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Meanwhile, on Earth; A timeline of Earth in the Ilion-verse
Topic Started: Jun 28 2016, 08:53 PM (1,282 Views)
malicious-monkey
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I've been holding all this in my head, and need a place to work out the state of the Earth during all the Ilion happenings. Most of it takes place in the 22nd century but to get there I need to start with today and move forward. And because futurism isn't really my forte, I'll need your help.
Edited by malicious-monkey, Jun 28 2016, 08:54 PM.
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Indeed, I think a East African Union/Coalition/Federation has a decent chance of forming in the long run. I personally think it would start off as a Chinese puppet, and it may take well within the latter half of the 21st century to form, but it could turn into a pretty notable entity in the long run.

Also, perhaps you could put some renaissancian Mexico? That could be interesting.
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A few other things that may be worth mentioning; I personally doubt that China's aggressive tactics in the South China Sea will continue for very long. They're burning far more bridges that it's worth to them, and I expect that they'll start acting a bit more diplomatic if either Xi gets a change of heart or leaves. For example, Indonesia-which usually prides itself in being neutral in all of this-is getting increasingly irritated by China's lax views over their sovereignty and their rampant illegal fishing. Hell, there may even be a scuffle between a few nations if the cards go bad.

But perhaps more interesting is China's attempts to revitalize the Silk Road. The project, OBOR or more eloquently "One Belt, One Road" could seriously change world trade if it is fully implemented and greatly increase China's soft power. This would also potentially offer as a boost to that East African Coalition deal, as East Africa will be heavily affected if the project goes well.
Edited by whachamacallit2, Jul 9 2016, 12:55 PM.
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Universal Phage

We talk a lot about antibiotic resistance, about what we can do to slow its advance. Agricultural reform, following the doctors' instructions, development of new antibiotics - these were not enough for 21st Century Earth. 2028 was the first year on record since 1919 to see a population decrease. Yes, widespread contraceptive use and other forms of population control played a significant role in slowing growth, but it was the bacteria that pushed the global population into actual decline.

Being human, the citizens of the 2030's would not go down without a fight. Treatments once considered too dangerous to even dare conceptualize began to emerge in full splendor from the cocoon of academia. The most effective of these was developed at the University of California, Berkeley. It was called Universal Phage, and was a powerful and dangerous tool indeed.

The idea of solving antibiotic resistance with a single drug may seem preposterous. It is preposterous. To call Univeral Phage a "drug" would do a great disservice to its ingenuity. The Phage was more like a nanomachine. Its base design resembled a simple bacteriophage but it had the ability to read the human immune system and modify itself to attack any bacterial intruder. It contained materials not found in any living thing or virus. It was, essentially, a new form of life.

(to be continued...)


The Phage required bacteria to reproduce. It could not lyse human cells, nor could it survive for long in a sterile environment. It was fragile by design, but that also made it difficult to maintain in vitro. Hospitals began to collect strains from patients who had been cured of infection, looking for durability and longevity, forgetting why the Phage was neutered in the first place. Each institution cultured its own Phage to ensure there was enough for all their patients. The strains began to diverge, to specialize. There were strains for gram-negative infections, for multiple agents, for unknown agents, for immunocompromised patients. For patients with overactive immune systems.

It was the last one that gave rise to the plague. Phage-resistant patients would fight off the virus before the virus could eradicate the infection. Some were naturally immune; some had acquired immunity from prior innoculation. A strain was developed that could survive longer in the patient. How it did so, nobody knew until it was too late. It was a hospital in China that discovered that several of its cancer patients were testing positive for a Phage that hadn't been given to them...not on purpose, anyway. Upon further study, they found that the Phage was modifying its host's DNA, and it was spreading.

Thus began the slow apocalypse.
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Jul 7 2016, 06:24 PM


The map of the world, probably won't change in a century. Some small unions may happen (Kosovo and Albania, Romania and Moldova, the Koreas) as might some independence movements (expect these only in democratic nations, or in nations that collapse. In strong, autocratic states, no chance. Tibet ain't breaking away any time soon) but I doubt we'll see continent wide unions popping up.

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The 21st century will be one full of challenges civilization has never had to deal with before. We have 85 years left of this century. A lot can happen and a lot is shrouded in mystery. I'm sorry but to simply claim that politics, whose only constant is its inconsistency, will remain stable, borders on being naive.

My two cents Monkey is don't underestimate climate change. It is easily going to be the biggest factor which will shape our grandchildren's society. Other major factors are the ones discussed here such as pandemics, virtual reality, transport revolution etc...
Another thing which certain people may wish to discredit is also the fact that our current capitalist economic system either has to undergo a transformation as radical as the post war boom or it will collapse, probably in the next generation. In the face of that collapse, extremism will thrive, in fact they already are. Old ideologies may reappear in force, and new ones might be born as well.

I generally hold the view that our civilization is kinda on its last legs. Historically they follow boom and bust cycles, and although we've grown in our civil rights, technology and scientific discoveries, it all ends up bubbling down to economics and we've passed our zenith. If you want a date I'd give it 1971. The big picture for Western civilization as we know is slated for a downhill journey.

A lot of people disagree with me, but so many other civilizations have come before us. Why should we be so arrogant in thinking that our current system can live through all the shit we are throwing at it? The only way to avoid some kind of dark ages* would be to reinvent our civilization. And even that is technically a planned suicide of our global, westernized society anyway.

*Doesn't translate to the world being transported to 1860. It just means everything slows down for a long while. Also the fact that ours is the first global society, a very deeply interconnected one. Throughout history, multiple civilizations at once means when one declines the other continues advancing and often gives the other a little push through trade. But there are no other civilizations to carry the light, which may worsen the overall effects.
Edited by bloom_boi, Jul 17 2016, 09:10 PM.
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malicious-monkey
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It's one thing to say the political climate will change, quite another to predict how. Most of the ways the world has changed in the recent past do not apply to the next century, as lamna said. I think the biggest disruptors to global society will be external. Climate change, antibiotic resistance, and agricultural monoculture are probably our biggest foreseeable threats.
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Having everything remain the same would be silly, but major changes in borders seem unlikely bar some huge disruption. We live in an age where conquest is taboo. The very idea is shocking and repulsive, and whenever it has happened since WWII it has been framed as reunification/liberation (Crimea, Goa, Kuwait, etc)

If things start to break down, then yes you might see much more fluid borders. But if everything remains somewhat stable, the interesting changes won't be visible on a map. Russia, China, South Africa, Iran, etc were very different places in 1950 than they are now.

Maybe in a hundred years Arabia will no-longer be Saudi. Maybe Afghanistan will be a slightly exotic tourist trap, maybe Bahrain will be a majority ruled democracy maybe Congo will be the powerhouse of Africa, Australia be republic integrating into Asia. Lots can happen with minimal border changes.
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Oh I doubt Saudi Arabia will make it through the 21st century. Maybe it'll be UN Pacification Zone, or a huge empty desert with a few coastal nations on the Persia Gulf.

But I think that's what I see for the future. A lot of nations are going to be so hurt that other nations are going to have to take control of those regions, which may effectively bring those regions under their control. A nice cartographer might say that those pacified nations are independent, but the reality they're effectively under the jurisdiction of their neighbors.

One of the big changers I think would be mass immigration, which seems like it would happen in Malicious-monkey's world. Refugeeism from all the things she mentioned could-no, would cause some pretty fricken huge changes in societal factors. How so? I dunno, but it's up for grabs.
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Arabic power won't last any longer than oil, and the Gulf already knows it. It's why the Emirates and Dubai are working so hard to become touristic and economic havens, which honestly will likely only last so long as the cash keeps flowing. Thinking along those lines, energy generation should be accounted for in this future, and given the timelines involved, it likely passed through several stages. While I doubt that biofuels will catch on simply because we don't have enough food and farmland to spare, I think it's something readily available to hold us until we reach a post fossil-fuel economy, simply because it doesn't require changing our cars and gas stations. It's the simplest form of sustainability, and might even be possible if enough people died in the phage. Granted, the phage might have also attacked food crops - it's not just humans at risk. Most heavily demanded crops are grown largely in only a couple breeds, and losing even one to disease would be catastrophic. The banana already almost went extinct once!

Indeed, how energy is handled would likely be tied into the eventual construction of the Odyssey itself. Clearly break-even fusion must have been accomplished to make its drive possible, and some form of solar power station to propel the starwisp probes. Said power station indicates well developed spatial infrastructure with a history behind it, while said fusion implies availability of widespread energy beforehand. This is especially true because He3-He3 fusion has a high Lawson criterion, which means it is particularly difficult to achieve. Chances are, deuterium-tritium and deuterium-deuterium fusion, which have much lower Lawson criteria, were achieved and used on wide scales far earlier. Deuterium-tritium fusion is somewhat problematic due to the scarcity of tritium, which is largely generated in lithium breeders - large scale nuclear technology. There isn't enough helium-3 on Earth to do much of anything with, so they'd need to have developed lunar mines or harvest it directly from the gas giants, though I suppose they could also create it in breeders, if they were desperate. Deuterium-deuterium will probably be the reaction of choice on Earth, seeing as the element can be extracted from seawater.

What fusion grants is incredible power density; the first powerplants would likely be monstrously huge facilities, on a similar scale to current nuclear reactors, but polywell fusors can supposedly manage 300 MW (that's enough to power 30000 of the largest most wasteful US homes, and maybe 5 times as many regular houses) within a 3 meter device - that's a flying car, no sweat. Without some sort of corresponding super battery the full import of this can't be felt, but having so much energy in such a small package is going to make some drastic changes to our society, and quite possibly our outlook on nature. Pushing hard enough (and with enough time to really figure out how to use all that is now available), man could become a Kardeshev type I civilization, and that basically means complete control of the planet. There are several vast engineering projects that could reshape the Earth that are simply too ambitious to attempt now, though we know how to do them: between that much energy and space-based infrastructure, weather and climate control would be trivial for one.
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Jul 18 2016, 04:56 PM
Arabic power won't last any longer than oil, and the Gulf already knows it. It's why the Emirates and Dubai are working so hard to become touristic and economic havens, which honestly will likely only last so long as the cash keeps flowing. Thinking along those lines, energy generation should be accounted for in this future, and given the timelines involved, it likely passed through several stages. While I doubt that biofuels will catch on simply because we don't have enough food and farmland to spare, I think it's something readily available to hold us until we reach a post fossil-fuel economy, simply because it doesn't require changing our cars and gas stations. It's the simplest form of sustainability, and might even be possible if enough people died in the phage. Granted, the phage might have also attacked food crops - it's not just humans at risk. Most heavily demanded crops are grown largely in only a couple breeds, and losing even one to disease would be catastrophic. The banana already almost went extinct once!

Indeed, how energy is handled would likely be tied into the eventual construction of the Odyssey itself. Clearly break-even fusion must have been accomplished to make its drive possible, and some form of solar power station to propel the starwisp probes. Said power station indicates well developed spatial infrastructure with a history behind it, while said fusion implies availability of widespread energy beforehand. This is especially true because He3-He3 fusion has a high Lawson criterion, which means it is particularly difficult to achieve. Chances are, deuterium-tritium and deuterium-deuterium fusion, which have much lower Lawson criteria, were achieved and used on wide scales far earlier. Deuterium-tritium fusion is somewhat problematic due to the scarcity of tritium, which is largely generated in lithium breeders - large scale nuclear technology. There isn't enough helium-3 on Earth to do much of anything with, so they'd need to have developed lunar mines or harvest it directly from the gas giants, though I suppose they could also create it in breeders, if they were desperate. Deuterium-deuterium will probably be the reaction of choice on Earth, seeing as the element can be extracted from seawater.

What fusion grants is incredible power density; the first powerplants would likely be monstrously huge facilities, on a similar scale to current nuclear reactors, but polywell fusors can supposedly manage 300 MW (that's enough to power 30000 of the largest most wasteful US homes, and maybe 5 times as many regular houses) within a 3 meter device - that's a flying car, no sweat. Without some sort of corresponding super battery the full import of this can't be felt, but having so much energy in such a small package is going to make some drastic changes to our society, and quite possibly our outlook on nature. Pushing hard enough (and with enough time to really figure out how to use all that is now available), man could become a Kardeshev type I civilization, and that basically means complete control of the planet. There are several vast engineering projects that could reshape the Earth that are simply too ambitious to attempt now, though we know how to do them: between that much energy and space-based infrastructure, weather and climate control would be trivial for one.


Like we discussed before, I expect waste heat to be the limiting factor in any system requiring energy. It is also predicted that heat sinking will be the limiting factor for computer processing power. It kind of already is in some technologies. Maybe biological components will be the key to this - after all, our brains don't overheat.

I don't expect the phage to cross kingdom barriers. It is designed to survive in the human body and can maybe infect other vertebrates. Also, it is not really a virus in the traditional sense but a mutagenic symbiont. People infected with the virulent strains get blood cancers and autoimmune diseases. They are also resistant to bacterial infection while hosting the virus, but can be deficient when cured. It can be cured, by the way, by keeping the host in a sterile environment until the virus is starved. It's just that doing this to everyone at once is...not exactly feasible.
Edited by malicious-monkey, Jul 18 2016, 07:34 PM.
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lamna
Jul 7 2016, 06:24 PM
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I will definitely need help with this. Global politics is not my thing; luckily we have Lamna

One thing that I would include, that I feel would be interesting, is a Caliph. I don't mean all Islamic nations inexplicably uniting into one super state in some right-wing nightmare fantasy. I mean that Islam has been without a Caliph for almost a century now, and things are a little rudderless. I think it's reasonably likely that within the next century or so we'll see a generally recognised Sunni religious leader emerge, equivalent to the modern pope.
the big question in such a scenario, would be "how much power, if any, does the Caliph have?"

the last Sunni Caliph was a religious figure, who basically got sworn in without any of the items associated with statecraft or military power. (his predecessor had been sworn in with them)

if its brought back, is it a purely sacred office, like the last Caliph and modern Popes are...or would they have the power to call up an army? and where would they be based? historically, they've moved around a bit, and I imagine a revival of the office would come with a move as well. not Mecca or Medina, though - I don't think any Caliph tried to move his HQ there.

though perhaps the Caliphate isn't Sunni -- perhaps its the Shia, the Alevis, or one of the other denominations. (something called the Dervish Caliphate, by those who don't look too closely at the distinctions between denominations and their organization?)



I don't see people abandoning the Holy Cities -- Mecca, Rome, Jerusalem, Medina, etc -- no matter how bad things get. the last time the Vatican left Rome, we ended up with centuries of Popes and Anti-Popes...though that might happen anyway?

perhaps a question at least as big as that: will there be, by Ilion's time, another messiah? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_Messiah_claimants#20th_century
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The 21st century will be one full of challenges civilization has never had to deal with before. We have 85 years left of this century. A lot can happen and a lot is shrouded in mystery. I'm sorry but to simply claim that politics, whose only constant is its inconsistency, will remain stable, borders on being naive.

I generally hold the view that our civilization is kinda on its last legs. Historically they follow boom and bust cycles, and although we've grown in our civil rights, technology and scientific discoveries, it all ends up bubbling down to economics and we've passed our zenith. If you want a date I'd give it 1971. The big picture for Western civilization as we know is slated for a downhill journey.

A lot of people disagree with me, but so many other civilizations have come before us. Why should we be so arrogant in thinking that our current system can live through all the shit we are throwing at it? The only way to avoid some kind of dark ages* would be to reinvent our civilization. And even that is technically a planned suicide of our global, westernized society anyway.
then I'd ask you how you're defining "Western Civilization".

people keep saying we're on our last legs, and while things change (decolonization, for example, and communism; the massive death tolls of WW1), Western Civilization is still around.

used to be, French was the international language of diplomacy and trade and whatnot; now its English and Mandarin.

used to be, the divine right of kings held sway everywhere from China to England to the Yucatan; now, a variety of government types exist.

used to be, the biggest thing was the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation; then it was splitting the atom; now...


(yes, past civilizations have passed away; look how long some of them lasted...there's a reason they're called the Neo-Hittite states for centuries after the passing of the Hittites, who themselves kept coming back from their deathbed to reestablish their empire; or Ancient Egypt, whose longevity is well-known; or Greek, where for example you can find the same god being offered to (say, Poseidon) in the work of Homer, in Linear B, and after Rome absorbed the Greek cities.........are they the same at the start and the finish? no, but if something has to be the same at the start and finish to qualify as a civilization - then and only then do I agree that Western Civilization is going to be short-lived)


wow, that was longer than I'd planned for, or thought it would be.
Edited by Rodlox, Jul 18 2016, 09:09 PM.
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Like we discussed before, I expect waste heat to be the limiting factor in any system requiring energy. It is also predicted that heat sinking will be the limiting factor for computer processing power. It kind of already is in some technologies. Maybe biological components will be the key to this - after all, our brains don't overheat.


Waste heat is an issue, but for powerplants on Earth it's not difficult to handle; you just equip bigger and faster ventilation fans or more heat exchangers that work off river water, using huge mass flows to ensure that the final water isn't too hot to be ecologically damaging. Waste heat for mankind as a whole starts becoming a problem once we're making a good fraction of the power that Earth gets from the sun, at which point it'll start effecting the climate. A figure that is often repeated that a surface temperature change of 0.6 degrees Celsius is enough to cause significant climate change, which, if you do the radiative balance and account for Earth's atmospheric insulation, could be achieved if the solar constant were 1.372 kW/m2 instead of 1.36 kW/m2 - that is to say, we'd have to provide an additional 12 W per every square meter of Earth's cross-section. That's 1.53e15 W, or 124 times the world's current power consumption of 12.3e12 W. True, we only have a fraction of that available as power due to inefficiency of the power stations, but it's not nearly as bad as you'd think, since powerplants are much more efficient than most heat engines - current coal-based Rankine cycle power stations can do 40-60% efficiency fairly readily, and Brayton cycle power stations are getting close to 70%. We can assume 50% efficiency without huge hassle and have tens of times what is manageable today available. This also assumes that vehicles are either electric or their power is accounted for in the above.

Basically, why spaceships worry so much about waste heat and we usually don't on Earth is that here we've got tons of spare mass to throw the heat into, and we can rely on conduction and convection which scale linearly with temperature and can move fractions of a megawatt in small packages (as any sports car can attest). Spaceships don't have spare mass, and are stuck with radiation, which scales to the fourth power of temperature, so it increases sixteen-fold every time temperature doubles - this means it's pathetically weak at low temperatures, but is enough to run our whole solar system at stellar temperatures.

So on the macro-scale, waste heat isn't a large issue - you can treat large objects like small powerplants. On the microscale, I totally agree with you, it's perhaps the most limiting issue, so much so that it's changed the way computers run and thrown Moore's Law for a loop (it still applies, but number of transistors is not doubling with anywhere near the speed it was before, and frankly we've already achieved transistors the size of individual atoms in labs so soon we won't be able to increase at all), and we need to find different ways to perform computing. Biological systems are, in some ways, better and worse than what we have right now. The brain is a 1 kilogram organ that uses 20 W of power on average to perform up to 1 exaflop (1e18 calculations per second), whereas your current CPU is something like the i7, weighs tenths of a gram and uses anywhere from 30-150 W to perform 2.5e11 calculations per second. A super efficient 1000-processor chip has been developed by UC Davis students (here: https://www.ucdavis.edu/news/worlds-first-1000-processor-chip/ ) that can manage 1.78e12 instructions with only 0.7 W, but the point stands. Biology has definitely beaten us for how many operations per second can be performed for a given amount of energy, and we're looking into it for that very reason - with the most success in DNA computing, as far as I know - but in terms of power density, we've got biology thoroughly trounced. On the one hand, that's why overheating is such a problem, but on the other, it's also why we can fit computers and chips onto more and more things, including eventually clothing (we hope).

But biological computing has some pretty impressive downsides. You can stuff your computer in a backroom for five years letting it collect dust then pull it out and still get it running long as it has a power chord and the fan is running, and CPU's can go past boiling point before they really start suffering. With moderate shielding, we can stuff these things into nuclear reactors and radiation-pelted satellites and they'll still run. I can't see a biological computer doing that, it's too needy, though providing for one is much less of an issue under general Earthly conditions. The best of both worlds would be if we could create biomimetic solid state electronics, computers based on circuitry that resembles neurons to get far more operations with far less power - this probably isn't possible with silicon, but might be good for futuristic materials, probably some form of electrically conductive nano-carbon. Chemical computers are a fairly good inbetween, but need good temperature regulation to keep rate of reaction and hence number of operations in check (though chemical computers would probably run FASTER as they get hotter, so this could be desirable). Alternatives that let us use even smaller elements and could theoretically beat out even biological systems include spin computing (using electron spin) and quantum computing, but these generally require super-cooling, which kind of sets a minimum size for the device as a whole.

malicious-monkey
 
I don't expect the phage to cross kingdom barriers. It is designed to survive in the human body and can maybe infect other vertebrates. Also, it is not really a virus in the traditional sense but a mutagenic symbiont.


I assumed based on your earlier statement that it was a chemical or mechanical agent and hence not really species-limited, but I think the greater issue still stands, if not from the phage itself - the possibility of crop failure due to some new strain. Not that you have to look into it, it was just a thought. Many of the worst disasters are perfect storms, things that could be handled on their own but together cannot.

I guess what I’m thinking is that there are a number of real-world issues going on right now, and for your future, you don’t have to go into them in-depth, but you do need to decide whether any of these persist till Ilion’s day or if they’re no longer a problem. You’ve already looked at some of these, but I’m writing them here to make them easier to keep track of:

  • Oil crisis: fossil fuels running out in the next 40-60 years

  • Metal crisis: current reserves of many industrial metals are viable to run out in the next 60-100 years – copper being a critical one

  • Food crisis: rather, maintaining farmland to feed the whole world’s population, considering our livestock now makes up a huge chunk of Earth’s biomass and we’re ruining the soil

  • Water crisis: where are we going to get drinking water for all these people, particularly seeing how we pollute so much of it

  • Population crisis: which relates to the above two – if there are fewer people, food and water aren’t as big an issue

  • Climate crisis: even if we stopped throwing in extra CO2 right now, we’ve still done some abhorrent damage, and the full effect has yet to be felt partially due to absorption by the ocean

  • Pollution crisis: we dump hundreds of millions of tons of plastic into the ocean every year, alongside how many poisonous metals, and we're turning the rain into acid... need I go on? At least biodegradability is catching on, and nanomachines can probably handle the former. We've finally found some bacterial species that can eat plastic too.

  • Species crisis: how many things we’ve killed off or endangered

  • Nuclear crisis: this one might be considered already solved, especially if peace reigns long enough and nations quit trying to bolster their stockpiles, as the nuclear bombs are slowly degrading and within a few decades, available stockpiles won’t be enough to irradiate the whole world several times over

This is entirely ignoring political issues, which will likely tie into these – such is not my expertise, and other members here have handled it better than I would. I will say that one thing I think has not been dealt with is how the world wars have changed the nature of warfare. Full-drawn battles aren’t really possible anymore, or at least they’re not desired because nobody wants a repeat of those, and fact is a no-holds barred engagement could set off a nuclear war that would end the world as we know it. MAD remains very much in effect. Instead, nations have had to suffice with proxy wars, intense guerrilla and terrorist tactics, political manoeuvring, industrial sabotage and economic sanctions. The dawn of electronic warfare promises even more changes to the status quo. Related to the nuclear crisis, if enough time passes that our current nuclear arsenal becomes obsolete, conventional warfare may become possible again, though most likely nations would simply rebuild new missiles to keep in check.

Related to this is the demographic/economic crisis. Not only is wealth increasingly concentrated in the hands of the few, but more relevantly, cost of living is increasing but people aren't making more, and the general population is poorer and worse off. This is usually quoted by Americans, but it's really a global issue, as more and more people live below the poverty line, and are increasingly unable to afford basic education and many basic human rights. This is a ticking time bomb; the powder keg for a revolution, as I've heard it said, is "lots of young men with no job/not enough money to feed their families", and it's why bread and circuses works so well - at least until the government can't provide one of the two, at which point it's certainly on its last legs.
Edited by Zerraspace, Jul 19 2016, 04:21 AM.
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lamna
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I'd disagree about Arabic power disappearing with oil, though I imagine in such a world Egypt's importance in the Arab world will increases a lot. I also think the Gulf States have potential to pretty quickly become modernised and developed. Still going to be a shock though.

In such a world, you might see an return to the bad old days of Arab-Israeli wars, as Israel/Palestine becomes much more valuable real estate.
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had a thought - has mankind been weaned off of dependence on one or two species of honeybee, and have crops pollinated by far more species of bees?
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lamna
Jul 19 2016, 01:22 PM
In such a world, you might see an return to the bad old days of Arab-Israeli wars, as Israel/Palestine becomes much more valuable real estate.
I'm starting to wonder if the revival of the office of caliph (sunni or otherwise) might be connected in some way to protecting Israel & Palestine both from each other and from outside aggressors.
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