what comes first #1

[FalTorPan]

It is my sincere hope that Earth is never run by a single government.

 

[Ward Fowler]

..and as i said, i dont see any of that happening for another 500+ years. You still have too many religious factions in this world that will hold on to their belief's for at least another 500 years; entire countries even. That isn't going away for a long long time...if ever, sadly.

You could be right. But globalization really is changing things very quickly. It's amazing how much the world has changed in just the last 30 years. Not to mention how fast technology is advancing. Once we can offer all of humanity economic prosperity, it will probably serve to remove a lot of the radicalization from religious factions. If these people actually had something to lose, they wouldn't be so quick to kill themselves fighting religious wars. Especially when they saw that cooperating economically with their neighbor would build a better life for them, which would be preferable to destroying lives, including their own.
Remember, religious and cultural differences don't have to be eradicated for their to be a world government. They only need for their hard edges sanded down. So I'm still guessing about a hundred years or so.

 

[Daneel]

I kind of think that contact with a sentient alien species is one of the only things that could spur the human species into becoming unified.

Well, looking at history, when the peoples of a given region are contacted from outside, it does tend to create in them a sense of a common identity in contrast to the outsiders when before they thought of themselves as separate groups (as seen in the Americas, the Indian subcontinent, Africa, etc.). On the other hand, that sense of shared identity doesn't translate to universal peace, and if anything there tends to be a split between factions who have different ideas of how to react to the outsiders (e.g. those who want to cooperate vs. those who want to resist, those who want to assimilate vs. those who cling to tradition, etc.).

Hmm, that's true. Even in Trek we've seen that happen (i.e. Starfleet vs. Terra Prime)

I agree with you that unity --true, lasting unity-- has to come from within, but one would hope that this "sense of common identity" brought about by extraterrestrial contact would help bring us a step closer to it.

 

[Christopher]

Once we can offer all of humanity economic prosperity, it will probably serve to remove a lot of the radicalization from religious factions. If these people actually had something to lose, they wouldn't be so quick to kill themselves fighting religious wars. Especially when they saw that cooperating economically with their neighbor would build a better life for them, which would be preferable to destroying lives, including their own.

Sadly, that's not the way it works. Religious warfare is often initiated by the wealthy and powerful. Look at the European kings who led the Crusades, or the Spanish Inquisition. Heck, the ultra-rich Saudi government has done more than just about anyone to fund and promote the rise of militant Wahhabist Islam, because of the historical ties between the Saud dynasty and the Wahhabi movement and because supporting the radical religious sentiments among the people and directing them against the West is an effective way to keep those radical sentiments from turning against the Saudi government and its oppressive, poverty-promoting behavior toward its own people. (And because of oil, we insist on calling the Saudis our allies, even though al-Qaeda might never have amounted to anything without their backing.)

It is true, though, that religious radicalism is more likely to emerge in an impoverished and unstable part of the world. Europe in the time of the Crusades was just as poverty-ridden, lawless, and hopeless as the Mideast is today. It may be the rich and powerful leading the charge, but they're only able to get anywhere because they can exploit the despair and hopelessness of the masses. Still, it's not so much that it's the poor and desperate who are waging religious militancy themselves. Rather, militants and extremists can only function so long as they have popular support, and a populace that's impoverished, angry, desperate, and uneducated will be more easily persuaded by the propaganda of a militant movement that claims its methods will change things for the better.

So worldwide prosperity would certainly tend to marginalize militant movements in general, make it harder for them to win support, because fewer people would be desperate enough to see militancy as a necessary option. But it's not because the people in the militant movements are themselves impoverished.

 

[Ward Fowler]

So worldwide prosperity would certainly tend to marginalize militant movements in general, make it harder for them to win support, because fewer people would be desperate enough to see militancy as a necessary option. But it's not because the people in the militant movements are themselves impoverished.

You're right and that is an important distinction. A major problem for the poor in the Middle East, especially in countries like Saudi Arabia, is that economic development is not necessary to enrich the elite. They make all of their money from exploiting natural resources rather than labor. With modern technology, drilling for oil isn't very labor intensive. This deprives the people of any bargaining power to better than lot in life. Globalization can actually make this problem worse, due to higher demand and rising prices for energy. Hopefully, as the world moves to other sources of energy, these oil-rich countries will be forced develop economically. Hopefully that would at least put them on Chinese path of being somewhat less authoritarian and allowing their people to prosper economically. Then perhaps the most extreme of the militant leaders would lose their hold over the people.

 

[T'Girl]

Especially since, as I understand it, the saudi do not even do their own drilling. outsider, UK and US ,and the Chinese do it for them.

When the world does, eventual, move to a new power source, I fear that part of the world will back slide from the small gains that they've made

World gov. and aliens are both a bit scary.