Five Signs the United States Is Withering Away

The United States has existed for only a little over two centuries, which is a paltry amount of time when you consider that many nations and city-states have lasted for thousands of years (hello, Rome). Now it's starting to look like this brief experiment with human government is going to fail, and soon. Science fiction writers from William Gibson to Lyda Morehouse have written about a future where the United States no longer exists, or has been so heavily reorganized that it isn't recognizable. And Stanford futurist Paul Saffo recently told the San Jose Mercury News, “The U.S. may not exist in any recognizable form in the middle of this century." Though he didn't offer a long list of reasons, we know exactly what he means. There are good reasons to believe that the U.S. is falling apart, and we've got five big ones for you to mull over as you watch this once-powerful twentieth century empire slowly drip down the drain. More »