While it is difficult to assign a probability, the possibility of modern civilization suffering catastrophic collapse in a relatively short time is not unthinkable. The combination of ever advancing technological capabilities and stagnant sociopolitical maturity should be prompting any thinking person to ponder how we could possibly learn and evolve long-term sustainable social structures.
The underlying 'freedom vs empire' theme that permeates the article is too simplistic. E.g., in the modern era empires fragmented into national states, granting "freedom" to populations self-identifying as "one people" yet the local extractive elites did not disappear, they persisted and promptly collaborated in a variety of supranational cartels.
The human society "equation" that would guide us how to reach a desirable stable state has never been written down. If it is close to anything it is highly complex and non-linear system, admitting a variety of solutions as "N" (our numbers) and "C" (the collective cultural imprints in our brains) keep cumulating, but "P", our planet, remains fixed.
Oppressive hierarchical societies seem to have been a relatively stable state in various phases of human development. This does not make them natural or inevitable under all conditions. Even a simple linear string will admit different solutions depending on boundary conditions.
If it happens next potential civilizationable species will be fucked: we have extracted all the easy high density resource we could find. So no easy gas for them which may hamper any progress. Also no easy high nitrogen sources: food sources will have to not depend on this cycle if they want a huge population. And maybe a lack of helium if they're unlucky.
Then maybe our folly will save them from making the same mistakes?
Another complication is elites could be leveraged against each other. In the Ottoman Empire, Egyptian farming villages would use strikes to discipline local elites. Village(s) unhappy with local elite decisions would go on strike - slowing down or abandoning work, and moving in with family in nearby villages. The production drop would bring down a pissed and powerful Ottoman official on the local elite - "you will fix this, now".
Are maps of ancient empires even accurate? What do they even mean. If you went back in time to some backwater village on the edges of some Empire map and asked the villagers who was the emperor could they even tell you? Or would they still name some king from 50 years ago?
For example, the Annals of Sennacherib show the Assyrians had to re-conquer areas that drifted after previous subjugation.
But how do you draw those boundaries between subjugations?
In the Bible, it shows that Nebuchadnezzar's armies had to repeatedly return to Israel to re-subjugate it between rebellions.
No doubt similar rebellions could occur in many different areas all at once.
Boundaries were likely never as neat as the boundaries we show today.
Plus, it's not like they were surveying their boundaries and monitoring them via a supranational body like the U.N.
Boundaries are policies, not objects. They always have been.
Then there is the trade of the early CE time. Trade between India and the Roman Empire over sea was of incredible proportions. Recently a sanskrit brahmi script was uncovered in an old Egyptian harbour port. So there must have been also a large group of people exposed to trade and exchange of ideas.
So I don’t think any broad sweeping statements can be made. To answer your question, it totally depends on the place and time you want to look at.
A lot of what we're told about is new locations for urban life. But the claim that they weren't empires is arguing from absence of evidence. We mostly don't know what they were.
For an interesting pairing, see Bryan Ward-Brown on the fall of Rome, interviewed here by Razib Khan (https://www.razibkhan.com/p/bryan-ward-perkins-the-material-...). There we do know what happened when an empire ended, and it was very bad for the people in it. That's because big empires are usually not replaced by anarchy, or by democratic nation-states, but by small empires, which have fewer economies of scale and therefore more taxation and exploitation.
Taxation in the empire had funded public goods, like aqueducts, roads and security, which enabled large urban centers and long-distance trade.
The rulers of tribes are going to want "freedom" so they can stay in the game of possibly building their own empire but that doesn't mean their people in the end wouldn't find some consolation in the stability of being under e.g. Roman rule.
I'm sure nobody wants to be under Russian or Chinese rule but if the rest of us cannot organise ourselves on a larger scale than they can .... it might eventually happen.
I don't have access to this article, but I'm skeptical. How would you conclusively determine that the ruins of a city without writing indicate a lack of rulership or central authority? Likewise, the fact that various archaeological finds are turning up more organized societies in previously unexpected places tells us nothing about how state-like and hierarchical they were, while all our evidence of cities from places where we have written historical records is of states that function on the basis of organized violence. This feels like ideologically-motivated wishful thinking. The author wants to believe that empires are not just bad, but "unnatural."
> What, exactly, were ancient empires ‘successful’ at, if extraordinary levels of violence, destruction and displacement were required to keep them afloat?
It comes down to whether you are with Hobbes or Rousseau. This author is clearly with Rousseau, and believes the natural state of humanity is to be free and happy and that empires are a kind of unnatural cancer. If you are a Hobbesian, and believe that violence and exploitation are endemic to human life, than what empires succeed at is to push the violence to the periphery, and allow those inside the orbit of the empire to enjoy a relatively peaceful existence.
Honestly, I can't imagine that a machine like that won't devolve into a Ministry of Truth.
I think the point is you can't go far with those fuel sources (e.g. you can't have a trucking industry that runs on whale oil).
> Surface level coal my be gone in most places, but large mines full of coal site idle in a lot of places now for economic reasons, and energy poor society may dig out these deposits.
How deep? In a thousand years (let alone a million), will the mining tunnels have collapsed and/or filled with water? Even if the tunnels still exist and are serviceable, an "energy poor society" is probably not going to pump out the many millions of gallons of water needed to get at the coal.
Current humanity has shown very little capacity for heavy investment with only a long range payoff (say taking 100 steps at a time vs. 1 or 2 steps). The problem is with removing all the easily extractable energy resources is that, is it puts the remaining ones too many steps out of reach for someone starting at square one. If you've got 2 6-sided die and someone has to roll 100 with them to get to the next step, it's never going to happen.
Yeah, that's true but you can have electric trains and trams. Canals and sails are also totally useful for a coastal society.
> How deep? In a thousand years (let alone a million), will the mining tunnels have collapsed and/or filled with water? Even if the tunnels still exist and are serviceable, an "energy poor society" is probably not going to pump out the many millions of gallons of water needed to get at the coal.
In the US alone, they're all over the place. There's 250 billion short tons of coal that's estimated to be commercially recoverable in the US today. A good bit of that isn't particularly deep. There's still surface coal all over West Virginia. A lot of of it just gets left around because its too dirty to burn under current law, or is a little to disperse to mine profitably in current energy markets.
Pumping isn't that hard if labor is cheap, the Romans did it with two cylinder pumps, person powered water wheels, and screw pumps. Pumping water is actually a key challenge that leads to important technology, or it did for us.