Civilization as a Large-Scale Energy-Information System

Abstract

The world is a triadic meta-system: nature - society - man, in which all components are linked by material, energy, and information relationships. These system subjects and their relationships are civilization structures represented by a "community" in our planetary House, i.e., Ecos (from the Greek ‘oikos’ – dwelling in various zones of the earthly oecumene). Civilization is a set of socio-natural factors, the system of life, and cultural-and-mental relations in the eco-system in its certain evolution stage. Regional and mental features (like apartments in an apartment house) characterize certain historical and geographical types of civilization, among which the Atlantic, East-Eurasian, and Islamic ones stand out. All of them are in different stages of their evolution and differ in their material level, the organization of social life, and the target vision of their arrangement. The current stage of the civilization development is characterized by a thorough transformation of all its types under the influence of regular cyclicality and change in the dominant factors of socio-natural relations in the planetary House, given the qualitatively new features of modernity - massive digitalization as a way of integrating the real (material and power energy) and verbal (subtle-energy and information) worlds. The paper briefly examines historical aspects of the cyclical development of civilization (using the example of its East-Eurasian type) and presents the author's target vision (foresight) of its future for the time horizon until the middle of the 21st century.

Quo Vadis: Anthropological Dimension of the Modern Civilization Crisis

“…Harari (2019), F. Fukuyama (2004, E. Wilson (2014), A. Etkind (2020), as well as articles of (Bushuev, 2020;Fox, 2020;Taylor, 2020), who represent the most relevant ways to solve the issue under consideration.…”