Going out for a drive today I was thinking about it a lot, you see a lot of buildings, and I really question whether we could build those buildings today. Imagine these multi-story buildings made out of red brick, that's not how we build buildings anymore, we just put up some made in China girders, slap some made in China siding on it, fill it with made in China insulation, and Pat our cells on the back as to how great we are.

You look at multi-story red brick buildings, and I just don't know if we as a civilization are capable of doing this thing anymore. Most of the people who built these things are either retiring, retired, or long dead.

Talking about it now, it reminds me of the archaeological remains of the Harappan civilization. Archaeologists were able to tell the decline of the civilization because they went from being extremely well kept and well regulated and doing the right things and doing things in a sophisticated manner to later on being a lot sloppier in the way that they do things, not following rules that obviously existed before, and doing things in an increasingly less sophisticated manner until the civilization just up and disappeared one day.

The bronze age collapse is relatively unique in the fact that over the course of such a short period of time so many major civilizations completely disappeared, but that doesn't mean that it's the first or last time civilizations will collapse. Just a little while before the Western Roman empire collapsed people didn't remotely think that it could ever happen, they just thought that the empire would last forever. Until it didn't... On the other hand, from an anthropological perspective, it was quite obvious that the Roman empire had fallen from its peak...