Dr Drake suggests, therefore, that there might be only a narrow window of time in the development of civilisations, analogous to the past 50 years on Earth, during which noisy electromagnetic signals are generated in large amounts.It is, however, also possible that someone is actively trying to send signals to the Earth.
It is worth persisting with, however, for its subject is nothing less than one of the greatest turning points in the development of civilisation.
Ever since Fernand Braudel, in 1949, published his groundbreaking work The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, historians have been alert to the role played by seas in the development of civilisation.
Again, this is where Marxist historical materialism is married up with the dialectic – and he sees the two as inseparable – by pointing out that the switch from the pleasure principle to the reality principle was absolutely necessary for the development of civilisation but that, in the process, the Eros of human fulfilment had to be sublimated.
KEN FEDER: So if we could find one of these absolutely earliest stages of civilisation it would make an enormous contribution to our understanding of the process of the development of civilisation.
When this approach falls short he resorts to the speculative "Just So" stories of evolutionary psychology, which recognises as history only the phase of hunter-gatherer human society which left us with a genetic legacy that is presumed to be out of kilter with the subsequent developments of civilisation.
Archaeologists have correlated the development of human civilisations with the evolution of what is now regarded as the modern species of bread wheat.
The government's first white paper on democracy in China, in 2005, began: "Democracy is an outcome of the development of political civilisation of mankind.
Surely Thomas Aquinas, Johann Sebastian Bach, St Francis of Assisi, to name but a few, have had a considerable impact on the development of Western civilisation.
He was an extraordinarily wide-ranging historian, producing more than 20 books that encompassed, between them, most of the cultural development of western civilisation.
