well no, nuclear weapons mean that any war will cost more than it earns, even if you don?t get absolutely stopped into the ground by every nation in the world.
Will there ever be another World War?
- Thread starter Liv's Runaway Snail
- Start date
Sure, but probably not in the way you're thinking. The Earth will be around for another 5 billion years, so the chances of there not being another global conflict are astronomically low. It could be fought with any weapons imaginable. There could even be a catastrophe that reverts our technology and we fight another WW1 in trenches or it could be nuclear, or anything far worse than we yet imagine. But there being another World War is nearly mathematical certainty.
I'm just gonna put a high precision space gun in space and kill every damn politician that even thinks of aggression beyond his own borders.
Don't send young dumb kids to kill and be killed, kill the fucking politicians. And aristocrats that somehow always gain the most out of a war, those god damn unnatural machine men.
Seriously. People of Earth. Rise up. Kill those fuckers, use the wealth of the world to end poverty and go to space. It is your destiny!
Don't send young dumb kids to kill and be killed, kill the fucking politicians. And aristocrats that somehow always gain the most out of a war, those god damn unnatural machine men.
Seriously. People of Earth. Rise up. Kill those fuckers, use the wealth of the world to end poverty and go to space. It is your destiny!
Nah, that was only one crazy dictator, I want them all to know they could be wiped out at any moment if they even think about sending young men out to die. Dictators, presidents, chairmen, CEO's, etc.thaluikhain said:
Keep it in your own borders, assholes.
I kinda want to be a super villain, yeah.
IBlackKiteI said:
Well, that's part of the problem and the gist of my point. Nobody has the willpower or the guts to do what is needed. The reaction "OMG, the death of 90% of the human race" misses the simple point of necessity. That's the level we need to reduce humans to if we're going to survive as a species, that reduction allows everyone to live at an acceptable level, while directed resources towards much needed space exploration, and allows the planet to heal itself.
Understand also that it's easy to look at this in a jaded fashion in the first world and think of your surroundings as the world. To be honest the first world accounts for a tiny percentage of humanity as a whole, close to 90% of the population lives in abject poverty as it is, with conflicts being sparked because all those people want better lives
and to have the things the first world does, but the planet simply cannot sustain it.
A big part of the trick to ending conflict and getting humanity off the planet so we can expand our population with our reach is to get the population down to the point where nobody needs to fight because everyone can live in a high degree of comfort. When you look at nations like China, India, or heck, the entire African continent, you can see how we're facing a situation of life killing us just as surely as a zombie plague in a work of fantasy.
Yes, a lot of good people would die during such a war, BUT that's the cost of the survival of the species as a whole. There will always be more great thinkers and upright guys.
The thing is that overpopulation is not a problem that can be solved slowly, some overpopulated nations like China talking about how their strategies are working and the population is going down kind of miss the point, such reduction takes generations, and even so reduction to the point that we need to see is not something people are going to endure willingly, at least not to the point where a government could do it without turning into a regime of psychopathic murderers, and if your going to go there, you might as well just get it over with by having a massive war and hash out all these differences once and for all. Time is a factor, as guys like Steven Hawking have pointed out, we don't have centuries for slow, gradual, long term changes to get up into space seriously, and as environmentalists have pointed out the current planetary resources won't last that long either. We're not talking with issues you can say "well this is something people need to be concerned about" and put it off for other generations, or hope a slow, unnoicible solution solves the problem, this issue has gotten to this point by being ignored as it is, which is why I advocate massive, global war, which will also let us get everything out of our system. I suppose if there was a single world government someone could institute a cull using a lottery system, but honestly I think war and people fighting for their survival works better social Darwinism and all of that.
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As far as things like World War II happening again, well the world is on the brink right now, all it takes is someone to drop a match. The illusion of MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) has been what's holding it back.
People here will hate this point, but understand that right now in the US we already have events going on that are very similar to how the Nazi party got started. We have popular "Democratic" leaders with socialist leaders who come forward claiming to represent
the people, and demonize the rich, your already seeing a lot of people pushing to pretty much steal what the wealthy top percentages of society have in the name of "being fair". It doesn't come with Hitler's ethnic cleansing agenda, but then again things are a lot different at the moment. Back when Hitler was doing his thing wealthy Jews owned tons of land and controlled huge amounts of the money. Countries like Romania joined in with Hitler to kill the Jews largely because they were concerned about the "Re-Romanianization" of land and property held by the Jews, basically kill the people owning the property, take their money, and then give it to the state or in some cases the previous owners who sold it.
Now to be honest on a certain level I actually agree with the principle of re-distributing some of the wealth. I believe strongly in capitalism and a lot of the things that are being exploited, but I believe some people take it too far and ruin it for everyone else. As I've pointed out before I empathized with "Occupy Wall Street" and it's objectives, BUT I didn't believe they could achieve anything without violence (and I've been proven pretty much correct, Rome might not have been built in a day, but it wasn't built by a bunch of hipsters sitting around on their butts refusing to bathe either). As I've said many times I'm pretty middle of the road politically as I have a number of very strong left and right wing
positions it's just the areas I swing heavily right on come up more often on the forums. On both sides I very much believe in calls to action and people actually doing things rather than bureaucracy and talking about doing them. It sucks, but at the end of the day humans are still barbarians, and change comes at the barrel of a gun, or tip of a spear, we just delude ourselves otherwise, and in doing so we have created these deadlocks that are dragging down all of our achievements since at the end of the day two sides bickering for years does
nothing but spread the rot both sides want to avoid.
The point here is that the demonization of the wealthy and the successful has gone well beyond where it should be, we're seeing the development of what amounts to a class war, and a brewing politically lead "workers uprising" on a level that even I can't support. I do not think Obama is the "American Hitler" so to speak, but I believe he's paving the way for something very similar, probably without realizing it. When it does happen, such a leader will be very popular with the masses, not viewed as a demon (Hitler being an international man of the year is something people tend to forget... among other things). By not sticking to their guns in this government shut down, The Republican party just cost itself a lot of capital and while many people might see that as a good thing, I think it's opening these doors. We have an increasingy large government, increasingly draconian police and surveillance measures, and a hatred of the rich. Scale matters, and without opposition I wouldn't be surprised if the government makes a move to try and outright seize a lot of private assets in the next few years without a serious opposition, in actions that go far beyond the limited action I feel need to be taken against specific groups (major banks, etc...) that are largely responsible for ruining things for everyone else.
We're probably looking at more than 50 years before there's a serious risk of another World War - but there will most certainly be another World War. Once America stops being the worlds only true Superpower (which is probably closer to becoming a reality than the rest of the world is comfortable with, though hopefully not in any of our lifetimes), other nations will move to try to fill that vacuum - China, Russia, Pakistan and India spring to mind, with Iran and North Korea as wild cards.
Once America reaches the point where it can't pay for its own military, that's when a whole bunch of conflicts will seemingly erupt out of nowhere. It isn't just buying the toys, it's making the toys - quite often subsidized by the American tax payer - it's training the people to use the toys training other people to maintain the toys. It's ensuring that there is a population educated enough to be able to understand how to maintain and repair the toys, which means a population which is healthy and stable enough from infancy to adulthood. It needs a population which believes in the nation so much they're willing to die and kill for it. The direction America is lurching toward is going to undermine the education, health and stability of the bulk of Americans. Not in this generation, or in my children's generation, but my grandkids are going to be looking at my generation, and my parents generation, and wonder why we couldn't see the train wreck we were creating.
(Ironically, I think the best way to turn that 50 years into 100 or 200 years is for countries like my own, Canada, many European countries, and other nations which have decided to rely on the USA for military defense to expand our militaries to the point where it's actually feasible for us to defend ourselves, on our own. As long as we let America be the worlds policeman, and let America pay for the privilege, we're helping to expand the inevitable vacuum that will come when America falls off its perch. The bigger the vacuum, the bigger the war that will come to fill it.)
Once America reaches the point where it can't pay for its own military, that's when a whole bunch of conflicts will seemingly erupt out of nowhere. It isn't just buying the toys, it's making the toys - quite often subsidized by the American tax payer - it's training the people to use the toys training other people to maintain the toys. It's ensuring that there is a population educated enough to be able to understand how to maintain and repair the toys, which means a population which is healthy and stable enough from infancy to adulthood. It needs a population which believes in the nation so much they're willing to die and kill for it. The direction America is lurching toward is going to undermine the education, health and stability of the bulk of Americans. Not in this generation, or in my children's generation, but my grandkids are going to be looking at my generation, and my parents generation, and wonder why we couldn't see the train wreck we were creating.
(Ironically, I think the best way to turn that 50 years into 100 or 200 years is for countries like my own, Canada, many European countries, and other nations which have decided to rely on the USA for military defense to expand our militaries to the point where it's actually feasible for us to defend ourselves, on our own. As long as we let America be the worlds policeman, and let America pay for the privilege, we're helping to expand the inevitable vacuum that will come when America falls off its perch. The bigger the vacuum, the bigger the war that will come to fill it.)
You've got a lot of...interesting points but I cannot at all grasp the idea of how wiping out the vast majority of the world's population will ultimately be greatly beneficial for the human race. If it we were up to that point, or even close, the whole world would have been hurting a lot more for a lot longer. Terrible as it would be I can get why a devastating 90% global population drop could in some ways ultimately be beneficial for the remaining 10, but it'd cause more problems than it'd solve and there's no guarantee whatsoever it would lead to any kind of prosperity. What you need to consider is the manner in which this population decrease will be accomplished how greatly that'll fuck things up even more. We're not talking about 9 tenths of the world suddenly dropping off the face of the Earth, we're effectively talking about World War 3 and everything that would entail. (or likely entail, noone's ever seen WW3, it'll be bad but the question is how bad and how lasting the effects would be, assuming anyone survives)Therumancer said:
Let's say hypothetically such a thing did happen. First thing you've got to worry about is ending the conflict and uniting the remnants. After years of warring the rival states won't easily accept a truce, and even if this did happen immense animosity between the various groups would mean conflict would inevitably spring up again. Only shot at lasting peace is to effectively exterminate every group that isn't yours which will be a very lengthy and difficult process, then you're left with one people centered in one area, with largely similar ideas, points of view etc. One of the things which made the Romans so powerful was their ability to assimilate aspects of other cultures, technologies, ways of thinking, etc., into their own. If everyone in the lands they conquered were just more Italians they likely wouldn't have advanced much at all. Lack of diversity overall reduces the ways in which you can advance. You don't hear about many societies and states getting stronger by working up all on their own, you hear about them getting stronger by basically ripping things off/working with other groups. Then you've got to worry about rebuilding everything. You'd need to get everyone to somehow get over it all and work together to rebuild the world and society. It would take many, many years and would be the greatest undertaking of human history. You'd need extremely good leaders to motivate people to get things done after everything they've suffered, and to be honest I think modern society simply doesn't produce great leaders anymore, at least not at level needed. You'd need a lot of remaining resources and access to them. You've got to worry about ensuring that the bare means of survival are met, so hope to God that some farmland still exists and whatever water that isn't polluted/irradiated/whatever is enough for everyone, or else you'll have more conflicts going on for ages as people struggle for resources.
You seem to have the kind of idea that the remaining people will have been made stronger by their struggle and in a sense more deserving of survival, the whole Social Darwinist gig. But we're not living in ancient times anymore, where the more powerful societies enslaved the weaker ones, becoming more and more powerful as they expanded, conquered and became more advanced in a number of ways as they fought their way through the world, where life was generally much harder than today and tough conditions bred tough people. A conflict like this won't involve anyone expanding or evolving in some way, it'll largely be determined by who can spit out the most bombs and fighter jets the fastest while everyone who is not directly involved in this hides in bomb shelters hoping they don't die. This means that the winner, if you can call them that, will be the group who already has the best technologies and means of waging modern war on a grand scale, but typically nowadays the more technologically advanced the group, the greater the standard of their living, the less able they are to deal with great hardships. In Medieval times and earlier people wouldn't ***** about losing their phone or not getting a 1 meg a second download speed. These people suffered great hardships again and again, when plagues rolled around and killed their families, when unstoppable armies invaded and burned everything. I'm not saying that everyone back then was a complete titan or anything, but as a whole people today in Western society don't know great hardships anymore. The surviving group will therefore be made up of people wholly unsuited to dealing with anything like the difficulties ahead of them. If they do somehow get it together enough that their descendants will be travelling space as you say, it'll take a very long time and they'll have to deal with a broken world.
In short World War 3 won't be some kind of salvation for the human race, it'll be massive destruction with no lasting benefit for anyone. Whoever's left will need to deal with, and likely mostly fail at dealing with, a new set of problems and a vastly changed world in efforts to rebuild and improve upon what was destroyed. This won't be a simple 'overpopulation is dealt with lets reach for the stars', things will change, people and their mentalities will change, there is no guarantee that any kind of peace or great new society will even be established at any point down the line.
As for the whole World War 2-esque scenario happening tomorrow like I said there were a ton of reasons why Hitler was able to come to power when and where he did and kick start the whole mess. What you seem to describe is more like the makings of a hypothetical 2nd American civil war/revolution rather than a regime taking power of a state by capitalizing on, among other things, the sense of wounded pride and great animosity towards various groups shared by the people of that state, then stream-rolling over a number of countries and bringing the world into conflict.
I don't live in America but I do not see how it's current state of affairs will lead to any kind of great conflict on the inside or out anytime soon. Animosity towards the government, the divide between rich and poor, shifting in government and society and radical ideas of various kinds will always be there but largely inconsequential to the everyman. People simply don't care enough to act substantially on these kind of things, there were no mass riots and protests regarding the 9/11 conspiracy (among other things) despite a huge number of people believing in it. So many people ***** about how apparently evil their government is whenever the latest scandal/leak/whatever comes up yet no one does anything real about it (they also don't question, if their government is so evil how come they are able to talk about it being evil?). People just want to be able to be and beliefs are essentially secondary to that. If people truly cared about the many apparent injustices the American government has visited upon its people, or the rich elements of the American people towards the poor, there would have been mass civil unrest at the least and either a revolution or true draconian state at the most.
Of course, push comes to shove at some point, and a number of signs point to this being a distant inevitability as America declines, costs increase and the standard of living goes down and people realize there are very substantial negative things happening to them, but as it is now there simply isn't enough discontent or real great injustice around for something big to go down in American anytime soon.
IBlackKiteI said:
I trimmed this down a bit to the key points though I'll touch on some of the others.
For starters the world is in a horrible shape, and it IS hurting that badly. It's just that it's hard to see from the perspective of someone living in a first world country, hence the usual crack about "first world issues" whenever an issue central to life in countries like the UK, USA, Australia, etc... becomes a global concern. The simple fact is that the second and third world GREATLY outnumbers the first world, and in those areas the population tends to live in abject poverty with daily concerns like food, fresh water, and basic medical supplies. Africa, Central and South America, most of Asia, and of course The Middle East. Right now China is rife with poverty, starvation, slavery, racism, and all kinds of problems. Diseases like SARS got started due to people being forced to live with their livestock, and you have people living "hot bed" in tiny living spaces where they might do things like stack dog crates with mats on them. This is an important point since China alone accounts for roughly 1/3rd of the world's population, India, another powerful nation is rife with the same kinds of issues and is set to replace China as the most populated nation in a few years, easily accounting for another 1/3rd of the human population. Then from the remaining groups spread all over the rest of the world, the squalor-infested and overpopulated nations of places like Africa vastly outnumber the developed countries where people live like we do. On some level most people realize these things, but when it comes to looking at the big picture they do not register.
The thing is that as the world exists right now we're already draining global resources faster than the planet can recover, and as demand increases and we strip more and more away, it increases the damage being done, we're literally at a point where we will strip the planet to the point of having nothing left to harvest before too long. The whole "peace at any price" attitude tends to overlook the simple fact that not everyone on the planet can live anything like the first world and be relatively comfortable and happy. Trying to do that with say China (which is competing for the resources to do so) alone would literally destroy the global ecology before it even came close. Right now we're very much in a situation where the first world has to keep the rest of the world down for any people to even have a hope of being comfortable, and at the end of the day that really sucks. People who don't think it has to be that way tend to overlook the facts themselves. Case in point if you take your typical "generous" member of the US left wing, they will both champion environmental causes, and also champion developing nations. This creates ironic situations where your trying to help people, while at the same time preventing them from harvesting resources like timber (and destroying national habitats) which they want to clear cut so they can use, or sell, for the money to improve their society. A big part of the reason the first world has a reputation for being a little bit insane and focused on it's own issues by everyone else. "Here let us help you... but no, don't do anything that might help yourselves because it might disturb the habitat of these Gorillas".
The point is that with poverty being a problem even in the first world, to the point of things like the immigration of poor people (the bottom line) being a big deal, we very much are at a crisis point and feeling all of the things you mention, most just choose to remain blissfully ignorant of the scope of the problem, and the terrible price of solving it due to the amount of time we've allowed it to fester. Once ALL of the resources are gone by trying to keep things going the way they are, it's too late, which is why acting in the very near future (or perhaps most appropriately... right now) is so necessary.
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As far as World War 3 goes, you are correct, 9/10ths of the world population won't just go quietly into the night. At the end of the day we're talking about the wide scale use of WMD. The truth is that the solution mostly resides with using biological and chemical weapons. The lasting effects of which (mutating viruses, etc...) would actually help to keep the remaining population in check as the survivors keep cures apace with the lingering effects of the weapons. Neutron bombs and their ilk are also a very real possibility for the kind of warfare that would need to be waged. Of course there WOULD still be environmental devestation, but with a reduced population and a focus on space travel the planet would have the centuries it needs to recover relatively unmolested as 10% of the population would allow for positive ecological restoration as opposed to a constant stripping of the planet's resources.
Don't get me wrong, the cost is terrible, but at the same time we're talking about the salvation of our species and the future of the human race. It's not like I'm talking about this kind of thing for some petty reason.
As far as factions go, in such a war half the point would be to continue until only one is left. Truthfully I think it's very much a possibility if the war was conducted the right way.
It's worth noting that a lot of science fiction, like Star Trek, involves a great war or disaster wiping out most of humanity, forcing the various factions to unify. Indeed in Star Trek, the USA pretty much annihilated everyone else on the planet using drug-controlled soldiers. "Q" makes this point in "Encounter At Farpoint" (first episode of TNG) that the relatively utopian state you saw in Star Trek came about specifically because of massive barbarity and intentional genocides, on a lot of levels making The Federation a huge group of hypocrits . The overall point though being more or less the one I'm making about the cost of having something better.
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As far as America goes, you are largely correct, a big part of the problem is that we in the first world choose to ignore the facts and what's going on. Hence posts like mine, disturbing as they might be, I try and introduce the truth in hopes that maybe it will have an effect. Sometimes I like to think that later on down the road a bunch of aliens would land on a resource depleted earth, watching all of the regressed humans run around eating each other, learning that there was once a great civilization here they restore a computer and find a message archive with some of my posts and go "Damn! this guy was a real bastard, but if they had listened to this guy this never would have happened and we might be welcoming these "humans" to the stars".
World War 3? More than likely. Quite honestly though, nukes might be used by world powers like the U.S. or China; but others who need resources (water, food, etc.) will more than likely use other forms of attacks: hackers, EMPs (Electro-magnetic pulses), and biological warfare (less risk of damaging goods like chemical warfare would).
This is just my opinion, of course; I don't have any facts to back it up, but it's what I would do. EMP electrical grids and military installations to knock out defenses, and use Blitzkrieg tactics (bomb, armor, infantry). Even in modern day wars, you will need ground troops to coordinate efforts and crush resistance movements (as we've seen in Afganistan and Iraq, technology only gets you so far, but also creates a higher casualty rate for your own forces -the double edge sword).
Quite honestly, I think a World War is needed, especially for the United States. Not to show that "The U.S. is superior" or some crazy B.S. like that; but to wake up the populace. An invasion of the U.S. would probably be for the best. While I don't like the idea of human suffering, sometimes it can be a necessary evil for people to realize what is truly valuable in life. The civilian population has been isolated and sheltered for way too long, and have lost their way; I think our politicians are proof of that (remember, our system makes these people), and our TV programming reflects just how far our values have fallen.
Aside from this, there is a lot of tension in the world. Terrorist attacks, religious extremists, and just plain nut jobs seem to be running wild and fully crazy (and fully armed). It's not an isolate incident, it already is world-wide; and it's only going to get worse, as the responses to these people and individuals only seem to create more and more of them. Something is eventually going to give, and push the situation to it's absolute worse. It's not a matter of if, but when.
This is just my opinion, of course; I don't have any facts to back it up, but it's what I would do. EMP electrical grids and military installations to knock out defenses, and use Blitzkrieg tactics (bomb, armor, infantry). Even in modern day wars, you will need ground troops to coordinate efforts and crush resistance movements (as we've seen in Afganistan and Iraq, technology only gets you so far, but also creates a higher casualty rate for your own forces -the double edge sword).
Quite honestly, I think a World War is needed, especially for the United States. Not to show that "The U.S. is superior" or some crazy B.S. like that; but to wake up the populace. An invasion of the U.S. would probably be for the best. While I don't like the idea of human suffering, sometimes it can be a necessary evil for people to realize what is truly valuable in life. The civilian population has been isolated and sheltered for way too long, and have lost their way; I think our politicians are proof of that (remember, our system makes these people), and our TV programming reflects just how far our values have fallen.
Aside from this, there is a lot of tension in the world. Terrorist attacks, religious extremists, and just plain nut jobs seem to be running wild and fully crazy (and fully armed). It's not an isolate incident, it already is world-wide; and it's only going to get worse, as the responses to these people and individuals only seem to create more and more of them. Something is eventually going to give, and push the situation to it's absolute worse. It's not a matter of if, but when.
The effects of EMP are overstated, people have been defending against them since that effect was discovered.ers020 said:
Biological warfare is a very bad idea, if you mean attacking people with it, because your citizens and you personally are just as vulnerable to it. However, not everyone's agriculture is the same...spreading tobacco blight is a good way of affecting economies of tobacco producing countries, while it can't directly affect countries that don't grow it.
What do you mean about technology causing a higher casualty rate for your own forces?
Eh, people have been complaining that "this generation has lost its way" forever, while there is certainly things to criticise it for, a terrible war is unlikely to make things better.ers020 said:
As to world tensions, the world is remarkably peaceful at the moment. Most of the last hundred years or so was rather worse for most of the world.
Well, currently international politics are relatively stable, but even if there's a 0.1% chance per year of WW3 cropping up, if humanity is still here in a few thousand years...Aesir23 said:
I mostly forsee the war in Orwell's 1984. A constant war between three-or-so superpowers that dominate the world, with absolutely no chance that one power is going to dominate the other, with the superpowers constantly helping one another then backstabbing them for no reason and helping the other superpower. People grow used to a constantly warring home nation, but they never directly feel the war (with a few exceptions in 1984 that might have been purposefully done by the government for fearmongering).
Course I know jackall.
Course I know jackall.
I agree that international politics are quite stable at the moment even if it doesn't seem like it at times. I just meant that someone in the hopefully distant future might do something to cause a bit of a chain reaction and start another World War. Sort of similar to how World War I became as grand in scale as it was.thaluikhain said:
Absolutely. Maybe not in the next decade, maybe not in the next century, but World War will happen again.Liv said:
We are already embroiled in wars of economics and politics, the casualties of which are the populations of 3rd world countries, so the news media and the first world countries at large pretend like it's not a problem. But the illusory peace will not last forever.
MAD works nicely as long as A) There is a decent balance of power B) Both sides feel that they have more to lose, then they'd have to gain. That held true for the Soviets and Americans, but if pushed I think many smaller nation states would have no compunction over using nukes, even if it meant the annihilation of their own state.Liv said: