Here is a fascinating look at the rise and fall of cities across time.
This should be a stark reminder that the US empire, too, will fall one day.
For much of human history, most people did not live in cities.
As Visual Capitalist’s Pallavi Rao details below, cities – settlements that are densely populated and self-administered – require many specific prerequisites to come into existence. The most crucial, especially for much of human history, is an abundance of food.
Surplus food production leads to denser populations and allows for people to specialize in other skills that are not associated with basic human survival.
But that also means that cities usually consume more primary goods than they produce. And their size requires a host of many other services – such as transport and sanitation – that are traditionally expensive to maintain. So maintaining large urban centers, and especially the world’s largest cities, was a monumental task.
Mapper and history YouTuber Ollie Bye has visualized the seven largest cities in the world since 3,000 BCE. His video covers cities with a minimum population of 10,000 and hints at historical events which led to the establishment, growth, and eventual fall of cities.
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ZeroHedge – On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero