Life in the Fifth Epoch - The End of Cities
Cities as We Know Them Will Make No Sense in the Fifth Epoch
The human journey has always relied on energy, intelligence, tools and the way that they interacted, often in a series of positive feedbacks, beginning with the runaway growth of the human line’s brain. I prefer this definition of a tool: “An object that has been modified to fit a purpose.” With that definition, even domestic plants and animals can fit the definition of a tool, as humans modified them through selective breeding, although cats and dogs may have self-domesticated themselves, as humans have, as they all adapted to human societies. In essence, humanity has modified the surface of Earth to serve it, often at prodigious cost to the other species that we shared Earth with, many of which humans drove to extinction, and the pace of extinctions is accelerating.
With that definition of a tool, houses, roads, and even the necropolis at Giza are tools. Sometimes the purpose is cognitive, as the Giza pyramids were, in a gigantic act of elite display. All civilizations have had their monumental architecture, which always serves some kind of cognitive function, usually along with practical functions.
Humans could only become sedentary where they had a local and stable energy source. The earliest sedentary societies were erected either where aquatic animals could be farmed or along migration routes. Not many places on Earth could provide that, but where it could, people became sedentary, as it beat nomadic life. Then the creation of tools began a runaway proliferation, as sedentary people amassed possessions that nomads could not. An early invention was the house, which conserved the energy of its dwellers, like clothing but on a larger scale, and even protected somewhat against predation, which is the ultimate loss of energy.
Until humans began domesticating plants, only a few locations on Earth could support sedentary populations. Farming was a huge winner that wrested orders of magnitude more energy from the land than hunter-gatherers enjoyed. In four places in particular, several thousand years after plants began domestication, humans independently invented cities. Those first civilizations were all situated on bodies of water that provided low-energy transportation lanes. Transportation on water used only about 1% of the energy that transportation on land did, and cities were not feasible without those low-energy transportation lanes, which greatly expanded their hinterlands.
Cities were huge collections of tools, from roads to palaces to aqueducts. New kinds of humans arose with cities, and two in particular: elites and professionals. Professionals, relieved from subsistence duties, developed unprecedented skills, which greatly increased humanity’s collective intelligence and toolset, while elites were generally violent societal parasites. Cities allowed for the quick dissemination of information and ideas, especially after writing was invented, and on a per-capita basis, cities used energy more efficiently.
In summary, cities allowed for specialization, better communication, and they were energy efficient. They also were death traps, subjected to epidemics, partly from the filth of civilization. Their embodied energy became attractive for plunderers, so cities were regularly sacked in warfare. Mongols and Nazis, among others, engaged in wholesale slaughters of city-dwellers, for those that were not enslaved.
Urban life expectancy did not exceed rural life expectancy in Europe until the 20th century. When cities got larger than about 100,000 people, extraordinary measures were developed to keep cities inhabitable. If the energy flows to a city are interrupted – food, water, fuel – then cities quickly become uninhabitable, to this day.
In the Fifth Epoch, all of those reasons for having cities disappear. People will easily travel Earth, communicate with anybody instantly, and energy will not be an issue. I have seen the polls, and people in industrial nations would prefer a pastoral existence with urban amenities. That will be the norm in the Fifth Epoch, and cities as we know them will cease to exist. I envision a generation or so to remediate those cities back to nature, and maybe preserve one or two as a kind of museum of humanity’s primitive past. Visitors in the Fifth Epoch will marvel and shudder at how people could live like that, jammed in like sardines.