外星人造訪地球必讀的一本書－－文明之網

This book mixes old and new wine, and pours the blend into a new bottle. Some of the ideas and perspectives offered here are distilled versions of the ones first proposed half a century ago. Others are set forth here for the first time. The new bottle, giving shape the book, is the notion of the centrality of webs of interaction in human history.

A web, as we see it, is a set of connections that link people to one another. These connections may take many forms: chance encounters, kinship, friendship, common worship, rivalry, enmity, economic exchange, ecological exchange, political cooperation, even military competition. In all such relationships, people communicate information and use that information to shape their future behavior. They also communicate, or transfer, useful technologies, goods, crops, ideas, and much else. Furthermore, they inadvertently exchange diseases and weeds, items they cannot use but which affect their lives (and deaths) nonetheless. The exchange and spread of such information, items, and inconveniences, and human responses to these, shape history. ...繼續閱讀