Human history is littered with expired civilizations, and scholars and archaeologists have made a determined effort to understand why and how civilizations collapse. They've found that symptoms like a growing wealth gap and distrust of the elites are precursors to civilizational collapse. But what about global technological civilizations like the one we live in now? How long can they last? What causes their collapse? How can they recover? These are difficult questions to grapple with. Many of the variables and parameters involved are well beyond the horizon of our knowledge. Still, it's worth a try as a sort of thought experiment. A new paper titled " Projections of Earth's Technosphere: Civilization Collapse-Recovery Dynamics and Detectability " explores some of these questions. The paper is available on arxiv.org and the lead author is Celia Blanco. Dr.…