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San Francisco, 4:19 AM
Tue Nov 10
25 posts in the last 24 hours
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10/20/09
10/20/09
Does he mention at all the effects of climate change on food and water supplies, and disease epidemics? These natural and often unpredictable events will have a huge impact on our future as the world scrambles to deal with the ecological mess we've all made.
And what about peak oil? How will we wage all these expensive wars with a diminishing global fuel supply?
It's precisely this sort of backward, war-mongering fiction that keeps people paranoid, and therefore warlike, in the first place. #books
10/20/09
10/20/09
10/20/09
10/20/09
I suspect we will gradually shift to other sources which generate equivalent feedstocks. I know various people who are working on this, and they all report it's merely a question of when it's more profitable to generate (say) diesel from (say) vast banks of bioreactors than it is to get it from crude sourced from diminishing fields. There are various alternatives, obviously, just hope one of them isn't tar sands. The winning technology will be whatever keeps the maximum amount of existing infrastructure, in terms of all those refineries and crackers and internal combustion engines. The losers are, obviously, the nations which rely upon oil fields for a large proportion of their GDP and have failed to transition to anything else, which has obvious geopolitical implications. #books
10/20/09
The sad truth is, the ability of smaller and smaller groups of people to do increasing catastrophic damage is going to do nothing but increase. The danger in the world is not going to come from countries fighting, but from small groups of people getting the hands on nukes and other WMDs.
It's much harder to fight that threat and it goes against most of the military industrial complex which is the mindset this poor old man is stuck in. #books
10/20/09
10/20/09
They found that whatever advantages were gained from being up there were neutralized by the fact that, just like Apollo, it would take THREE DAYS for the birds to hit their target. The generals were strictly of the "30 minutes or it's free" school of Armageddon. #books
10/20/09
Behold, it is the Mooninites who will be victorious in the end. The few remaining humans will be spanked with moon rocks. #books
10/20/09
10/20/09
10/20/09
looking at you, Milton... #books
10/20/09
10/20/09
Good for you. #books
10/20/09
Olaf Stapledon predicted a second world war between the UK and France, with Weimar Germany getting caught up in the middle. If he'd just been a little hazy about which countries were involved, people would be lauding him for predicting WWII, instead of just "hehehe, France..."
Nostradamus had the right idea, his predictions could refer to anyone from Hitler to Barney the Dinosaur, and they just keep coming back. #books
10/19/09
Of course, arguably (and I've said so myself) people want details not because they think it will happen exactly that way, but because it's more entertaining. It still misleads the reader into thinking that events are likely to follow such a specific path, though.
More accurate, if less sensational, would be a discussion of general trends and ways they might interact.
But in any case, the author doesn't really seem to look at what may change, or present convincingly why things would remain the same.
It's the 20th century IN SPACE!!! #books
10/19/09
German-Polish conflicts? Why not a French-German fallout? Lets bring out all the classics! A Russia-EU kerfluffle is much more likely.
Once Japan gets the Gundams working, all is lost anyways. #books
10/19/09
10/20/09
Ray Kurzweil he ain't. #books
10/19/09
10/20/09
10/19/09
Also the predictions of technological change seem a bit odd. There's an emphasis on classic Sci-Fi tech, like "space war!" "robot war!" "powered armour war!" but no consideration of subtler, but perhaps ultimately more powerful changes. For example, how will computers change over the next few decades, if they'll keep getting more powerful and more omnipresent? I'll bet they'll have a more interesting and complex impact than just designing War-Bots.
To me, these predictions feel more like a classic science-fiction setting: The future will be an exact analogue of the past, only some of the names will be different and some of the action will happen in space.
10/19/09
So George Friedman is basically predicting Pancho Villa II: Electric Boogaloo.
But yeah, he's being way too conservative about his predictions, sometimes so much so as to not even pay attention to the modern day. Assuming nationalistic tendencies will continue to be important in 21st century conflicts, when the biggest (at least by financial cost) current conflict on the planet is between various Western democracies against combatants of a nation-less ideological movement? Brilliant idea. #books
10/20/09
The conflict has been simmering for a long time and now there's literally a war going on here in Mexico, slowly but surely oozing its way into the US.
If the US doesn't back us up like they did with Colombia, well... it's going to get ugly everywhere.
Edit: the conflict he's describing might be fueled by these socio-cultural aspects of a deformed part of our shared society instead of tensions between governments.
10/20/09
10/20/09
The Mexico element makes a little more sense to me - given that their economy is much more robust than I thought, and given the number of people on this side who have come across - the nation already has a bit of an identity crisis when it comes to immigration, so that's not something totally out of left field. The problem I see with that is the very nature of immigration - people are coming to the United States, to get out of their old country, retaining some of their culture, but not necessarily their nationality. #books
10/20/09
I don't know that Mexican Drug Cartels will become a bigger priority than they have been - the whole 'War on Drugs' push has really done little, especially with the country moving more towards legalization of some drugs in its various elements. I think that the idea that there is complete chaos in Mexico, that it'll become a failed state, is not correct, although they certainly aren't in that good of a spot at the moment.
No, the conflict that he's talking about is one of identity - will the millions of immigrants who came up from Mexico identify with the United States in the event of a border crisis? I don't know, but I think that the situation that he talks to in the end of the book is complete rubbish. #books