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Abstract
Utilizing the complex systems scholarship of Ugo Bardi as well as potentially informative, but always imprecise, historical analogy, this article examines the unraveling of the Roman Empire. In Bardi’s view, this “Mother of All Collapses” is a potentially powerful warning for our twenty-first-century globalized planet. Our work situates a key collapse “tipping point” for Ancient Rome’s Mare Nostrum (Our Sea)-centered civilization at “The Alexander Moment”—the assassination of Emperor Alexander Severus in 235 CE. Ancient and modern analogues and potential key differences, in terms of both exacerbating and dampening types of interacting feedback, are identified and analyzed.