If you could redesign the Earth the way you want with a snap.
- Thread starter Gingerbread Demon
- Start date
This was pretty much 'peak America' as I've experienced it in my lifetime, at least in my personal opinion. I was 17 in 1985, for perspective. I could even argue as late as 1990, but not much past that. In my view, the country has been in a steadily accelerating decline since then, and 9/11/2001 really steepened the curve. (The country has been declining since the end of WWII, but it was much less noticeable for a long time) The mid-80's were about the tail end of the time when a nuclear family could survive comfortably on the income of a single working parent. Opinions will vary on this, of course.
Yeah, definitely sucks to be them.
Lucky for me and mine I got to decide the finger snap per the OP.
Well, he did say "the American people" not "everyone within America's borders" so maybe by the magic rules of this thought exercise, you would have been brought along too!
Interesting. The underlying thesis of this then seems to be that the problems that have caused the decline you postulate are all external?
I did some quick Googling, and it looks like the US imported $361 billion of foreign goods in 1985. I wonder if it would really be that good for your populace to suddenly find themselves with only their own resources to sustain them?
To say nothing of the chaos that would introduce to the rest of the world at that time.
Interesting thought experiment, though. I'd read that novel.
I've never really give it that much thought. Like I said before, I am just constantly disgusted by all of the damage we've done to the planet. From urbanization wiping out natural environments, to pollution and trash in our air, land, and water, the physical damage to the planet things like mining and frakking are doing, and all of the animals species we have or are in the process of wiping out.
No, they are almost entirely internal. But moving the country's stuff and people to a virgin Earth would necessitate massive change, and hopefully in a good way. For starters, every man, woman, and child would be a huge asset- nothing would be more valuable than human capital until a true robotics industry took shape. The military-industrial complex would cease to have an excuse to exist, and probably most of that effort would need to be converted over to manufacturing the stuff we used to import.
America did best from 1789-1970, when there was a western frontier. With the rest of the Earth to re-settle, the frontier would be open again, for a couple centuries at least. Imagine the innovation that could result! Not only that, there would be a record of where a lot of the valuable resources are, helping to speed along that development.
I can't predict the outcome, of course, but I like to think it'd be pretty rad.
As for the world left behind, well, they mostly just bitch about America anyway. So they can roll on without it.
America gave us the home computer and the microprocessor revolution there is that.
Even ignoring all the massive geopolitical implications... that would leave us in a world without Star Trek: The Next Generation, or any of the subsequent spinoffs. So definitely a bleaker timeline!
Even ignoring all the massive geopolitical implications... that would leave us in a world without Star Trek: The Next Generation, or any of the subsequent spinoffs. So definitely a bleaker timeline!
But it sounds like we would be creating a “Life-Imitating-Art” version of Roddenberry’s
“Genesis II/ Planet Earth” kind of thing…
…ok, so still pretty bleak.
