[QUOTE=The Tao’s Revenge]
The Bush years are my cite.
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looks around cautiously Yep, we still seem to be here. I’d say we could survive just about anyone being elected, including Ron Paul and he’s probably the craziest of the bunch (counting either side).
Der Trihs is probably the only one who was born here and absolutely despises the place and believes that everything the US does or has done in the past is evil. Most 'dopers might have reservations about stuff we are doing or have done (especially regarding recent US foreign policy), but I don’t think many despise the country and everything it stands for and a large majority of the folks who live here.
Nothing would be my guess. Even Der Trihs isn’t going to go out and try and actually ‘destroy’ the country. I doubt any of them would do so even if there was something they COULD do to have that effect.
I don’t ‘despise’ the country, but my guess is if you really wanted to destroy it you would use our own system against itself. If you make people afraid and in their fear make them lash out and look for someone to save them you could twist our system in similar ways to how the Roman Republic was overtaken by the Empire. We could go a similar route given the right circumstances, and that would, IMHO ‘destroy’ the nation we are and make us something else. Or, with a large enough disaster or a continuation and massive ramping up of the current political wrangling by the left and right the country could fragment into true Red/Blue sovereign states or regions. Again, whatever came out of that wouldn’t be the nation we are part of today, so in effect you would have destroyed it for all practical purposes.
How would I destroy the United States? Simple. Invent a universal fabrication machine that can build anything given the right raw materials. The first thing I build with my universal fabricator is another universal fabricator, then two, then four, then etc. Once I’ve got lots of them, start handing them out for free. It’s not like they’re worth anything, because all you need to make one is a first one. In a few years, everyone one planet Earth will have a universal fabrictor, or access to one.
Then, sit back as national governments and economies become instant anachronisms. The United States will cease to exist as a meaningful method of organizing the social and economic life of people who live in North America, and so will be effectively destroyed without a single moment of violence. And my work will be done.
**I shall summon my Extraterrestrial Brethren to bombard your cities from orbit (just to be sure), burn your great works of art, enslave your minds by putting Ceti eels in your ears, and putting nude portraits of Newt Gingrich on each & every billboard left standing.
Nuclear weapons in every major city (plus DC, which isn’t really a major city and is more some sort of bureaucratic pimple) plus, I don’t know, LSD in the water supply? It’s hard to think of anything that would truly destroy the US. Change it fundamentally, sure, but even after the fall of Rome we’ve still got Italy.
Throw in gutting the EPA, getting rid of the fed and going to a gold system, allowing States to print their own currency, repealing all aspects of Frank Dodds, gut the SEC. Sit back and wait until the US makes China look like a paradise.
[QUOTE=FinnAgain]
Nuclear weapons in every major city (plus DC, which isn’t really a major city and is more some sort of bureaucratic pimple) plus, I don’t know, LSD in the water supply? It’s hard to think of anything that would truly destroy the US. Change it fundamentally, sure, but even after the fall of Rome we’ve still got Italy.
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Well, neither of those would destroy the US in the sense that the ground would still mostly be here, if a bit hot and glassy. I suppose if you dropped a big enough rock on the continent that would do the trick. Have to be a pretty big rock though. Or, if one was a magical race of alien space-bats with the ability to make all of our technology, including electricity and steam power quit functioning, and then use a large finger quote LASER end finger quote to cut the country into small paisley shapes exactly 5 miles in area, that would work.
How the heck do you control a gismo that can create anything, even another gismo? Like, all you need is for one person to get access to the boss’s gismo long enough to make another gismo. Then they’ve got a gismo, and in five minutes all their friends have a gismo, and five minutes later everyone has a gismo. How the heck do you control that?
And how the heck do you get a “wealthy minority”, when anything you can imagine can come out of a gismo? What exactly counts as wealth, then? Slaves? Yeah, I don’t think so. What exactly can your slaves provide you with?
[QUOTE=Lemur866]
How the heck do you control a gismo that can create anything, even another gismo? Like, all you need is for one person to get access to the boss’s gismo long enough to make another gismo. Then they’ve got a gismo, and in five minutes all their friends have a gismo, and five minutes later everyone has a gismo. How the heck do you control that?
[/QUOTE]
Raw materials would be my guess. You have to have stuff to make stuff, even with magical nano-replicators. Where would people get the raw materials needed, especially if it took rare earth metals or heavy metals…or even large quantities of iron and something to produce plastics and polymers? Sure, they could cannibalize their own stuff initially, but eventually they are going to need materials to make materials.
I’m unsure why this would destroy the US in any case. Why would the union and states just dissolve simply because all peoples needs were met materially?
Do people still want entertainment? Do they still want to go to ball games or watch movies in this world of yours? Do they still want to read books or watch midget porn? We might use something else for wealth (though my guess is we’ll just stick with money) but as long as someone can produce something that someone else enjoys (say, a cool new program for your magic replicator to produce a perfect Spuds McKenzie light up dog) then there will still be people that willing to buy and sell stuff.
Well, with a true magic replicator gizmo it should be able to use any raw materials to create just about anything. Insert handful of dirt, get handful of dysprosium, or what have you. Hell, it might not even use raw materials and might just tap into zero point energy or something.
Missed the edit window…also land would still be valuable. Your replicators can’t give everyone a Malibu (or even a Caribou) beach house, or a French/Italian villa on the Med, or a mountain castle in the Alps or private island in the Pacific. Nor will it invent new drugs to make us all immortal or a cool new Skyrim game. What will happen if everyone’s material needs are met by magic machines would be that our individual time and energy would be spent in other pursuits…that, and the folks who would still have to go out and get the raw materials we’d need to feed the machines (assuming the magic machines didn’t do that and turn us all into gray goo that is).
With real bone china tea cups? That might use up all the computing power available, leaving none to fire the infinite improbability drives! Could be risky…
[QUOTE=jayjay]
I think that might be just you.
[/QUOTE]
I find that hard to believe, but if so, then I’d single-handedly (you DON’T want to know what the other hand is doing) keep the midget porn industry alive. It would be an, um, moral imperative.
Well, I haven’t yet, but I really should. What is a resistance movement, domestically, anyway? Something like the American Indian movement?
Any or all of the above.
But let’s be clear here. One does not do these things to bring down the nation. A nation is made up of people. Bringing down the Yankee nation would involve extermination, repatriation, or at best re-education on a difficult scale. One attempts rather to bring down a* régime.* Like the present system of economically unsustainable Wall Street/Washington corruption, or the “unipolar world.” One must identify the problem and then find what will solve that problem.
This is explained very thoroughly by a character in the first chapter of the book. (I’m not saying it would work out that way IRL, only that it’s worth thinking about; that’s SF, it’s a literature of ideas.)
