One of the ironies of the Manichean, "clash of civilisation" model, which has split the world on your watch, is that the very aspects of literal, Wahhabist Islam that westerners have proper worries about - the death penalty, the subordination of women, homophobia, censorship, aggressive warmaking, the divine authority of leaders - are aspects you don't have that much trouble with.
Rooted in the 1960s idea that the most sustainable model of civilisation was a medieval town in which most products and services derived from within its walls, the start of the decade saw a dawning realisation that new jobs and responsible custodianship of the environment weren't mutually exclusive.
So, I ended up creating Koturia, a world that models its civilisation on our modern Las Vegas.
Plato's Atlantis, shown at the Palais Omnisports in Paris on 6 October 2009, was based on the mythical lost underwater civilisation and showed the models morphing into a post-human watery species with scaly bodies and "Armadillo" shoes.
The predominant varieties of atheist thinking, in the 19th and early 20th centuries, aimed to show that the secular west is the model for a universal civilisation.
Tainter's model of the collapse process of past civilisations in his landmark book, The Collapse of Complex Societies, is contradicted by the historical record on many of his own examples (a matter I've discussed more extensively elsewhere).
Its goals were the modernisation of Russia on a western model and the establishment of a new, universal civilisation.
He feels he has a bigger mission: to reject the West's "frail civilisation" and instead, with Iran's bumper oil revenues, build a "model Islamic" country.
He quotes, for instance, leading collapse anthropologist Prof Joseph Tainter, who critiques the HANDY model for a "flawed" understanding of the rise and fall of civilisations due to unsustainable levels of complexity.
But a grounding in one's culture, in all the contributions black people have made to the civilisation we now live in, goes much further than our current obsession with role models.
Using theoretical models, the applied mathematician Safa Motesharri "explored the factors which could lead to the collapse of civilisation, from population growth to climate change" and warned of "impending global disaster".
