrong, or right . . . the list goes on and on. Some good fiction, and for that matter, a lot of bad, got inspiration from the various ways civilization could collapse.

Let's go back to those mysterious ruins somewhere in the jungle. There are ruins that don't show any particular disaster ever took place. Some ruins look like everyone suddenly came to the realization that civilizations wasn't worth it and wandered back into the jungle. Maybe that's what happened. Maybe, just maybe, people became so sick and tired of the costs associated with maintaining the thing, that they wrote the whole deal off as a botched job. Perhaps a priestly caste made one to many demands on Joe six banana pack? I can visualize the look on some bureaucrat's face as his meal ticket decides it's easier to grub roots in the jungle than pay taxes.

It must be nice to have a jungle to run off to. Nothing to worry about except poisonous snakes, spiders, crocodiles, piranhas, jaguars, and tropical disease. Compared to dealing with the IRS, it's really not all that bad. People have been running from civilization for years. The whole story of westward migration is a tale of people leaving more civilized lands for less civilized lands. It's my theory that when civilization gets too expensive, when the cost of hot showers and cold beers is too high, people just want to run away from it.

Imagine if you will, a world where people work day and night to make ends meet. Where their natural freedoms and rights have been slowly eroded to the point where the average citizen is little more than a prisoner in a prison the size of a country. Now imagine things getting worse and worse until all a person's efforts aren't enough. Imagine that the promise of civilization, the higher things in life, are available to only a select few. Now into that world comes a major disruption. It could be a war, a plague, food shortage, or even the sudden unavailably of some essential commodity. How will the average person react to such events?

Yep, there's a story somewhere in there all right.

As I write this the world's satellites, communications and electrical grid are being stressed by unusual solar activity.

This is only a test . . . only a test . . . only a test. . .

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