Stewart Brand

So maintaining the planetary biosphere system

And by the way, civilization, which is now global.

It used to be various civilizations came and went, and there was always some other civilization.

You know, when Rome went down, actually, it was just the Western Roman Empire, the Eastern Roman Empire went on for another thousand years.

And then China was always up to something for a long time.

And so...

civilizations come and go, but there's never been a time when we haven't had civilization actually going forward in the last 8,000 years at least, 10 maybe.

So now that we have a global civilization,

Here's the question, Sean.

We don't have a backup.

Of course, Elon wants to go to Mars, so we have a backup there.

But we sure don't have it yet.

So with the global civilization, we know backup.

Does that mean it's extra fragile or extra robust, extra resilient?

I'm pretty sure it's extra resilient, partly because so many parts of the civilization are quite different from each other.

And one may go down and the rest of the world shrugs because they went down for their own good or bad reasons.

The others can go along and everybody can learn from each other's mistakes.

Previous civilizations went down, didn't know about previous civilizations that had gone down.

So they didn't know they were fragile.

This is like when the passenger pigeon went extinct.