Civilisation as Innovation Engine: Why Simulating a Thousand Civilisations Changes Everything

Civilisation is an innovation engine. Every civilisation that has ever existed has produced innovations as a natural emergent property of intelligent agents interacting under pressure over time. Humanity has run exactly one civilisation: one trajectory through an infinite space of possible configurations. We propose that the ability to simulate civilisations of genuinely intelligent agents — made possible by LLM-based agentic AI — transforms civilisational development from a singular historical process into a repeatable, parallelisable, accelerable experiment. Running a thousand civilisations in parallel, each with different configurations, at speeds compressing millennia into days, produces a thousand…