Skip to content
Civilizations
18 pixels

Systems · branch

Stages of civilization

Progress is path-dependent. Techs unlock. Some unlocks are real. Some are only the game.

This hangs on Literacy → institutions, Energy.

See on the tree

The Civilization series, from 1991, made the tech tree famous as a playable object: you cannot research Literature before Writing; you cannot build the Great Library until you have Literature. GamesBeat, covering the 2015 AMA, noticed that Elon seemed to have internalized that model for real scientific discovery.

Real history is messier: multiple origins, lost techniques, simultaneous invention, collapse. The useful remainder is still the 2023 sentence: outstanding insight into the stepping stones of actual civilizational growth. Some doors do not open until another door has.

2016, Y Combinator: they forgot how to build pyramids. They forgot how to read hieroglyphics. Entropy is not on your side. Stages can reverse.

This node is the namesake of this world. Civilizations, plural: the game, the historical process, and the knowledge-structure they share.

That I was useful in the furtherance of civilization. That I helped move civilization forward. Added to the store of knowledge and capability. That I helped understand the universe.
Elon Musk2025Lara Trump
We need to preserve and make accessible as much knowledge as possible. So much has been lost over the past 5000 years.
Elon Musk2024X
Read The Story of Civilization by Durant
Elon Musk2026X
I’ve asked the SpaceXAI team to preserve any rare books in a library and scan them the hard way vs just cutting off the spine and scanning
Elon Musk2026X

Asked what he wanted his legacy to be, he does not name a company. He names a civilizational duty: to be useful in the furtherance of civilization, to add to the store of knowledge and capability, to help understand the universe.

Hangs on Stages of civilization

Writing is about five thousand years old. Civilization is an instant on a galactic clock. He names Durant’s Story of Civilization, the rise and fall of many, and the duty: become multiplanetary while the tech level still allows it.

Hangs on Stages of civilization

Hangs on

What hangs from here

Sources