One day at a random moment the entire amount of land comprising the USA is POOF gone along with all equipment and personnel.
What happens then? I assume the Australia and other large landmass countries could reconfigure to handle the disruption in trade and economy, but what about countries more dependent on trade and world economic conditions to survive?
A fortune is made selling Canadian southcoast beachfront property.
One thing to consider is that the sea level would drop. I don’t know how significant that would be, but I suspect it would make a bunch of countries a lot larger.
The change in weather patterns would cause chaos. No more Gulf Stream, for instance.
The Chinese and other nations that have purchased huge amounts of our treasury securities would be very, very unhappy.
No more football:(American football of course)
But recover on considering that they are now in a position to dominate global industrial markets.
Think about the ramifications if Greece defaults on it’s debts on the economy of the rest pf the EU…then think about how that would effect the rest of the worlds economy. Then multiply that effect by at least an order of magnitude. Then, to paraphrase from Mega Mind…multiply it byyyyyyyyyy…six! That should get you in the ball park of what would happen if suddenly there was no US (and this is just the short term economics angle…no idea what the climate ramifications would be, and the long term logical fallout would be worse and hugely expensive, for example to NATO).
IOW:
Your assumption is wrong…it would be a global economic collapse in the short term, including in Australia. Long term I’d say it would be worse, but hard to say.
-XT
Crossing the Rio Grande would be a real bitch.
I’m thinking more like Alderaan. Remove the US and you remove a semi-conical segment of the globe going all the way to the center of the earth. Three of them, actually, That would destabilize the remainder of the globe to the point that it would tear itself apart.
If you go on the idea that the land extends down as far as it extends to sea (12 miles), you get a couple of huge deeps twice as deep as the Marianas Trench. What that would do to sea level is the same as pulling the plug in the bath tub.
John Birmingham has the best author’s bio I’ve ever seen:
No more Elections forum.
Job losses in Great Debates and The BBQ Pit mod ranks.
Years ago I was a big fan of English novelist Jack Trevor Story and read many of his books. I seemed to be continually confused by details in his biography.
One day I found out why. In an essay he explained that, in those pre-internet days, your publisher didn’t know anything about you so you wrote your own blurb. So why not have some fun and embellish it a bit. So he would fictionalize hi life - be raised in India or by gypsies, his parents would have various arcane trades or hobbies, he would own exotic animals as pets. And all would change from series to series or book to book.
So it is good to see the tradition continues.
Ten years ago, this December, the question was asked…
Ted: I finally remember, Ten years ago December,
My grandma, the hunters, I finally remember
Um… I would think South America would be in a decent position to try to take the U.S.'s place as the world’s bread-basket.
Meanwhile, say goodbye, immediately, to any last vestiges of Taiwanese independence… And Israel gets very edgy, and starts playing up to Europe… You’d have a lot of realignments of that variety. Australia would find itself very much involved in three-way power games between China and India.
The world-wide economic depression would be a stinker, but the world would get through it. It wouldn’t necessarily lead to WWIII. (But…it could…)
I think Australia would be more concerned with Indonesia than China immediately.
The United Nations would fall into a hole with no funding.
Airliners- we’d do with Airbus I guess. I imagine all the jumbo’s would still be around and there are plenty of plans.
We’d learn to live without American sitcoms.
On a more serious note I would see an alliance along the lines of UK/ France/ Russia as opposing China. Turkey would be a desirable friend.
India and Pakistan belt shit out of each other.
Such an unprecedented apocalyptic global catastrophe would cause much of the world population to fall into scale panic, resulting in global rioting, looting and general lawlessness. The internet is severely compromised as well. This chaos adds to the economic collapse and makes recovery much slower and more difficult. For a long time, everyone dealing with the implications of the event and living in fear of another would make it difficult for a global recovery attempt to productive.