I hear their wax is quite popular.
Didn’t Atlanta become the “superpower” it is today in big part due to its central location aviation wise? Obviously its not the ONLY thing, but it does seem to suggest the OP’s author wasnt totally off base theory wise.
And Che Guevara also.
Maybe we should look back in geological time to when the continents were all together as one big land mass, determine the center point of that, and then see where that point is now that the continents have split apart.
That might be interesting, but I still don’t see any real point to it.
Centers of transportation depend on where people have chosen to live, and where the raw materials are vs. where the factories are, and where the food growing areas are vs. where the food eaters are. And that has certainly changed over the centuries, as culture changed. (The Middle East was once important as a trade route for spices; now it’s more important for oil.)
And I don’t see the importance of air transportation. Air transport is about 4 down in the list of transportation volume (after pipelines/electric grids, water transport (cargo ships & barges), and land transport (trains, trucks, etc.)). And or intercontinental rockets(!) – they aren’t used for transportation at all, that I know of. Even as weapons, they’ve never been used, just a threat during the cold war.
Hey, nobody said anything about “dry” land.
The George Friedman book mentioned earlier (The Next Hundred Years) is indeed an interesting look at geopolitics. He makes and rather successfully backs up the predication that Mexico, Poland and Japan will become the key players in the coming century.
Heh. There was a time in the 1970s when everyone thought that Brazil would be the next superpower. I remember it’s described as one in Frederik Pohl’s 1977 sf novel Gateway; the U.S., Soviet and Brazilian space navies are the strongest in the Solar System, IIRC.
Really, being central for the southern United States. It was the central rail hub for the South at one time, too. If you’re traveling from another region of the United States to a Southern city, whether by road, rail or air, the odds are much better of you passing through Atlanta than any other city. The phenomenon is even stronger with Chicago in the Midwest. It’s difficult to think of any sort of scenario with settling the North American continent that doesn’t involve the emergence of a large city at the southern tip of Lake Michigan.