The Balloon Goes Up, The Boot Comes Down
Possible Futures installment 1
“..said Susan at last with the sort of calmness that comes over people when they realize that however bad things may seem to be, there is absolutely no reason why they shouldn’t simply get worse and worse.” —Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency
In the last installment, I promised that the next few would map out some possible futures. If you read my fiction or have followed me from time to time in other venues, it will come as no shock to you that I set a particularly high value on the survival of the human species. Thanks to astrophysics we now seem to have a pretty shrewd idea about the life cycle of stars, and that means that we know one sure and certain thing about humanity:
There will come a day when our sun will expand and engulf the Earth, and then Mars, and then the Asteroid Belt. Some day after that, it will go cold forever. We cannot survive either inside the sun or without it, and so at that point, the astounding legacy of life on Earth (which, so far as we know, is unique in the universe) will end...unless we find some way to escape to the stars.
The ultimate environmentalist pill (pick your color) is that our current historical crisis has some pretty profound implications for the future of life in the universe.
Therefore, all the scenarios I spin here should somehow take account of:
1) Technology’s ability to radically centralize power
2) Technology’s ability to radically decentralize power
3) Control of the money supply
4) The relationship between demographics and economics
5) The relationship between demographics, economics, and war
6) The human capacity to build cultures to cope with all manner of bizarre things
7) Any potential permanent effects upon the endgame of the human species
Today, I’m spinning out what are, in my view, the worst cases. This set of scenarios is the one that I least want to write—partly because it nearly writes itself (thus making it boring to write)—and I considered holding it till the end so it would work as a dramatic flourish before I move into wrapping up my stray thoughts on the subjects I’ve covered in this series.
But that wouldn’t be fair. This is the scenario that, in one way or another, is on everybody’s mind. It’s also the darkest. You have been warned.
* * *
It would be too easy to say “where we go from here is anybody’s guess,” even if there’s a certain amount of truth in it. There are a LOT of balls in play in this convulsing world—the demographic crash, its geopolitical and economic consequences (including the World War and global famine that are both currently gaining steam), the cultural ferment as people scramble for a workable moral paradigm after the death of both God and the Post-WW2 era and its attendant mythology, the emergence of new technologies that upend everything, the resurgence of old dangers—and things could break in a number of interesting ways; some fair, some foul, and some indeterminate.
Death is the ironclad law of the universe and everything in it. All things have a life cycle—stars, planets, galaxies, lives, cultures, technologies, machines, species, civilizations, and empire. When I started writing this series, it was still an open question (even in my mind, at least to some extent) whether we were truly at the End of Empire.
After the events of the last few weeks, I don’t think that’s anymore in question, which means that The End of Empire must be the base assumption for my projections of potential futures.
The End of Empire is a historical danger point, and the nature of that danger depends a lot upon what kind of collapse happens. Some empires end in an orderly fashion, and not catastrophically. Some end in ways that completely ruin the nation at the hub of that empire. In the latter case, the Roman Empire collapsed slowly, over centuries. The German Empire collapsed catastrophically in war over the course of a few months/years (depending on which of the two Empires we’re talking about). The Japanese Empire collapsed catastrophically in the course of a week or two.
The two worst possible futures for America and the current world follow from one of these models, and it is these that I’m going to focus on in this set of scenarios.
Let’s get the short collapse out of the way first. There is now a non-zero chance that, within a year of this column, Russia will attack the US with nuclear weapons. This could come in one of four forms:
1) A direct first-strike bombardment
In this scenario, Russia launches short-range hypersonics at US strategic targets in hopes of crippling our retaliatory capacity, and the exchange ends there.
2) A rapid escalation from battlefield tactical weapons to global thermonuclear war
In this scenario, Russia uses low-yield nuclear weapons against targets in Ukraine, Lithuania, Poland, Latvia, Finland, Romania, or the former Yugoslavia. I’ll spare you the details of why this could happen—it would involve a long digression explaining Russia’s grand strategic ambitions—so let’s allow it as a possibility for the sake of argument. In this situation, America or an allied power (France, Israel, or the UK) retaliates with medium-range missiles against Russian battlefield units, then Russia retaliates with strikes on civilian targets in the West, and the West retaliates with a full salvo, provoking a full-scale last-ditch launch of all weapons from Russian silos. The northern hemisphere, for all intents and purposes, is wiped out. The global south inherits the Earth. Humanity goes on, but on a very different trajectory than all of history might lead one to expect to this point.
3) An EMP attack
Russia deploys either a ground-launched ICBM or one of its orbiting weapons platforms for a high-altitude detonation over the North American continent. Anything with electronics in it (cars, computers, power grids, water pumps, fuel refineries, oil wells, communications equipment, etc.) becomes immediately inoperable. America disappears from the geopolitical map, her people descend into chaos, and most of them starve, die of thirst, or are killed in the following weeks. The American people persist in small bands and towns, but only in places where hard toil can secure food and where there is enough surface water (rivers, lakes, etc.) that people can survive. Plagues of water-and-vector-born illnesses start culling those persistent population pockets in the following months and years.
4) An EMP attack followed by direct bombardment
Russia launches that same EMP attack as a way to cripple American defenses and retaliatory capabilities, so that American can be safely wiped off the map at little-to-no risk to Russia. NATO allies stay out of the fight in order to guarantee their own survival.
While my sources tell me that such scenarios are now more likely than they have ever been, and that the current situation is far more perilous than either the Cuban Missile Crisis or any of the many so-called “close calls” during the cold war, there is no way to know in advance exactly how likely this nuclear war really is. Some of the people I know and trust are putting the odds at 80%. Some at 3%. Near as I can tell, they’re all guessing—how could they not be? We have no historic data against which to measure projections.
But one thing about this cluster of scenarios is certain:
With the death of the United States in a nuclear war, the world’s greatest swath of arable land will disappear from cultivation for decades, if not centuries.
Worse, the expertise needed to extract oil from shale, to build nuclear reactors, and to design and run late-stage industrial civilization will die with it.
Why? So much of the world’s brain trust is concentrated in the continental United States that losing it will mean, eventually, the end of industrial civilization. It might eventually be rebuilt, but the plain fact is that resources have become so much more difficult to obtain and technology so much more difficult to sustain than it was a hundred years ago that it is likely that it will mean the end of human expansion into space.
Humanity will persist. It will create new civilizations, new towering cultural achievements, and more priceless beauty that will remain unique in the universe. But the human race will die on this planet, unremarked in the great unfolding of the cosmos.
If the US Empire ends in a day, the grand opera of the human story is all but over.
Probably forever.
But what if we avoid this clear and present danger? What if we take a more Romanesque path?
For those of you who can get WiFi when you’re sitting in the bathroom and so don’t read classical history books (and who can blame you?), the Roman Republic ended in the last few decades of the BC Era.1 Before that time, the aristocratic families (the billionaire oligarchs of the era) had found themselves at odds with one another, and into this fractious environment came a patrician from a relatively minor family who, while serving his time in the army, went rogue, started a few illegal wars, built himself an enormous fortune, and set himself up as the champion of the commoners against the corrupt and decadent ruling class. This man, Julius Caesar, was given a dictatorship in order to pacify his fans—but when he started taking his power too seriously, he was assassinated by the very people who gave him his power. In the subsequent civil war, the Republic was destroyed and the Empire erected in its place—Caesar’s nephew Augustus ruled it, while keeping up the forms of the Republic for PR reasons.
Augustus was the high point of Roman civilization. His force of personality, political savvy, administrative acumen, and governing team unified Rome and changed its direction as a world power. His towering presence also doomed his Empire to terminal decline. The succession of his relatives that followed were, in large part, far more interested in indulging in the pleasures that power made available (pedophilia, drugs, spectacles, tortures) than in maintaining Rome’s institutional structure. They had nearly absolute power, after all, so why bother maintaining the Republican facade?
When the Julio-Claudian dynasty (Augustus’s family) met its ignoble end in the late first century AD, the Empire began passing through hands quicker than a Ferrari with a bad clutch. Everyone wanted the power, nobody wanted to really do anything with it. The Empire entered a kind of stately decline, where things continued much as they had been, but the machinery of power, economy, culture, and politics gradually eroded like a sandstone cliff under relentless assault by the tide. Foreign policy ceased to be coherent, and terrorist invasions of the Roman heartland (and the Imperial City itself) became increasingly common.
Despite the ongoing foreign-policy blowback from previously-conquered peoples, prosperity remained high for a long time, but that was largely due to inertia. Gradually freedmen became bonded to the lands that produced the food. Citizens became subjects. Credit became a favor granted by the state rather than a commercial relationship. As power became less useful, it became more centralized, and eventually even the great common currency of Roman culture—the Games and the Circus—which had outlasted even the allegiance to the gods, grew stale, uninteresting, and forgotten. By the sixth century the Coliseum was a garbage dump and the Circus Maximus (where the horse races happened) was falling to ruin...and nobody cared. Rome had become so irrelevant that it persisted in name only, and then eventually not even that.
This whole process, from the peak of Roman might and culture under Augustus to the final sacking of Rome by Odovacer, lasted five hundred years. And they were not good years. There came a point in the second century when there was no more forward-looking optimism in Rome. Almost every year was a little worse than the one that came before, and the people comforted themselves with being members of a nation and race that once was great, and that someday might rise from the ashes to reclaim its rightful place in the world.
By the late third century, even that hope was gone.
America’s rise was faster than Rome’s, but the English Enlightenment civilization from which it sprang has unfolded over a similar time scale. Looked at through this lens, we would mark FDR as our Augustus, and the height of American power and identity and legitimacy that characterized the Julio-Claudian dynasty would map to the post-WW2 world order.
If this is our trajectory of decline, we can expect the continued concentration of power and desolation of trust. Institutions will retain an iron grip on their populations, but that grip will continue—as it has been doing—to become more porous and arbitrary. Rights will become more notional and less real. If we’re lucky, it will be a drug-fueled hedonistic paradise devoid of deep meaning or inquiry, at least in the short term. The great centralizing might of technology will allow those in power to control all property, all commerce, all speech, all association, and virtually all thought.
In the long term, we can expect a complete debasement of currency, a more-or-less complete centralization of ownership, persistent low-level civil wars and occasional mass eruptions of violence, and, in the end, a return to a feudalistic form of government and the return of slavery (in fact if not in name). This is, after all, the historic norm of humanity.
After a few hundred years, the situation will unwind enough that civilization itself will collapse and enter a new dark age, from which it will re-emerge...into a world whose resources are no longer accessible, due to the extinction of the technology and expertise required to access the resources to build an advanced industrial economy.
Living through this will feel like an extended, slow-motion Covid crisis. The long emergency will erode trust even within families, and the very ability to lift one’s eyes to the heavens will evaporate over the next generation or two (if it’s not criminalized first). Those in power will bend every resource and flip every lever to keep themselves from being deposed—and they will have to, because revolution will be perpetually in the air. By 2100, the global population will be back down to between three and five billion, and the world’s cultures will everywhere be governed by the kind of nostalgia for the glory-that-was that dominated the legends and though-patterns of the medieval world.
Eventually, these power structures will themselves fail, and local cultures and consciousness will once again come to dominate human life. Hard patriarchy, new religions, new versions of old religions, and a very limited focus of life will be the rule of the day. Eventually, humanity will rediscover varieties of freedom and flourishing (as well as oppression and degradation) that we have all but forgotten about in the modern world.
But such a respite from the decay will be too late on at least this front:
In a slow-motion Romanesque collapse, despite surviving the long period of tyranny, humanity will once again fail to reach the stars.
I’d be lying if I said that either of these futures are unlikely. But they are not the only ones in the cards. And they may not be the most likely of the futures we face. My understanding of history gives me hope that we may yet steer our way between these two dooms into some other, at least marginally more hopeful scenarios.
We’ll start exploring those in the next installment.
Yeah, I’m an atheist using the AD/BC dating system. I do this because the CE/BCE nomenclature is based on the lie that the centuries are marked the way they are because of common agreement (Common Era/Before the Common Era), which is bullshit. The formerly Christian world marks time this way. The Islamic world marks it another way. The Chinese a different way. The Japanese still a different way. There is nothing “Common” about the “Common Era”—the nomenclature is just a way for secular scholars to hide from themselves the embarrassing fact that their forebears were so religious as to be willing to focus human history on the alleged birthday of a quasi-mythical godling who may never have existed, and who could not have been born in the year zero (or one) if he had (if the accounts of his birth are to be taken seriously). The Gregorian calendar is an embarrassment to moderns, but, really, it wasn’t a bad bit of guesswork by the standards of the time when it was formulated, and the dating system serves us well enough to continue using it, so I refuse to lie about the fact that its central conceit is religious in nature.