cerealbad

Demography of England:

  1348 4,810,000 +16.7%

  1351 2,600,000 −45.9%

  1650 5,310,000 +29.2%

300 years to recover

very little of a writer survives with time; asimov had interesting world building but his characters are a little flat. the surviving great works of literature deal with human beings rather than the world they find themselves in. there is also the problem today of new authors breaking through and having to compete with a giant cannon of golden age sci fi or fantasy, and it can be overwhelming. if you read genre fiction, you could continue to do so for another 20 years and never leave the 20th century. there is a similar problem in literature, but there you get a lot more adventurous readers and experimental writers so novelty is sought out.

the general problem is a massive bloat of amassed and received works. record keeping is almost exhaustive so new books, movies, shows and songs just keep piling up, and the immensity of choices is overwhelming. i wonder how many people are subscribed to dozens of channels on youtube but just never find the time to catch up with more than 2 or 3 videos a day, and their backlog just keep growing and growing.... overcommunication and data creep. i can see a near future where the virtual you goes off and tests entertainment products then comes back and offers recommendations. in a primitive way this is already happening it's just past-you helping make selections for present-you.

it reminds me towards the end of the middle ages, when chroniclers amassed hundreds of manuscripts and began creating world history by condensing it down into something readable and understandable. maybe the essence of the age we live in is that of the neo-chronicler, tools that will reconnect people with the passage of time.

in a multipolar world you might see precise attacks during periods of tension targeting military facilities - base trade conflict. this minimizes loss of life and it creates a real sellers market for turnkey anti-missile solutions. the regional hegemon (china, russia, usa) can build their anti-antimissile hypersonic weapons to keep their edge while smaller countries in those regions develop accurate missile guidance and missile defence. this is a type of lukewarm war which is good for everyone, doesn't disrupt trade and can be used to justify military spending in a time of relative peace. after all the point of war is to win your opponents resources, nuclear weapons make nuclear war pointless. small tactical nukes might still be useful to have as a final deterrent against all out ground invasion, but the superpowers are unlikely to allow any new nuclear development.

Lockheed makes a mobile system called THAAD. I doubt there were any deployed in Iraq, and the effectiveness of these are dubious. The Russians put the S400 in Syria and it has performed well enough. These act more like a deterrent than an actual viable defensive grid.

radiation spreads and matter clumps. in this universe matter was allowed to form but radiation dominates. island chains swallowed up by a rising ocean.

Management bloating faster than the codebase.

The meta-position that you can absorb multiple world views and hold them temporarily to assess their ontological narrative is ridiculous. It bleeds from the stone of Christian reformation theology and the rationalist enlightenment chisel chipping away at it for centuries to increase the flow. What has been en vogue for the past 100 years is to fuse east and west in order to sell universality without the baggage of the past to the largely indifferent emergent empires in the Eurasian continental landmass.

Morris is a propagandist, whitewashing colonial-imperialism for the sake of posterity and progeny. Call it the bigotry of low time preference towards civilizations, call it misguided mystic zionism compounded by centuries of guilt of identity and millennial discrimination, call it international capital. The American founders understood that use of power is the trap of all great power and worked to curtail the accumulation of it by maintaining the settler ethos in the American mind. Now it has been replaced by 'a nation of immigrants'.

With Asia we see the fraying of the American ideals, betrayed and exposed as an empty power grab at cultural hegemony, a molten liquid setting into a misshapen lump, waiting to be squeezed, chipped and remelted again. A world war will be necessarily fought over this anti-human humanist idea, since people are not liquid and can only be squeezed so hard before they crack and splinter.

21st century American can only be reasoned with from an equal position of power, and the madness that spreads top down from the entrenched political apparatus is fanatical in its devotion to self-serving narratives, which will lead to more and more erratic and unpredictable outcomes, until corruption and despotism rule the day.

China has always dealt with ideological theocracies with subversion and reasoned pragmatism, it survived the mongols and the japanese and it will survive the americans too. what survives of the extended western roman empire? likely the political monuments of worship too large to tear down and a few choice words of english.

regional hegemons enforce embargoes on nations which refuse to behave according to new standards. a carbon non-proliferation treaty backed with coordinated blockades and cyber-attacks of critical infrastructure, initiating limited civil wars. the top level view is mutual cooperation to avoid global catastrophe.

this would require america and russia to stop selling their terrestrial missile technology and fossil fuels to the rest of world. once the current generation of inventory and raw energy is cleared it, orbital space based weapons can be deployed, obsolescing land and sea nuclear delivery and defense. this might explain china and india's rush to space, in order to have a bargaining chip in the future discussion about their territorial and energy sovereignty it is necessary for them to have a significant presence in low earth orbit.

things typically don't escalate dramatically during international disputes, and it's likely that the russians and americans will just use blackmail diplomacy to freeze, then develop the rest of the world with new energy they control. in order to avoid public scrutiny it's important to paint this as a critical emergency rather than a strategic sharing of influence between continental superpowers.

i suspect this will play out slowly over the next century, all the while regular people will be cowed by the ever looming threat of total extinction. not a very original sequel, a real throwback your parents might enjoy, cold war 2: fight the heat. the science on anything hardly matters, since scientific truth is subservient to pragmatism and political realities. given the massive investment in government information collection, it is clear that any large popular movement would quickly be steered towards desired policy goals, which should reinforce some version of the above story i laid out.

specific languages are the result of history and territory. Language is an innate human capacity. the speed, breadth and depth of acquisition is measured relative to other humans. less methodical than athletics, art, music or mathematics- which are easier to measure. but definitely not as nebulous as influence, attraction, art or leadership- which are just now becoming measurable with proto artificial brains.

human biology adapts to the environment and forms the basic primitive culture. technology for over 10,000 years rapidly mixed cultures and to a lesser extent biologies forming: languages, empires, religions, and ages. the technological process is far more efficient at shaping our cognition than the slower evolutionary one which works through intergenerational selection events. this is a cumulative runaway event which makes sense- given that human intellect is probably a bad mutation for long term fitness and survival, as humans wiped out all of the other humanlike species (and dangerous megafauna) which might have kept us in some ecological niche like the other animals. all living things head towards extinction, but our strategy is to burn up rather than fade away.

Allegedly Rent seeking billionaires are hypothetically positioning themselves in the supposed space race because the theoretical American -Chinese cold war will be potentially fought in low earth orbit, "smart money gets in quick to suckle at the trillion dollar defense budget." some people might say. Edit: opinion duly corrected in line with moderation standards

people are self-interested not truth interested. most scientific fields are initiated by a small handful of geniuses, but over time become a type of cloistered bureaucracy. your standard university education teaches you there are two paths - you make significant contributions and are remembered long after you die, or you plug in as a fresh node into the existing structure and are rewarded with a comfortable life, just check your ethics at the door.

this is largely due to the failure of idealism as a philosophical framework to set up any type of enduring political, economic or secular social structure. the blame lies on hegel or perhaps marx's interpretation of hegel getting stuck in praxis quagmires. which is why the turn towards asia and the new age movement which emerges from it in the early 1900s is essentially anti-science. the spiritual successor of communism is the idea of fusing the east and west traditions to form the new enlightened human, who sees no race, religion or gender but simply behaves as the universal light and creator. it has largely been a failure, as folding china into the world community has been against the pragmatic self-interest of various sensitive american industries - weapons, space, communication, high finance, which can exert sufficient power on the american leadership structures to avoid any type of idealism about world peace. there are no more enemies or allies just competitive co-morbidity, actors fraying the ropes they are tugging on until something breaks, like the ussr in the 80s.

it's only a problem if you think humans are equal. if you shift the view that humans are unequal and life is deeply unfair, then it's normal to see the next 100 years as a struggle for dominance between superstition and science, between a world led by north america or eurasia, between the new dominoes of fascist nationalism and disinterested international capitalism. it's a hot peace, which will end up with one temporary victor, possibly colonizing mars - or just landing there and coming back, before a new power emerges to challenge the old empire. i would argue that this is a bi-product of the 'correct' interpretation of hegel, the one that isn't taught directly in schools, the master and slave dialectic.

It's a continuation of the pivot to Asia strategy dating back to Clinton. The Middle East was a sandbox for testing new weapons for the next cold war century. Remember in American foreign policy the two parties are indistinguishable.