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PiMuNu had what I consider the most insightful comment of the week, on the story about Japan's troubles finding people to research and run nuclear power plants:

Note that Civ and other strategy games in the same ilk got it wrong.

Science/Research is not something you "bank". Science is something you invest in, and continue to invest in. Stop the investment and "Science" regresses.

For those who haven't played the Civilization games, the idea is that you run a civilization and compete with other civilizations. They typically are city-oriented (a key step in expanding power of the civilization is building more cities), and they invariably bank science. That is, if I'm researching writing and decide for some reason to switch over to research other technologies for a while, I can pick up where I left off on writing - even if it is a thousand years later!

This is part of a larger problem, namely that civilization is seen as a strictly progressive affair - anything you do aside from losing wars moves the civilization forward. Sure, if you start next to Alexander the Great or nuclear Gandhi (or worst of all a human player!), you have plenty of opportunity to experience civilization setbacks as the aggressive neighbor makes war on you. But you can slack off on science, infrastructure maintenance, etc and pick it up later.

In the real world, there's plenty of failure modes other than losing wars. Conversely, a number of real world civilizations have lost a bunch of wars yet still were able to keep relevant.

Over the past couple of weeks, I've been watching a podcast series called "Fall of Civilizations". Production values do leave something to be desired (such as showing a trash fire in an unnamed Middle East neighborhood when discussing someone burning something in a war or rebellion or reusing stock images in multiple episodes), but it's an interesting angle on history. The author starts with a discussion of the significant ruins that the civilization left behind, often from the point of view of historical figures who discovered it first, what the civilization actually did that made it notable, and finally, what led to the fall and its aftermath - including from the point of view of the people caught up in the fall. Last I checked he's up to 16 episodes.

What's interesting is how few of these disasters have a single, clearly identifiable cause (sometimes they just don't know why at all). Usually it's multiple factors with considerable uncertainty as to the relative significance of the factors. Again, this isn't something captured in historical games like Civilization. For example, what combination of factors caused the collapse of the Assyrian empire (Episode 13)? Did it fall due to the fact nobody liked them and finally unified enough, climate change transition from the best rainfall in the region to something of a megadrought, vast overextension of the empire (key parts of the army couldn't return in time to the core Assyrian region to save it), or an effect nobody has considered yet (maybe some sort of heavy metal poisoning explains their wacky leaders)?

A key problem for many of these civilizations was that they either stopped banking something (the collapse of the trade networks and disappearance of multiple languages of the late Bronze Age cultures of the eastern Mediterranean which at least partially was due to not diversifying critical resource needs like bronze and food and very low literacy) or they had some hidden deficit in their civilization that grew over time (such as the decline of Sumeria due to widespread salinization of irrigated farmland which when the region was hit with a drier climate turned the area from a great net food producer to mass starvation).

That leads to my observation - that just because a society or civilization has something now, not just nuclear engineering know-how and experience, doesn't mean it can keep it. Too often strengths of civilizations are taken for granted and just assumed that they will continue no matter how much we or the environment impair them. Well, there are a bunch of dead civilizations that indicate otherwise. You or nature can break something to the point that your civilization no longer exists in a recognizable form.