People have lived in very small spaces since the dawn of civilisation, of course, whether out of necessity or monkish self-denial.
He is currently working on Chronicles, a series in which players can chart the course of Western civilisation over the course of several linked games.
It's strangely anthropological, like examining the artefacts of a bygone civilisation – only, of course, it's our own, a generation removed.
Channel heads look on nervously at the fate of big new entertainment ideas such as Utopia, the latest offering from Big Brother creator John De Mol, in which a group of strangers try to create an ideal civilisation over the course of a year, which was rejected by American audiences and panned by critics.
Clearly, however, the course of civilisation does have something to do with the discovery, preparation, cooking, preserving and storing of certain foodstuffs.
That said, it's a long way from getting the medium-term path of interest rates and inflation more or less right to predicting the overall course of civilisation centuries in advance.
This dream was given further impetus, he speculates, by the emergence of a genuine predictive capability regarding such events as solar and lunar eclipses at an early stage in human civilisation, which has of course become increasingly refined with the development of the natural sciences and their concomitant technologies.
Presumably, in its less-metallic past, that would have been true of the Milky Way as well.Whether the constant pressing of the evolutionary reset button suggested by the calculation Dr Piran and Dr Jimenez have made really is the explanation for humanity's lack of contact with alien civilisations is, of course, a matter of speculation.
And in encapsulating that creed I can draw on a frequent presence in courses in western civilisation, because I don't think I can improve on the formulation of the dramatist Terence: a former slave from Roman Africa, a Latin interpreter of Greek comedies, a writer from classical Europe who called himself Terence the African.
I couldn't read these without remembering David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, published last year, which also deals with a post-apocalyptic future and the breakdown of civilisation.' Novelists have, of course, been conjuring up these sorts of visions for centuries; but, as Angel continues, 'Perhaps the uncertainties of a post-11 September world have lent this kind of questioning more urgency.
