As you report in your review of Neil Ferguson’s Civilization: The West and the Rest (London: Allen Lane, 2011), the British historian purports that the so-called west may be on its hind legs as top dog, but that values that made it great have spread to the rest of the world (“A Success that Looks Like Failure,” March 12, 2011). The west is best for ever, that is. Covering Europe since some five-hundred years ago, the book focuses on six “killer apps” of the west: science, medicine, protestant work ethic, competition, property rights, and the consumer society. Cute, this. I can well imagine a Chinese historian writing a similar book with the word “east” replacing “west” in the title. In fact, human civilization stretches over a hundred-thousand years, of which the last ten-thousand have to do with the current interglacial period conducive to its rapid development. In the last five-thousand years, the world is highly interconnected. What comes and goes are not “civilizations” but its specific forms, usually associated with empires. Here, empires of China, India, Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, Rome, and so forth, come and go, but their continuous interactions make it impossible to identify the vaunted killer apps as belonging to anyone in particular. In this sense, the end of the interglacial period may bring a dimming of the human civilization as a whole, but that remains an open question. This is how a Martian historian would see the phenomenon in question rather than focusing on the east, west, south, or north. And that is the only perspective actually worth pursuing here on earth.