I think this mess in the Middle East should show that you can’t simply prevent genocide. Social and economic forces are big things that tend to move unpredictably. Attempts to sway public opinion can backfire. (I once heard an anti-vaxxer say “Why are they trying to so hard to convince me I’m wrong? It’s proof of a government/corporate conspiracy to stamp out the truth!”)
So when we topple a dictator like Hussein or Assad, the result is not necessarily that everyone says “Wow, we have freedom. Let’s work together and be rich and prosperous.” No, some people say “If there’s no dictator now, that just creates room for me to take over!”
Space is easy. Two engineers get together, build something, test it, send it up. You don’t have to persuade a rocket to cooperate - you just build it that way. Solar panels don’t become corrupt and hoard power for themselves. If you seal up the interior, the air stays where you put it.
Wait a minute. The Nazis were part of “The West”. Much of Western Europe flirted with Fascism in the 20th century. Germany might have been the worst, but they had a lot of company.
Something like this. History won’t consider it all that important. It’s being made a big deal of* right now *because it fits into the whole “war between Islam and the West” narrative that so many people are pushing. But by the time historians are analyzing it, something else will probably be the cause of the moment.
It’s true that the West can’t sort out all the world’s local conflicts. Full out ethnic cleansing and genocide raises the bar in any violent crises. ISIS, much like Nazi Germany is committed to ethnic cleansing wherever they take territory. Lebanon for example has a large Christian minority. If ISIS gets a foothold there, then there’s no doubt the executions would soon begin.
Looking ahead, Middle East region will never be quite the same. Christians, Kurds, and the Yazdi have lived along side Muslims since antiquity. The Yazdi for example practice a blend of Christianity and Muslim faiths. The loss of diversity within those populations will be felt for generations to come. The culture there will be more isolationist and even less tolerant of outside religions.
I think the shape and structure of the Middle East decades from now will be something historians will study, Going back to the lines drawn on maps by former colonial powers. The formation of many of these countries was flawed from the very beginning.
Agreed. So, what’s preventing the powers that be from re-forming things in a way that will be more peaceful? It would be difficult, sure, and involve compromising. But keeping things as they are seems to just perpetuate the stalemate (e.g. no one is willing to compromise, and no one political body has the authority to made necessary changes.
I have to admit that, while I usually have a strong opinion on things, I fan on this. I just don’t know what is right. One thing to mention is that a lot of this is the fault of Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld and company.
Writing now knowing about the massacre in Paris this evening, I feel we should let them stew in their own fetid juice. If we bring in hundreds of thousands of refugees, some tiny percentage of their children will turn into terrorist fanatics.
Depends who writes the history.
I don’t hold out much hope for history being the least bit accurate. Considering the twisting, omission and ignoring of even the current reality of things.
How is a reasoned rough estimate based upon decades and decades of actual costs for space projects a “preconception”.
Even when you’re talking about sending robots to grab presumably platinum-rich asteroids, you have the problem that the cost is so large to do this that to break even you will need to bring back enough platinum to crash the market.
I’m in no way saying it can’t ultimately be done. I just don’t believe, and I have read of absolutely no credible evidence contradicting this, that we have the technology to do this today or in the near future. The only way to make this work is you need something like self replicating machinery, like I mentioned above. This isn’t magic, it would be a factory full of general purpose machines that can do common manufacturing tasks. The machines would reconfigure themselves into ad hoc assembly lines to fill a specific order. Self replication comes when the machines are sophisticated enough to manufacture components used in themselves.
You use the factories to expand industry on earth about 10 fold, making it possible to cheaply mass produce rockets or the components for a larger scale space launch system (laser launch, mass drivers, that kind of system). Then you make a massive number of launches - tens of thousands - and basically build a self replicating factory unit on the Moon. Rinse and repeat until you conquer the solar system. Use these vast industrial resources to build machines that can emulate complete human brains, and develop a compact version of a brain emulator that can fit on a rocket, and you have the kind of crew member that could practically survive the radiation, crowding, and time of an interstellar voyage.
TLDR : if you wanted to build 10,000 Atlas IV rockets using today’s tech, a vast number of clean suited workers would be needed to do it. More advanced tools would let you both build the rockets, and collect the material resources needed to build them, with minimal human labor.
To be fair, the victors do sometimes feel guilty and admit wrongdoing, centuries after the fact. The Trail of Tears is mentioned in US history class…though, come to think of it, they spent a lot more time on the Founding Fathers and other events important to the theory behind the USA government.
You are younger than I. The Trail of Tears never happened in the US history I took as a kid in the 70s. Conversely, the Sooner land rush was a Glorious example of Our Destiny. And this was in lefty California, not righty Texas.
But your point is well-taken.
My implied counterpoint to PatrickLondon’s dig at the OP was that it’s too early to know which side will be victorious and write the history.
I’m certainly pulling for Modernity and the West. As is most of the smart money today. But there was a lot of smart money bet on the Romans in their time too. And they lacked some Achille’s heels we’re now stuck with. As Mao’s deputy Zhou Enlai famously almost said about the results of the French Revolution: “It’s too early to tell.”
The historians. Despite the old saying the victors* don’t* write the history books, because long after the victors are dead different people will be writing the books.
Modernity is one thing. Technology gives those who wield it near unassailable advantages. The romans had nothing like this. Sure, they had some neat tricks - military techniques, aqueducts. But their technological advantages had weaknesses - they needed huge numbers of people to be organized for their formations to work, they needed vast amounts of labor to make aqueducts. I don’t see the modern technology being lost.
Systems of government and the general ways that Western countries tend to develop and make decisions, though - that might collapse. Western governments, run as democracies, make financial decisions about as wise as typical residents of trailer parks, running up vast debts with no plan to ever repay them. They make bad decisions and attack their own people in the interests of political correctness. In the USA, specifically, they attack their own people on a colossal scale. In China, ok, you don’t have the right of free speech and may be arrested at any time.
In the USA, you don’t have the right to enjoy a centuries old medicinal plant in the privacy of your own home. Guess which country locks up a greater percentage of it’s people?
I’m not saying the West will lose in the long run. But it might. I think I’ve mentioned this before - the global equilibrium, where borders on the map are about the same as they were in the 19th century, where no one power controls everything, etc - may not be as stable as it looks. If a single nation surges ahead in technology, using technology to develop better technology even faster, roaring ahead in a orgy of self-amplifying development, it could possibly gain such a lead in industry and military that it could wipe the board clean, invading or vaporizing every other nation on the map. There may be an end game here.
I guess history will judge ISIS’s response to the West’s atrocities - half a million dead Iraqi civilians could look a lot like attempted genocide in decades to come, depending who’s history you read.’
Machine intelligence makes a hydrogen bomb look like firecrackers. H-bombs can only blow big craters. Machine intelligence is a tool that could be used to control everything, or build things that H-bombs can never accomplish.