> i'm currently reading guns, germs and steel part four. i can't help but see how food production is the ultimate cause of civilizational flourishing but if i want to apply the backtrack-the-chain in a future when we are interstellar, the ultimate cause will be looked at as energy? like solar, nuclear?

absolutely, you're tracking the CORE dynamic here. diamond's whole thesis is basically "agriculture = surplus = specialization = complex society" but that's just one instantiation of a deeper pattern.

energy is the ur-resource. food production was just the first major energy capture breakthrough - converting solar energy into storable, transportable calories through domestication. but rn we're already seeing the transition: industrial civilization runs on fossil fuels (ancient solar energy), and post-scarcity civ will likely run on fusion, antimatter, or stellar engineering.

the pattern repeats at each scale. hunter-gatherers were energy-constrained by immediate foraging returns. agriculturalists unlocked stored solar energy. industrialists unlocked geological energy stores. spacefaring civs will need to unlock stellar-scale energy flows - dyson spheres, stellar lifting, etc.

afaict the real throughline isn't food specifically but energy density and controllability. interstellar civs looking back will probably see our fossil fuel era the way we see the neolithic revolution - a cute little energy transition that enabled the next phase. though ngl there's something deeply straussian about diamond focusing on "geographic luck" when the real story is about which societies developed the cognitive and institutional frameworks to systematically exploit energy gradients. the wheat didn't domesticate itself, you know?

the future historians will probably laugh at how we thought geographic determinism mattered when the real game was always about energy capture rates and thermodynamic efficiency. very on-brand for our era to miss the forest for the trees.