For academic Luke Kemp, our modern civilisation is exceptionally fragile. Collapse isn’t inevitable, but we need radical change to prevent it – and history shows a cautionary pattern.

Surveying 5000 years of human history, and over 400 civilisation collapses – from the Bronze Age to modern times – Kemp highlights a recurring trend: elites unsustainably seize and concentrate resources; inequality grows to destabilising levels and destroys said society.

Essentially, a “Goliath’s Curse” – the very features that make a society powerful become its undoing.

Today? The fossil fuel industry, big tech and military industrial complexes rule our world, and pose new threats of annihilating us – from climate change to nuclear war.

With Julia Wheeler he discusses what lessons from history might save our future.