Give me an official timeline for world events in the Mad Max universe.
In Mad Max, society was in decline, presumably due to energy shortages. We are given a glimpse of a world where gangs and criminals are taking over because government no longer has the resources to support it’s infrastructure.
In the prologue to Road Warrior, it is said that “two great tribes went to war”. Presumabably the war eventually went nuclear as the superpowers fought for the last remaining resources.
And of course, it is confirmed in Thunderdome that there was a nuclear war. The city at the end is Syndey, Austrilia. It could have been blowed up or it could just be from 15 years of neglect or some combination of both.
IMHO, there doesn’t have to be a consistant explanation. All we need to know is they ran out of energy and the world tore itself apart.
I also like to point out that in a world where you have to stop your car in the middle of a chase to mop up any spilled gasoline, perhaps a supercharged V-8 Ford Falcon isn’t the best choice of vehicles.
What do people mean by “fall”? Regress into a Mad Max style barbarism? Unlikely without some sort of massive disaster that completely disrupts our infrastructure. Do they mean a radical political restructuring? This happens all the time. Fortunately, we have set up various mechanisms here in the West to facilitate those changes non-violently.
One of the advantages of Western style democratic / capitalist society is that it is very flexible and adaptable to change. Markets tend to adapt to scarcity, encouraging people to find substitutes. When you put a lot of fixed government institutions in place, they tend to be self-perpetuating exist outside of market forces. Because of this, once they are no longer sustainable, they tend to collapse suddenly and violently instead of change themselves gradually.
There isn’t one. The first film is set “a few years from now”, according to Wikipedia and IMDB, although I could swear the UK-market version said 1995.
This sounds to me like “making it up as you go along” with no attempt at a consistent explanation.
I think this is an important point.
Barring a huge natural calamity, in which case all bets are off, I think it quite likely that the current superpowers will fall in much the same way as the British Empire - still a perfectly fine place to live but real power is concentrated somewhere else for a while, or in fact shared more equally. As other countries grow in economic strength it is inevitable that the relative power of the old guard will slip.
I think this is an inevitable consequence of the modernization of many of the developing countries, and do not think it a bad thing at all.
But never in a society that has no local technologies.
That’s the trouble with the Earth today-- we are a global village. Any one thread of our economy or knowledge base is fragile, but in totality, it’s an extraordinarily complex and dynamic weave.
Thus, in order to achieve a regression that simulates what the OP has in mind, you have to destroy that weave.
It’s a case of network attack: networks are resilient in nearly all cases. Lose a few nodes, or even many nodes, and they will reconstitute themselves in new patterns.
In the modern world? U.S. declines, someone else steps up (or, more likely/accurately, U.S. keeps going well, but other nations get better too). Other nations decline, maybe “nations” get replaced by something else-- fundamentalist medieval faiths, globe-spanning corporations, what have you.
The way to take that down network is to take it down at many nodes simultaneously. You have to essentially destroy global communications and atomize the network-- and more importantly, eliminate any ability/desire on the part of the zillion constituent components (U.S., China, the E.U., Microsoft, the Catholic Church, Al Qaeda, AAA auto club, etc.) to reconstitute that network. And you have do it FAST.
Scenarios? As said above-- nuclear war, comet/asteroid strike, or supervolcano(s) are about all that could do that.
Disease isn’t going to do that-- even the perfect bioweapons won’t be 100% efficient, let alone quick enough. Global warming? Whatever, that’ll be easy to deal with in comparison to the biggies up there.
EMP could come close to doing it, if you set off enough orbital nukes-- but even then, we’d just be set back, and enough folks would want to move forward quickly to overcome it (the world would look different, but we’d largely still have the capacity to return to something that looked more-or-less normal. . . not fast, not easily, but it would be done).
One caveat to all of this, however: no sufficiently advanced interconnected civilization has ever “fallen” due to external forces-- they instead invariably do it to themselves.
Personally, I think the most likely doomsday scenario of the next hundred years is that what we think of the West chooses to die off. Europe and Japan have already stopped having babies, and the U.S. does well because we still import them. I wonder what the world will think of the ancient nations of Europe when most of them are majority Muslim (and Muslims will be the last “believers” on the Continent). Opinions of that desirability aside, the world WILL look different.
As for China vs. India, we’ll discover what does them in. Either we run out of cheap & easy energy and the “early adopters” suffer the most, China implodes under an unsustainable corrupt kleptocracy, or a democratic India just can’t get everyone as wealthy as it wants, and social unrest results.
Fun times ahead.
Which advanced interconnected civilization has fallen due to self-destruction?
The Inca would disagree with you. If they were still around, that is.
They weren’t written as a trilogy. The first screenplay was written, produced, and was successful, so they decided to make two more.
India has been a democracy for its entire existence as a nation, and has had massive income inequality for all of that time. I don’t see the social unrest bit happening.
None, actually. But modern “nations” have certainly declined (post-imperial Britain, post-Soviet Russia, etc.).
Alas, they weren’t advanced or interconnected. Which is why they’re not still around.
Except for when, you know, that it does. Or has India not had more than its fair share of civil wars, religious strife, and other nasty bits in the past century?
Income inequality isn’t a bad thing by itself, and the social stability in much of India isn’t amenable to such strife now. But a rising power tends not to shoot itself in the foot-- what happens if/when India “hits a wall” and discovers that it can only give 200, or 300 million Indians Western-style wealth, but a billion Indians who get a vote have to stand on the sidelines and watch the better sixth live it up on Bollywood screens?
People are happiest when they think they have the opportunity to have a better life than they do now. If they lose that belief, trouble tends to follow.
Personally, I’d bet on India doing pretty well. China, on the other hand. . . I’m far more pessimistic there.
Why would you need a modern text though? I bet there’s plenty of middle ages texts, copies of which survive. Middle English can be rough to read for a modern but it’s not exactly a foreign langauge.
I’ve thought the same for a long time. I hope the U.S. can be friends with both, but between the two, my money’s on India. Sooner or later I suspect the Communist aristocracy in China will take a fall, and the aftermath could be ugly before (if ever) democracy can be established.
Sure it has… but none of it has had anything to do with income inequality. It’s all been religious strife and border wars with China and Pakistan.