Human civilizations have only been around for a couple thousand years. That's nothing.

edit: by this I mean to say that it's too soon to make sweeping generalizations about what human social organizations can or cannot do. A commenter downstream rightly points out that "civilization" isn't a well-defined term in this context, although I was thinking of it as a shorthand term for the various human political, commercial, cultural, etc. organizations of a given era. My contention is that because recorded history is only a couple of thousand years old, we do not have enough information about what the various components of "civilization" are capable of, especially when they are overlapping, interacting, and meeting a novel challenge.

btw I tried reading this book but got bored halfway through, and I watched the first episode and wasn't that impressed either. I read the wikipedia summary and it's got some neat ideas, though.