History How Will The 20th Century Be Remembered?

Zyobot

Just a time-traveling robot stranded on Earth.
Root causes will almost certainly be sought in the preceding period. When we want to explain the Hellenistic Era (or "Alexander to Actium", as Greene defined it) we look to the circumstances that produced Alexander. It's no surprise that Antiquite had its own "Enlightenment": Sokrates, Plato and Aristotle didn't just come out of nowhere! And the last of these three was literally the tutor of Alexander the Great. Well, in much the same way, Napoleon was a child of the Enlightenment. Its logical product, even. And our "Modern" period is shaped by all of this as well.

But of course "root causes" don't really exist. The situation that brought forth these philosophical and social upheavals (and all their later outcomes) was itself produced by earlier developments. Think of the Wars of Religion (particularly the Thirty Years' War), and we see but a new iteration of the Peloponnesian War. The old world, divided against itself, when the younger power in the Far West hadn't even even shown the first stirrings of its vital strenth yet.

And we can trace that kind of division, and those resulting conflicts, back to underlying causes, too. And so on and so forth, all the way back to the first dawn of the culture in question -- in this case we talk of the Classical and the Christian/Western cultures, but of course you and I have talked at length of many others, such as China, Egypt and Mesopotamia. The same patterns of development recur again and again. The same causality shapes all of them, and sets them on remarkably similar trajectories.

The reason is simple: the real "root cause" is human nature. History rhymes, again and again, because humans remain fundamentally the same. And it doesn't matter if they fight with bronze swords or iron lances. It doesn't matter whether they possess paper, or a new kind of plough, or the printing press, or gunpowder. It doesn't matter whether they burn wood or coal or gas. It doesn't matter whether they officially have slavery or not. It doesn't matter whether they have satellites or fusion bombs, for that matter.

They -- that is to say, we -- remain human. All too human. And as long as our essential nature remains unaltered (and it has not been fundamentally changed for the past 10.000 years at least), the established patterns in our history wil continue to manifest, time after time. This is why the people who stare obsessively at specific details ("muh industrial revolution!") are utterly missing the point. People have been doing the same things since the neolithic revolution. Competing over scarce resources, inventing and endlessly re-inventing the same basic paradigms for the allocation of means. And then beating each other over the head with sticks.

A hydrogen bomb is just a bigger stick, that's all. It's wielded by the same human hands, steered by the same human mind, put to the same human purposes. History shrugs and marches on, the pattern of its steps unaltered and unrelenting. The same marching song is chanted. The words, and the language in which they're sung, will be changed from time to time. But the tune remains the same.

Sure, we've discussed that at length already, and I look forward to discussing it some more.

However, my initial question was more to do with what ways the 20th century could be "foreshadowing" or "sneak peeks" for what's to come next? For example, I mentioned above that I'd expect Hitler and Stalin—murderous, bloody-minded despots that they were—to preview the monsters yet to come, assuming your macro-historical model is correct. You know that I'm already convinced that the tyrant who comes in at the very end will, indeed, be far worse than the sum of his predecessors, though given the context he'll operate in, I'm sure he won't be alone. (And will probably be joined by future expies of Pol Pot, the Kims, and everyone else on the "Worst Dictators Ever" list right now, never mind by the end of this century!)
 

Skallagrim

Well-known member
However, my initial question was more to do with what ways the 20th century could be "foreshadowing" or "sneak peeks" for what's to come next? For example, I mentioned above that I'd expect Hitler and Stalin—murderous, bloody-minded despots that they were—to preview the monsters yet to come, assuming your macro-historical model is correct. You know that I'm already convinced that the tyrant who comes in at the very end will, indeed, be far worse than the sum of his predecessors, though given the context he'll operate in, I'm sure he won't be alone. (And will probably be joined by future expies of Pol Pot, the Kims, and everyone else on the "Worst Dictators Ever" list right now, never mind by the end of this century!)
Alhough I turned it into a bit of a tangential rant (as I often do), my point was that "the middle" is rarely a typical reference point, even if it's a valid one. People compare the start to the end. So Caesar gets compared to Alexander (indeed, even in his life-time), but he doesn't get compared to Philippos V, or even to Fabius Cunctator (which comparison, in any case, would make little sense). The comparison with Hannibal (whose presence loomed much larger in the Roman phyche) has been made, however.

So if we are to expect our own Caesar, and if we realise that Hitler looms much larger in the American mind than, say, Hirohito, then it's not unlikely that the "American Caesar" that is yet to come may end up being compared to Hitler. But I think that far more prominently, the comparison will be the one with Napoleon.

In a more general sense, the "escalation" of the world wars (unprecedented destruction, deliberate targeting of civilians, explicit policies of exterminating "undesirables") will later be seen as anticipating the events of the later 21st century. But then again, people will not miss the fact that this same escalation is also foreshadowed in the revolutionary terror in France, and in the levée en masse of the subsequent wars.

When you take a step backward, the "trend" of Modernity is obvious. And it's not the enlightened, progressive direction that short-sighted presentists imagine it to be in their typical masturbatory self-congratulation. The dominant trend of Modernity is that of mass movements, mass production, mass warfare... and mass murder. That's the red thread, which future historians will certainly discern.
 

Bacle

When the effort is no longer profitable...
Founder
I think that it is fair to say human society and tech accelerated like never before in the 20th century, and that acting like people will be as in the dark on the minutia of life as we are for previous societies is underestimating data backup in the cloud and how it will be retained in the long run.

Short of a all out nuclear war or massive CME blowing out the entire Earth's electrical grid and orbital infrastructure, the electronic records will persist, and be accessible in detail to future scholars. This means the amount of interpretation of artifacts and myths vs access to existing and maintained records/evidence ratio will favor the latter, not the former as it has for most of our current knowledge of history.
 

Aaron Fox

Well-known member
I think that it is fair to say human society and tech accelerated like never before in the 20th century, and that acting like people will be as in the dark on the minutia of life as we are for previous societies is underestimating data backup in the cloud and how it will be retained in the long run.

Short of a all out nuclear war or massive CME blowing out the entire Earth's electrical grid and orbital infrastructure, the electronic records will persist, and be accessible in detail to future scholars. This means the amount of interpretation of artifacts and myths vs access to existing and maintained records/evidence ratio will favor the latter, not the former as it has for most of our current knowledge of history.
That assumes that memetic ordinance doesn't taint the entire lot... going back to square one, as it were.
 

Zyobot

Just a time-traveling robot stranded on Earth.
I think that it is fair to say human society and tech accelerated like never before in the 20th century, and that acting like people will be as in the dark on the minutia of life as we are for previous societies is underestimating data backup in the cloud and how it will be retained in the long run.

Short of a all out nuclear war or massive CME blowing out the entire Earth's electrical grid and orbital infrastructure, the electronic records will persist, and be accessible in detail to future scholars. This means the amount of interpretation of artifacts and myths vs access to existing and maintained records/evidence ratio will favor the latter, not the former as it has for most of our current knowledge of history.

Not an expert on computer tech, but I don't suppose data corruption could be a problem for future archaeologists trying to "reconstruct" their findings?

Conversely, I can imagine universal literacy (at least, in First World countries) allowing common people to jot down their thoughts in diaries and such will lend more insight into how the people of 1960 thought and operated. (We don't have that luxury for the average ancient Roman or Greek, because given both rock-bottom literacy rates and the loss of so many records that still were produced, I don't think you're likely to find a series of letters that Iosephus Average wrote to his wife while away on business.)
 

Skallagrim

Well-known member
acting like people will be as in the dark on the minutia of life as we are for previous societies is underestimating data backup in the cloud and how it will be retained in the long run.

Short of a all out nuclear war or massive CME blowing out the entire Earth's electrical grid and orbital infrastructure, the electronic records will persist, and be accessible in detail to future scholars.
Not an expert on computer tech, but I don't suppose data corruption could be a problem for future archaeologists trying to "reconstruct" their findings?
Digital records are ludicrously vulnerable and poorly-adapted to preservation. Backwards compatibility is a problem for computers across the span of decades (and sometimes mere years). Apply that to a time-scale of centuries, and you may safely assume that anything not jotted down physically will be completely lost.

That's not even going into deliberate attempts at destruction. The "cloud" is a nightmarish concept, and a gaping security leak. It's a matter of time before it goes completely wrong, and anything non-local is somehow infected, corrupted or otherwise lost. As for local storage... no matter what drives or disks you use... they rot. Odds are that after a few years, the data is forever corrupted.

Another thing -- I know you envision the conflicts of the future to involve large-scale engagements of a more "familiar" sort, @Zyobot, but if you ask me, you should expect escalation in fields such as cyber-warfare. To the point that within a century, I expect Commander Adama-like attitudes of "no networked computers ever!" to become predominant. In any event, I have no hope at all of much -- or perhaps any -- of the digital record of mankind to survive the conflicts of the next century.

So as far as that goes, my view is that "digitalisation" will actually end up creating a gaping hole in the historical record.

That being said---

Conversely, I can imagine universal literacy (at least, in First World countries) allowing common people to jot down their thoughts in diaries and such will lend more insight into how the people of 1960 thought and operated. (We don't have that luxury for the average ancient Roman or Greek, because given both rock-bottom literacy rates and the loss of so many records that still were produced, I don't think you're likely to find a series of letters that Iosephus Average wrote to his wife while away on business.)
---we do have a lot of books. A lot of writing. Much of that will be preserved. Although I must stress that much of Modernity's "output" probably won't be regarded as worth preserving, afterwards. So it'll end up getting pulped anyway.

So all in all, I think that historians in the further future will not regard so-called Modernity as a period from which particularly much has been preserved. Perhaps not particularly little, either, of course. Just the average amount. But what is left will probably be considered pretty silly, boring, self-absorbed and un-inspired tripe. (Some exceptions notwithstanding.)
 
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Bassoe

Well-known member
While you might be right, you ARE leaving out a historical technological/exploration achievement that WILL be remembered from the period of the Cold War: The manned moon missions.

These will be remembered for one of two reasons: either they represent the first true steps of humanity off the planet and colonizing other planets and beyond, and thus have the cultural impact and importance similar to the Columbus expedition, OR they represent the high water mark of America's technological and cultural efforts that no other power managed to match or exceed due to decline and collapse.
Taking the long view, the manned moon missions will not have an impact similar to the Columbus expeditions. The Columbus expeditions were notable for starting the exchange of culture and goods across continents and enabling European settlement of the Americas within a relatively short time after.

The moon missions did not do that. Rather, the moon missions would be remembered similarly to the Phoenician circumnavigation of Africa, sponsored by the pharaoh Necho II, in the early sixth century BC. Very impressive achievements - just like the moon missions - no doubt, especally for the time. Even Herodotos remarked on the wonder of the circumnavigation centuries after the fact in his Histories. But this voyage did not result in anything resembling the Columbian exchange or the settlement of the Americas. This would have to wait for voyages centuries later. Not just by Columbus, but also for example Da Gama's voyage to India via the Cape of Good Hope.

When humanity finally reaches the point where true large-scale human exploration and settlement of space is possible, it will be one of these voyages that has the same cultural impact of the Columbian expeditions to them.
I imagine the Apollo Landings going down more like Zheng He's Treasure Fleet expedition than anything else. Legitimately an incredible accomplishment and if Ming Dynasty China/America hadn't given up and destroyed their prototypes, their nations would've greatly benefited.

However, the leadership of the Ming Dynasty* status quo didn't benefit from exploration. They had a total monopoly on China, but not on foreigners, contact would've created competition and/or allowed plebeians to escape their rule. Didn't work out in the long run since said foreigners didn't cripple their own advancement while China did, so China got curbstomped and forcibly opened to exploitative trade deals anyway, but at the time, none of the Ming Dynasty higher-ups could've predicted that.

Compare the Apollo Program. Space colonization posed the same threats to the American status quo, so it got the same response.

Imagine for a moment that someone had built a self-sustaining space colony. It'd be immune to all the status quo's most common tricks. The obscene expense of launch costs vs local materials would mean whenever possible, it'd have to manufacture locally rather than importing, so boycotts and sanctions wouldn't work, likewise, importing scab labor would be more expensive than training the original colonists and their descendants as laborers and accepting whatever wages they demanded as what the market would bear since there was no cheaper alternative. Regime Change in favor of a more earthling-friendly vinchy regime? Possessing the technology and infrastructure for moving large masses around in space would be an essential prerequisite for building a space colony in the first place and the earthlings live at the bottom of a gravity well, or in other words, the space colony would have a MAD deterrent.
Danse Macabre by Stephen King said:
We were the children of the men and women who won what Duke Wayne used to call "the big one," and when the dust cleared, America was on top. We had replaced England as the colossus that stood astride the world. When the folks got together again to make me and millions of kids like me, London had been bombed almost flat, the sun was setting every twelve hours or so on the British Empire, and Russia had been bled nearly white in its war against the Nazis; during the siege of Stalingrad, Russian soldiers had been reduced to dining on their dead comrades. But not a single bomb had fallen on New York, and America had the lightest casualty rate of any major power involved in the war.

Further, we had a great history to draw upon (all short histories are great histories), particularly in matters of invention and innovation. Every grade-school teacher produced the same two words for the delectation of his/her students; two magic words glittering and glowing like a beautiful neon sign; two words of almost incredible power and grace; and these two words were: PIONEER SPIRIT. I and my fellow kids grew up secure in this knowledge of America's PIONEER SPIRIT—a knowledge that could be summed up in a litany of names learned by rote in the classroom. Eli Whitney. Samuel Morse. Alexander Graham Bell. Henry Ford. Robert Goddard. Wilbur and Orville Wright. Robert Oppenheimer. These men, ladies and gentlemen, all had one great thing in common. They were all Americans simply bursting with PIONEER SPIRIT. We were and always had been, in that pungent American phrase, fastest and bestest with the mostest.

And what a world stretched ahead! It was all outlined in the stories of Robert A. Heinlein, Lester del Rey, Alfred Bester, Stanley Weinbaum, and dozens of others! These dreams came in the last of the science fiction pulp magazines, which were shrinking and dying by that October in 1957 . . . but science fiction itself had never been in better shape. Space would be more than conquered, these writers told us; it would . . . it would be . . . why, it would be PIONEERED! Silver needles piercing the void, followed by flaming rockets lowering huge ships onto alien worlds, followed by hardy colonies full of men and women (American men and women, need one add) with PIONEER SPIRIT bursting from every pore. Mars would become our backyard, the new gold rush (or possibly the new rhodium rush) might well be in the asteroid belt . . . and ultimately, of course, the stars themselves would be ours—a glorious future awaited with tourists snapping Kodak prints of the six moons of Procyon IV and a Chevrolet JetCar assembly line on Sirius III. Earth itself would be transformed into a utopia that you could see on the cover of any '50s issue of Fantasy arid Science Fiction, Amazing Stories, Galaxy, or Astounding Stories.

A future filled with the PIONEER SPIRIT; even better, a future filled with the AMERICAN PIONEER SPIRIT. See, for example, the cover of the original Bantam paperback edition of Ray Bradbury's Martian Chronicles. In this artistic vision—a figment of the artist's imagination and not of Bradbury's; there is nothing so ethnocentric or downright silly in this classic melding of science fiction and fantasy—the landing space travelers look a great deal like gyrenes storming up the beach at Saipan or Tarawa. It's a rocket instead of an LST in the background, true, but their jut-jawed, automatic-brandishing commander might have stepped right out of a John Wayne movie: "Come on, you suckers, do you want to live forever? Where's your PIONEER SPIRIT?"

This was the cradle of elementary political theory and technological dreamwork in which I and a great many other war babies were rocked until that day in October, when the cradle was rudely upended and all of us fell out. For me, it was the end of the sweet dream . . . and the beginning of the nightmare.
Donald Trump Weaponized Retrofuturism to Create Marketable Fantasy by Andrew Burmon said:
The pomaded, uniformed, and gleeful mail man jet packing into the yard of a happy homemaker with a fist full of paper correspondence looks, depending on where and when you’re sitting, absurd. The image suggests a techno-determinist view of the future that sidesteps the idea of social change or turbulence with the reckless abandon and agility of a seasoned copywriter. And that’s the appeal of retrofuturism: the juxtaposition of cultural and demographic stasis with temporal and technological shift. The pages torn from Popular Mechanics in the fifties make their modern fans smile because they depict an intellectually ambitious task of predicting what will come next, being pursued in the most intellectually lazy way possible.
Retrofuturist imagery was at its most searched during the George W. Bush presidency, but there has been a rebound in Google queries of late after a major dip in the early 2010s. This imagery is now consumed with real pleasure and real irony. After all, the popularly accepted narrative is that America changed for good in the late sixties. These illustrations were outdated almost immediately.

But if hubris looks like a mail man in a jet pack, foresight could look like a hurriedly drawn suburban idyll.
Several weeks ago, the Public Religion Research Institute released the results of the 2016 American Values Survey, a standardized culture test filled out by 2,010 Americans representing national demographics. The subjects of the survey were divided on a number of issues, but none so severely as the vector of history. Some 51 percent of respondents believed life in America had changed for the worse since the 1950s; 48 percent believed the opposite. Those reactions broke down along racial and religious lines: Nearly three quarters of white evangelical Protestants claimed that life in America has gotten worse.
This response can only be understood when broken down into its constituent parts. The first claim being made is that America has changed. The second is that the change has been negative.

The acknowledgement that America has changed is important because many commentators and pundits have and will maintain that the social bloc that buoyed President-Elect Donald Trump to Victory is attempting to bend the timeline of progress back on itself. This is not the case. White evangelicals are not ignorant of technological or cultural shifts. They aren’t ignoring the process, just contesting the significance of the results.

Given that the purchasing power of blue-collar workers has largely gone up — pay hasn’t kept up with inflation, but the cost of consumer goods has fallen — the claim that life in America has gotten worse is clearly not a consumerist one. This means that life has gotten worse for white evangelicals in immaterial ways. It’s totally fair to point to skyrocketing education costs, unstable housing markets, and a widening income gap, but its also clear that the internal lives of a specific class of Americans have been diminished. America may or may not be in decline, but thinking has made it so even if history has not.
The present is two-dimensional — too narrow for much consideration. By temporal default humans spend a tremendous amount of time thinking about the future. Research shows that these thoughts can be siloed into two categories: expectations and fantasies. These manners of thinking work differently in that positive expectations, informed by reality, lead to hard work and successful performance. Positive fantasies, on the other hand, lead to lower effort and diminished performance. Polling numbers show that white evangelicals have had low expectations and Trump’s rhetoric — “Your dreams will come true” — is indicative of an openness to positive fantasies. Which brings us back to the imagined future, the one with the happy homemaker and the jetpack.

The picture is perhaps more plausible than it previously appeared. But what does it depict now? Perhaps retrofuturism isn’t about the humor of cultural stasis juxtaposed against technological progress. Perhaps it’s about cultural reversion on the other side of technological and social progress. These images — all these smiling, pomaded men and their indistinguishable wives — depict both the toys and the values that white, caucasian, and mostly male illustrators thought Americans would have. These values are uniformly capitalistic, consumerist, heteronormative, and bourgeois. The growth of the middle class at that period in history gave would-be futurists the sense that prosperity would create a puddle in the economic middle, a vernal pool out of which generations of nearly identical nuclear families could squirm.
The internet has spent half of its existence chuckling at these dull-nubbed Nostradami, but perhaps their failure to understand how external forces could affect culture was a product of an understanding that culture trumps technology. Maybe they understood that culture trumps everything.

The illustrators who gave us the futuristic images we repurposed as retrofuturism didn’t draw many Black people, Latinx people, Asian people, gay people, trans people, or prisoners. They had the confidence to believe that they would inherit America and that the others would exist on the other side of the pleasure dome walls. They had positive expectations with the same conviction their descendants now have negative fantasies.

In the wake of a tectonic political event, images of a whitewashed future can no longer be seen as illustrations of an abandoned fantasia. It was never abandoned. And it wasn’t retro after all.


The British Empire should've built a giant monument to the Ming Emperor responsible for the end of the Chinese Age Of Exploration for handing them the planet, just like in a couple centuries, the PRC should build one to Richard Nixon for essentially the same reason.
As long as we're reliant on rocketry to escape Earth's gravity well, space ventures will (essentially) be a bit like wind energy. That is: subsidized hobbyism, of interest to enthusiasts, a few government bureaus, and some quirky rich folks.
NERVA nuclear rockets or Project Orion had that solved since they were invented during the cold war and in the long run, wouldn't create much more radiation than all the test nukes the US and Russians were detonating essentially to show off. Space development being crippled by legalistic bullshit against using them isn't an argument against space development any more than earth-based infrastructure's crippling by greenlaw is against it.

* Actually, this applied equally to all of the imperial Chinese dynasties right up until they finally got wiped out and replaced by a non-dynastic form of totalitarianism.
 

Zyobot

Just a time-traveling robot stranded on Earth.
Another thing -- I know you envision the conflicts of the future to involve large-scale engagements of a more "familiar" sort, @Zyobot, but if you ask me, you should expect escalation in fields such as cyber-warfare. To the point that within a century, I expect Commander Adama-like attitudes of "no networked computers ever!" to become predominant. In any event, I have no hope at all of much -- or perhaps any -- of the digital record of mankind to survive the conflicts of the next century.

Oh, I'm not ruling out cyber-warfare at all, by the time the next great crisis period starts up.

Whether or not the cycle as you see it happens, I still expect Wall Street, tech companies, the grid, pretty much anything sufficiently "wired up" or designed to process and store lots of data to become critical targets. Just now, I've come across this frighteningly large list of "significant" cyberattacks from within the last year, so I definitely don't expect them to "ease up" if full-blown war breaks out between blood-lusted factions who hate each others' guts and will never compromise. That said, I really hope the next few decades bring about "countermeasures" that make hacking a thing of the past—or at least, extraordinarily difficult—though I guess we should also add EMP blasts to the list, too, given that completely taking out enemy electrical infrastructure is also more likely than not to happen, from time to time.
 

Cherico

Well-known member
I imagine the Apollo Landings going down more like Zheng He's Treasure Fleet expedition than anything else. Legitimately an incredible accomplishment and if Ming Dynasty China/America hadn't given up and destroyed their prototypes, their nations would've greatly benefited.

However, the leadership of the Ming Dynasty* status quo didn't benefit from exploration. They had a total monopoly on China, but not on foreigners, contact would've created competition and/or allowed plebeians to escape their rule. Didn't work out in the long run since said foreigners didn't cripple their own advancement while China did, so China got curbstomped and forcibly opened to exploitative trade deals anyway, but at the time, none of the Ming Dynasty higher-ups could've predicted that.

Compare the Apollo Program. Space colonization posed the same threats to the American status quo, so it got the same response.

Imagine for a moment that someone had built a self-sustaining space colony. It'd be immune to all the status quo's most common tricks. The obscene expense of launch costs vs local materials would mean whenever possible, it'd have to manufacture locally rather than importing, so boycotts and sanctions wouldn't work, likewise, importing scab labor would be more expensive than training the original colonists and their descendants as laborers and accepting whatever wages they demanded as what the market would bear since there was no cheaper alternative. Regime Change in favor of a more earthling-friendly vinchy regime? Possessing the technology and infrastructure for moving large masses around in space would be an essential prerequisite for building a space colony in the first place and the earthlings live at the bottom of a gravity well, or in other words, the space colony would have a MAD deterrent.




The British Empire should've built a giant monument to the Ming Emperor responsible for the end of the Chinese Age Of Exploration for handing them the planet, just like in a couple centuries, the PRC should build one to Richard Nixon for essentially the same reason.

NERVA nuclear rockets or Project Orion had that solved since they were invented during the cold war and in the long run, wouldn't create much more radiation than all the test nukes the US and Russians were detonating essentially to show off. Space development being crippled by legalistic bullshit against using them isn't an argument against space development any more than earth-based infrastructure's crippling by greenlaw is against it.

* Actually, this applied equally to all of the imperial Chinese dynasties right up until they finally got wiped out and replaced by a non-dynastic form of totalitarianism.

We have a lot in common with the Chinese now complete with asshole uniques fucking up all the things
 

Bassoe

Well-known member
We have a lot in common with the Chinese now complete with asshole unique fucking up all the things
While this forum loves comparing everything to Rome, Dynastic China arguably makes a better prediction model.
  • The status quo leadership deliberately sabotages the country's own technological and scientific progress because it's expensive and since they've got a monopoly on things the way they are, any change could alter that, while foreign barbarians who don't likewise limit themselves eventually outcompete them.
  • Massive governmental corruption.
  • Education system is weaponized, you can't rise in societal rank without extensive and massively expensive education which is also intended to brainwash students into supporting the status quo.
  • Barbarian foreigners take over the system, set up humiliation rituals for and ban symbols of the natives*.
  • Extensive use of eunuchs as bureaucrats and enforcers**.
  • Foreigners flood country with drugs to simultaneously weaken it and get rich. British Opium and Chinese Fentanyl.
  • The ruling classes succumb to bizarre cultish ideologies about how they should run society, eventually leading to their mismanagement causing failures of supply chains and famines.
Going with the parallel, either we're gonna get militarily defeated by foreigners who've adopted technologies we've refused for reasons of ideology and expense*** or have an Emperor Qin Shi Huang figure seize power after the status quo discredits themselves by causing a famine through equal parts slavish adherence to unworkable ideology and incompetence and buries all the ideologues alive.

*
qing-han-and-manchu.png

**
eunuchs-in-administrative-positions.png

***
china-want-their-mozarts.png
 

Skallagrim

Well-known member
Imagine for a moment that someone had built a self-sustaining space colony. It'd be immune to all the status quo's most common tricks. The obscene expense of launch costs vs local materials would mean whenever possible, it'd have to manufacture locally rather than importing, so boycotts and sanctions wouldn't work, likewise, importing scab labor would be more expensive than training the original colonists and their descendants as laborers and accepting whatever wages they demanded as what the market would bear since there was no cheaper alternative. Regime Change in favor of a more earthling-friendly vinchy regime? Possessing the technology and infrastructure for moving large masses around in space would be an essential prerequisite for building a space colony in the first place and the earthlings live at the bottom of a gravity well, or in other words, the space colony would have a MAD deterrent.
Sure we can imagine, but that doesn't make it real. It's not that your argument is without merit if we were actually capable of doing this, but we are not. In another thread you wrote this, which you frame as the "conclusion" to the points raised by an ideology being discussed, but which I assume is actually just your own view:

All of these problems have the same solution, we need more resources and a frontier to serve as a pressure release value for dissidents to establish whatever type of society they'd prefer. We have the technology, what we don't have is the money and that's primarily because our leaders know they couldn't accomplish their dream of ruling everyone if people escaped to self-sustaining space colonies and possessing engines capable of moving large masses around in space, had a MAD deterrence.

You outright state that we can supposedly build actual space colonies, but we don't have the money because our evil leaders are deliberately stopping us. Well, I agree they'd be that evil -- but they're hardly that competent. No, the truth is: we aren't remotely close to being able to build space colonies, or in fact doing anything half-way profitable in space.

I'll re-iterate my earlier points about this:

1) Even if we can get automated mining probes built, launching them and jetting them over there, and then sending useful stuff back (and somehow landing that safely) is still going to be prohibitively costly. (And forget about self-replicating machines. That's cool, but also something we're not even close to, yet.) For a very long time, exploiting resources on Earth is just going to be cheaper and easier, which means that's what'll happen.

2) We'll see colonisation -- real, actual, people-live-there colonisation -- of Antarctica and the bottom of the ocean, before we see meaningful space colonisation. Once you have already built a domed city with a few hundred thousand untrained civilians living in it right at the South Pole, and that's stable and safe over longer periods... then, you can really work on a space colony. Not before. Not if you want it to work.

So, really, I challenge those who say space colonisation is so very feasible: build us a domed city at the South Pole. Have, say, half a million civilians live there for, say, five generations or so... without cataclysmic failures leading to mass death. Also, since you explicitly advocate space colonisation as the way to escape oppressive government, you're obviously prohobited from using anything even resembling authoritarian methods to keep things going smoothly, or your results will be invalid. Good luck. Until this "proof of concept" has been delivered, I'll maintain that the time for space colonies has not yet come. And in the meantime, I'll periodically think back to the failure of Biosphere 2, and heed it as a warning against the hubris of people who think they can just colonise the most hostile environment in existence. We can't even manage a closed ecosystem here on Earth!


NERVA nuclear rockets or Project Orion had that solved since they were invented during the cold war and in the long run, wouldn't create much more radiation than all the test nukes the US and Russians were detonating essentially to show off. Space development being crippled by legalistic bullshit against using them isn't an argument against space development any more than earth-based infrastructure's crippling by greenlaw is against it.
I'm all for nuclear rockets. Of course, the comparison with nuclear tests is revealing. Isn't there a test ban treaty or something...? Isn't there a reason for that...? Hmmmm. My point being: nobody is going to let you do this. Nuclear propulsion in space, sure, and that's awesome. But for surface-to-orbit launch, you will not be permitted to use nuclear detonations. Even if at some point, some government is willing to allow it... that scheme is one failure away from termination. All it takes is one Columbia disaster, and it'll be like the Hindenburg turning into a fireball, or the Concorde ploughing into a high-rise building. Except worse. Much, much worse. Which means the end of the nuclear rocket, and far more definitively than the end of the Zeppelin or the end of the hypersonic passenger plane. (And we don't see a lot of those, right now.)

So that's a no. Surface-to-orbit is the big hurdle, and if shortcuts were as easy as you think they are, we'd be taking them. Keep working on it. My estimation: we won't see meaningful space colonisation until science and tech develop enough to allow us to build a space elevator. (It helps that if you're savvy enough to do that, you can probably also build a decently safe space colony.)


While this forum loves comparing everything to Rome, Dynastic China arguably makes a better prediction model.
  • The status quo leadership deliberately sabotages the country's own technological and scientific progress because it's expensive and since they've got a monopoly on things the way they are, any change could alter that, while foreign barbarians who don't likewise limit themselves eventually outcompete them.
  • Massive governmental corruption.
  • Education system is weaponized, you can't rise in societal rank without extensive and massively expensive education which is also intended to brainwash students into supporting the status quo.
  • Barbarian foreigners take over the system, set up humiliation rituals for and ban symbols of the natives*.
  • Extensive use of eunuchs as bureaucrats and enforcers**.
  • Foreigners flood country with drugs to simultaneously weaken it and get rich. British Opium and Chinese Fentanyl.
  • The ruling classes succumb to bizarre cultish ideologies about how they should run society, eventually leading to their mismanagement causing failures of supply chains and famines.
Going with the parallel, either we're gonna get militarily defeated by foreigners who've adopted technologies we've refused for reasons of ideology and expense*** or have an Emperor Qin Shi Huang figure seize power after the status quo discredits themselves by causing a famine through equal parts slavish adherence to unworkable ideology and incompetence and buries all the ideologues alive.
I can't speak for others, but I'd like to point out that the historical comparisons I tend to make are not limited to Rome. Because my whole point is that civilisational cycles keep recurring, regardless of the "window dressing". In fact, I did that in post #20 of this very thread, where I wrote:

"(...) in this case we talk of the Classical and the Christian/Western cultures, but of course you and I have talked at length of many others, such as China, Egypt and Mesopotamia. The same patterns of development recur again and again. The same causality shapes all of them, and sets them on remarkably similar trajectories."

Anyway, I have to point out that you're pretty randomly listing characteristics you associate with China, with little regard for the fact that many things you mention were only relevant in certain periods, over a history spanning thousands of years. The key question is: what happens in what stage of a culture's developmental cycle?

I'd say you're not far off the mark here:

(...) an Emperor Qin Shi Huang figure seize power after the status quo discredits themselves by causing a famine through equal parts slavish adherence to unworkable ideology and incompetence and buries all the ideologues alive.

I compared Modernity in the Western world to the Hellenistic period in the Classical world, but it's just as accurate to compare it to the Warring States period in China, or the Second Intermediate Period in Egypt, or the chaotic period following the Late Bronze Age collapse in Mesopotamia. So whether you want to imagine the future tyrant as Caesar, Qin Shi Huangdi, Hatshepsut or Ashurnasirpal II... that barely matters. In a world-historical sense, you're talking about the same figure. The one who seizes power and brings ruthless order after several centuries of chaos, confusion and division.

And yes, such a tyrant is typically too harsh, too unyielding, to be tolerated for an extended period. Most often, you'll see this person killed or deposed, to be supplanted (optionally after a final civil war) by a more constructive leader, who establishes the universal empire, the early phase of which will forevermore be viewed as the "golden age" of that culture. Augustus inaugurating the Principate. Gaozu founding the Western Han. Thutmosis III organising the New Kingdom. Shalmaneser III consolidating the Neo-Assyrian Empire.

We've had our "Alexander" (who initiates the age of chaos) in the form of Napoleon. You may expect our version of the last great Despot by the end of this century, and our version of the First Emperor at the start of next century.

Ultima Cumaei venit iam carminis aetas;
Magnus ab integro saeclorum nascitur ordo.
Iam redit et Virgo, redeunt Saturnia regna,
iam nova progenies caelo demittitur alto.
 
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Bassoe

Well-known member
The big difference is technology and therefore:
  • Our weapons are better, a great power war and/or civil war could kill everyone or at least, enough people to collapse civilization.
  • The oil and rare earth ores essential for building technological infrastructure which can be extracted without preexisting technological infrastructure are all mined out, if we collapse now, we won't be able to rebuild. This is our one chance to beat the fermi paradox and our leaders are squandering it.
  • Some of the deranged ideologies our leadership is succumbing to can theoretically work. A ruler causing a famine by micromanaging agriculture while knowing nothing about it is destructive sure, but a problem which eventually ends when nearly everyone dies and the survivors start civilization over, or the ruler dies and is replaced by someone less insane. A ruler with hypothetically plausible future technologies like killing off potentially rebellious human laborers in favor of automation, building police states comprised of mindlessly loyal robocops that'll never revolt regardless of what atrocities they're ordered to commit, creating transhumans with built-in override mechanisms, etc, is worse because it can last.
We are not Rome, and the idea of continuing to look to Rome and try to figure out the future in a 'cycles of time' fashion is mostly conservative cope. It give them the wrong ideas about how to handle things, while also not realizing the civilizational cycles have sped up since the time of Rome, and limits the thinking of the Right when they fall back on this theory.

The elites have control of the nukes codes, they have control of the logistics chain, the water and power, the comms/internet infrastructure, and the orbitals. The people trying to destroy humanity want to replace us with what amounts to immortal Borg corp/political overlords, where the human body is seen as but a chrysalis for an uploaded intelligence that treats bodies as cars, at the cost of killing off most of the population and limiting human population to 500 mil while using biomedical control that acts like ketracel white from DS9, where life itself, not matter how seemingly immortal even in an uploaded state becomes a subscription subject to gov and corp control down to the cellular level.

You need to be looking at shit like 1984, Rainbow Six, and Ghost in the Shell to get what we are likely looking at; Casear cannot help us here.
 

Sailor.X

Cold War Veteran
Founder
Well I think the best way to view it is ironically through the lifetime of my father; I will explain. My Father was born in 1908 in what was then the unicorporated settlement of Santee. At the time of his birth one of the main roads that connected Columbia South Carolina with Charleston SC was a Dirt Road. My father grew up riding Horses and using wagons as the main form of transportation. Airplanes were still a rare novelty at best. The Titanic sinking was still a new thing. World War I was the big war during his childhood. By the time he turned 18 in 1926 big things were gonna happen. The seeds or the Great Depression were about to manifest and all hell was going to break loose. He would see all the major civil engineering projects that would transform not only South Carolina but the US in general. He would see the massive and rapid advancements in technology that would define the century. He went from using a Horse and Buggy to driving a Model T Ford in less than 5 years.

He would be part of the war effort growing the food that fed the troops fighting in Europe and the Pacific. He would in his 50s finally get his High School Diploma and become one of the first non white Forest Rangers for the State of SC. He would participate in the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s and would see a Man walk on the moon. By the time I was born in the 70s to his second wife (my mother) He was living in what could be called the tomorrow land as seen at the time of his birth. By they year of his death in 1985. Home Computers, Video Games, The Space Shuttle and all the things we take for granted were established. He was a man that grew up the way many in my family had done for 3 centuries. Yet all the massive change happened in his lifetime. Kind of gives you perspective when you think about it. Just imagine what changes can and will happen in your lifetime.
 
Ultimately no one can predict the future but the fact that our wisemen and elders (meaning the few from WWII that still live and those that went through the cold war) fear the collapse of western civilization as we know it followed by balkanization is concerning. If That happens I can't help but think that future generations will look back at the 20th century with the same mythical awe that we do Ancient Rome, Ancient Egypt, and even Atlantis. I can almost hear the elders telling the stories over the long tables now.

the 20th century was the beginning of the end. Cultural cohesion and technological advancement were still strong but political subversion (IE communism/Socialism) started to take root. Throughout the decades' culture began to fade, the people began to fracture and the rulers opened the gates to allow invaders in to so the rulers could amass more powers and riches for themselves. by the end of the century and the beginning of the new, The people's sense of identity faded completely and their minds became weak. cultural identities and strong-minded people now had given away to mindless consumerism, mindless hedonism, and a feeling of blindness. People formed groups of degeneracy, mutilated their bodies beyond repair, and other unnatural things in a vein attempt to regain the sense of identity their forefathers had, and on top of all that, they took and threw away more than they created and kept.

First to collapse was the heart (the culture), then the mind (mental and emotional discipline, as well as knowledge and wisdom), and then finally the body. (the western societies themselves)


I hope I'm wrong about this, but I'm really afraid that's how things will go down and be remembered. I know the west has survived bigger storms throughout history, but the biggest storm is not always the perfect storm.
 
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Jormungandr

The Midgard Wyrm
Founder
That, despite its bloody and turbulent beginnings, it held so much promise by the end of it... only for the 21st Century to basically piss on all of that promise.

If the current insanity is setting a trend for the next one hundred years, global Idiocracy will be the least damaging option.
 

Robovski

Well-known member
I am old enough to remember living in a US that was not formally at war, you didn't need to pass through a metal detector to enter a Federal building, and schools were not univerally surrounded by fences. The nation has decayed in many ways but most especially we have lost trust and trust is hard to regain.
 

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