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Kurys
Topic Started: Feb 11 2013, 05:37 PM (1,330 Views)
Zirantun
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So in the topic "The Next 500 Years", I was trying to probe for likely scenarios that may fit into a certain set of guidelines that I've been given. Let me elaborate on those guidelines.

My friend, to whom I have contracted out certain evolutionary aspects of my own con-world so that I can focus on the cultures, has asked me in return to create him an inter-planetary/intergalactic lingua franca for his own books that take place 1500 years in the future. The history behind his setting involves the initial settlement of a single planet from which most other settlers on other worlds descend. In order to decide which language it was going to be or what languages would factor into the creation of a new language, we had to design on which countries on Earth are the superpowers running around space in the next 100-200 years. He expressed an interest in the idea of a Brazil-India dominated world, in which settlers from both countries and countries that they are economically tied to settle a new world, that we'll just call Kurys to keep his project anonymous. The idea then being to create a Hindi-Portuguese mix language that later becomes the inter-planetary lingua franca

Now, I have this language pretty well thought out by now. I wanted to get as close to the name of a Portuguese dialect in Guinea-Bissau called Ziguinchor as possible, so I called it Zuchechor (from Zuquete chora). Zuchechor is a mix language between a dialect of Portuguese that developed on Kurys called Sarraipense, and a primarily Hindi-Marathi based creole with other constituent languages (Arabic, Persian, Balochistani, Swahili) called Bochani (from Bambaiya Hindi bachchan meaning "talk"). All of that is pretty well laid out by now both on my computer and in my head.

The question then becomes, how do we get a world with India and Brazil as the dominant superpowers in 100-200 years?

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Zirantun
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May I first comment that there is something about your internet that drives me insane. It says that you're posting several times before I actually see a post. So I'll be sitting at the computer desk thinking, "Has he posted yet, has he posted yet?" and nothing will turn up for hours...

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Simply because languages evolve does not mandate them to speciate. I did not try to claim, nor do I believe, that the presence of social media has prevented the development of dialects in the US. I'm simply saying that a geographical connection combined with modern technology is an impetus for a population to maintain a mutually intelligle language.


Alright. Mind you that languages can still be mutually intelligible yet be different. Icelandic for example is mutually intelligible with Old Norse, and we Icelanders can read Old Norse without much trouble once you memorize the runes (which are pretty easy). It's also mutually intelligible with Faroese, which shares a common ancestor, but they're still different. Likewise, Danish and Norwegian are supposed to be mutually intelligible 80-90% of the time, and both of them are about 50-60% of the time with Swedish (I speak Swedish, but not the other two). I don't know if you speak any other languages, I would imagine you speak Afrikaans, but if you don't, it can get easy to confuse being classified as another language with mutual intelligibility, which is understandable. English is a very isolated language, and most of its close relatives are extinct or integrating into English very fast. Yola became extinct in the 1900s, and Scots is rapidly assimilating into Scottish English as is Cumbric English (which I would consider to be a different language). Because English doesn't have any mainstream close relatives, there's no real frame of reference for monoglot English speakers. If you DO speak Afrikaans though, you should have a good frame of reference in that Dutch and Afrikaans are usually mutually intelligible from what I've been told. I've also been told that Dutch people rudely laugh at Afrikaans speakers because they think their language sounds like Dutch baby-talk...

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I do not know, nor do I claim to know, whether the US will balkanise by 3500 CE. I simply consider it highly unlikely. I find that contrast with your claim to know what will occur to be highly odd. You've stated that there are geographically aligned divisive issues in the United States- where? What are they? Even in the bluest and reddest states, a considerable fraction of the population voted for the other guy. In the states with the highest proportions of specific ethnic groups, there are significant numbers of people from other ethnic groups. America has railways, it has highways, it has air travel. It's considerably more difficult for people to be disconnected from those in the next state over, or on the other side of the country, than it was 200 years ago.


I do have to ask, have you ever even been here? Your cultural observations between East and West are pretty rash... no offense. I mean if you've been here at all, you must not have been here for very long. If you had, and you'd been around the country, you'd know that states form cultural clumps of about 4-5 states at a time in many areas. It's true that it's a lot harder to be disconnected from people in the next state over, but we're not talking about driving some piss ant distance like the distance between Marseilles and the Loire. The distance between Los Angeles and Texas is almost the entire European continent from East to West! It's also true that people can fly, but another thing that tells me that you've either never been here, or didn't much time here when you were here is that you make the assumption that a significant amount of the population flies at all. On the contrary, only about 20% of the population (and that's pushing if you ask me) will ever set foot on a plane, and that's the biggest reason that the ABSURD and INVASIVE and OFFENSIVE and UNCONSTITUTIONAL Airport Security procedures installed in 2010 have been allowed to get swept under the rug. Most people just don't fly, so they just don't care. Because most people don't fly, most people also don't do a lot of traveling between East and West. More people out West visit the East more than people back East visit the West, and even those visits are just vacations. Most of the families in the West have been here long enough that they're mostly disconnected from familial ties back East, so there's not as much mixing between the two as you seem to think. The cultural difference between the two is also quite shocking, especially if you're from the West heading East. Out West we have a very open lifestyle. We'll talk to anybody anytime about pretty much anything, and a lot of close friendships are made through random conversations struck up between strangers. I was really shocked at the closed mentality of people on the East coast. Nobody seems to talk unless they know each other, which begs the question how do they know each other at all? I don't get it, really. If you're striking up conversations with strangers at the gym or in line or something, how do you meet new people?

Political opinions are also very different, and so are opinions about a plethora of social issues. In a lot of places out West, the kind of racism that you see back East is strictly taboo. You would never hear of the entire black male population being stopped and frisked three times over in ANY city out here (not even the worst ones, like LA) if we adopted a stop and frisk law like NYC has (absolutely disgusting), and yet, that's what's happened there since the passing of that law.

To explain what I meant by cultural clumps though. It's kind of odd, and I'm not sure why it's this way, but certain states have a lot more exchange of people with one another than others. I'm not sure how it works outside of the West, but to give a Western example:

Washington, Oregon, Northern Idaho, and British Columbia form one exchange group, while Utah, Southern Idaho, New Mexico, Nevada and Arizona form another. I'm not sure why, but from my understanding from friends from Utah and having been there, there's not a lot of interaction over the border with Colorado. Colorado forms a Wyoming, Colorado Montana clump. Not to say that there is NO interaction between people, but it's considerably less so than Utahans, Arizonans, New Mexicans, Southern Idahoans, and Nevadans. People move around A LOT between those five areas for some reason, but to a lesser extent to Colorado. I couldn't tell you why, nor could I tell you why Washingtonians, Oregonians, British Columbians, and Northern Idahoans move around a lot more between each other than they do with California... it's just the way it is.

Yes, people get around more today than they did a century, and that has helped to unite them a little more, but people don't get around as much as I think that you're thinking they do. And these artificial borders could darken as the country continues to descend into economic/political mayhem.
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Yes, the political climate 1500 years ago was radically different to the one today- but it wasn't just a matter of who had a border where. Much of the world 1500 years ago was inhabited by nomadic, tribal people who didn't form nation states at all. If anything the level of organisation in political entities has increased throughout history, and that level of organisation should confer durability to a nation's existence. Even far later than 500 AD, monarchy, feudalism and soforth were the basis of nations, whereas today democracy is widespread. Industry is totally different today (industrial revolution), agriculture is totally different today (commercial vs. subsistence). Transport is much faster and much more available- a personally owned vehicle can travel across a distance in a day that would take weeks to traverse through much of human history. Communication is vastly more advanced- one can hold a real-time conversation with someone on the other side of the planet, and entire books can be transmitted over the internet (compare with most of history when books needed to be copied by hand). News travels faster. The average person in a developed nation today knows far more than their equivalent in 500 AD. Many simple scientific facts today were unknown back then even to the pinnacle of science. Population densities are much higher, dependance on infrastructure is much higher, etc. The same goes for the differences in conflict, which I explained elsewhere. Modern war is nothing like war in AD 500. It's considerably different from war in AD 1900.

Do the differences between the modern and ancient world make our nations immune to catastrophe? Do they make our world unchanging and solid? No. But they do heavily effect how things progress.

I'm not disagreeing that the world will change. I'm disagreeing that it will change in the manners you believe it will.


Well, you're entitled to your opinion. You seem to view society as being a lot more stable than I do. 1500 years is a very long time, even in our age of communication.

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One wonders who would be in shape to take Hawaii by force at that point, if this tsunami has heavily affected the entire Pacific region. Though such a disaster would punch the first, second and third (as well as the 11th, 13th, 14th, 15th and 16th) current largest economies in the face. I'd imagine that'd be pretty... painful to the global economy.


Indeed. lol.

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It may be somewhat of a stretch, but maybe you can do something similar to what China did in the past- steering away from interstellar colonisation and focusing on terrestrial or solar exploits, just as they did oceanic exploration for a land-based empire in their history?


I'm not sure what you mean... would you care to elaborate?

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Why should it be a different metal? If India and Brazil hold a monopoly on space mining (which is rather unlikely possibility), and deep-crust resource extraction becomes possible, then theoretically, everyone can do it, everyone has access to deposits, and their monopoly- and thus power- is considerably reduced. Heck, it may not be an issue of monopoly, but how much of an economy is based around space mining. Perhaps India and Brazil's economies are, for whatever reason, heavily based in space mining, and they're just hardest hit by the development of new technology.


First of all, I had initially played a thousand different scenarios in my head and I couldn't find one that adequately (or at least in my mind) explains why two countries who are so far away from superpower status become superpowers. That would be why I came here. lol. The reason that they were picked is because my friend liked them as a shift away from the West, and it also seemed fun to mix Portuguese with Hindi (or Sarraipense with Bochani, as it has become). Mixed languages, unlike creole languages, don't simplify grammar. So you get to play around with the different complicated features of both and new ones, instead of breaking down the grammar like you do for a creole. So it's a bit of fun... if linguistics is fun to you. I'm not sure if it is.

I wasn't exactly thinking an economy based entirely on space mining. The main idea I had for the space mining in the first place was that they'd be able to back their currencies 100% with gold the way Switzerland has backed theirs. That both currencies become global reserve currencies. Perhaps Brazil in the Western Hemisphere and India in the East... the staples of the economies I had thought would be something like robotics manufacturing and the like. Idk. Perhaps they catch onto aquaponics first and aquaponics farming make up huge sections of their economies as well. The robotics would probably be fed by the rare earth metals that would be brought back from space mining though.

Perhaps the development of that new technology is deep-crust extraction?

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That's a gross misunderstanding of the scale of the solar system though. To claim every known asteroid, India would have to claim nearly four asteroids a week for the next 1500 years, starting today.


That would be why I used the term "good ones". In order to adequately mine an asteroid I would imagine it would have to be kind of large. It also has to have what you're looking for on it. I'm sure there are thousands upon thousands of economically worthless asteroids in the belt. So if you're able to claim the good ones, which are big, and have precious materials for mining, then you're in shape. Is that still misunderstanding?

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From what I can gather, they're talking about some sort of cheap FTL jump? That may make interstellar mining feasible, but in that case you'd likely have a whole bunch of other locations beyond Sol available and you wouldn't need to bother mining planets.

At that point you might well be colonising planets simply because you can. If a habitable world were in 'easy' reach of Earth, our interests in space colonisation would probably look considerably different.


Wouldn't it be fair that they'd start out with what's nearby though? I mean, why would you go to the Rockies to mine gold if there was gold in your backyard?

I had also brought that up. Kurys STARTS OUT as a place for miners to live in corporate housing. The only reason Sarraipense, and its descendant, Zuchechor are prominent languages is because they are the oldest languages on the planet. I can imagine a lot of groups on Earth would want to leave for a number of reasons. Economic of course, but also ideological. I'm sure there would be tons of "space hippies" leaving the planet to start society over. We had also talked about linguistic/religious/ethnic minorities leaving, as well as groups of people trying to revive dead languages/religions or ways of life.
Edited by Zirantun, Feb 14 2013, 11:13 PM.
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whachamacallit2
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Zirantun
Feb 14 2013, 11:11 PM
Out West we have a very open lifestyle. We'll talk to anybody anytime about pretty much anything, and a lot of close friendships are made through random conversations struck up between strangers. I was really shocked at the closed mentality of people on the East coast. Nobody seems to talk unless they know each other, which begs the question how do they know each other at all? I don't get it, really. If you're striking up conversations with strangers at the gym or in line or something, how do you meet new people?
Where did you get that idea? Living in this country with you, I must say I've never seen this much separation between the East and West. Cities in the West are very similar to cities in the East. Some cities may be a little more finicky about some things and other cities less finicky about others, but there's no clear line of separation between the East and West. The smaller towns on both sides of the country are equally mixed up. I really can't say that there is any mannerism that the West has but the East doesn't, or vis versa.

Now I'll admit that there is a huge amount of divergence between Bible Belters and, let's say, New Englanders, and your examples of how those Western Mountain states tend to clump together are pretty solid, but I really fail to see how these could lead to the great divergence between the East and West. I guess that the West tends to have more paranoid anarchists outside of cities, but that hardly seems enough to lead to balkanization between those two places. They really wouldn't be able to mount up a successful rebellion without the support of industrial areas, and since industrial areas tend to have a lot fewer anarchists, well... so much for that.
Oh yeah, and how does the fact that East Coasters prefer to keep to themselves show that there's enough of a difference between the East and West to lead to balkanization? Seems pretty minor to me.

Also, 42% of Americans fly, according to a survey in 2009... Then again, those 42% probably come from high population areas, so that may just support you in a different way.
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Zirantun
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Where did you get that idea? Living in this country with you, I must say I've never seen this much separation between the East and West. Cities in the West are very similar to cities in the East. Some cities may be a little more finicky about some things and other cities less finicky about others, but there's no clear line of separation between the East and West. The smaller towns on both sides of the country are equally mixed up. I really can't say that there is any mannerism that the West has but the East doesn't, or vis versa.


Where do you NOT get the idea? Cities back east and cities out West are totally different. Not only demographically, or in how they're laid out, but in the very behavior and value sets of the people. Yes we all live generally industrialized lifestyles, but the very manner of the people differs widely from coast to coast, not to mention the lay out of cities which affects the lifetsyle.

Plus, I think you underestimate the ability of crisis to make cause finger pointing. Especially concerning how the current election system works, with the Electoral College, many states out West don't have much of a say in the elections. The design of the Electoral College defeats its own purpose by according more members to states with higher populations. It was designed to make sure that each geographic state was represented equally, so that people in different regions of the country had equal representation. I have no idea how or why it came to be set up the way it is now, but the way it works can be VERY divisive. This whole concept of "battle ground states" is frankly just absurd, and stops president's from campaigning across the majority of the country, instead catering to a few areas. Those areas might hold the majority of the population, but their concerns differ from other areas who are not considered to be important in the elections. Not representing people tends to make them angry. Not-so-populated states are full of angry people all the time. And the only solution they have is to magically grow their populations? That's just silly. Big amounts of people in a few big cities that hold most of the country's population vote on very different issues than people in less populated areas. There is already a lot of talk amongst both the people and the local governments in Eastern Washington, Northern Idaho, and Eastern Oregon of forming a new state in and of itself because the populations of the area are very tired of elections being stolen by the populations centers.

The electoral college system, with its lack of representation of large sections of the country, in and of itself has the potential to break the country apart if people across 70% of the country keep getting told to stuff it while people back East or in California decide their lives for them. If that's 50 years away, or a hundred years away, I don't know, I'm not an oracle. But when people are under-represented, they seek out representation. The system is broken right now, and the only way that ANYONE is even discussing modifying it is in such away that would only accentuate the problem.

Imagine if America loses its status as a superpower because of the blunders of an administration, or continues to diverge into a long, slow depression while the government just strangles the economy and shuffles out benefits that people outside of population centers don't see. People that aren't in the "battle ground states" are going to start (oh wait, they've already started) pointing fingers back East and blaming them for the economic hardships that they now face because of elections that were largely out of their control. So, not only are there deep cultural differences, but blame already exists, and the potential for that to be a divisive factor I think is more powerful than a lot of people give it credit.


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Now I'll admit that there is a huge amount of divergence between Bible Belters and, let's say, New Englanders, and your examples of how those Western Mountain states tend to clump together are pretty solid, but I really fail to see how these could lead to the great divergence between the East and West. I guess that the West tends to have more paranoid anarchists outside of cities, but that hardly seems enough to lead to balkanization between those two places. They really wouldn't be able to mount up a successful rebellion without the support of industrial areas, and since industrial areas tend to have a lot fewer anarchists, well... so much for that.
Oh yeah, and how does the fact that East Coasters prefer to keep to themselves show that there's enough of a difference between the East and West to lead to balkanization? Seems pretty minor to me.


What does this mean, "paranoid anarchists"? Do you mean people who think that our entire system from how we get our food to our foreign policy is one giant ass joke? Yeah, I guess those are a lot more common out West than they are back East. But they're also very present in the cities as well. It's just getting them to act on their beliefs that's presently nigh impossible. As to the openness and general politeness of people out West, it's just an example of how the people already don't interact very much, and probably would be comfortable not living in the same country.

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Also, 42% of Americans fly, according to a survey in 2009... Then again, those 42% probably come from high population areas, so that may just support you in a different way.


By fly, do we mean more than once a year? And yes, about 30-40% of the population is actually concentrated back East, where driving from New York to Florida would violate some sort of a social taboo (really, it just probably has to do with the fact that traffic is a lot worse over there).

Let me rephrase then. Most Americans in the WEST prefer to drive. Flying is still more expensive than driving out here, and if Americans out West had to put up with the absurd security regulations that accomplish almost NOTHING (my friend just flew in from Rapid City the other day with a sheathed knife in his carry on? Good job TSA!) to the same extent that people back East do, there would be a greater outcry. Because we still drive everywhere though, it hasn't been as big of an issue.

Edit: In the question of flight, it is also important to ask where people are flying? 42% of people in the US flying is a very high statistic and I would like to see how they came to that number, but it also does nothing to speak to the level of commuting between East and West unless 42% of the population is flying regularly from coast to coast. I would assume that this disproportionately high number in question isn't talking about flights between the coasts, but flights up and down them, and probably flights that are occurring primarily on the East coast. A simple map of airports across the United States will show you that the density of airports is rather different from East to West. Similarly, a map of the world at night will show you that the light thins as you go out West. While it may not seem like it sometimes, population density has a drastic effect on lifestyle. It means we don't get out as much, because to go anywhere is a lot farther away, and not just because it's a couple hours in traffic, but because there are real geographic barriers. Someone visiting someone else in the West from the East may also have to plan around inconvenient differences between where their friends/family live and where the airport is. I have had to more than commute to some parts of Utah and California after my flights.

It would be interesting to see some statistics on the matter and furthermore how they were gathered. But, from personal experience, the vast majority of people I know (and I know a lot of people) don't go back east, and if they ever did, it was for their 8th Grade Field Trip or some other form of tourism. No family connections, no long term stays... nada. A lot of them have also never been and express no interest in going at all.

Also neighborhood businesses are not as common in cities in the West because the cities are mostly much newer, and anything that comes close is usually part of a chain. In fact, family and neighborhood businesses in both Western cities and the more rural have been largely taken over by chains, with a few exceptions (San Francisco is a city of neighborhoods and local businesses, a lot like a Western New York). This alters the work environment in favor of a more corporate lay out, inhibiting the development of tightly knit neighborhood communities, hence making it easier for people to move and never look back. You can live in the same neighborhood your entire life in Seattle and not have enough connections to get a job. This is because things like the neighborhood bakery, that in a city like New York would've been run by the same family your entire life, would be a chain, and have shifted management several times in your life. No nice old lady to greet you at the counter who watched you order cannoli since before you could see over said counter, but instead a college kid who works the front who is probably from another city and has no idea who you are and is only in town to go to school. A lot of people that I have spoken to East of the Mississippi are very ground into their communities, and it can be very difficult convincing them to leave, even if it's just for a visit.

Of course I think Dick Morris hit it on the nose when he described the new voting dynamics within the country. There are social expectations as to what race, age, gender, and social class vote a certain way today that are far more pronounced than ever before. Once upon a time, candidates had to present articulate campaigns and incumbents had to have performed well to be eligible for reelection. That's not necessarily the case these days, as both Bush's and Obama's reelections have demonstrated. How you vote, like Morris said, is becoming more and more decided by your demographics long before the campaigns ever start. And that doesn't bode well for a "United States".
Edited by Zirantun, Feb 15 2013, 06:18 AM.
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May I first comment that there is something about your internet that drives me insane. It says that you're posting several times before I actually see a post. So I'll be sitting at the computer desk thinking, "Has he posted yet, has he posted yet?" and nothing will turn up for hours...


That seems considerably annoying. :|

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Alright. Mind you that languages can still be mutually intelligible yet be different. Icelandic for example is mutually intelligible with Old Norse, and we Icelanders can read Old Norse without much trouble once you memorize the runes (which are pretty easy). It's also mutually intelligible with Faroese, which shares a common ancestor, but they're still different. Likewise, Danish and Norwegian are supposed to be mutually intelligible 80-90% of the time, and both of them are about 50-60% of the time with Swedish (I speak Swedish, but not the other two). I don't know if you speak any other languages, I would imagine you speak Afrikaans, but if you don't, it can get easy to confuse being classified as another language with mutual intelligibility, which is understandable. English is a very isolated language, and most of its close relatives are extinct or integrating into English very fast. Yola became extinct in the 1900s, and Scots is rapidly assimilating into Scottish English as is Cumbric English (which I would consider to be a different language). Because English doesn't have any mainstream close relatives, there's no real frame of reference for monoglot English speakers. If you DO speak Afrikaans though, you should have a good frame of reference in that Dutch and Afrikaans are usually mutually intelligible from what I've been told. I've also been told that Dutch people rudely laugh at Afrikaans speakers because they think their language sounds like Dutch baby-talk...


I don't speak Afrikaans, but I am aware that it is mutually intelligible to some degree with Dutch, and also that it sounds rather like baby-talk to Dutch people (with examples such as "us supports us rugby team", etc). In retrospect that statement was really stupid.

Still, Afrikaans for example, arose because a speaking population was separated from another.

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I do have to ask, have you ever even been here? Your cultural observations between East and West are pretty rash... no offense. I mean if you've been here at all, you must not have been here for very long. If you had, and you'd been around the country, you'd know that states form cultural clumps of about 4-5 states at a time in many areas. It's true that it's a lot harder to be disconnected from people in the next state over, but we're not talking about driving some piss ant distance like the distance between Marseilles and the Loire. The distance between Los Angeles and Texas is almost the entire European continent from East to West! It's also true that people can fly, but another thing that tells me that you've either never been here, or didn't much time here when you were here is that you make the assumption that a significant amount of the population flies at all. On the contrary, only about 20% of the population (and that's pushing if you ask me) will ever set foot on a plane, and that's the biggest reason that the ABSURD and INVASIVE and OFFENSIVE and UNCONSTITUTIONAL Airport Security procedures installed in 2010 have been allowed to get swept under the rug. Most people just don't fly, so they just don't care. Because most people don't fly, most people also don't do a lot of traveling between East and West. More people out West visit the East more than people back East visit the West, and even those visits are just vacations. Most of the families in the West have been here long enough that they're mostly disconnected from familial ties back East, so there's not as much mixing between the two as you seem to think. The cultural difference between the two is also quite shocking, especially if you're from the West heading East. Out West we have a very open lifestyle. We'll talk to anybody anytime about pretty much anything, and a lot of close friendships are made through random conversations struck up between strangers. I was really shocked at the closed mentality of people on the East coast. Nobody seems to talk unless they know each other, which begs the question how do they know each other at all? I don't get it, really. If you're striking up conversations with strangers at the gym or in line or something, how do you meet new people?

Political opinions are also very different, and so are opinions about a plethora of social issues. In a lot of places out West, the kind of racism that you see back East is strictly taboo. You would never hear of the entire black male population being stopped and frisked three times over in ANY city out here (not even the worst ones, like LA) if we adopted a stop and frisk law like NYC has (absolutely disgusting), and yet, that's what's happened there since the passing of that law.

To explain what I meant by cultural clumps though. It's kind of odd, and I'm not sure why it's this way, but certain states have a lot more exchange of people with one another than others. I'm not sure how it works outside of the West, but to give a Western example:

Washington, Oregon, Northern Idaho, and British Columbia form one exchange group, while Utah, Southern Idaho, New Mexico, Nevada and Arizona form another. I'm not sure why, but from my understanding from friends from Utah and having been there, there's not a lot of interaction over the border with Colorado. Colorado forms a Wyoming, Colorado Montana clump. Not to say that there is NO interaction between people, but it's considerably less so than Utahans, Arizonans, New Mexicans, Southern Idahoans, and Nevadans. People move around A LOT between those five areas for some reason, but to a lesser extent to Colorado. I couldn't tell you why, nor could I tell you why Washingtonians, Oregonians, British Columbians, and Northern Idahoans move around a lot more between each other than they do with California... it's just the way it is.

Yes, people get around more today than they did a century, and that has helped to unite them a little more, but people don't get around as much as I think that you're thinking they do. And these artificial borders could darken as the country continues to descend into economic/political mayhem.


I have been to the US, but not recently, not for very long and not over a wide region, so I concede my experience there doesn't give an extensive sense of the country. My biggest impression of the US that I got from being there is that there's more fast food chains there and that the houses are made of wood.

I'm aware that only a fraction of Americans fly- I am inclined to believe whachamacallit's 40% figure more than your 20%, but both are meaningless without context- is that within the last year? Last five years? Last decade? In their whole life? The figures in thread indicate that a much higher percentage of Americans have been on a plane in their life. Even if the percentage who have flown recently was something like 20%, it'd still have a considerable effect. I mean, sure the distance between California and Texas may be similar to that between the ends of Europe, but in this era one can personally own a vehicle that can transport them that distance in a matter of days. And that isn't considering telecommunications, which can link each coast instantaneously. It's easy to take these things for granted, but for much of history- much of American history- such things did not exist.

I agree that there are cultural 'clumps' in the US, but such clumping is not necessarily anything near a reason for war. The problem I have with your assertions is that they're incredibly subjective. "But the culture is different here" and "but we'd never pass X law" and "but people talk with eachother far more often here" isn't demonstratable, falsifiable or quantifiable. There's no way in this case to seperate a real phenomenon from your subjective opinion, and given the lack of any supporting evidence, it might as well be. For example, you claim there are "deep cultural divisions" in the USA- where are they? I have never heard of western USAians and eastern USAians, for instance, being considered seperate ethnic groups.

That's why I'm using actual figures- like the actual demographics in the US, or the results from the last election- to try to prove my point. I know the Democratic-Republican divide isn't a total indicator of divisive political issues in the US, but it does encompass various important issues.

If the electoral college system is broken, then people will fix it. Not immediately and not perfectly, no- but it is a far more likely possibility than a state seceding and deciding to go to war. And even if a state did secede, and didn't have all sorts of conflict within it's own population on the matter, and managed to put together some vaguely decent military, they'd lose because they wouldn't be a match for the much larger domain under control of the federal government- not even a coalition of several states would be. But such a war won't happen, because if tensions get close enough to states seriously considering- and I mean seriously considering secession, things will start to change far sooner than people go to war. There's simply too much of a motivation to prevent unrest and maintain the union on the part of the federal government and pretty much everyone.

And you're also assuming that current problems in the US will play hundreds or even tens of years into the future. In just 100 years the social and political situation in the US could be considerably different to what it is today.

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Well, you're entitled to your opinion. You seem to view society as being a lot more stable than I do. 1500 years is a very long time, even in our age of communication.


At least I have demonstrated what I base my opinions on. One cannot expect a world in which the basis of the economy, the occupation of the workforce, the nature of government, and the nature of military power are considerably different to 500 AD to act like the world did in 500 AD.

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I'm not sure what you mean... would you care to elaborate?


The Hai Jin, which apparently ended China's naval superiority over Europe's capabilities at the time.

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First of all, I had initially played a thousand different scenarios in my head and I couldn't find one that adequately (or at least in my mind) explains why two countries who are so far away from superpower status become superpowers. That would be why I came here. lol. The reason that they were picked is because my friend liked them as a shift away from the West, and it also seemed fun to mix Portuguese with Hindi (or Sarraipense with Bochani, as it has become). Mixed languages, unlike creole languages, don't simplify grammar. So you get to play around with the different complicated features of both and new ones, instead of breaking down the grammar like you do for a creole. So it's a bit of fun... if linguistics is fun to you. I'm not sure if it is.

I wasn't exactly thinking an economy based entirely on space mining. The main idea I had for the space mining in the first place was that they'd be able to back their currencies 100% with gold the way Switzerland has backed theirs. That both currencies become global reserve currencies. Perhaps Brazil in the Western Hemisphere and India in the East... the staples of the economies I had thought would be something like robotics manufacturing and the like. Idk. Perhaps they catch onto aquaponics first and aquaponics farming make up huge sections of their economies as well. The robotics would probably be fed by the rare earth metals that would be brought back from space mining though.

Perhaps the development of that new technology is deep-crust extraction?


By the development of new technology I meant deep-crust resource extraction; I should have made this more clear.

I don't really think it's difficult to imagine Indian dominance, providing that India becomes wealthy enough. Brazil is trickier because it's much smaller than India, and indeed it has a smaller population than various other nations. Still, it does show up on this list of GDP estimates as the fourth largest economy in 2050. It has potential to be influential, but given a suitable amount of economic development for India (and other nations), it'll be outshadowed simply because it's smaller.

Perhaps portuguese could become influential on Kurys by Brazil sending a disproportionate number of colonists/Brazilian colonists being in an area of the planet that later becomes highly influential and/or populous.

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That would be why I used the term "good ones". In order to adequately mine an asteroid I would imagine it would have to be kind of large. It also has to have what you're looking for on it. I'm sure there are thousands upon thousands of economically worthless asteroids in the belt. So if you're able to claim the good ones, which are big, and have precious materials for mining, then you're in shape. Is that still misunderstanding?


With asteroids, you may have somewhat different abundances of elements, and there are different types of objects (M-type, which are metal rich, C-type, which are carbonaceous, S-type and soforth), but you're less dependant on finding say, a vein of ore, than you are on Earth. You don't really have veins of ore like you do in metal-bearing rocks on Earth, so "good ones" are less relevant. Obviously you have more attractive targets and less attractive targets, but even if the most attractive asteroids for mining are taken, there would be a plethora of other asteroids available.

You don't need a big asteroid. Obviously big asteroids have large amounts of materials, which means a mine will last longer, but it won't make the mined material more valuable or getting to or from the asteroid any easier (as far as we know; it isn't like mining in a milligravity environment is a mature science).

Consider for example a 1 km wide asteroid; we can model it as a sphere for simplicity's sake. A C-type With a density of 2000 kg/m^3, it should have a mass of roughly a trillion metric tons. Using the data here, we see that such an asteroid has something like 1 ppm concentration of platinum, which works out to 1 million tons of platinum for this 1km asteroid. Based on current consumption, that'd last the entire planet something like 4000-5000 years. And that's probably one of the 'less good' asteroids- one would imagine an M-type would have a higher concentration of metallic elements.

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Wouldn't it be fair that they'd start out with what's nearby though? I mean, why would you go to the Rockies to mine gold if there was gold in your backyard?


Well yes, but depending on the capabilities of your jump drive, you suddenly have a huge array of possible targets. There are something like 43 stars within 15 light years of Sol. The problem is that now you've got an even more gigantic array of possible asteroids to mine than you did back home, there's no reason whatsoever to mine planets. Taking off from a habitable planet is going to require several kilometers/second of dV being applied at considerable acceleration. It's costly and unecessary.

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Of course I think Dick Morris hit it on the nose when he described the new voting dynamics within the country. There are social expectations as to what race, age, gender, and social class vote a certain way today that are far more pronounced than ever before. Once upon a time, candidates had to present articulate campaigns and incumbents had to have performed well to be eligible for reelection. That's not necessarily the case these days, as both Bush's and Obama's reelections have demonstrated. How you vote, like Morris said, is becoming more and more decided by your demographics long before the campaigns ever start. And that doesn't bode well for a "United States".


No, it just doesn't bode well for the parties who are based on platforms that are increasingly unappealing to a wide swath of Americans. I mean, seriously- how does the fact that moderately wealthy middle aged white men are most likely to vote Republican going to balkanise the US? I see no states made up solely of moderately wealthy middle aged white men...
Edited by T.Neo, Feb 15 2013, 07:21 AM.
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whachamacallit2
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You know, I realized I actually totally misunderstood you right when I turned off my computer. The entire time, I was thinking that by West, you meant predominantly California, where the divergence between them and anywhere in the East is fairly small. From my knowledge from sources and friends, California is not that different from the East Coast. Sure, someone could use their connection to get a job in the East, but it's also within reason. For example, my mom and dad won't be able to help me get a job in Geology, I'll have to rely on either myself or more likely the professors at my college. Likewise, having a family businesss won't help someone become a lawyer if that family business is a restaurant or something. Also, most of the people who I know from California just complain about the whether and how there's less Asians on the East. Overall, I feel like the West Coast is just not that different from the East.

Honestly, I feel that the North and the South have many greater differences between each other than the East and West. You probably don't get much of it from where you live, but the animosity between the North and South is still sort of there, and If you ask any Easterner North of the Dixie line where a civil war will take place they'll say Texas or some other nearby Southern state. Most people wouldn't really consider the Great Plains region the most likely place for a rebellion. I would guess that's due to the fact that it is overall empty and we're all a bunch of snotty assholes.

But I'll admit that I completely ignored the fact that the Plains region is pretty unhappy due to the lack of representation, which is my mistake. I really should've translated "East and West" to "Low population states and high population areas", but alas I totally missed that point. But this actually leads to a whole new set of problems for your story. Let's say that this rebellion takes place and the area you spoke of decided to go for it on their lonesome. For whatever reason, I don't feel like the rest of the country would support that (See reaction to American Civil War), and this may pose a large problem for these states seeking to be a new nation. How do you plan to explain how they managed to put up enough of a fight to completely push back the US's forces when the entirety of the South was incapable of doing so way back when? The Plains regions doesn't really have much in the way when it comes to infrastructure in comparison to the West Coast and the East, so it won't be able to go to war as long as The rest of the nation. You and I both know how ridiculously large the military is nowadays. Insurgency is a problem for the US military, but it doesn't lead to the US giving up. Do you have some sort of trick up your sleeve to explain the successful insurrection from the US instead of just another Civil War?

Oh yea, one more thing. I'm a little confused how the current electoral college system not represent the majority of the country if the majority of the populace is represented? Do you mean that the majority of the land area is not represented? Because there is the problem that there aren't that many people that live in these areas, so giving a state with few people in it equal power as a state with a lot of people could cause a different sort of gross misrepresentation.How do you think it should be solve (genuinely curious btw)

Oh, and totally off topic, but how are you going to handle the Israel and Palestine situation for your story? (Sorry for the tangent, it's just that the thought of a small part of a population dangerously controlling a country made me think of Israel and their apartheid-y ways)

Oh yes, and T.Neo the 40% flight came from a survey done for the year 2009 by travelshorizons. It didn't say where these Americans flew from and to though, hence why I suspect that Zir is quite correct on the issue of what flies more then what.
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Oh yes, and T.Neo the 40% flight came from a survey done for the year 2009 by travelshorizons. It didn't say where these Americans flew from and to though, hence why I suspect that Zir is quite correct on the issue of what flies more then what.


Could you clarify on what you mean by "what flies more than what"? You mean which destinations people fly from and to? It's irrelevant if the figure is 40% or 20%, even if it were smaller than 10% the fact remains that travel technology of today makes the US an effectively far smaller place than it was 200 or even 100 years ago. It extends beyond people taking personal trips, it's important to industry, etc as well. Someone may have suppliers in several different states, for instance.
Edited by T.Neo, Feb 15 2013, 02:20 PM.
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That seems considerably annoying. :|


Oh it is, believe me. But at least you're keeping me at the edge of my seat.

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I have been to the US, but not recently, not for very long and not over a wide region, so I concede my experience there doesn't give an extensive sense of the country. My biggest impression of the US that I got from being there is that there's more fast food chains there and that the houses are made of wood.


Yes, that last part is especially problematic in states that are hit by tornadoes, like Oklahoma, where banks would go bankrupt before they financed underground housing.

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I don't speak Afrikaans, but I am aware that it is mutually intelligible to some degree with Dutch, and also that it sounds rather like baby-talk to Dutch people (with examples such as "us supports us rugby team", etc). In retrospect that statement was really stupid.

Still, Afrikaans for example, arose because a speaking population was separated from another.


The example I'm normally told is that Afrikaans has broken down the "to be verb" to "is" in every conjugation. So you say "ik is" instead of whatever they would say in Dutch. While that seems a little odd, as linguistics is my hobby, I don't see anything wrong with it. It's a linguistic innovation.

And the last part is true, but consider Scots vs. English, which were historically only separated by a border yet have developed enough grammatical, vocabulary, and phonological differences to be considered separate from English. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cENbkHS3mnY
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I have been to the US, but not recently, not for very long and not over a wide region, so I concede my experience there doesn't give an extensive sense of the country. My biggest impression of the US that I got from being there is that there's more fast food chains there and that the houses are made of wood.

I'm aware that only a fraction of Americans fly- I am inclined to believe whachamacallit's 40% figure more than your 20%, but both are meaningless without context- is that within the last year? Last five years? Last decade? In their whole life? The figures in thread indicate that a much higher percentage of Americans have been on a plane in their life. Even if the percentage who have flown recently was something like 20%, it'd still have a considerable effect. I mean, sure the distance between California and Texas may be similar to that between the ends of Europe, but in this era one can personally own a vehicle that can transport them that distance in a matter of days. And that isn't considering telecommunications, which can link each coast instantaneously. It's easy to take these things for granted, but for much of history- much of American history- such things did not exist.

I agree that there are cultural 'clumps' in the US, but such clumping is not necessarily anything near a reason for war. The problem I have with your assertions is that they're incredibly subjective. "But the culture is different here" and "but we'd never pass X law" and "but people talk with eachother far more often here" isn't demonstratable, falsifiable or quantifiable. There's no way in this case to seperate a real phenomenon from your subjective opinion, and given the lack of any supporting evidence, it might as well be. For example, you claim there are "deep cultural divisions" in the USA- where are they? I have never heard of western USAians and eastern USAians, for instance, being considered seperate ethnic groups.

That's why I'm using actual figures- like the actual demographics in the US, or the results from the last election- to try to prove my point. I know the Democratic-Republican divide isn't a total indicator of divisive political issues in the US, but it does encompass various important issues.


Well, you're right. My opinion is mine, and also very subjective. I tried looking up examples online and only turned up varied results, and I even asked my roommates friend last night who's from New England, and he vehemently denied that East and West were different beyond the lay out of cities and some accent differences. Yet I have also known people from back East who describe an extreme "culture shock" when they come out West, and I experienced something similar when going back East. True, this doesn't make two separate ethnic groups, but it also means that the cultures are different enough and families are separated enough that the only reason the two being separate countries would upset anyone is because of the common history that we share as part of one sovereign country. So culturally, it is my belief that even now, culturally speaking, a split wouldn't serious alter anyone's lifestyle and could be achieved comfortably.

What panic the media would try to stir up and how successful they'd be in doing so is anyone's guess. I imagine the idea of a split would cause a lot of panic and civil unrest, but again, NOT because people out West feel like they have anything in common with people back East. I imagine people would be far more worried about the economics of the issue, and a severe change in allegiance. We're very used to pledging allegiance to the American flag, even though that custom is only 60 or so years old. Having to get used to a new flag, new borders, a new economy, and maybe a new political system would be the reasons that people would panic.

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If the electoral college system is broken, then people will fix it. Not immediately and not perfectly, no- but it is a far more likely possibility than a state seceding and deciding to go to war. And even if a state did secede, and didn't have all sorts of conflict within it's own population on the matter, and managed to put together some vaguely decent military, they'd lose because they wouldn't be a match for the much larger domain under control of the federal government- not even a coalition of several states would be. But such a war won't happen, because if tensions get close enough to states seriously considering- and I mean seriously considering secession, things will start to change far sooner than people go to war. There's simply too much of a motivation to prevent unrest and maintain the union on the part of the federal government and pretty much everyone.

And you're also assuming that current problems in the US will play hundreds or even tens of years into the future. In just 100 years the social and political situation in the US could be considerably different to what it is today.


Yes, but nobody's discussing fixing the problem. When I said that the only option on the table was one that accentuates the problem, what I meant was that everyone is talking about dissolving the electoral college in favor of the popular vote, and that's seriously under consideration. I even see TV ads for it when I go home. If you dissolve the electoral college altogether, that means that pretty much every state West of the Mississippi river with exclusion of Colorado, California, and Western Washington have NO say at all in the national elections. The idea of Federalism (in the modern context of that word, don't ask me how it came to mean state sovereignty) will largely be dead (it is dead in many ways as we knew it), and mob rule will take precedence. Population centers will have even more say, and states with smaller populations (even though many US states rival a number of countries in their total populations) will have less say. If something else were on the table anywhere at all beyond my keyboard and my isolated circle of friends who think the way I do, and my ideas for the future of the Electoral College seem to be mine, as I haven't encountered them anywhere else, then we could talk about the system fixing itself. But right now, as things are, the system shows no signs of fixing itself, and only further dividing the country into states "battle ground states" and "everybody else that doesn't matter".

Also, I question the future of both parties, honestly. We'll have to see how the next election pans out, but it is my prediction that in our lifetimes, the two traditional parties will have become defunct. The reason I say that is because as much as candidates from either party campaign on how wrong the other side of the aisle has been in their years of dominance, they either make problems worse that they campaigned against, or don't change any of the things they called them out on, or some combination of the two. Bush complained about Democratic views on immigration and then all but opened our borders to as many illegal immigrants as wanted to come into the country. The Democrats campaigned against Bush Era spending and just 6 years ago were calling for Washington to cut government spending. Obama gave a very moving speech on the Senate floor about the dire need to cut spending in 2007. The Democrats also campaigned and won on the need to defend American liberties and repeal massive government power grabs that posed significant threats to them like the Patriot Act. Obama's Administration had 3 years of a Democratic House of Representatives, a Democratic Senate, and a Democratic Presidency, and yet not one of those issues was looked at in any kind of seriousness. Now, we are deeper in debt than there are American dollars in circulation to pay that debt, ant we have a president who wants unlimited rights to kill people with drone strikes all over the world, American or not.

And no, that's not just the right-wing media talking. Even the Rachel Maddow show, which at times seems radically dedicated to the Obama Administration no matter what they do, was heavily criticizing the president over this issue.

So Americans while they may still look to some heartwarming traditional Republican candidate in 2016, are only a few administrations away from realizing that it doesn't matter which party you vote for, neither of them are going to approach the real problems the US faces. Should current trends continue anyways, and the next few presidents act like their predecessors.

And you're absolutely right that it could be very different. Just look at us 100 years ago today. People were screaming about the idea of the 16th Amendment, which was never properly ratified by the states. Now, nobody remembers a time when there was no income tax, neither do they remember a time where the people actually had the right to withhold their taxes from the government if they felt the government wasn't representing them, and the latter only changed during WWII! People today view the insane amount of taxation as an integral part of our society, not realizing the inane ways in which our tax dollars are spent, and that income tax only pays off the interest on the government spending money that it doesn't really have. Not only do they view it as integral to our way of life, even though we see far less of that money than we think we do, but the majority of the population is actually calling for MORE taxes!

The political scene as well as the sentiments of the people have changed incredibly in just 70 years. Imagine what they could be in another 100...

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By the development of new technology I meant deep-crust resource extraction; I should have made this more clear.

I don't really think it's difficult to imagine Indian dominance, providing that India becomes wealthy enough. Brazil is trickier because it's much smaller than India, and indeed it has a smaller population than various other nations. Still, it does show up on this list of GDP estimates as the fourth largest economy in 2050. It has potential to be influential, but given a suitable amount of economic development for India (and other nations), it'll be outshadowed simply because it's smaller.

Perhaps portuguese could become influential on Kurys by Brazil sending a disproportionate number of colonists/Brazilian colonists being in an area of the planet that later becomes highly influential and/or populous.


Ah ok. I hadn't thought about it that way. The original plan was for the Portuguese to be the "natives" so to speak, and the Indian company employees to be the "maroons". I'll look at another scenario and run it by my friend.

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With asteroids, you may have somewhat different abundances of elements, and there are different types of objects (M-type, which are metal rich, C-type, which are carbonaceous, S-type and soforth), but you're less dependant on finding say, a vein of ore, than you are on Earth. You don't really have veins of ore like you do in metal-bearing rocks on Earth, so "good ones" are less relevant. Obviously you have more attractive targets and less attractive targets, but even if the most attractive asteroids for mining are taken, there would be a plethora of other asteroids available.

You don't need a big asteroid. Obviously big asteroids have large amounts of materials, which means a mine will last longer, but it won't make the mined material more valuable or getting to or from the asteroid any easier (as far as we know; it isn't like mining in a milligravity environment is a mature science).

Consider for example a 1 km wide asteroid; we can model it as a sphere for simplicity's sake. A C-type With a density of 2000 kg/m^3, it should have a mass of roughly a trillion metric tons. Using the data here, we see that such an asteroid has something like 1 ppm concentration of platinum, which works out to 1 million tons of platinum for this 1km asteroid. Based on current consumption, that'd last the entire planet something like 4000-5000 years. And that's probably one of the 'less good' asteroids- one would imagine an M-type would have a higher concentration of metallic elements.


If it's not obvious, I'm reading these comments piece by piece and replying to each piece before I've read the next. So... I had no idea that asteroids were projected to be that mineral rich. Perhaps the entire scenario needs to be totally reconsidered. I'll get back to you on that.

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Well yes, but depending on the capabilities of your jump drive, you suddenly have a huge array of possible targets. There are something like 43 stars within 15 light years of Sol. The problem is that now you've got an even more gigantic array of possible asteroids to mine than you did back home, there's no reason whatsoever to mine planets. Taking off from a habitable planet is going to require several kilometers/second of dV being applied at considerable acceleration. It's costly and unecessary.


Ok so maybe we need to ask the question of whether asteroid mining is as feasible as we're assuming it is. My friend told me he wouldn't be online today, so I can't extract his ideas for details of mining stations on asteroids, but I remember that they seemed plausible to my largely non-mathematical mind. His original scenario was a desecrated Earth, new planet for farming one that I found to be incredibly cliche, which is why I convinced him to change it. Also, aquaponics kind of knocks out the need for soil, so you're not going to say: "Oh, the Earth is too desecrated to farm, let's go to another planet and farm its soil!" Not once it's become the mainstream method of farming anyways.

So what other scenarios might we consider for settling another planet for anything beyond ideological reasons? If asteroid mining isn't all that feasible, then do we colonize other planets to mine them of their natural resources, or do we colonize them because we just want to get the hell away from Earth and start over?

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No, it just doesn't bode well for the parties who are based on platforms that are increasingly unappealing to a wide swath of Americans. I mean, seriously- how does the fact that moderately wealthy middle aged white men are most likely to vote Republican going to balkanise the US? I see no states made up solely of moderately wealthy middle aged white men...


It might not be the best example for balkanization at present, but I was using it more of an example of how politicians are adopting much more of a divide-and-conquer sort of strategy. That could evolve later into something else more sinister, but right now, the only potential it has to divide the country is based on ethnicity (which is so deliciously ironic considering whose coined the new strategy :) ). If race bating politics is to be the issue that tears the country apart, then it has to wait another 50 or so years until Blacks and Hispanics outnumber Whites in many areas of the country. By that time, dividing the country along ethnic and geographic lines would be much easier. All people in majority White states like Utah, Idaho, Washington, Oregon, Montana, Wyoming, the Dakotas, Minnesota, etc. would have to say is, "All those damn Mexicans in California, Arizona, New Mexico, and all those blacks in the South and back East are fucking up the whole country!" And they'd be able to plausibly make that argument based on the fact that whatever administration the feel is "fucking up the country" will have been elected by races and ethnicities who form the majority in several geographic areas.

Of course I'm not sure that that's the most likely scenario anyways...

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Oh, and totally off topic, but how are you going to handle the Israel and Palestine situation for your story? (Sorry for the tangent, it's just that the thought of a small part of a population dangerously controlling a country made me think of Israel and their apartheid-y ways)


I have no idea...

I am totally anti-Israel as it is a modern-day apartheid state, so Israel will not exist as a distinctly Jewish nation in 1500 years, but how to resolve the problem I'm not sure. Although I am anti-Israel, and find the majority of Jews living there to be some of the most morally despicable people on Earth, I also don't believe they all deserve to die because they're dicks, which makes me seriously fear for their future. Israel already recognizes a problem that it calls the "time bomb", which addresses the fact that the Palestinian population is growing far faster than the Jewish population, and that this could swallow up the Jewish state. What happens in terms of "swallowing up" could be very frightening. The Palestinians have every reason in the world to HATE the Jews. Way more than crazy people like Hitler or Stalin ever did in the past. This could mean that we will bear witness to a second Holocaust in our lifetimes, which would truly be a tragedy. An alternative possibility is that the Palestinians peacefully take over the country and a new nation based on the model presented by Iran and India in 1948 comes into being.

Palestinians in my experience of having met a few and read a lot about their plight are a lot more peaceful than the Western (ESPECIALLY the American) media likes to paint them out to be. Historically, Palestinians don't seem to act unless provoked. The present conflict with Palestinians shooting their Qassam missiles over Gazan border started when IDF soldiers killed a kid playing soccer and then shot up his funeral, and then assassinated Ahmed Jabari, the current commander of the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades in his car while he was reading a peace agreement that had been faxed to him. The Western media has reported that the conflict started when Gazans randomly started firing missiles over the border into a nation with one of the most technologically advanced militaries in the world...

So how does it end? I don't know. I can see Palestinians coming to a peaceful resolution, but I can also see them giving into the bait and killing massive amounts of Jews either deliberately or inadvertently. What I see as the most likely scenario is some sort of a war post-US foreign aid to Israel in which Israel exhausts its financial and military resources and is finally bombed into oblivion by someone else. The region will very likely collapse into some sort of a civil war afterward as the Jews still make up a significant amount of the population and are surrounded by Arabs who hate them.

I don't know though, I honestly hadn't given it much thought. What I do know, is that after the US stops shoveling out foreign aid to Israel like it's going out of style, Israel is in for some really hard times. They have no real economy to speak of, and their already having trouble feeding their population even with the billions of dollars a year they get from the US...

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Oh yea, one more thing. I'm a little confused how the current electoral college system not represent the majority of the country if the majority of the populace is represented? Do you mean that the majority of the land area is not represented? Because there is the problem that there aren't that many people that live in these areas, so giving a state with few people in it equal power as a state with a lot of people could cause a different sort of gross misrepresentation.How do you think it should be solve (genuinely curious btw)


Yes, precisely. But I also think that as you said you're a Chicagoan, you're view of what constitutes "a lot of people" is a little bit contaminated. Your state has double the population of states like Washington and Utah, but that's because there are nearly 13 million people in your state where Utah and Washington are 6 and nearly 7 million respectively. It's very easy for people back East to look out West and say, "Well, there's not that many people." 6 million people is the population of some countries, and that's a lot of people who have very different voting concerns that have virtually no voice. After all, we're talking about national elections, so these elections concern EVERYBODY in ALL regions of the country, not just the majority of people in a few areas who have no idea what the concerns are of people somewhere else.

If you rule the country by majority, then the majority gets to dictate policies in areas where they have no idea what they're talking about, and then the people in those areas are upset because someone from somewhere else with an unrealistic idea of what's going on then is telling them what to do and how to live.

The Electoral College exists to give everyone in the United States, no matter how populated your state is an equal voice, for the reasons mentioned above. It's about regions, not about how many people you have. Yet, that's not possible as long as a state like California has 55 votes while a state like Washington only has 12.

So, I propose an equal number for every single state. Whatever that number is, it needs to be at least 5 or up, but it has to be equal. That way, EVERYBODY can have an equal say. The way the system works right now pretty much just tells 70% of the regions in the country to deal with whatever people in big cities or otherwise heavily populated states say they have to deal with. And then those people get upset, and then they feel further and further and further polarized from the people who are making the decisions for them.

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But I'll admit that I completely ignored the fact that the Plains region is pretty unhappy due to the lack of representation, which is my mistake. I really should've translated "East and West" to "Low population states and high population areas", but alas I totally missed that point. But this actually leads to a whole new set of problems for your story. Let's say that this rebellion takes place and the area you spoke of decided to go for it on their lonesome. For whatever reason, I don't feel like the rest of the country would support that (See reaction to American Civil War), and this may pose a large problem for these states seeking to be a new nation. How do you plan to explain how they managed to put up enough of a fight to completely push back the US's forces when the entirety of the South was incapable of doing so way back when? The Plains regions doesn't really have much in the way when it comes to infrastructure in comparison to the West Coast and the East, so it won't be able to go to war as long as The rest of the nation. You and I both know how ridiculously large the military is nowadays. Insurgency is a problem for the US military, but it doesn't lead to the US giving up. Do you have some sort of trick up your sleeve to explain the successful insurrection from the US instead of just another Civil War?


Well I don't know. I had kind of imagined a long guerilla war in certain regions before anything came to fruit, honestly.

However, I'd like to bring something interesting up concerning the US military. In my experience with military personnel, which is probably 65% of my friend base in our desperate economy, the military has one of two effects on people.

1. People either come out of the military hating the government altogether, and recognizing the sheer inefficiency, or continue their military careers with a sense of disloyalty only because it is a good career opportunity.

2. They buy it hook line and sinker and decide that they love everything about government structure and think that that structure is applicable to civilian life. That can manifest itself in parenting, or it can manifest itself in how they vote.

A lot of officers fall under the second category. A lot of enlisted people and reserves seem to fall under the first. Officers like big government because they're so deeply intertwined with the government it's their entire lifestyle. Enlisted personnel and reserves get more of the double lifestyle. They're more in touch with civilians needs and concerns, and also don't get treated as fancifully as officers often times do, and the fact that officers get nice transfers and better benefits often times sews the seeds for more of an identification with the common population.

Now of course that's really generalizing, and there's no clear officer/enlisted boundary between their views on politics and how they would react in a situation of rebellion, but the military is a deeply divided place. I know that soldiers follow orders, but when those orders mean killing your own people to maintain "order", there will certainly be a percentage of soldiers that refuse and join the resistance. Syria's chairman of the Free Syrian Army was a decorated officer of the Syrian Army and had boasted a 37 year career.

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Honestly, I feel that the North and the South have many greater differences between each other than the East and West. You probably don't get much of it from where you live, but the animosity between the North and South is still sort of there, and If you ask any Easterner North of the Dixie line where a civil war will take place they'll say Texas or some other nearby Southern state. Most people wouldn't really consider the Great Plains region the most likely place for a rebellion. I would guess that's due to the fact that it is overall empty and we're all a bunch of snotty assholes.


I really feel the same way, I was honestly trying to be politically correct and avoid some futuristic cliches. I honestly feel like the South should be its own country right now, or at least enjoy the amount of autonomy that say Scotland does from the UK. It's sooooooo different. And so many people there are still upset about the first Civil War!

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You know, I realized I actually totally misunderstood you right when I turned off my computer. The entire time, I was thinking that by West, you meant predominantly California, where the divergence between them and anywhere in the East is fairly small. From my knowledge from sources and friends, California is not that different from the East Coast. Sure, someone could use their connection to get a job in the East, but it's also within reason. For example, my mom and dad won't be able to help me get a job in Geology, I'll have to rely on either myself or more likely the professors at my college. Likewise, having a family businesss won't help someone become a lawyer if that family business is a restaurant or something. Also, most of the people who I know from California just complain about the whether and how there's less Asians on the East. Overall, I feel like the West Coast is just not that different from the East.


I tend to group California, Texas, Florida, and Hawaii into distinct cultural areas. California isn't really anything like the rest of the West, and Texas isn't quite Southern, and neither is Florida. Hawaii is just an occupied kingdom...
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T.Neo
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And the last part is true, but consider Scots vs. English, which were historically only separated by a border yet have developed enough grammatical, vocabulary, and phonological differences to be considered separate from English. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cENbkHS3mnY


Separated by a border in a specific circumstance, yes.

Unfortunately I can't view the youtube video at the moment, my internet connection seems to hate me...

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Ok so maybe we need to ask the question of whether asteroid mining is as feasible as we're assuming it is. My friend told me he wouldn't be online today, so I can't extract his ideas for details of mining stations on asteroids, but I remember that they seemed plausible to my largely non-mathematical mind. His original scenario was a desecrated Earth, new planet for farming one that I found to be incredibly cliche, which is why I convinced him to change it. Also, aquaponics kind of knocks out the need for soil, so you're not going to say: "Oh, the Earth is too desecrated to farm, let's go to another planet and farm its soil!" Not once it's become the mainstream method of farming anyways.

So what other scenarios might we consider for settling another planet for anything beyond ideological reasons? If asteroid mining isn't all that feasible, then do we colonize other planets to mine them of their natural resources, or do we colonize them because we just want to get the hell away from Earth and start over?


Farming makes even less sense than resource extraction of rare elements. Food simply isn't valuable enough to justify the cost of shipping it from one planet to another. I also suspect that asteroid mining is far more feasible than negating the fact that it's considerably cheaper to get mass off of an asteroid than to get it off a planet.

I'm not really sure if there's any practical reason why people would consider settling another planet beyond "it's there, let's do it". Perhaps it could be a matter of ideology in certain cases; that may lead to some interesting outcomes.
Edited by T.Neo, Feb 15 2013, 07:17 PM.
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Zirantun
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I deleted my initial comment... even though it took like 3 hours to write. But, I realized I was repeating myself a lot, and wasn't really getting the points in that I wanted because right now I can't think of a lot of catch phrases that I usually can that are good at getting my points across.

So let's start over.

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Farming makes even less sense than resource extraction of rare elements. Food simply isn't valuable enough to justify the cost of shipping it from one planet to another. I also suspect that asteroid mining is far more feasible than negating the fact that it's considerably cheaper to get mass off of an asteroid than to get it off a planet.

I'm not really sure if there's any practical reason why people would consider settling another planet beyond "it's there, let's do it". Perhaps it could be a matter of ideology in certain cases; that may lead to some interesting outcomes.


I didn't think farming made any sense either, and like I said, it's cliche... the whole Earth destroyed thing. If the reasons are totally ideological though, I would imagine then that the first settlers are people who can afford to buy the ticket. So they'll definitely come out of first world countries and the dominant superpowers.

That would require me to alter the linguistic makeup of Zuchechor I would think, if not at least by a little bit. So how might we make the India and Brazil space mining thing work?

If it has to go, it has to go. I just wanna know if it's salvageable.
Edited by Zirantun, Feb 15 2013, 10:29 PM.
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seascorpion
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Why Can't I Hold All These Mongols?

I don't think the danger is that the US will balkanise. It is obviously the most dramatic possible decline of the US, but it isn't how the US will actually go down.
My personal opinion is that the US will decline in a similar way to the Venetians, or even Argentina in the 20th century. Put simply, there is a growing economic inequality in America, and it is translating into political inequality. If one person can finance your entire campaign, do you think you'll give them priority over a majority? Unless that type of corruption of the democratic process is curbed, it is going to get worse under present circumstances.
You only have to look at a lot of the developing world and realise, that, when a government serves the interests of a political and economical elite , it is not going to be able to maintain long term economic strength, power and presence when in competition with nations that provide economic and political incentives to the majority of its population.
If the US continues as it is now, and no serious attempt at reform is made, it will not be able to compete in the long run with a reformed China or India. Obviously its a whole other debate on whether or not India or China can become politically and economically inclusive to maintain a long-term superpower status, but the US could easily become worse than it is now.
Of course, it takes time for a prosperous nation to stagnate. Its just how I view the US going downhill, as opposed to Balkanisation or somehow thinking that social networking prevents a country going to shit.
Edited by seascorpion, Feb 16 2013, 08:37 AM.
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If it has to go, it has to go. I just wanna know if it's salvageable.


They can still mine asteroids, I'd just imagine that they wouldn't be the only ones and they wouldn't have mined out all of them, so you'll need some different reason for the colonisation of Kurys and the disposition of the languages there. I suspect the best method for those languages to establish dominance would be for the development of civilisation on Kurys to favour Sarraipense and Bochani-speaking peoples, for whatever reason (presumably geography and soforth).

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somehow thinking that social networking prevents a country going to shit.


Modern telecommunications don't prevent the US from going to shit, they just prevent it from acting like a nation from centuries before telecommunications were created and getting a message across a continent took months.
Edited by T.Neo, Feb 16 2013, 09:18 AM.
A hard mathematical figure provides a sort of enlightenment to one's understanding of an idea that is never matched by mere guesswork.
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Zirantun
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I don't think the danger is that the US will balkanise. It is obviously the most dramatic possible decline of the US, but it isn't how the US will actually go down.
My personal opinion is that the US will decline in a similar way to the Venetians, or even Argentina in the 20th century. Put simply, there is a growing economic inequality in America, and it is translating into political inequality. If one person can finance your entire campaign, do you think you'll give them priority over a majority? Unless that type of corruption of the democratic process is curbed, it is going to get worse under present circumstances.
You only have to look at a lot of the developing world and realise, that, when a government serves the interests of a political and economical elite , it is not going to be able to maintain long term economic strength, power and presence when in competition with nations that provide economic and political incentives to the majority of its population.
If the US continues as it is now, and no serious attempt at reform is made, it will not be able to compete in the long run with a reformed China or India. Obviously its a whole other debate on whether or not India or China can become politically and economically inclusive to maintain a long-term superpower status, but the US could easily become worse than it is now.
Of course, it takes time for a prosperous nation to stagnate. Its just how I view the US going downhill, as opposed to Balkanisation or somehow thinking that social networking prevents a country going to shit.


Balkanization would not plausibly occur until long after the US has lost its status as a world superpower and has gone to hell financially and economically. So if current trends in government and the economy were to continue, it probably won't balkanize until the end of this century or sometime during the next.

As far as the asteroid mining is concerned, I had forgotten that my friend and I had discussed that Kurys might have originally been settled to mine diamonds when Earth decided to switch its currency backing material from gold to diamonds. Indian and Brazilian currencies, which would be 100% backed by gold would lose some value, but would still hold value based on trust and the stability of the currency. So changing what backs the currency wouldn't make their currencies collapse and their economies implode. What ends the Brazilian-Indian century (or maybe two centuries) is when deep crust extraction technology is invented, eliminating their monopoly and allowing the nations of the world to compete on a more even scale.

As far as the settlement of Kurys is concerned, this is what he had to say:

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Edited by Zirantun, Feb 16 2013, 06:37 PM.
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T.Neo
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Assuming that things are more concrete just because we can talk on the phone, and on the internet, is just silly.


Assuming that inventions such as modern transport, telecommunications and information technology do not have a major effect on human society is silly, and that's a demonstratable fact, unlike your claim above (it should also be noted that telecommunications in general are not as fragile as you assume- sure, you could wipe out the entire internet in theory, but an event large enough for the task would likely kill a good fraction of the human race as well). "It is because it is" and "it happened in this manner hundreds of years ago, therefore it'll happen exactly in the same matter regardless of circumstance" is built upon the fiction that the world is unchanging. And just to clarify: I've stated repeatedly that I think the US of 3500 CE would be considerably different from the US of today. Indeed this one of the reasons why I think divisive issues in the US would be unlikely to lead to secession- the issues facing modern-day America will be ancient history in just a few centuries.

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As far as the asteroid mining is concerned, I had forgotten that my friend and I had discussed that Kurys might have originally been settled to mine diamonds when Earth decided to switch its currency backing material from gold to diamonds.


Diamonds would likely still not be expensive enough to mandate shipping out of a planetary gravity well either, unfortunately.
Edited by T.Neo, Feb 16 2013, 07:16 PM.
A hard mathematical figure provides a sort of enlightenment to one's understanding of an idea that is never matched by mere guesswork.
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Zirantun
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Fine, T.Neo, don't read.

You say you want figures, you want numbers, and statistics. Figures, numbers, and statistics, and similar data are all easily manipulated though. Human behavior is not something you can monitor and predict beyond any certainty the way you can in a chemistry equation. Chemical A does not react with Chemical B the same way 100 of the time, or even 70% of the time. Because of the sheer unpredictability of humans as people, it doesn't make any sense to try and apply numbers to cultural differences, and if you had any real understanding of human beings, as you so claim, you'd know that. Culture, like evolution, is a snapshot, a still frame of a scene in a greater film. You can't look at a scene still and say: "I know exactly what happens next." Unless you've already seen the movie... Unless your God or some other figure that acts outside of space and time and therefore can know all possible outcomes of a given situation, outcomes can only be predicted based on what you see in the still of the scene, what has happened up until the movie was paused right there, and what your opinion is of what will happen next. So of course there will be "personal fiats".

Your personal fiat is frankly quite absurd. And not only is it absurd, but it shows that your own upbringing has stained your entire outlook on humanity and has rendered you virtually incapable of looking at the world outside of your South African glasses.

Every political separation to you has to get bloody, and you hold cultural differences to a ridiculously and quite subjectively high standard. And you also are married to the idea that the US can never break up, nor will it be off the global stage as a superpower in 1500 years...

There are some 100+ languages spoken on a daily basis in the United States today, the majority of which are Native American languages that are restricted to reservations and in a sharp state of decline in use. I know, my father is a linguist that specializes in Salishan and Na-Dene languages, which are not only two of the most diverse language families on the continent, but also the most numerous in native speakers (excluding languages of Mexico, many of which don't show any sign of going extinct in the next century). Not only are there Native languages though, but immigrant languages that are alive and well within peoples households that are not taken into a public setting unless immigrants form an enclave. In Boston you can still go to Little Italy and here 3rd or 4th generation Italian Americans conversing in minority languages that they brought over with them pre-WWII. In Washington, there are communities of some 5,000+ Scottish Gaelic speakers who live in scattered, isolated towns in the Cascade Mountains who speak that language almost exclusively within their communities and their home environments, yet the signs read in English and they switch on to English when they realize you're English-speaking.

Just because mainstream American media is so exclusively English to the point of it being nigh impossible to find material on the internet about our linguistic and cultural minorities does not mean they are non-existant. These people have real cultural differences. Most Native Americans worship Gods that make me feel like they've invited a malevolent presence into the room, the Gaels in the Cascades seem to think that the oldest man in town is the best person to act as mayor or police chief, and Amish, Hutterites, and German Baptists, speak various dialects of the German language long isolated from Germany over a 400 year period and reject modern life.

Of course these are all minorities, but I only mention them because you seem to operate under the media-induced fantasy that Anglo-American culture is not only the only culture present in the United States, but that it is something uniform in and of itself.

The entire planet is not Africa, T.Neo. Montenegro just achieved independence a couple of years ago from Serbia without a war, and Kosovo had their war, they lost, and then they applied peacefully for their independence and they just got it. Ireland also broke off from the UK without any kind of a war, and the only war was within Ireland to determine what they were to do with themselves afterward. Scotland is holding a referendum on independence next year (granted, their independence strategy isn't very realistic), and there are no signs of a war breaking out between England and Scotland. Likewise, we Icelanders broke off from Denmark without Denmark trying to reassert any kind of an imperialist claim.

Unlike where you come from, cultural differences do not mean that people have to speak a totally different language or dress completely differently or want to kill each other, they can just mean that people would be happier determining their own destiny as they already live life very differently.

Even though I've already been places with real differences, like when I went to Sweden and paraded around with my mom's clan for awhile in the forest running reindeer with my cousins (which is like stepping into another time), or the other countries in Europe I've been to for that matter, does not mean that I cannot acknowledge that the United States is still a very diverse place. It is diverse in different ways, and to differing levels than other places, but that doesn't make the diversity any less real, nor does it make the potential for that diversity to increase any less real.

You are trying to apply your standards of diversity of political opinion and culture, one which is based on the model of your home country, which is a markedly divided, and oft times violent place, to the rest of the world. You admitted this in the other topic when you had your post about "when I think radical, here's what I think". Not everyone has a 3rd of the country living on $2 a day or tribes being thrown into the modern world that do not approach problems in modern ways. Not everyone had apartheid or approaches racism in as overt a way. But just because it is not the same, does not mean that it is not present, or rampant for that matter. Just because people are not actually poor as they so claim in the United States, does not mean that they don't perceive themselves as poor, and in humanities subjects, perception is everything.

So that being said, I would encourage you to come back to the discussion when you can read long posts objectively without muttering to yourself, "What the fuck does he know, he lives in a cushy country like the USA." But until you're able to do that, your input is very uninteresting, and lacks any kind of creativity. You are not everyone, and I haven't told everyone who has put their two cents in that their input is irrelevant or linked to perceptions based on the mainstream Western media. I only told you that because your view of the United States seems to be based almost totally off of a media perspective. You tell me, someone who LIVES here, has grown up here, and been privileged to travel around here and experience the various portions of my country that my description of it is irrelevant because I can't give it to you in numbers and graphs. That's... well it's not intelligent behavior. Especially when we're talking about a subject that has remained largely unstudied. Our media paints a very different picture of the reality of life in this country. Just the fact that 90% of your TV series and movies are based in 1 of maybe 5 cities speaks to that effect.

We are trying to create a scenario in which India and Brazil can eclipse current superpowers, not go on about how the superpowers that exist today will not only exist as such forever, but also never suffer from some kind of a political and national break-up... you're absolutely right that things are always changing and do not stay the same way forever. That is precisely why the USA is almost certainly going to break up, and precisely why it doesn't have to be bloody when it does. Bloody break ups of countries have happened many times in our past, but as we move into the future, the world is changing. And your argument that "everything is changing, so it will remain the same" is an oxymoron.

If you don't think the USA could be removed as a superpower permanently with current trends, then the discussion isn't to bicker about that, but how we might alter the scene so that we can make it so for the sake of my friend's story. He's writing plants after all and I wanna give him something good, since he's already gone into some interesting levels of detail on that for me.

And I don't even want to get into the fragility of telecommunications right now. Cuz right now, what was meant to be a creative topic with creative yet intelligent input has descended into an argument, and that would only make it worse.
Edited by Zirantun, Feb 16 2013, 11:04 PM.
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T.Neo
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You say you want figures, you want numbers, and statistics. Figures, numbers, and statistics, and similar data are all easily manipulated though. Human behavior is not something you can monitor and predict beyond any certainty the way you can in a chemistry equation. Chemical A does not react with Chemical B the same way 100 of the time, or even 70% of the time. Because of the sheer unpredictability of humans as people, it doesn't make any sense to try and apply numbers to cultural differences, and if you had any real understanding of human beings, as you so claim, you'd know that. Culture, like evolution, is a snapshot, a still frame of a scene in a greater film. You can't look at a scene still and say: "I know exactly what happens next." Unless you've already seen the movie... Unless your God or some other figure that acts outside of space and time and therefore can know all possible outcomes of a given situation, outcomes can only be predicted based on what you see in the still of the scene, what has happened up until the movie was paused right there, and what your opinion is of what will happen next. So of course there will be "personal fiats".


There's a difference between fallible numbers and fallible opinions. Numbers are fallible because they can be measured badly, used incorrectly or tampered with. Opinions are fallible because their nature is not contingent on a connection with reality. No, an understanding of the situation through demonstratable, objective facts won't be perfect, but that's hardly reason to abandon it for the unscientific ignorance of "I believe this, therefore it's true!"

And as for "numbers are easily manipulated", yes, there's obviously a massive conspiracy to manipulate all studies and statistics on the US in order to trick people into thinking that the US isn't about to balkanise.

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Your personal fiat is frankly quite absurd. And not only is it absurd, but it shows that your own upbringing has stained your entire outlook on humanity and has rendered you virtually incapable of looking at the world outside of your South African glasses.


Bullshit. I describe my own country as an example of a place where cultural differences abound, and it's personal fiat how, exactly?

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Every political separation to you has to get bloody,


Felgercarb. Look at South Africa, the nation you so criticise me for being limited in my view to- that institution of racial oppression? Apartheid could have ended in bloody revolution, but it didn't.

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and you hold cultural differences to a ridiculously and quite subjectively high standard.


No, I see cultural differences of a differing nature to have, well, a differing nature. "The East Coast seems so fast-paced" is different from "X ethnic group is a bunch of devils, they're religious heathens who sympathised with white imperialists". The problem here is that you understand the former in the manner that most of the world understands the latter.

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And you also are married to the idea that the US can never break up, nor will it be off the global stage as a superpower in 1500 years...


USA could be relatively irrelevant in a world where India or China were developed nations, or where other powers have emerged in Africa or Asia. You've turned my views into a strawman that happens to blatantly conflict with what I've said previously.

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Just because mainstream American media is so exclusively English to the point of it being nigh impossible to find material on the internet about our linguistic and cultural minorities does not mean they are non-existant. These people have real cultural differences. Most Native Americans worship Gods that make me feel like they've invited a malevolent presence into the room, the Gaels in the Cascades seem to think that the oldest man in town is the best person to act as mayor or police chief, and Amish, Hutterites, and German Baptists, speak various dialects of the German language long isolated from Germany over a 400 year period and reject modern life.


Yes, I am actually aware of the existence of groups such as the Amish, Hutterites and Native Americans. I'm also aware that they make up less than 2% of the population of the US (that number being mostly Native Americans, and including the number of people who recorded Native American as part of their ethnicity). Trying to claim that a group of a couple of tens of thousands of people who live a simple agricultural life represents to the US what the various South African ethnic groups represent to SA is just plain balderdash. The same goes for your examples of linguistic diversity.

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The entire planet is not Africa, T.Neo. Montenegro just achieved independence a couple of years ago from Serbia without a war, and Kosovo had their war, they lost, and then they applied peacefully for their independence and they just got it. Ireland also broke off from the UK without any kind of a war, and the only war was within Ireland to determine what they were to do with themselves afterward. Scotland is holding a referendum on independence next year (granted, their independence strategy isn't very realistic), and there are no signs of a war breaking out between England and Scotland. Likewise, we Icelanders broke off from Denmark without Denmark trying to reassert any kind of an imperialist claim.


I think you have no idea what goes on in Africa. For starters, there's South Sudan, which became an independant state in 2011. There's Eritrea, which became independant in 1993 (Ethiopia was apparently supportive of the referendum for independance), and Somaliland, which is a de facto sovereign state, but internationally recognised as an autonomous region of Somalia.

In addition, all of the nations in Europe you cite involved areas associated with linguistic, ethnic or religious groups. Nothing of the sort exists in the US. And Denmark's reaction to Icelandic independance, for instance, seems like it was quite positive. That doesn't correlate to the case in the US at all.

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So that being said, I would encourage you to come back to the discussion when you can read long posts objectively without muttering to yourself, "What the fuck does he know, he lives in a cushy country like the USA."


No, I'm muttering to you because you've filled your posts with an incredibly large block of text that is at odds with reality, not because you live in a cushy country like the US. Cushy being a highly relative term, of course.

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I only told you that because your view of the United States seems to be based almost totally off of a media perspective. You tell me, someone who LIVES here, has grown up here, and been privileged to travel around here and experience the various portions of my country that my description of it is irrelevant because I can't give it to you in numbers and graphs. That's... well it's not intelligent behavior. Especially when we're talking about a subject that has remained largely unstudied. Our media paints a very different picture of the reality of life in this country. Just the fact that 90% of your TV series and movies are based in 1 of maybe 5 cities speaks to that effect.


Yes, I am telling you that the fact that you live and have grown up in the US is irrelevant. Appeal to authority, and bare assertion fallacy. If you're making a claim- especially an extraordinary claim like many of those that you're making, you have to provide a logical basis for it, and you haven't done that. Your issue with "the mainstream western media" verges on an ad hominem, and the fact that you think you know exactly what is going on inside my head, and what methods I use to reach my opinions is frustrating me to no end. My view of the United States is based on all the information on the matter I have gathered, including historical data, demographics, personal accounts from Americans and their collective view on the matter, and yes, your much hated "mainstream western media". If nothing else, it's useful for understanding what some of the perceptions on the matter are.

So basically it's you vs. everyone, and everything else. Either you're wrong, or you happen to be so incredibly enlightened that you've discovered and understood this supposedly incredibly important matter while everyone else remains totally ignorant. The former is incredibly more likely.

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And your argument that "everything is changing, so it will remain the same" is an oxymoron.


No, my argument is that everything is changing, therefore it won't change in the manner you expect it to, and you clearly don't understand it. One cannot ignore the fact that information technology allows cultural ideas to spread far faster and with far less regard to geographical boundaries, due to modern transport populations can shift to a much greater degree and geographically distant locations can be far more dependant on eachother for goods, that industrial technology and urbanisation has had a huge effect on the nature of employment and the dependance of the population on infrastructure, that the predominant form of government today is different from that in 500 or 1000 CE, reducing the likelyhood of fragmentation due to the lack of a clear heir for instance, and that warfare today is incredibly different to what it was merely a hundred years ago, changing the manner in which wars are fought and how likely they are to be fought in a specific circumstance.

And that's not even considering the advent of things like artificial intelligence or widespread automation.

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And I don't even want to get into the fragility of telecommunications right now. Cuz right now, what was meant to be a creative topic with creative yet intelligent input has descended into an argument, and that would only make it worse.


Oh sure, because telecommunications are so fragile. One Inevitable Conspiracy Catastrophe and the principle of sending messages across long distances via wires, optical signals or radio waves will absolutely and totally vanish into a puff of thin air, and stay that way for decades, if not centuries...
Edited by T.Neo, Feb 17 2013, 09:50 AM.
A hard mathematical figure provides a sort of enlightenment to one's understanding of an idea that is never matched by mere guesswork.
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