There are very strong reasons to believe that all civilizations (multitudes of independent, individualistic semi-cooperating sentient creatures) are inherently chaotic and therefore unstable. There are loads of arguments as to why they are doomed to fail, or to try to expand exponentially. If we take a cold and realistic eye to technological civilizations, they do seem doomed to self-destruct or &quot;sublime&quot; into something incomprehensible. There aren&#x27;t many examples in nature of things that are the confluence of two or more super-exponential processes that are long-term stable. (In our case, those would be population, energy use, and technological change.) In fact, I think there are basically none.