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Comment by rishav_sharan | Hacker News Reader

I think a lot of us assume civilization to mean that the sapients must at least be as technologically advanced as us right now. But there could have been simple hunter gatherer societies which used materials like wood and other organic stuff for their constructions.

I think assuming that all civilizations must live in a concrete jungle like us is as likely to be wrong as to assume that all aliens must look like us, or that all life in the universe must only exist in a temperature range of 0-60'C

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I certainly never had that opinion. I would consider for example the people of ancient Greece to be an advanced civilization, despite the relative lack of what we consider to be modern technology. And you can go back much further than ancient Greece for that matter.

There is a general misconception that advanced modern technology equates to an advanced civilisation. Looking back to ancient Greece, Mesopotamia or Egypt there were a lot of interesting ideas implemented in those societies that we haven't even thought of today. Ancient Greece had a very interesting healthcare system for example which was passed down to ancient Rome in some form. A lot of countries today have advanced weaponry, rockets, digital computing but haven't managed to implement a solid healthcare or education system.

Ouch

It's true. We could define civilization as being consciously aware of the state of Nirvana. It's possible that early pre-human civilians all transcended long before discovering how to weave baskets or husband livestock.

If your species only needs to spend half a day foraging for food and the other half lounging under a tree contemplating the nature of existence, why bother with the grind of technology when you could jump straight to the endgame?

I sorry what? This comment reads like complete gibberish based on the context of the OP

Civilisation is not a state of mind. That doesn't make any sense, because it is completely at odds with how the word is used in practice, e.g. "Aztec civilisation", "Western civilisation", "Modern civilisation". The actual definition of civilisation is about structured culture and communities: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/civilization

The wiktionary definition of "civilized" [0] is "Having a highly developed society or culture" -- developed into what, late Victorian era upper-class British men, like the people who wrote the OED the definition was cribbed from? The human species, especially those of highly developed society and culture, have a long record of exterminating others of their kind on the grounds that the others are "uncivilized".

Civilization is purely a state of mind. A species that achieved enlighnment before inventing the wheel or harnessing fire can be no less "civilized" than one that will engage in intraspecies mass murder for the right to enslave other members of their own species. I would argue they are more civilized, in fact.

[0] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/civilized

Civilization means complex urbanized society. Doesn't imply technology like the present - for example we talk about the Sumerian civilization. It is really a question of how organized the society is.

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