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 Unit1126PLL wrote:

 Shadow Captain Edithae wrote:

 Unit1126PLL wrote:
At the risk of going OT, I do question that wisdom.

War has changed radically.

Unless we're all just angry men with cowhide armour trying to storm a wooden palisade by building a dirt ramp up to it.

I see you missed the reference?

No no I know it's fallout.

I just think fallout is silly for saying so. Being a popular game series does not allow one to abandon logic in pursuit of pithy silliness.

I think your mistake is interpreting it literally.

The theme of Fallout is about the human emotions and vices that lead to War. Greed. Envy. Hatred. Prejudice. Jingoism. Nationalism. Religious Fundamentalism. Its a dark, dystopian analysis of the human psyche.

And as such, the term "War never changes" refers not to the technology and weapons used to wage war, but the motivations behind why humanity wages war.

Hm, let me see if I can put in my two cents on this.

50 years isn't a long time, really. So I can't imagine many big changes that would be startling to us here and now.

America's fight on net neutrality will be over marking the end of the Information Age. Citing security reasons, the government will leave it to companies to have the internet regulated with paywalls/packages much in the same way cable providers offer them. News and information will have started to be regulated to the paying demographic.
This will not stop places like libraries, and places of education, from still being a resource of info, knowledge, and news for those in lower paywall demographics.

College education will continue to suffer from problems of rising cost and job placement. Trade schools will see a rise of attendance for people unable to afford the debt that college inflicts.

Tech will continue to progress and offer means for people to be connected, and distracted.

 Shadow Captain Edithae wrote:

 Unit1126PLL wrote:

 Shadow Captain Edithae wrote:

 Unit1126PLL wrote:
At the risk of going OT, I do question that wisdom.

War has changed radically.

Unless we're all just angry men with cowhide armour trying to storm a wooden palisade by building a dirt ramp up to it.

I see you missed the reference?

No no I know it's fallout.

I just think fallout is silly for saying so. Being a popular game series does not allow one to abandon logic in pursuit of pithy silliness.

I think your mistake is interpreting it literally.

The theme of Fallout is about the human emotions and vices that lead to War. Greed. Envy. Hatred. Prejudice. Jingoism. Nationalism. Religious Fundamentalism. Its a dark, dystopian analysis of the human psyche.

And as such, the term "War never changes" refers not to the technology and weapons used to wage war, but the motivations behind why humanity wages war.

But wouldn't that just be "humans never change?" Equating something with its motivations is a linguistic stretch. That's what bothers me. It's like saying that "Coke never changes" because humans have always wanted something to drink.

 Cream Tea wrote:
I could definitely see a collapse, the world of today shares more than a few similarities with the late Bronze Age Mediterranean before the Bronze Age collapse, and with the late Roman Empire before its fall. A big difference is that today, the whole world is interconnected and interdependent, while back then, there were several civilisation clusters in the world, so that the Mediterranean could collapse while East Asia or Mesoamerica didn't. It could also go along as usual, with technology rapidly improving (and accelerating) like it has since the Industrial Revolution.

 NenkotaMoon wrote:
Don't care enough really.

Enough to comment, apparently?

No, just that I can post in here.

Whoa, 2edgy4me.

 NenkotaMoon wrote:

No, just that I can post in here.

Words are like the notes in jazz; the only ones that matter are the ones you could have used but didn't.

My prediction is that the global organizations, like the EU and UN, will actually become irrelevant. Even now, the EU is fracturing. Give it another 50 years or so and I think most of the members will have realized that it was a huge mistake. And heck, the UN is basically irrelevant as it is right now. They have no real power to enforce any legislation without the consent of the involved parties, and the Veto bearing members are usually at odds with each other so nothing meaningful can get passed anyway.

You'll see more fracturing of global politics, not more consolidation.

 Unit1126PLL wrote:
No no I know it's fallout.

I just think fallout is silly for saying so. Being a popular game series does not allow one to abandon logic in pursuit of pithy silliness.

The quote has been stripped of its original context in subsequent games. This is from the first game;

"War. War never changes. The Romans waged war to gather slaves and wealth. Spain built an empire from its lust for gold and territory. Hitler shaped a battered Germany into an economic superpower. But war never changes. In the 21st century, war was still waged over the resources that could be acquired. Only this time, the spoils of war were also its weapons: Petroleum and Uranium."

It goes on from there. It's saying that wars are always over resources. I don't agree with the actual, FWIW, but it was internally consistent. I agree the quote makes little sense in later games, because it was just given as a single line, often used to intro war terms of total planetary destruction, which is the exact opposite of war never changing.

I see two likely possibilities:

1) An increase in population, pollution, and limited resources causes a small renaissance of technological advancement. I think we may be seeing a bit of it now with space exploration taking off again a bit, electric cars that are economical, and the internet becoming close to ubiquitous due to the smart phones being more or less available world wide. Not sure if 50 years is enough time where we may be living on Mars or the Moon in any significant numbers but I think we would be on the cusp of that. I think that material sciences may also be primed for some interesting advancements in the next 50 years.

2) One of the existing rogue states with nuclear weapons, or one that develops or steals them in the near future basically starts WWIII. This could easily escalate wildly out of control and will end with a horrific death toll, to be honest it is a minor miracle something like this has not already happened considering how many times the USSR and the United States came close to nuclear war, often times only avoiding it through what can be generously considered dumb luck. I think once enough countries/groups have nuclear weapons the worlds dumb luck runs out eventually.

While I realize I started with the World, it might be good to give some specific thoughts to America in 2017 (though many will apply to all of the rich world).

1. You probably never heard of it - The Balkanization of culture will continue and grow with no one watching the same shows, listening to the same music or reading the same books. The idea of a common culture even with touchstones like Shakespeare, Mark Twain or I Love Lucy is already being lost and may vanish entirely. We live in a world where every TV show, book, movie, song ever made are available always at any time so there's no reason to be exposed to stuff outside your bubble, because everyone's bubble is big and getting bigger. I spend way too much time on GW stuff and I cannot claim to have read every rule book from the last few years, much less every novel, audiobook, etc, etc. I can't even keep up with my own bubble, where is the time for a common culture or getting into someone else's bubble?

2. Fake News - now extend that to news and history and it gets scary. Why are we suddenly re-litigating the Civil War? Why is the status of George Washington or Christopher Columbus in question? Because we're retreating into our own news/history/culture bubbles but, unlike what music you listen to, our understanding of history and the present has real impacts in law, economics and voting. And if there's no common understanding of those then how do you make policy? Which brings me to...

3. Disunited States - With no common culture or history (or religion or language) the question becomes why are we hanging out together? I don't think anyone would be shocked to hear a prediction that Puerto Rico or Guam will eventually go their own way (though PR voted this year in favor of statehood). What if I threw Alaska, Hawaii, California, Texas or even the old South into that mix? I won't draw a map, but I will predict that in 2067 the United States will be smaller and there will be several splinter states.

Assuming the Federal Government allows it. As for Fake News, it ought to be shouted down as what it is whenever it shows its ugly face. Lies. Falsehoods. Propaganda.
And while I'm not very familiar with the history or status of George Washington or aware of a reinterpretation of his role, Cristopher Columbus' reinterpretation I can see some logic to it.
But then, we in Europe never had the reverence for him that the USA seems to.

The world will be one of renewable energy and electric powered vehicles by 2067... while we have to build seawalls around all of our coastal cities due to the effects of global warming. Basically, I forsee humanity adopting clean energy far too late to have prevented global climate change. At that point the debate over global climate change won't be over it's existence but how best to mitigate it. I also forsee the migrant crisis in Europe to get much, much, much worse as droughts worsen in Africa. China might even start seeing folks trying to get in. By then the EU will also fracture and we may even see another European war.

Unless we reform the election process the US will likely see another civil war. Probably a very brief one but some stats *Cough* California *Cough* will attempt secession. That or some states may break off from the mega-cities in them due to the conservative/liberal divide. I do think the US will have "City-states" in the future. Also, due to mega hurricanes annually wiping entire communities off the map the US government might start slowly evacuating much of the American south east. That, or we start building stuff there to be extremely hardy.

Also, World of Warcraft will announce it's new expansion: World of Warcraft: Return to Pandaria (Again) (again)

In 2067, the Millenials and Echo-boomers and Generation Y will all be calling the Gnereation behind them lazy and the reason no one can have nice things!

 TheCustomLime wrote:
The world will be one of renewable energy and electric powered vehicles by 2067... while we have to build seawalls around all of our coastal cities due to the effects of global warming. Basically, I forsee humanity adopting clean energy far too late to have prevented global climate change. At that point the debate over global climate change won't be over it's existence but how best to mitigate it.

Honestly, what I've seen of the discussion within the scientific community is already over how to mitigate it. The scientists at my school are working with/on models that slow down warming, rather than reverse it, because the consensus is that it is already too late to reverse the process.


Now, whether 50 years from now means the common lay-person congress-critter (lay-person as in, non-scientific background) is having this same debate as it going on today??? Well, judging by what evidence we have from some sectors of the governmental halls, I doubt it.

I'll take a crack...


Nations will cease to exist in any meaningful way, either via becoming irrelevant or becoming radioactive.

Post Human beings will be created.

The human population on Earth will decrease, for one reason or another.

Bran Dawri wrote:
Assuming the Federal Government allows it. As for Fake News, it ought to be shouted down as what it is whenever it shows its ugly face. Lies. Falsehoods. Propaganda.
And while I'm not very familiar with the history or status of George Washington or aware of a reinterpretation of his role, Cristopher Columbus' reinterpretation I can see some logic to it.
But then, we in Europe never had the reverence for him that the USA seems to.

See, as an American, I don't really see that we revere Columbus much at all. He's certainly not anywhere close to revered as the Founding Fathers or any other number of important figures. We just have a holiday named after him. I've never met anybody who really holds him up as some pillar of our society. He just discovered the continent and as far as I can tell he's given due credit.

Discovering a new continent and basically changing the course of western civilization seems at least worth one day off work each year. Regardless of how you feel about the rest of what he did.

I really don't get why people are all offended over Columbus Day. Sure, he was pretty cruel to the natives. So were tons of other (in)famous conquistadors. It's just part of the history.

I remember a friend commenting on the film Children of Men, saying one of the most amazing things about that film is that the world is ending, but it barely changes how anyone behaves because here in the real world we already act like the world is going to end.

It was an interesting point that I never fully believed. This thread has helped me understand that point, understand the movie, and maybe also understand a lot about why people do what they do.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Grey Templar wrote:
See, as an American, I don't really see that we revere Columbus much at all. He's certainly not anywhere close to revered as the Founding Fathers or any other number of important figures. We just have a holiday named after him. I've never met anybody who really holds him up as some pillar of our society. He just discovered the continent and as far as I can tell he's given due credit.

Discovering a new continent and basically changing the course of western civilization seems at least worth one day off work each year. Regardless of how you feel about the rest of what he did.

He landed in the Bahamas. He later went to Puerto Rico, and while he did reach the coast of Central America. But it's kind of debatable what he discovered, because he certainly had no idea. He always believed where he'd landed was part of Asia, and not a new continent. So despite his amazing good fortune of bumping in to a new continent while on a fool's errand, he doubled down on his stupidity and insisting on being wrong until his death.

Nor was he the first to reach the new world. He just happened to do it at a time when Europe was ready to follow his journey with a massive expansion of trade.

I really don't get why people are all offended over Columbus Day. Sure, he was pretty cruel to the natives. So were tons of other (in)famous conquistadors. It's just part of the history.

He was unacceptably brutal even by the standards of the time, and that's saying something. He was removed by Spain from his role as governor, and an investigation in to his brutality was undertaken. They found Columbus routinely mutilated people, cutting off ears and tongues for the slightest of offences. Because of his connections and the fact he'd made the crown very rich his prison sentence was ended and he was funded to go exploring again, but he was never given another governorship.

So yeah, Columbus, staggering idiot and a brutal monster. Who never reached mainland USA, and never even knew what he'd actually found. I'm not offended by Columbus Day, but you guys have hundreds of amazing people who did amazing things, who never cut out a single human's tongue and actually knew what continent they were on, so it does seem a strange choice for a person to celebrate.

 Grey Templar wrote:

Bran Dawri wrote:
Assuming the Federal Government allows it. As for Fake News, it ought to be shouted down as what it is whenever it shows its ugly face. Lies. Falsehoods. Propaganda.
And while I'm not very familiar with the history or status of George Washington or aware of a reinterpretation of his role, Cristopher Columbus' reinterpretation I can see some logic to it.
But then, we in Europe never had the reverence for him that the USA seems to.

See, as an American, I don't really see that we revere Columbus much at all. He's certainly not anywhere close to revered as the Founding Fathers or any other number of important figures. We just have a holiday named after him. I've never met anybody who really holds him up as some pillar of our society. He just discovered the continent and as far as I can tell he's given due credit.

Discovering a new continent and basically changing the course of western civilization seems at least worth one day off work each year. Regardless of how you feel about the rest of what he did.

I really don't get why people are all offended over Columbus Day. Sure, he was pretty cruel to the natives. So were tons of other (in)famous conquistadors. It's just part of the history.

Probably has to do with how, some of us of a certain age "learned" about the "great explorer" from around 1st grade through 7th or 8th grade, if not on into high school. . . It wasn't until University courses that I had an honest class about him (mind you, I'd read some actual history books that involved him/his actions prior to, so no big surprises)

I don't think that its so much that we hero worship Columbus. .. .but the education system definitely holds him in a VERY rose-tinted light.

Human cybernetics. Eye implants that all normal vision from semi- and full blindness. Eye implants that allow a soldier to see in 50x magnification, IR spectrum, and with HUD to determine friendlies from not-friendlies without a visor or helmet.

well the mathetician giant Isaac Newton spent most of his time on the end of the world and it is supposed to be in that very decade by his calculations.

interesting.

As a Farmer I an told by the industry that the world will have a population of about 10 to 11 billion by then.

As a person that understands basic math and history I think the industry is way way off.

1800 1 Billion people
1900 2 billion
1975+ 4 billion
2010+ 7 billion

So lets see...almost a doubling in 100 years then 75 years, then 40 years....

Yea....I think more like 15 billion during those future dates and there is no way we can feed that many even if GMO's triple our food supply. Sorry 3rd worlders...you need to stop the breeding us into extinction.

Is it the 3rd world eating us out of house and homeworld?
By all accounts in the news, it is Western meat-eaters taking up lots of the land for animal feed, and leaving little for actual food.

As for 2067:
People will see little need to travel as much, as remote access to most information and experiences will bring everything to them.
Less travel makes tourism less desirable, and places that rely on it will suffer. Some countries rely on it, and will have to turn to other ways to exist.

 Skinnereal wrote:
Is it the 3rd world eating us out of house and homeworld?
By all accounts in the news, it is Western meat-eaters taking up lots of the land for animal feed, and leaving little for actual food.

Wait is it only westerners who eat meat?

I always got meat in my Chinese and Indian and Thai and Russian food... am I doing it wrong?

The proven way to get birth rates down is:

Get rich and stop substence farming.
Allow women to control their fertility.
Reduce infant mortality.

 Kilkrazy wrote:
The proven way to get birth rates down is:

Get rich and stop substence farming.
Allow women to control their fertility.
Reduce infant mortality.

Actually, subsistence farmers don't have all that staggering birthrates (higher than post-industrial societies, but nothing shocking). After all, on a small farm a few children are enough to do all the work, and any extra child is simply an extra mouth to feed. Agricultural societies tend to have very stable populations with little growth. The really high birthrates are mostly found in industrial societies, where every child can earn money by working, and thus the more children you have the more income you get. Just look at historic population graphs to see the huge population booms in different places in the world coinciding with the increasing importance of industry there. And unfortunately enough, the only way to get rich and develop a post-industrial society with low birth rates are by going through that industrial phase and its huge population boom. So getting rich actually leads to more people, not less.

 Unit1126PLL wrote:

 Skinnereal wrote:
Is it the 3rd world eating us out of house and homeworld?
By all accounts in the news, it is Western meat-eaters taking up lots of the land for animal feed, and leaving little for actual food.

Wait is it only westerners who eat meat?

I always got meat in my Chinese and Indian and Thai and Russian food... am I doing it wrong?

I think the media has a thing about the amount of meat eaten in the Western World. The articles I remember reading imply that 'Easterners' eat less meat, using less farmland to produce it.

 Skinnereal wrote:

 Unit1126PLL wrote:

 Skinnereal wrote:
Is it the 3rd world eating us out of house and homeworld?
By all accounts in the news, it is Western meat-eaters taking up lots of the land for animal feed, and leaving little for actual food.

Wait is it only westerners who eat meat?

I always got meat in my Chinese and Indian and Thai and Russian food... am I doing it wrong?

I think the media has a thing about the amount of meat eaten in the Western World. The articles I remember reading imply that 'Easterners' eat less meat, using less farmland to produce it.

Oh, if the media says it, it must be true. Carry on.

Yeah. I don't have stats to prove any of it.
Too lazy to look, too.

 Unit1126PLL wrote:

 Skinnereal wrote:

 Unit1126PLL wrote:

 Skinnereal wrote:
Is it the 3rd world eating us out of house and homeworld?
By all accounts in the news, it is Western meat-eaters taking up lots of the land for animal feed, and leaving little for actual food.

Wait is it only westerners who eat meat?

I always got meat in my Chinese and Indian and Thai and Russian food... am I doing it wrong?

I think the media has a thing about the amount of meat eaten in the Western World. The articles I remember reading imply that 'Easterners' eat less meat, using less farmland to produce it.

Oh, if the media says it, it must be true. Carry on.

The real issue is just how much food we waste.

Here's some stats on meat consumption for everyone's review.

https://data.oecd.org/agroutput/meat-consumption.htm

"Meat demand is associated with higher incomes and a shift - due to urbanisation - to food consumption changes that favour increased proteins from animal sources in diets."

The media are going by 'per capita' - the average amount eaten by a person in a year and the more affluent First Worlders score high on that chart. 'Total meat consumed by nation' seems harder to find...