Key Insights:

* There is a perspective from which “today” means “post-Ordovician”

* Catul-Huyuk as 900 families living cheek-by-jowl, and after 1500 years… people leave…

* Angkor’s uniquely vulnerable water reservoirs… and eventually… people leave…

* Cahokia’s sophisticated organization of labor… but eventually… people leave…

* Pompeii… well, we know why people flee all-of-a-sudden…

* Cities are magical places, but not always, and not forever…

* Cities suffer from abandonment when an overdetermined disaster hits a sclerotic system: you can deal with politics, you can deal with climate change by themselves, but…

* Question: Will Detroit or Miami or Houston be the next “lost city” in the U.S.?

* Hexapodia!

References:

* Annalee Newitz: Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age (New York: W.W. Norton, 2021) <https://www.google.com/books/edition/Four_Lost_Cities_A_Secret_History_of_the/l6K6DwAAQBAJ>

* Joseph Tainter: The Collapse of Complex Societies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988) <https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Collapse_of_Complex_Societies/YdW5wSPJXIoC>

+, of course:

* Vernor Vinge: A Fire Upon the Deep (New York: Tor, 1992) <https://archive.org/details/fireupondeep00ving_0/mode/1up>

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