How long does the USA have anyway?

closest to 200 years imo - it took 320 years between the beginning of the decline of the Roman empire & the final emperor, England's still England, etc

fwiw I think England's in a massive post-empire psychocultural slump that more than anything represents the end of a global powerhouse. England likes to think it's still England in, but in fact it's post-England.

Anyway, I'm going for 51-100 years before it becomes Greece to China/India/Sub-saharan Africa's Rome. The world's a more crowded place now - cataclysms happen more quickly and comprehensively.

Will Never Die. Needs vigilance, but I'd say it's pretty close to self-perpetuating good governance. Biggest threat? Um, natural disaster probably, or Canadian invasion.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

I say another 101-200 years. The election of Barack Obama has shown an increasingly ugly side of America that we need to address before it really gets out of hand.

Two years. Death panels.

Um, natural disaster probably, or Canadian invasion.

We're just biding our time up here; we're waiting for just the right moment. We hold monthly meetings at an undisclosed location in North Ontario, in honour of Neil Young. We're targeting Idaho first. (Not really, that's just meant to throw you off.)

Our resource, environmental and economic problems are tightly interrelated. Our mandate is economic growth, which comes at the cost of our depleting resources and environment, which is already in the midst of the 6th great extinction event, among other calamities. I'm one of those guys who says that unless those problems were addressed, er, 20 years ago, many countries are about to go tits up, not just us. So I went for 11-25 years, optimistically.

http://i40.tinypic.com/2r6ipuc.jpg

We've got five more fraking minutes. Duck and cover.

So I went for 11-25 years, optimistically.

but - I mean - what do you see things looking like at the end of your least optimistic version? a splitting-apart into fiefdoms? or by "how long does the USA have left" do we just mean "how long until we're poor like a lot of the rest of the world"?

Well, debbiedowner.jpg again, but our global food system has already been straining, to put it lightly (and to downplay the malnutrition of billion+ people that already exists), to feed the 7 billion that we already have, and 2-3 more billion are coming in the next 40 years. Feeding the world depends on the quality and quantity of the soil, of course, which is a whole other category of debacle. Here was the state of our topsoils twenty years ago:

http://i42.tinypic.com/71iakz.gif

And sadly, things have gotten worse since then, not better. Don't get me wrong, there have been very helpful progress in advancing techniques like no-till agriculture and organic farming, but at this point the optimistic view on topsoil loss and erosion is that perhaps we can decrease the RATE of the annual loss.

This is not even mentioning water, which is one of the subcategories of "resources/environment" in my post above, but is likely to be an even more critical problem than energy.

Anyway, yes, we will be poor like a lot of the rest of the world is NOW. And my point is, much of the rest of the world is already struggling with poor agricultural output and energy and water constraints, and those constraints are likely to even tighter.

http://i40.tinypic.com/2r6ipuc.jpg

but - I mean - what do you see things looking like at the end of your least optimistic version? a splitting-apart into fiefdoms? or by "how long does the USA have left" do we just mean "how long until we're poor like a lot of the rest of the world"?

Either way, really. I tried to leave it open-ended.

Neurotic adherence to social and personal traits characteristic of period when were global superpower, massive psychic collapse as luxuries that have become necessities start becoming hard-to-come-by luxuries again. Uncontrollable, internally destructive social unrest by people in grubby singlets w' dreadlocks. Urban wastelands becoming toxic rural no-go zones w' charred things perpetually by the side of highways. Chinese baubles bartered for warehouses of dollar notes. People walking from city to city or getting tanks if they can. State organised power cuts. Intermittent access to ILX. Language unspooling into communications of meaningless, phatic vocables. The usual.

Intermittent access to ILX.

You've crossed the line, pal.

Intermittent access to ILX

noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

i'm a pessimist by nature, so i feel odd sounding optimistic, but i think we'll be fine for a long time. yes, there are crises ahead -- serious ones. the could be disasterous. but the risks seem no worse to me than the threat of nuclear strikes during the cold war era (through inadvertent or accidental launch, most likely), mass genocide during the world-war II era (or the possibility of a nazi germany overrunning all of europe or even beyond), the long depression we endured, and other overwhelming threats. we're not immune to a decline and fall, of course. i'm just saying there have always been reasons -- good reasons -- to assume "the end is near."

it took 320 years between the beginning of the decline of the Roman empire & the final emperor
Yeah, and the whole show wasn't over until the 1400s, so I reckon this could take a while.

Arguably Rome didn't die. But technology and population and our capacity to seriously fuck things up have come on a bit since the middle ages.

Actually I guess the lesson you could take from the Roman or British empires is that institutions and culture can survive major socio-economic shifts.

Every empire probably has its 'two vast and trunkless legs of stone' somewhere in the future, but yes, facetiousness apart, reckon you're right D, Esq. Nevertheless, reckon there can be shrinking pains (that sort of luxuries - necessities - luxuries mechanism I outlined above before the horror film) an increase in the fetishization of goods and cultural artefacts from an up and coming economic or political power, as indicators of wealth or class.

Certainly in England I've long felt there's a sort of post-Empire disconnect between the people we (national, and therefore meaninglessly generalised 'we') feel we ought to be and the people we are. We go on about the traits that we've kind of inherited from periods of national importance (the Victorian Empire, the second world war possibly) such as fair play, a sort of stuck up authoritarian cultural snobbery, fair-minded capitalistic cheating (taking money but looking sombre and pious as we do it), drawing-room shockability.

A sort of writhing, craven-but-hating, almost gollum-like attitude to the USA, is also characteristic. We love the power we think we had, we love the sight of it, but someone else has it.

In fact we're just reverting to pre-Empire type - an ill-educated and anti-cultural nation of raggedy, xenophobic, naturally suspicious, apathetic and cynical pissheads. With shit high streets.

Which isn't at all bad thing necessarily, but there's just transformational pains, you know, the pretence we're still top-hatted moral overlords of the world.

xposts

And yeh, NV, reckon that's true, cultural institutions become adopted and are inherited by the new home of wealth, and this can be another psychological issue for the nation in decline.

http://www.channel4.com/assets/programmes/images/life-after-people/life-after-people_625x352.jpg
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_RPS679wXewI/SlXPMvtd23I/AAAAAAAACfE/LnMBkCzfpJA/s400/History_Life_After_People_Ep104_Image020.jpg
http://www.chicagonow.com/blogs/show-patrol/assets_c/2009/04/after-chicago-thumb-570x313-311.jpg

Well, at the very least, I wouldn't be surprised to see a couple more major cities go the way of Detroit in the next 20 years. Desolate, downtrodden and downsized, etc. Which I think would in turn make major cities/employment centers even more crowded. And we all know population plus technology leads to:

http://iconicionic.files.wordpress.com/2008/02/jabladerunner.jpg?w=450

51-100

's funny: the post-England England you describe is so much my conception of its true identity that, were it around today, I honestly can't imagine what a swaggering, cocky, masters-of-the-universe England might be like

Try watching the World Cup coverage for the next month.

Yep, agreed. But I think that more a relaxed complacency of its own powers is any governing power's default spiritual manifestation. Until things start going wrong, then you probably get some more interesting end-of-days decadent and apocalyptic shit going down.

xpost

ha ha, NV.

Trying to think, what was that last major developed nation to more or less suddenly devolve into chaos? Yugoslavia?

texas.

Proper barbarism? Arguably Iraq, and for similar reasons.

Biggest threat is corporate takeover, which is pretty well on its way, leading to some kind of international incident wherein the whole of American gov't and citizenry are used to defend the actions of the most powerful entity, the one really in charge. Picture something like this oil spill. Or maybe something easily preventable (yet expensive and thus risky and inevitable), happening overseas and killing thousands of people, the corporate mindset at fault using America as a human shield, the military being used to defend someone's profit motives, etc. All this stuff more or less happens already to a degree, but maybe WWIII will start with a legal case.

And given immigration weirdness/deterioration of the dollar/poor education & fitness standards/agressive history of America/rise of the Chinese/etc I'd say baring even the above scenario we have less than a decade or two left of 'world dominance' positioning. As for completely disappearing off the Earth, I think 'freedom', 'democracy', etc. have proven such loose and malleable terms people will still be talking about it even after it's functionally long gone.

don't know that u cd ever properly call texas 'developed' tho

xxpost

i'm just saying there have always been reasons -- good reasons -- to assume "the end is near"

Yeah, I definitely take that point, and sometimes I cringe at myself as I elaborate on very scenarios of collapse, because I know what it looks like. I realize there's a continuum of terrifying predictions of the future running all the way from the Bible to Ragnarök, McCarthyism to the Singularity.

I'd argue that the most important threats that we face right now are different in two key ways. The first is the nature of the problems themselves, and the second is humanity can respond.

1) The thing about our current batch of crises is that they're not so much "threats" as they are systemic processes driven by feedback loops, and in many cases the damage is irreversible. I don't want to go down the well-worn, lonely road to tl;dr so I'll just say that it took millions of years to build up the stock of fossil fuels that we've managed to greatly deplete in about 250 years, post-Industrial Revolution, and the remaining stocks are those with much lower quality and in much harder to reach locations (e.g., 18,000 feet below sea level in the gulf of Mexico) Similarly, an inch of topsoil takes up to 500 years to produce, yet we're depleting it ten times faster than that rate. We're losing species at 1,000-10,000 the pace of "natural rate" of extinction, and of course, those species can't come back.

Even if we miraculously stopped our GHG emissions today, atmospheric GHG concentrations will continue to rise for another 30 years, due to the time lag between actual GHG emissions and their uptake into the atmosphere. And then there are the feedback loops that we are likely very close to activating: the albedo effect (melting ice leads to more sun being absorbed in the land leads to increased rate of warming leads to melting ice leads to...), methane in permafrost (methane is a GHG almost 20 times more potent than CO2, with much of it stored in permafrost. As temperatures increase, the "perma"frost releases more and more methane, which contributes to greater warming, which melts more permafrost, which leads to...). Finally, on climate alone, NOAA's research shows that the worst effects of climate change are irreversible for at least 1000 years.

2) The threats that you mentioned (Great Depression, Nazis, nuclear strikes) were all very tangible, short-term threats. The developing economic/resource/environmental crises certainly will manifest themselves in extremely tangible ways if shit hits the fan, but broadly, they're quite abstract problems (I'm speaking now from the perspective of a U.S. citizen, obviously), an effect that is multiplied by the natural human tendency to discount according to time and distance. Imagine any natural disaster, say a flood. If the flood occurs on your land, in the present, it's a big fucking problem and you respond NOW. If the flood occurs four counties away and doesn't affect you directly, it's still a problem but you're much less likely to respond. Same with a state away, and particularly across the ocean. Similarly, if you know there will be a flood on your land but it won't occur for 10 years, you'll still be alarmed, but not nearly the amount of panic as if it was going to happen tomorrow. If the flood is 1 in a 100 chance over the next century, your alarm bells are relatively quiet.

The trouble with the resource and environmental problems are that they require a WWII-type of massive, coordinated response, but that by the time a galvanizing "Pearl Harbor" type of event occurs, it is likely that it will be too late to mitigate the worst impacts.

I don't want to go down the well-worn, lonely road to tl;

oops
http://i39.tinypic.com/ekl1zl.jpg

Also, typos galore. Especially the second paragraph, which should read "The first is the nature of the problems themselves, and the second is the difficulties that humanity faces in responding."

I guess my pessimism also comes from the thought that the problems I'm worried about aren't isolated problems that play out in one country or continent. When Rome fell (whichever date you want to use), no one in North America noticed. Globalization, for better or worse, has led to a world that is radically different than before. Intuitively, you'd think that globalization would have greatly increased humanity's resilience to crises, in the same way that a rope made up of many individual strands is resilient. But an economic crisis in one country creates shockwaves across the rest of the world. A catastrophically misguided U.S. mandate to increase corn fucking ethanol production causes food riots in Mexico, Indonesia, Haiti and more than a dozen other poor countries. And, of course, nature doesn't really care about political boundaries when it comes to increasing atmospheric concentrations of GHGs.

Intermittent access to ILX.

take away anything else, but if I'm prevented from visiting the one place where anyone understands what "challops" or "RIP D0m" means, then fuck it

ZS relentlessly OTM here

11-25 years, tops.

Z_S is otm, but the power of inertia will carry the carcass forward longer than you might suspect. The various forms of weakness that he identifies are generally delivered as a steady degradation or erosion. Such problems lend themselves to a series of patches and workarounds that leave the system weaker and poorer, but still functioning after a fashion.

Under those sorts of circumstances, governments still have a value, in that the patches and workarounds require a social organization capable of marshalling forces. Despotisms of varying shades of efficiency are a more likely outcome than a sweeping away of social forms.

The coup de grace to the USA as a nation, when it comes, is likely to look like an acute event, against the backdrop of chronic crises. Apart from such a swift fall, the USA could stick around in one form or another for a few centuries more. And if the subsidence is gradual enough, with no massive car crash, it could still have some recognizabnle life in it for as much as 600 or 800 years.

The coup de grace to the USA as a nation, when it comes, is likely to look like an acute event, against the backdrop of chronic crises.

I agree, but I'd add that a unique aspect of our modern chronic crises is that some of them are making acute "disaster" events more likely.

It's another feedback loop.

When you are operating from a platform of 7 billion beings, it's amazing how many you can lose each year and still muddle along to the next year.

If the disasters are on the order of a global population loss of a few million per year (as opposed to the even larger yearly gains we are seeing now), I think the social structures can absorb quite a few consecutive years of that. I'd say annual losses in the range of 50 to 100 million would probably push things into chaos within a relatively short time. Say, five to seven years. (Obv I'm just guessing here.)

I am kind of disturbed by the millenarian underpinnings of this question.

Heh, yeah. It's disturbing to me that a large part of my life has been directed by a negative reaction to my dad's constant evangelical End is Nigh dinnertime rants, and then I too grow up and rant that the End is Nigh, although for (I believe, at least) much more logical reasons.

If you like, we can stipulate the Jewish, Islamic or Chinese calendar. I don't think this thread has its roots in any kind of Christian religious fatalism. It's more a sense that the natural system, upon which the economic system rests, has been degraded to the extent that the economic system, despite its superficial prosperity, has become a house built on shifting sands.

Y'all are high. There's no reasonable way for the US to partition itself in order to collapse in the near future. Our enormous military has no regional fealty and throws individuals from around the country together, preventing units from uniting for one side or group. No states or regions are self-sufficient economically to allow separation.

The only way the US ceases to exist is unprecedented human catastrophe that destroys every bit of economic, military and political unity we have.

The future is a long decline toward parity with the rest of the world and maybe an authoritarian govt replacing democracy.

I am kind of disturbed by the millenarian underpinnings of this question.

thank you

it could still have some recognizabnle life in it for as much as 600 or 800 years.

oh i dunno, how long did uqbar and tlon last for?

Aimless, millenarianism isn't explicitly xtian – it's just END IS NIGH shit of any stripe . And why every group of humans has always thought they were on the edge of it, almost like a sick desire for everything to crash and burn, has always baffled me. Sometimes that apprehension has been right, but mostly it just makes for a lot of undue anxiety.

y'all are forgetting

http://s3files.core77.com/blog/images/Independence%20Day.jpg

the world will exist until I die

xposty, with revisions

Within the doomsayers I tend to be among the optimistic ones. I do see plenty of cause for concern that we've grown too fast and built too shoddily and nature will impose a retrenchment on us willy-nilly.

Change is a constant. Progress is not. The END isn't nigh. Everything ends, and anyway no one can tell a start from an end from a middle. We're always in the middle of things.

I believe strongly in the resiliance of life and the utility of intelligence as a survival strategy. Life on earth is undoubtedely undergoing a large-scale extinction event at our hands. Humans may have to pass through a stormy period of economic regression. But the dust will settle and humans will still be around and the earth will be habitable, if less diverse. Culture will reorganize itself. Life will go on. Even in the midst of the shit-in-the-fan, there will be the same ordinary causes for joy and laughter. People are like that.

puff puff post otm, you guys are mainly visions

xp 9/11 was an inside job is still a valid theory in my book

would love to read that book, frankly

http://373virtualpta.files.wordpress.com/2009/04/the_lorax1.jpg

I voted "will never die"

Although the North American Union might happen too. Who knows

I definitely sympathize with those who repulsed by the doomsayers, because it's uncomfortable to think about, although I do think that the worst response to clear threats is to plug your ears and pretend it's not happening.

But I don't understand how anyone would ever put "will never die". How many civilizations make it even 500 years without being ruined at least once or twice?

lorax, who did 9/11?

Personally, I believe it was Zorgon the lake god

lorax, who did 9/11?
― iatee

whoever wanted to? my reasoning for it maybe being an inside job has more to do with the weird physics of how the second building fell down

not that I paid much attention to this, but was it ever ruled out that the plane that hit the pentagon was shot down?

maybe the conspiracy theory is that the guberment knew about the attacks and did nothing [/off topic]

http://coreofcorruption.net/images/Tshirt_black.jpg

otm

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

We won! We won! USA! USA!

The USA will never run into serious problems, just like all other civilizations in history!

Hey, with a few better breaks, Egypt would still be rockin that whole pyramid thing, f'shizzle.

i've been there and trust me - they've *really* let themselves go.

England has existed as an entity for almost a millenium and is far more comparable to the US than the Romans, Soviets etc..

So far as I can tell, it shows no signs of dissolution despite Cameron.

In 200 years I'll be like "hey guys remember this thread? you all FAIL"

my reasoning for it maybe being an inside job has more to do with the weird physics of how the second building fell down

you're kidding, right?

are you a scientist?

batman's a scientist

and he's american!

i'm a lawyer, dammit, not a scientist.

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_k9o95P6v99A/Sao6_SxV20I/AAAAAAAAAes/aFRZntZmXss/s400/LeonardMcCoy.jpg

i do see your point about how the scientific community has come together around the "9/11 inside job" notion.

National Geographic channel did a documentary called 9/11: Science and Conspiracy in which they tried to set up several experiments to simulate issues of thermite, controlled demolition, and whether fires could have melted steel in the WTC. And not a single experiment was set up properly as they even admitted on the documentary. It was really lame to say the least

Anyone want to adjust your votes?

If you crunch these all together, the first thing you discover is that the average lifetime of these powers is 215 years.

If you’re playing at home, this number is pessimistically eerie: It’s been 223 years since the ratification of the US Constitution. And that should perhaps give us some pause. To make this explicit, the United States has now outlasted the majority of the empires in my historical data set, and is now crossing the threshold into hoary old age.

https://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2011/10/28/how-long-will-america-last/CDVPtlTaX89RTsrtavVyYO/story.html

in a lot of ways the us already ended

the only thing keeping it alive are the financial institutions and countries that have a vested interest and so much money into making the us a meeting point for all financial transactions/exchanges, comparing currency values to the us dollar, ie printing us money, etc

america is only alive bc other countries need it to be alive

once countries become less america-dependent it will become just another country, seeking to specialise in one or two things, but a lot of aspects of the us have already become very much average and are similar to other western countries, which is not a bad thing, but americans are not used to such averageness so itll take some time to get used to it and it might get ugly (riots, deaths, etc) before people (cultures/institutions/etc) get used to the new normal

sorry by printing money i rly shld have said quantitative easing

Unless riots lead to something like a Texit referendum, I'm not sure that the perception of America as stable will so quickly droop relative to other countries.

England has existed as an entity for almost a millenium and is far more comparable to the US than the Romans, Soviets etc..

So far as I can tell, it shows no signs of dissolution despite Cameron.

― a cross between lily allen and fetal alcohol syndrome (milo z)

Revisiting this comment, Brexit surely has frayed the seams of both 'Great Britain' and England. Thanks Mr. Cameron!

Anyone want to adjust your votes?

― how's life

people who don't speak chinese systematically underestimate what an arcane and impenetrable language it is.

Unless riots lead to something like a Texit referendum, I'm not sure that the perception of America as stable will so quickly droop relative to other countries.

― Salsa Golf (Argentinean Ketchup) (Sufjan Grafton), Saturday, July 9, 2016 12:42 AM (14 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

turmoil doesnt last long

straight/flat lines appear stable but are usually lower than where you were before

We're untouchable thanks to the F-35 Joint Task Tactical Advanced Strike Fighter

xp that sounds folksy and good but doesn't make sense

ill put it another way

all the riots and murders happening in the us right now, all of which have increased, will only occupy a small part in the history of the us as a superpower

as the us becomes more average, ie as its influence on the world diminishes, it may stabilize into an average developed western country

one way to measure this i think is to see how well the us performs in areas such as education and middle class wages, where it is already comparable to other western countries, ie not number one anymore

turmoil doesnt last long

straight/flat lines appear stable but are usually lower than where you were before

― F♯ A♯ (∞)

is this one of those "moral arc of the universe" things?

haha newp

us collapse will follow environmental collapse. i think it's likely we see significant political splintering / new borders in the next 50 years.

as an empire it's probably already over but as a world power / civilizational force i see no reason why it can't continue in one form or another for a long time to come. plenty of resources, decent institutions, separated by two oceans from much of the turbulent world.

imo environmental collapse is most likely to occur as a kind of slow sagging over the decades. it will place enormous pressures on existing social and political structures, but the price of social disintegration is usually higher than the cost of the sacrifices required to keep limping along and patching things together.

of course, if the collapse of environmental viability is sudden and catastrophic, ripping vast holes in the social fabric over a period of a decade or so, then all bets are off and it's a free-for-all. that seems unlikely to me atm compared to the slow-motion series of emergencies without a single crescendo.

yeah there probably won't be an implosion just gradual decay but i think the big distribution networks that connect us will start to see a lot of pressure, steady accumulation of failures and cynicism will have a traumatic psychological effect in large enough numbers that we'll get some localized principalities that break away with renewed political energy, feeding on an appetite for violence and fundamentalism. the country is isolated from the rest of the world but it's also huge, already very disconnected internally, i think there's a possibility we see it unravel itself.

I think it's mostly from other countries catching up and the US stagnating. The US hasn't had significant infrastructure upgrades since the 50s. Its creaking constitution (and an undereducated voting populace) has prevented the legislative branch from doing as much as it needs to do.

End of the US timelines seem approximately analog to the Big One earthquake/asteroid timelines. It's happened before and will happen again, but it does not stick to a schedule.

not long, hope to be dead

I hope to die not before Criterion keeps reissuing Renoir films.

what floor is yr condo on?

sea rise level

Miami: Future Venice of Florida.

crosspost to us foreign policy thread

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hDzyFBcYgN8

That video addresses US global hegemony but not the maintenance of its internal integrity. It should seem pretty clear by now that the series of military and foreign policy failures since 2002, topped by the election of a bloviating incompetent, have badly eroded US hegemony, so the video is essentially correct in its analysis.

We've obviously lost far more global prestige and power than can be repaired by the sort of marginal political change that Obama was able to promote after 2010 saw Congress change hands, and Obama was close to a best case scenario in the absence of profound political realignment in the USA. But the USA can survive quite a long time w/o global hegemony.