Civilizational Intergenerational Transmission: Adjacent-Generation Co-Nucleus Overlap and the Intergenerational Dynamics of Civilizational Continuity

Every generation dies; civilizations can persist for millennia. What mechanism sustains continuity across the death of any single generation? Many apparently “sudden” civilizational collapses are in fact the cumulative result of intergenerational transmission breakdown: not a single external shock that directly destroys civilization, but the transmission efficiency falling below threshold across successive generations until one generation cannot find enough inheritors, and civilization enters irreversible collapse. This chapter provides a complete mechanism for civilizational intergenerational transmission within a sedimentation field dynamics framework. The intergenerational continuity of a civilization’s cross-generational co-nucleus is maintained through the co-nucleus overlap between adjacent generations (GenOverlap) — jointly determined by three factors: transmission integrity, participation rate, and institutional continuity. As long as GenOverlap between adjacent generations remains above the intergenerational survival threshold, civilization retains the capacity to continue across the death of any single generation; when GenOverlap falls below the intergenerational fracture threshold, transmission enters irreversible breakdown, triggering the intergenerational collapse pathway. Three results follow. First, civilizational continuity depends on the collective transmission behavior of the generational cohort — ritual participation, language use, educational institution maintenance — not on the memory of any single individual. Second, the decline of GenOverlap is not linearly lethal; two distinct threshold regions exist: a fragile transmission zone and an irreversible fracture zone. Third, intergenerational fracture is the micro-level realization mechanism of civilizational compression death; external shocks (forced assimilation, religious purges, large-scale displacement) destroy civilizations precisely by driving GenOverlap below the fracture threshold.