Neidhart:
Never mind sudden extinctions. I’ve wondered what happens if a country’s population just keeps falling. There was a Washington Post story a few weeks back saying that Portugal only had something like 40,000 births the past year. Could a situation eventually arise, around 2100 or so, such that only one family, perhaps resident in Brazil, owns most of the land in Portugal? Would Lisbon become some kind of living-history theme park like Colonial Williamsburg?
It’s dangerous to assume that a trend will continue indefinitely. Most likely the trend would be modified before it got to that extreme. From Mark Twain:
In the space of one hundred and seventy-six years the Lower Mississippi has shortened itself two hundred and forty-two miles. That is an average of a trifle over one mile and a third per year. Therefore, any calm person, who is not blind or idiotic, can see that in the Old Oolitic Silurian Period, just a million years ago next November, the Lower Mississippi River was upwards of one million three hundred thousand miles long, and stuck out over the Gulf of Mexico like a fishing-rod.
And by the same token any person can see that seven hundred and forty-two years from now the Lower Mississippi will be only a mile and three-quarters long, and Cairo and New Orleans will have joined their streets together, and be plodding comfortably along under a single mayor and a mutual board of aldermen.
There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.
This thread shows the importance of every country having a government in exile.
But in any case, a government in exile can take the UN seat of the “disappeared government” and we can move forward from there.