The Weather

This summer and early fall (from May to September) has been the hottest in the history of Phoenix. On September 28, 2024, it had a 118º Fahrenheit day, smashing the record for the hottest September day in history there by a large margin. It had 113 or so consecutive days in excess of 100º  this summer, setting another record. 

The frequency of Category 4 and 5 hurricanes has surged in recent years (eight in eight years, after eight in the 57 years before that). Hurricane Helen was the most deadly hurricane (and over a larger geographic area) than any in the last fifty years (at least). There is a good chance that the Gulf Coast will be hit by another Hurricane in the next two weeks.

Huge wildfires in the Western U.S. and Canada are not unrelated.

This is likely to be the "new normal" with climate change. If so, it make make Phoenix and some other cities in the South and Southwest uninhabitable at some point in the next fifty or hundred years (or sooner). New Orleans has already experienced a major exodus after Hurricane Katrina. The vast low lying portions of Florida are particularly vulnerable.

This isn't limited to North America either. 

For example, Central and Eastern Europe have record breaking flooding and Nepal is experiencing catastrophic floods and landslides. Before that, Europe has had some record heat waves in the last few years. 

Glaciers are vanishing rapidly. Arctic ice caps are smaller and shorter lived. Huge ice sheets are calving off Antarctica. Events that increase sea levels will increase non-linearly at current tipping points, i.e. sooner than one would expect with linear increases in sea level over time.

Much of this climate change is irreversible at this point, although we can stop doing things that cause it and slow down the rate of change going forward.

Climate change won't end humanity or civilization although it may result in some species extinctions beyond what mankind is already causing anyway by other means. It will result in noticeable changes in many critical places, however, that will impact human affairs.

The U.S. Approach To A Hypothetical Invasion Of Taiwan

Size comparison

The United States military is acutely aware of the possibility that the People's Republic of China on the mainland (the PRC), might try to invade and conquer Taiwan, something that the PRC has repeated threatened to do, although a military conflict with between the Philippines and the PRC in which the U.S. might become embroiled seems more likely in the short term and has resulted in more incidents of low intensity warfare in the last two or three years. I've also explained, elsewhere, why the PRC's reliance on international trade in a wide variety of goods and services to support its economy makes an invasion of Taiwan a much more costly option for it, than a globally unpopular war would be for Russia, whose international exports are dominated by oil and gas, or North Korea, which is very isolated economically from the rest of the world. Further background is available below.

Indeed, the threat of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan is the single largest rhetorical justification used by the U.S. Navy, and to a lesser but still great extent by the U.S. Marine Corps and U.S. Air Force, for U.S. military expenditures.

The U.S. Strategy

The U.S. doesn't have any major military bases in Taiwan, unlike its military bases in Japan, South Korea, Hawaii, Alaska, three U.S. territories in the Pacific, and a smaller U.S. military base in the Philippines (which was once a much larger presence), presumably, in order to formally honor its "One China" policy.

But the U.S. has sold a lot of sophisticated U.S. military equipment to Taiwan, and together with its allies, can marshal considerable naval and air forces in the region.

Basically, the plan is for the U.S., Taiwan, and its allies to direct large numbers of anti-ship missiles and when the opponents are very close, Taiwanese artillery and allied naval gun shells at invading Chinese ships and boats, deployed from land, from surface ships at sea, from every manner of aircraft from long range stealth and conventional bombers, to carrier and land based fighter aircraft (some making the trip with the help of aerial refueling), to maritime patrol aircraft, to C-130 and C-17 military transport planes carrying missile launching cargo, to long range drones, to nuclear attack submarines, with the nuclear attack submarines also launching torpedoes. It would use U.S. satellites, high altitude spy planes, surveillance drones, and U.S. signals intelligence resources to identify targets (as well as any human intelligence resources within China available to the U.S. or its allies). Containerized anti-ship missile batteries will soon make it possible for cargo ships, amphibious transport ships, and merchant ships to also carry and deliver anti-ship missiles with ranges in the hundreds of miles.

Long range bombers, maritime patrol aircraft, C-17s, and fighter aircraft that use aerial refueling tankers, can travel thousands of miles and make the trip in about 12-13 hours from Hawaii. The trip from based in Japan or South Korea or Guam or American Samoa or the Northern Marina Islands would be shorter. Surface ships and submarines not already in the area can take several weeks to arrive, rendering them almost irrelevant in a fast developing naval battle, without a great deal of advance warning from satellites and other intelligence that she China mobilizing.

The aircraft and ships and ground batteries firing anti-ship missiles don't have to get particularly close. The aircraft can stay at high altitudes. Even the shortest range fighter and helicopter carried anti-ship missiles have a range of 18-20 miles. Most have ranges from 100 to 600 miles, and the aircraft can get just within range and turn around if the risk of air defenses is great. Modern torpedoes have a range of about 24 miles, although a longer range provides a target a greater opportunity to evade it.

The U.S. and its allies could deposit of small force of mostly light ground troops in the lead up to an invasion and during an invasion, but for the most part, Taiwan would have to rely on its own troops and reserves, and pre-placed equipment for its ground forces, to repel any Chinese troops that managed to cross the Taiwan strait by sea or by air.

The mission of Taiwan and its allies is easier. It need only destroy or mitigate the harm from incoming ships, aircraft, drones, missiles, and naval gun shells (the Taiwan strait is too wide for cannon artillery or all but the longest range artillery missiles on the mainland to cross) with a mix of anti-ship and anti-aircraft weapons. They don't need to board ships of the People's Liberation Army Navy (PLAN), and don't have to deliver troops or their equipment in an amphibious invasion. PLAN submarines are effective ways to deny access to the ships of Taiwan and its allies and merchant ships bound to Taiwan, but most are fairly short range coastal submarines that have almost no effectiveness against the aircraft of Taiwan and its allies, and pose only a manageable threat to surface warships of Taiwan and its allies that are not in the Taiwan strait or too close to the island of Formosa.

A carrier with F-35C fighter aircraft, for example, need only be close enough for its fighters to fly to the edge of their 700 (non-nautical) mile combat radius which in turn must be within 150 to 700 (non-nautical) miles of the target of their anti-ship missiles. So, the carrier can strike a ship in the Taiwan strait that is 850-1400 miles away from its, for example, from the vicinity of the Northern Marina Islands, or Tokyo, or South Korea, or the southern most islands of the Philippines. 

A carrier group at that distance would also have a decent chance of intercepting long range missiles bound towards it from mainland China, and the range of these anti-ship missiles is greater than all but the most potent anti-aircraft missiles in China's arsenal and would have to be timed to strike the aircraft delivering the missiles only just as the aircraft is about to launch its air to ground missiles or is just returning from doing so. And, of course, if an F-35 is hit by a Chinese anti-air missile, only one pilots life, at most, is lost, and there is a decent chance that the pilot could eject and be recovered by a search and rescue team. The number of Chinese ground troops killed every time a Chinese warship or worse yet, a Chinese troop carrying ship, is sunk, would be profoundly greater.

Certainly, Chinese troops that do manage to reach the Taiwanese shore by sea, or by helicopter or transport plane or as paratroops, as elite soldiers in an massive all volunteer military of professional Chinese soldiers are, on average, going to be better trained and more skilled soldiers, than Taiwanese ground troops at the vanguard of a massive but not terribly ready or elite reserve force. But the Taiwanese troops know their territory, have the support of the locals, have been training for this mission and this mission only, are fighting to protect their homes, and will locally outnumber the modest number of Chinese troops that manage to cross the strait at least at first, if the efforts to Taiwan and its allies to destroy incoming troop carrying ships and transport aircraft is reasonably successful.

Also, in an era of Chinese demographics where one child families are the norm, even in this nation of 1.4 billion people, the lives of young men serving as soldiers in the PRC's military are no longer cheap and expendable. And, China has not fought any actual hot conflict in which its any significant number of its soldiers and sailors have lost their lives in the living memory of the vast share of the Chinese people. They haven't had much of a chance to come to see these losses as a necessary price to meet its geopolitical objectives, which it has mostly achieved with trade, aid, and diplomacy.

For all of China's bluster, one can seriously doubt whether China really has the stomach to lose the lives of hundreds of thousands of young men, most of its navy, a substantial share of its air force, and many of its coastal military resources, when it can already extract much of what it wants Taiwan for economically as opposed to culturally or politically, through trade. 

China has nuclear weapons, but those too are less potent of a threat in a Taiwan invasion. Using on nuclear weapon on the island of Formosa pretty much defeats the purpose of conquering it and would make it an international pariah. But missile defenses are effective enough that ICBMs aimed to the U.S. or its allies might be completely or almost completely thwarted, with any successes threatening massive nuclear retaliation against it.

The Historical And Geopolitical Context And Background

The island of Formosa is about 100 miles from mainland China across the Taiwan Strait. 

A typical naval warship can make the trip in about four hours, a very fast one might make it in two or three hours. A helicopter or slower drone could make it in forty-five minutes or less. A subsonic missile or fighter jet or military transport plane can make the trip in ten to fifteen minutes. A supersonic jet fighter can make the trip in five minutes. A hypersonic missile can make the trip in less than two minutes.

The PRC claims the island of Formosa upon which Taiwan is situated is a rebel province which is part of its territory, along with the strait between Formosa and the mainland, despite the fact that the regime has never had any control or authority on the island, and the fact that no mainland Chinese regime has had any control or authority on the island since 1895. The modern Chinese state dates only to the revolution in China in 1911.

Meanwhile, Taiwan, even more laughably, claims to be the legitimate government in exile of mainland China, a territory it lost any remnant of authority or control over from its inception when its regime retreated there after losing the civil war in China that persisted from the end of World War II in 1945 which left a power vacuum there, until the victory of the Maoists and defeat of the Nationalists in 1949, 75 years ago. The Kuomintang party abandoned its claim to be the sole government of mainland China in 1991 in the same year that it ended "emergency rule".

Imperial China ruled the island of Formosa from 1662 when it ousted the Dutch and large numbers of people from mainland China migrated there, until 1895 when the island was conquered by the Japanese Empire. The Japanese ruled it for half a century until the end of World War II in 1945. 

After World War II, there was a civil war in China between the Maoist Communists and the Chinese Nationalist Party led by Chiang Kai-shek. The non-communist Chinese Nationalist Party eventually lost that civil war and relocated to the island of Formosa in a mass migration of its remaining loyalist in 1949 (the same year that the Maoist PRC regimes was declared by Chairman Mao), filling the post-World War II power vacuum caused by the collapse of Imperial Japan's rule there. The following year, in 1950, now 74 years ago, the PRC conquered Tibet.

Chiang Kai-shek ruled Taiwan as a de facto dictator for twenty-six years until 1975, with U.S. backing against expansion of the Communist PRC as part of the Cold War, running the economy on a capitalist model.

The PRC claimed the island as its territory, even though no mainland Chinese government had ruled there since early 1895, and in 1971, after three-quarters of a century in mainland China had no control or authority there, and despite the fact that the PRC regime had never had control or authority there, in 1971, the U.N. recognized the PRC's claim to the island and expelled Taiwan from the U.N. The PRC terminated its diplomatic relationship with Taiwan in 1978. Today, following the U.N.'s lead, only 13 countries, including the U.S., have formal diplomatic ties with Taiwan. The PRC and Taiwan had their first formal talks with each other again in 2014, thirty-six years after breaking off diplomatic relations but have not reestablished diplomatic ties. Per the BBC link below:

Today, only 12 countries (plus the Vatican) officially recognise Taiwan. The US decision to switch diplomatic recognition from Taipei to Beijing in 1979 was the turning point. And a richer, more powerful China exerts pressure so more countries do not recognise Taiwan or lend it support. But America remains the island's strongest ally, sells arms to it and has vowed to help in case of a Chinese attack.

The U.S., however, continued to be a strong ally to Taiwan and its military guaranteed its independence from the PRC, and under its influence, Taiwan eventually reformed itself, carrying out land reform to address the feudal era inequalities that led to the Maoist revolution on the mainland, instituting universal public education, modernizing its agricultural and industrial economies, and finally, step by step becoming a democracy. Martial law was lifted in 1987 after 38 years. Four years later in 1991, four decades of "emergency rule" was ended. And, five years after that in 1996, Taiwan had its first direct Presidential election, which the Kuomintang party, the successor to the original Chinese Nationalist Party that had controlled Taiwan for forty-seven years since 1949, won. 

The uncontested rule of Chiang Kai-shek's dominant Kuomintang party finally ended in the year 2000, when the leader of the pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party won the Presidential election, only for the Kuomintang party to regain the Presidency from 2006 to 2016, when the Democratic Progressive Party regained the Presidency, in part, over concerns that the Kuomintang party was to friendly with China and might jeopardize Taiwan's independence. The Democratic Progressive Party still holds the Presidency today. China has gradually stepped up its saber rattling towards Taiwan since the Kuomintang Party lost the Presidency in 2016.

Taiwan is now a first world country with a high standard of living in an advanced stage of demographic transition of 23.6 million people (compared to about 1,400 million people in the PRC which is about 59 times a large). Taiwan's economy is best known for its advance computer chip manufacturing which is the global state of the art. Indeed, according to the BBC, "By one measure, a single Taiwanese company - the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company or TSMC - has over half of the world's market."

Despite a lack of formal diplomatic relations, 21% of Taiwan's imports are from the PRC and 26% of its exports are to the PRC.

About 70% of the Taiwanese people are Han Chinese, another 25% or so are from another Southern mainland Chinese ethnicity, about 2-3% of the Taiwanese people are indigenous Formosans who speak sixteen different languages once of which is the ancestral language of the Austronesian family of languages spoken from Easter Island and Oceania, to Southeast Asia, to Madagascar, with a small percentage of people of other ancestries. Mandarin Chinese, and two other Chinese topolects (one of which has several dialects) are the predominant languages of Taiwan. But even Chinese languages like Mandarin which are present in both Taiwan and the mainland have developed distinct Taiwanese accents that are perhaps as distinct from their mainland counterparts as American and Canadian English dialects, in their spoken versions, in the non-logographic written versions of them, and in subtleties of meaning and pronunciation of their shared Chinese characters. 

Over the last thirty years or so, however, the people of Taiwan have increasingly come to identify themselves as Taiwanese, or as both Taiwanese and Chinese. About two-thirds identify as Taiwanese only. Almost a third identify as both, and only one or two percent now identify only as Chinese.

Taiwan's religious makeup reflects the pre-Maoist religious mix of China, with 42% adhering to Chinese folk religion (a close cousin of Japanese Shinto practice), 27% identifying primarily as Buddhist, 13% identifying as Daoist, 7% identifying with East Asian "new religions", 6% as Christian, and the remainder as non-religious agnostics, although these religious movements are not nearly so mutually exclusive as Western religious denominations and sects.

Taiwan controls a territory of about 13,900 square miles, while the PRC controls about 3.7 million square miles, which is about 2660 times as large.

Critically, the PRC of today is not the PRC of 1949. While the PRC doesn't adhere fully to the extreme version of capitalism found in the United States and has high levels of state involvement in the economy, its record economic growth for many decades has been made possible only through market based economic reforms, soft recognition of property and contract rights, and sufficient openness towards ideas from the world outside of China to allow it to gain the scientific and technological knowledge necessary for it to rapidly catch up to the developed world. 

The assimilation of Hong Kong into China has meant even more growing pains for both sides. 

China is still astoundingly authoritarian, but it is also not the raw, unpredictable cauldron of violence that it experienced in the 1970s during the Cultural Revolution. 

Despite being nominally communist, China has its fair share of billionaires and there is a great deal of overlap between its political elites and its economic elites. In other words, China's rules are also among the very wealthiest people in the entire country, which makes a return to an extremely leveling brand of communism that eats the rich unlike to recur there, even if it is quite a dangerous thing to be a billionaire or centi-millionaire in China that can lead to your untimely demise in a usually not officially acknowledged manner if the cross the wrong people or offend the sensibilities of leaders in the Chinese Communist Party.

So far, China has liberalized economically in a gradual manner, rather than all at once as the Soviet Union did in what turned out to be a chaotic and sudden mess that transformed the country from Soviet style communism or crony capitalism run by oligarchs in less than a quarter of a century, with intense societal and governmental pain along the way. This lesson schools Chinese Communist Party leaders to be cautious in their reforms, and had discouraged a relaxation of its authoritarian political model. 

But the expectations of continuous fast economic growth that they have developed for themselves puts pressure on them to adopt policies that work to continue that as much as possible and at some point, China's authoritarian rule will have to be relaxed to sustain that, particularly as China starts to have to rely on new innovations of its own, rather than copying proven global economic and technological models to achieve new economic growth. Also, non-economic freedom is, to some extent, one of the luxuries that people in economically prosperous societies crave and desire. The more affluent the Chinese people become, the more they are going to be willing to face significant personal risk and sacrifice and economic resources to escape authoritarian rule. And, there are enough wealthy Chinese people who have traveled abroad to less authoritarian counties, or who have access to less censored international media, that they can know that it is possible to leave in a freer and more democratic world (and the people of Hong Kong have demonstrated that this can work even for ethnically and culturally Chinese people), that it is an enjoyable and desirable intangible luxury to have, and that there are ways of achieving and sustaining it that they can learn and copy as they did less political foreign technologies. It isn't clear how smooth or rocky the path to that end will be, and in the near term, transitioning from China level authoritarianism to Singapore level authoritarianism, or something like it, may be an intermediate step. But it is hard to see a trajectory in which China becomes more insular and authoritarian, rather than less so, in over the next several decades.

This is all to say, then, that it an invasion of Taiwan can be discouraged for a sufficiently long period of time, that eventually mainland China may eventually catch up with Taiwan (which has only enjoyed more or less full democracy and social freedoms for thirty years or so itself), at which point a merger of the PRC and Taiwan might not be so problematic anymore.

Military Capabilities

Taiwan is quite militarized, with 169 thousand active duty military personnel, 1,657 thousand reserve troops, and a defense budget of $16.2 billion. But this is dwarfed by the PRC's 2,035 thousand active duty military personnel, 650 thousand reserve troops, and $242.4 billion USD defense budget. Taiwan has 26 surface warships of frigate class or larger and 4 military submarines and many smaller naval and coast guard vessels. China has 92 surface warships of frigate class or larger and 59 military submarines and many smaller naval and coast guard vessels and is expanding its fleet rapidly. Taiwan's air force has 405 jet fighters. China has more than 1,628 jet fighters. Taiwan has 650 tanks. China has 4,800 tanks.

Most of the information above is drawn from a BBC background piece and the 2024 World Almanac (hard copy).

Unlike the United States and Russia, which have large "blue sea Navies", China's ships rarely venture more than 400 miles from its Pacific Coast (although China has deployed as many as a dozen naval ships to suppress pirates in the Indian Ocean right up to the Persian Gulf and Red Sea, and has an ample merchant and fishing fleet that is sometimes pressed into paramilitary service), and Taiwan's navy stays even closer to home.

Attrition In Ukraine

In the Ukraine War, Russia has so far lost about 2/3 of its major army military systems like tanks, infantry fighting vehicles, and artillery batteries, in two and a half years of fighting. 

Some of its losses are being replaced with vehicles left in boneyards, but Russia is starting to scrape the bottom of the barrel even there, putting tanks from the 1960s and 1970s back in service, sometimes as stationary pillboxes or filled with explosives and converted into crudely controlled unmanned ground vehicles full of explosives and used as rolling bombs. A thousand of its early T-72 tanks are too far gone and have too complex autoloading systems to restore at all.

Russia has perhaps 1,750 tanks in operation with perhaps 2,000 more fifty to sixty year old tanks that are salvageable to some extent from its bone yards. It has lost about 3,000 tanks, including the lion's share of its most advanced ones. It has lost about 10,000 artillery pieces leaving a bit more than 4,000 left. It can build only about 100 new tanks a year. It is already having to ration artillery shells, despite its depleted supply of artillery pieces, because it can't make new ones fast enough. Russia's supply of guided missiles is dwindling and can't easily be replaced. It is getting new armed drones from Iran but can't procure them as fast as it is using them.

At the rate that Russia is taking losses, by the third anniversary of the conflict it will have lost 3/4 of it army's major military systems. A year after that it will have lost 90%. Russia doesn't have enough major military equipment to keep fighting for another two full years from now.

Russia's naval and air force losses have been less severe, but it has lost about half of its Black Sea fleet, including its flagship, its headquarters in Crimea, and two submarines. At the current rate, its Black Sea fleet could be 75% depleted by the third anniversary of the war, Russia could be down to a dozen ships and armed boats or less out of an original eighty or so, by the fourth anniversary of the war. This isn't a huge blow to the overall Russian navy, although surely the Ukraine war must at least be causing Russian resources to be diverted from maintaining and expanding the Russian navy to the war (notwithstanding claims by Russian leaders that it is expanding its navy). The fact that Russia has suffered these Black Sea fleet losses from an opponent without a navy of its own and with only a limited air force also underscores how vulnerable the rest of Russia's navy is in a near peer war where its opponents have modern anti-ship missiles and modern air and sea drones.

Russia has lost more than 300 aircraft and is losing about 50 more every six months. This isn't negligible, but it also isn't crippling. But Russia's air force has been largely impotent in this conflict due to its inability to gain air superiority in the face of Ukrainian air defenses. This example also provides a roadmap for other countries wondering how to thwart Russia's immense on paper air force. And, the pace at which Ukraine is damaging Russian air assets is rising.

After some quick territorial gains relative to the 2014 status quo, it lost much of that, and there is been little progress territorially for either side since then. There is no reason to think that Russia will make any meaningful territorial gains in these time periods, indeed, Ukraine recently occupied some of its own territory.

Russia has already sustained more casualties (only about 5-6% fatal) so far, probably 500,000 to 600,000, than the entire size of its active duty military less its navy and air force, of about 400,000 ground troops, when the war began two and a half years ago. At the current rate, it will sustain perhaps 120,000 more casualties between now and the third anniversary of the conflict. By the fourth anniversary of the conflict it is on track to have suffered more than 800,000 casualties with perhaps 50,000 lives lost. Russia's losses can and have been backfilled with green conscripts and with reserve soldiers who were former conscripts or retired and have a lower level of readiness. It may have only something on the order of 50,000 group troops who haven't suffered casualties and were part of the active duty Russian army when the Ukraine war started.

These losses involving such a large percentage of the soldiers deployed to the war have a corrosive effect on morale and unit cohesion. It has, or soon will, have too few experienced soldiers at a high level of readiness to hold the new conscripts and reservists pressed into action together and functioning effectively.

Indeed, assuming that Russia suffers losses at current rates is optimistic. It has fewer major military systems and the ones it has less are inferior older models or in ill-repair. Its troops are getting steadily less skilled. Its logistics systems are being degraded. The Western supplies that Ukraine is getting are becoming more advanced, like longer range MLRS artillery missiles and F-16s.

So, while the current situation in the Ukraine war is frustrating, the current territorial stalemate and war of attrition ultimately works in Ukraine's favor because it has more access to new resources from the West than Russia does from its allies. Russia, realistically, only has the ability to continue for fight for six to eighteen months. And, of course, every month that Russia suffers more losses reduces the conventional warfare threat that it presents to NATO.

Also, as Russia's ground forces grow more depleted, the time becomes ripe for would be insurgents in ethnic minority reasons to rise up again into civil wars in their regions, knowing that Russia has only very limited military resources available to put them down. There mere threat that this could happen discourages Russia from trying to fight down to its last man and last tank in Ukraine.

Best Case Scenarios

We spend a lot of time thinking about worst case scenarios. But we shouldn't discount the likelihood of better outcomes. Smart people of goodwill all over the world are trying to achieve them. And, by "best case scenarios" I mean outcomes that have some plausible chance of happening within time frames that people who are adults today can live to see.

China

China joins the rest of the world in backing away from coal as a power source and shifting to renewables like solar, wind, and tidal power, to nuclear power, and to improved energy conservation. Its high speed rail network and growing fleet of electric vehicles suggest that it isn't as indifferent to the environment as we might think.

A new generation of political leaders eases its authoritarianism and censorship, curbs its excessive use of the death penalty, checks China's territorial ambitions. It also cuts off tactic support for North Korea if it isn't conditioned on North Korean demilitarization and reforms.

Russia and the former Soviet Union

Putin dies. The Ukraine War is abandoned on terms not materially more favorable than the 2014 status quo. The Black Sea is demilitarized in a multi-lateral agreement. Maintaining a Soviet scale military becomes unsustainable and is curtailed. Ukraine joins NATO. Most autonomous regions of Russia gain more autonomy or gain independence.  

The declining importance of oil and gas in the global economy weakens autocratic powers in Russia and strengthens urban commercial and technology sectors. A grass roots political movement curbs the power of the oligarchs. Russia stops supporting North Korea, which together with Chinese tough love weakens that regime.

Former Soviet Republics continue to go their own ways with weaker ties to Russia and Russian expeditionary military activity is curtailed.

Sub-Saharan Africa

Belatedly, sub-Saharan Africa follows in the footsteps of Mexico, China, and Southeast Asia and becomes a global center for manufacturing, initially fueled by cheap labor and lax regulations, which leads to economic development, greater affluence, and a demographic transition. Improve rail, roads, and air travel link the continent. The declining importance of oil and gas weakens authoritarian regimes.

Regimes will start to leave the highly unstable coup and civil war prone phase of the transition to democracy and agricultural production in Africa will also improve and rise to global standards. So far, Africa has increased output by increasing the amount of land farmed, rather than by increasing productivity per acre, but this could easily change in the decades to come.

The Islamic World

The declining importance of oil and gas undermines the oil monarchies and authoritarian regimes of the Middle East, North Africa, Brunei, and Aceh. Without oil money to prop it up, fundamentalist Islam fizzles. Guest workers in the Arab world are replaced by domestic workers ending massive unemployment among young people in the region. Power shifts to commercial and technology sector firms forcing a transition to democratic regimes, peacefully or by revolutions.

The Islamic world, now in something of a Victorian era stage of cultural development, progresses, with less restrictive dress codes, less repression of women, less use of corporal punishment, and more commercial activity. Iran remains nominally a theocracy but with a great shift in the balance of power in favor of reformist politicians and away from religious leaders, until finally disestablishment arrives tracking the religious diversity and growing secularization of ordinary Iranians.

Latin America

More sensible regulation of guns and decriminalization of drugs in North America deflates and disarms the cartels of Latin America and opens the door for less corrupt government. Drug prohibition driven waves of homicides end, and a well-educated population comes to the fore. The disaster that is Venezuela eases as the declining importance of oil and gas in the global economy makes top down communist rule infeasible.

Climate change

We won't end the causes of anthropic climate change soon enough to prevent or reverse it. Sea levels will rise faster than expected, but not so fast that coastal urban centers can't be protected with sea walls that become island redoubts to a great extent, especially in places on the brink like Venice, southern Florida, and southern Louisiana.

Ski resorts move north with Alaska and the Yukon taking the center stage once held by Colorado, Utah, and Switzerland.

The great U.S. migration to the Sun Belt reverses itself as the heat in the Southern U.S. becomes intolerable and the winters in the Midwest and Northeast become more tolerable. The southern U.S. shifts in the direction of tropical and deep desert from subtropical.

The Sahara continues to expand before reaching a stabilized peak as fossil fuel use is discontinued worldwide. 

Petroleum and coal become as archaic as merchant and naval sailing fleets, while merchant ships start to universally rely in part upon wind power for propulsion. Natural gas fades more slowly but is eventually replaces by electrical grids fueled by wind, solar, tidal, geothermal, and nuclear energy.

U.S. political divisions

As Baby Boomers die off and younger generations come to great power in society, Christianity withers, anti-LGBT sentiment fades, reproductive roots overcome a decade or so long stumble, anti-science movements return to crackpot status, and the Rehnquist court goes down in history as a second, regrettable, Lochner court. The filibuster is abolished, court packing ends the ultra-conservative Supreme Court, and the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico and other U.S. territories gain their rightful political rights. The U.S. adopts a popular vote for the Presidency either by interstate compact or by constitutional amendment, or by the former leading to the latter. Gradual cultural homogenization, and continued migration to major cities eventually undermines the worst facets of Southern/Country/Western culture.

The global economy's shift away from fossil fuels undermines the worst political factions in places like West Virginia, Wyoming, Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi.

The U.S. will finally get high speed rail in select, regional high traffic corridors, but will probably not develop a national high speed rail network.

Which Policies Are Most Sensitive To Change?

This is a line of research I'm posing so I don't lose the train of thought.

What are the most outrageous, absurd, or wrong policies that could be enacted that would do only minimal harm?

What are the policies that are most important to get pretty much precisely right and would could immense harm if they were tinkered with even a little?

Why?

How Will The Future Look And Feel Different?

This trend will be one of the biggest visual differences between life in the late 2020s and 2030s and the period from about 1980 to the twenty-teens – in addition to the shift to now ubiquitous cell phone presence, the relative absence of roaming tweens and early teens roaming the streets when school isn't in session, fewer people carrying disposable coffee cups, and more men with beards, that have already happened.

Other pervasive change in how life feels in the late 2020s and 2030s will be a great increase in the number of people living in central cities relative to office space, more protected bike lines in cities, and the rise of recycling and compost bins. 

Fashion

Ever fewer men wearing neckties and business suits. More men and more women are wearing short sleeves in the workplace as air conditions are set to less chilly temperatures during hotter summers. Watches are returning, but are smarter now, monitoring your health and sleep.

Younger adult women are much less frequently wearing bras, other than sports bras while exercising, especially in casual settings, and have been doing that for a while. Women and girls who would have worn one piece bathing suits in the 1980s often wear two piece bathing suits that providing varying degrees of coverage now. Adult women's panties have also been trending towards being more skimpy. Yoga pants and tights for women increasingly substitute for jeans, slacks, shorts, or a skirt, without anything over them. 

Contrary to many people's conventional wisdom, however, more affluent countries and communities tend to become more gendered in dress and education and professional roles as people feel more free to put self-expression over economic priorities, not more androgynous.

Food

Diners and diner-like restaurant chains like Perkins and Village Inn are fading away. Fast casual restaurants like Chipotle have become common place. Ethiopian, Thai, Vietnamese, Korean, Japanese, and vegan food has entered the urban American palette, as Mexican and Chinese food did before it.

The remaking of a shared, cosmopolitan American establishment culture diet is has been ongoing for some time now and continues. This is a question of multicultural integration, of changing lifestyles, of food economics, and of health. 

We know we have an obesity problem, and we seem to be homing in on an overemphasis on simple carbohydrates, too many "ultra-processed" foods, and a more sedentary lifestyle as some of the main culprits behind this, although it is still somewhat puzzling and intractable trend that we don't really understand well. Old conventional wisdom, like the importance of a low fat diet, hasn't stood the test of time.

Drugs

Marijuana dispensaries are now pervasive and common place and are on the brink of becoming much more mainstream since the federal government is likely to reclassify it from a Schedule I Controlled Substance under federal law to a lower schedule which will end the punitive taxes of Internal Revenue Code § 280E on dispensaries and will allow marijuana firms to use banks, declare bankruptcy, apply for federal patents and trademarks, and avail themselves of the federal courts. About half of the states have legalized THC at the state level, almost all of them have legalized CBD at the state leve, and the rest will probably follow suit quickly when marijuana is rescheduled at the federal level.

Other formerly illicit drugs are also gaining respectability in medical niches that will become a part of people's daily realities. Ketamine is now available as a fast acting, short term antidepressant and is also being widely used as an anesthetic used by first responders in trauma cases. LSD and peyote are being explored as PTSD treatments. A significant small percentage of older children, adolescents, and adults routinely take amphetamines for ADHD.

Semaglutide drugs like Wegovy and Ozempic are proving to be wonder drugs for Type II diabetes, obesity, addiction problems, cardiovascular diseases, and even enhancing executive function in people with ADHD that have surged to widespread use very rapidly despite their very high sticker price.

Surprisingly, the religious moral crusade against drugs, like the anti-gay efforts of religious conservatives (as distinct from anti-transgender efforts), seems to be a war that religious conservatives have largely conceded, at least on the political front. 

Six months away from the 2024 election, no prominent Republican politician has made the war on drugs an important part of their campaign, and this is not a drum beat which conservative media outlets are pounding any longer. There has been sharp rhetoric aimed at Latin American drug cartels with a strong xenophobic bent, an instinctual desire to crack down on the fentanyl trafficking that is behind so many drug overdose deaths, although this has finally plateaued. But few political arrows have been aimed at U.S. drug users, or harm other than opioid addition by mostly white and often working class Americans, that drugs themselves, as opposed to foreign drug cartels as sources of organized crime, have caused to the United States.

Moral resistance to marijuana legalization has been undermined by the legalization of marijuana in about half the U.S. states without any clear and shocking ill effects. Indeed, marijuana legalization has coincided with a dramatic decline in illegal opioid use by minors despite a relentless surge in adult opioid overdose deaths fueled mostly in recent years by growing illegal distribution of fentanyl, often by dealers who don't disclose that fentanyl has been cut with other drugs from heroin to meth, in non-laboratory conditions.

Red states have softened overly punitive incarceration sentencing for drug offenses as much or more than blue states have, despite their strongly conservative politics, in part, to save on the staggering costs of having the world's highest incarceration rates that has been mostly financed with state tax revenues. Red states have lagged in legalizing marijuana, but his seems unlikely to persist and all or almost all of them have already legalized  CBD cannabis products, which are more medicinal than psychoactive. Bipartisan federal legislation has mildly relaxed sentencing for drug offenses.

Demographic Trends

This said, however, the global demographic transition that has emerged hand in hand with economic development all over the world in every religion and culture that has experienced economic development shows no signs of abating. 

The average age of marriage has risen a lot hand in hand with a larger share of women attending college and weaker economic prospects for couples who don't have college degrees. The percentage of men and women who never marry has surged, as women choose not to and men can't find partners to marry as a result (and as more men who don't have college degrees can't fulfill a role as a primary economic provider for their families). Couples who do marry are increasingly close in age. Men and women are having children later in life. A large share of children in the U.S. are born to unmarried mothers, although many of those mothers are cohabiting with the fathers of their most recent child at the time. 

While divorce rates for college educated couples have plunged to levels not seen since the 1960s, divorce rates for couples without college degrees have reached unprecedented levels despite falling marriage rates (with a majority of these couples having a first child before rather than after getting married). This is driven mostly by the economic stagnation experienced by men without college degrees as the economy has developed greater intellectual requirements in a modern, automated and computerized work environment in a sophisticated complex bureaucratic society. Black families started experiencing these trends in the 1960s and have reached the most extreme realization of them, with children raised by unmarried mothers becoming the norm. But working class white families and Hispanic families are following suit thirty and forty years later. Strong social welfare systems have also made this pattern viable and the norm for lots of middle class Northern Europeans. 

These factors combined have led to a marked drop in the total fertility rate (roughly speaking the number of children per lifetime per woman) almost everywhere worldwide outside of non-elite families in sub-Saharan Africa, and outside of Gaza and Afghanistan. The decline has been seen in the Arab and non-Arab Muslim world, in East Asia, in Europe, in Latin America, among Protestants and Catholic alike.

There have been subcultures, especially among religious conservatives, pushing "tradwife" traditional housewife roles and pro-natalist agendas. But the Mormons are real the only organized movement that has had any success in implementing this agenda. And, they have seen their share of Americans decline by a third over the last fifteen years to a mere 1.2% of religious adherents in the United States. 

It is unclear if the Dobbs decision of the U.S. Supreme Court that ended the constitutional right to an abortion, and other ruling of an ultraconservative U.S. Supreme Court will turn the tide. Courts and voter initiatives in several Red States, and a handful of dissenting GOP legislators in Arizona, have restored some or all of the abortion rights that Dobbs took away. Abortion drugs for some early term pregnancies, and interstate travel from states where abortion is banned to those where it is legal have caused the number of abortions carried out to decline far less than was anticipated in the wake of Dobbs. Even Donald Trump has bucked the Republican grass roots by taking the position that abortion laws should be decided on a state by state basis and not strongly advocating an anti-choice position. All of this suggests that Republican efforts to roll back the clock of reproductive rights and women's rights may not be the major step backward turning point that it seems once the dust settles over the next few years, regardless of who wins the Presidential election.

East Asian total fertility rates have fallen to the lowest levels because all worldwide, because the factors delaying marriage and child birth are present there in spades, but out of wedlock births remain extremely rare there. Out of wedlock births are rare there, in part, because neither the social safety net nor family law rules provide nearly as much support and protection to single mothers there, and because abortion is less taboo there.

For example, in Japan, much of the social safety net provided by government in Western Europe is provided by large corporate employers, to whom single parents have no access, there.

Concretely, in people's daily lives, this means smaller families, more only children, fewer siblings, far fewer families with three or four or five or more kids (especially, in couples that have not recently immigrated from countries where larger families are common) and far fewer cousins, aunts, and uncles, although longer life spans mean that more children know not just their grandparents but their great-grandparents well. In working class America, it means that lots of kids are raised by single mothers with little contact with with their fathers or father's side of the family during their childhoods. Part of the reason that housing supplies are tight in many areas is that smaller households required more distinct housing units to house the same number of people, as typical family households now have three or four, instead of four to six family members. This trend toward smaller families muddled somewhat by complex blended families resulting from fragile marriages and even more fragile cohabitations that produce children.

It will be interesting to see if polygamy laws change anywhere in the U.S. as this becomes an issue of Muslim immigrants and leftist polyamory advocates, and not just vanishingly few Mormon fundamentalists in a handful of distinct geographic places.

Shrinking families make community and government safety nets and support more important, and reduce the relevance of nepotism and clannishness in American life. This is also impacted by the fact that Americans are among the most mobile people geographically in the world. Less than 59% of Americans age 25 or older live in the state where they were born, far less comparable mobility levels in any country in Europe, and especially in Western states there is even more mobility. Less than 20% of people aged 25 or older in Nevada were born there and more of these adults in Nevada were born outside the United States than were born in Nevada.

Race

Interracial couples, married and dating alike, are no longer as striking, and mixed race children are much more common. Interracial marriage rates of native born Hispanics, Asian-Americans (including East Asians, Southeast Asians, and East Asians), Native Hawaiians, and Native Americans are all very high, and interracial marriage rates for whites (who have few non-white prospective marriage partners in some parts of the U.S.) and blacks, while lower, are at record highs. Jewish outmarriage rates to non-Jews are also very high.

The U.S. is basically seeing shrinking proportions of purely white European stable proportions of black Americans, and a rapidly growing share of mixed race, Hispanic, Middle Eastern, Native American, and Asian Americans, as well as African immigrants, who are starting to blend into a "brown" plurality that is not starkly internally divided by race or deeply separated from or antagonistic to white Americans, in a manner similar to how Catholic immigrants, especially from Ireland, Italy, and Spain were assimilated into a pan-ethic white American identity. 

The cultural divide in the U.S. between native born black Americans and those of other races is higher, but not as high as it has been for most of American history since the abolition of slavery in 1865 that was replaced by de jure and de facto segregation until long after the victories of the Civil Rights movement a century later. The emergence of significant ethnic populations that are neither black nor white has helped bridge the cultural racial gaps between blacks and whites in the United States.

Homosexuality And Transgender Realities

Homosexuality and same sex couples are unremarkable, and not that controversial. A conservative majority U.S. Supreme Court established a right to same sex marriage, and there are a number of high profile politicians and celebrities who are gay or lesbian. They haven't abandoned this fight entirely, but they have deemphasized it.

The Christian conservative right has diverted its current efforts to scapegoating transgender people instead focusing on homosexuality, which is more common, more mainstream, and easier to understand.

It isn't clear how successful and sustained the religious conservative scapegoating of transgender people will persist. Those targeted don't have much of an ability to fight back on their own, and have broad but not very intense support from much of the rest of the political left, which is impotent at the state level in many Red States.

Housing, Land Use, and Remote Work

 

Land use regulation reform and New Urbanism seems to be finally hitting their stride in response to an affordable housing crisis, with state laws forcing major liberalizations of zoning regulation of residential development density in states including California and Colorado, and local municipal reforms in cities like New York. We're seeing more townhouses, more midsized apartment buildings, more conversions of office buildings to residential use, and more apartment buildings with first floor retail. 

Accessory dwelling units (i.e. "granny flats" and "tiny homes" on existing single family home lots) that are built as extended family housing or rental units are being legalized in more places and need just a little nudge to take off exponentially. Parking requirements are being dispensed with, especially near major transit lines and in walkable developments. 

There hasn't yet been much restoration of pre-zoning law land use patterns like single occupancy hotels and boarding houses, but the legal authority to do that kind of development is quietly being put into place. The same legal developments are also laying the groundwork for another round of cooperative housing with shared kitchens and common areas in basically an owned boarding house arrangement that flourished briefly in the late 1960s and 1970s before the governance and social interaction issues associated with them took the shine off of them. But the less ambitious project of having single family homes with multiple unrelated households in them, either by subdividing them physically or just having the room tenants share a house like college students is also supported by these land use reforms and is already quietly becoming more common.

We are still working out the remote work issue. But the pandemic gave videoconferencing the boost it needed to become a part of every day work life and extended family interactions. The percentage of office workers who work remotely at least part of the time has surged, although probably less than half of them are fully remote workers. A pandemic generation that attended school remotely makes this way of working a lot more familiar.

Religion

Plenty of people still attend church with some regularity, but it is no longer socially assumed that everyone does, even in the South and rural America. It is also increasingly no longer assumed that everyone is Christian. 

"Nones" and Muslims make up a growing share of Americans, while almost all forms of Christianity have a decreasing percentage of Americans who adhere to it (apart from some definitional arbitrate as Evangelical Protestant denomination adherents rebrand themselves as non-denominational Christians).

About 30% of adults view themselves as "not religious" and almost half of young adults identify that way, in a dramatic growth over the last half century.

Muslims have become much more common due to immigration and to a lesser extent due to native born African-American converts, and are increasingly a visible presence in daily life. Halal food offerings are now almost as common as Kosher ones, and institutions like schools now have to be conscious of Muslim holidays and holy days (although public calls to prayer five times a day, which are pervasive in Muslim majority countries, are absent).

Mormons have resisted the trends of late marriage, fewer marriages, less stable marriages, and fewer children, more than any other faith in the U.S. But while natural growth from these natalist attitudes has helped to keep the number of Mormons declining as much as mainline Christians, white Catholics, and white Protestants, neither natural growth nor a massive missionary effort deeply ingrained in this faith, have been enough for them to increase the share of Mormon adherents in the overall population much. For example:

Between 2007 and 2022, the percentage of Americans who self-identify as Mormon has dropped from 1.8 percent to 1.2 percent (according to an independent tabulation of election survey data) - a percentage decrease of one-third over 15 years.

Via Wikipedia.

Communication, Transportation and Energy

Other look and feel changes in daily life already happened a while ago. 

Landline phones are almost gone. Fewer and fewer people read dead tree newspapers. Broadcast and cable TV have already been replaced by streaming to a great extent. Satellite radio and apps like Spotify have gradually undermined major radio stations that used to be a pervasive sound track to almost everyone's life.

Paper checks and postal money orders sent in the mail are becoming a thing of the past, while cash apps have started to become mainstream even though they are somewhat uncommon. Invoices and appointment reminders now come via email and text rather than snail mail. Email and texts have also increasingly replaced letters. Court documents are now usually e-filed and the service has been made available to non-lawyer litigants in many cases. Tax forms are usually e-filed too, and sooner or later, the IRS will cast aside the fax machine - a technology that is increasingly used by no one else - in favor of secure online portals. 

Parcel post from the postal service has increasingly lost market share to private delivery services as online shopping has led to a resurgence in package deliveries. Homes increasingly have front porch video streaming, in part, to deter porch pirates who steal those parcels. Quality photography and videography from cell phones, pervasive security and laptop cameras, dash cams, and body cameras, cheap and small tracking devices, cell phone GPS and Wi-Fi locator technology, and digital payment systems have made a well documented surveillance society an every day reality.

As typing has replaced dead tree writing, cursive writing has waned as well and will soon go the way of the slide rule. Voice operated computer system are already common in big business phone systems, where they compete with international call centers in India and the Philippines. Dictation, now done by computers instead of secretaries, is making a gradual return. And, real time voice to voice language translation is on the brink of becoming commonplace - it is already widespread as a cheap and fast way of doing text to text language translation.

Most cars are now keyless and manual transmission has virtually vanished from the United States. A modest but growing share of vehicles are plug in electric. We are on the brink of widespread use of self-driving vehicles, although we aren't quite there yet. When the do arrive, this will have a profound effect on the long haul trucking industry, as robots replace humans on our interstate highways (probably with greater safety).

Smart phones, GPS, and computer networks with AI features, have already enabled ride sharing that has effectively restored decentralized, thinly regulated taxi service to much of the U.S., and has facilitated easy scooter and bicycle and e-bike rentals. Online real estate sharing services like Airbnb have vastly increased the supply of hotel and bed and breakfast type services on a decentralized basis, with vacationers now as likely to stay in an online brokered short term rental of a private home as they are to stay in a hotel.

Life in 2024 is full of battery charging. Laptops, smart phones, smart watches, headphones, toothbrushes, shavers, cars, and even device and home backup power systems, all have batteries that must be regularly recharged with customized power charges, and can even pose fire hazards on commercial airline flights. But this part of daily life will soon make some subtle but noticeable changes. Spurred by the demand for better electric car batteries, several new game changing battery technologies for electric cars, like solid state batteries with different raw materials will enter the marketplace in the mid- to late-2020s. The new batteries will store several times more energy than existing electric vehicle batteries, will have longer lives with less depletion in capacity as they are recharged repeatedly, will recharge more quickly, will cost less, will have less of an environmental impact, and will be safer. This will make electric vehicles in every context where internal combustion engines (ICEs) running on gasoline or diesel fuel more competitive vis-a-vis ICE vehicles - cars, trucks, buses, delivery vehicles, construction equipment, farm equipment, military vehicles, boats, and even propeller driven short haul aircraft and drones. It will make electric lawn mowers and leaf blowers and snow blowers more attractive via existing two stroke engine models. It will mean that laptops and cell phones and smart watches and headphones and toothbrushes and shavers that used to have to be charged daily will be able to manage with a couple of rounds of charging a week.

Supersonic commercial airline flights across the Pacific and Atlantic oceans are on the brink of returning after the supersonic transatlantic Concorde flights from New York City to Paris and London were discontinued after a couple of decades of limited and unprofitable service.

Intracity passenger rail has experienced a minor resurgence over the past few decades although this trend may have neared its peak for a while. There are a handful of intercity high speed passenger rail corridors in the U.S. which are built or in progress, although few meet the standards of Western Europe, Japan, and China, and it will still be many decades before this really becomes an feature of American life for most people.

Modern heat pumps are replacing air conditioning and gas forced air HVAC systems in homes. Home and business solar panels are now common and meet a decent share of household electricity demand, sometimes feeding energy back into the grid. Trains full of coal to deliver to utility power plants are a lot less common, while large utility company wind mills to generate electricity are common worldwide.

Historical Causation And The Deep Future

Unless there is strong evidence to the contrary, it is safe to assume that the chain of causation for historical events is:

Climate change and new technology ==> New economic realities ==> Changing cultural norms ==> Changing politics, changing religious views, new laws, and new wars.

While individuals aren't irrelevant in history and drive the particulars of how it plays out, the Marxist concept of economic determinism is more right than it is wrong. If particular people at particular times in history had acted differently, an Arian Christianity or the cult of Mithras or Rabbinic Judaism or Zoroastrianism might have become dominant in Europe, instead of the version of Christian Orthodoxy orchestrated by Emperor Constantine, of the world we live in. If certain battles and events had come out differently, England might have been French speaking, and Ireland might predominantly speak a Celtic language. The United States might have been a constitutional monarchy under George Washington's dynasty, and the Confederate States of America might still exist today. But the technological, economic, and cultural character of those alternate histories would have been similar no matter how they got there.

Climate and technology drive change in everything else until they stop changing so much and the chain of causation plays out until it reaches a stable equilibrium, where it will then remain more or less indefinitely, until climate and technology chain gain.

Epochal periods in history, from the Out of Africa migration, to the migration of humans beyond India to Southeast Asia, East Asia, and Australia, to the human replacement of Neanderthals in Europe, to the migration of humans to the Americas, to the Neolithic Revolutions across the globe, to Indo-European expansion and the fall of the Harappans and the fall of the Minoans and the fall of an Egyptian dynasty, to the rise and fall of sedentary farming civilizations in the Amazon basin, to Bronze Age collapse and the fall of empires like the Hittite Empire, to the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, to the demise of the Anasazi, to the Black Plague in the Middle Ages, to the Dust Bowl of the Great Depression in the U.S., are all attributable to a great extent to climate events.

Technology fills in the gaps that climate doesn't explain. The domestication of a sufficient package of plants and animals in the Neolithic Revolutions. Stone working and astronomy and calendars for megalithic civilizations. Metallurgy and writing in the Copper and Bronze Ages. Domestication of the horse and the invention of a practical wheel in addition to metallurgy, for Indo-European expansion. Maritime navigation techniques and ship building for the Austronesian expansion, for Phoenician and Punic exploration and trade, for the Viking Expansion, and with European colonial expansion and the Columbian Exchange. Ironworking metallurgy and mathematics for the Iron Age. Road building, plumbing, and aqueduct building for the Roman Empire. Reinvention of art and science and mathematics in the Renaissance. The printing press and practical military use of gunpowder in the Reformation and early modern era. Then windmills and dikes in places like the Netherlands and England. Then coal driven steam engines in the Industrial Revolution. Then electricity, hydroelectric power, trains, steamships, and telecommunications. Then petroleum driven vehicles and antibiotics and vaccines. Then nuclear power and weapons and quantum physics and general relativity. Then computers and space travel and satellites and robots and automation and genetic engineering.

We continue to produce new technologies and have much more to discovery. We've reached a point where our own technologies have brought about rapid climate change.

But our technological development has grown systematic and our scientific understanding grows ever more complete. The remaining frontiers of physics, astronomy, and cosmology probably have few technological applications. Deriving the principles of chemistry from fundamental physics is something that has already been outlined and is close to being possible to do rigorously. We understand chemistry well enough that increasingly it is becoming a matter of artistry and craftsmanship rather than a question of the limits of our scientific understanding of it. Biochemistry is the hardest part of that and we are seeing a torrent of progress there. From biochemistry and parallel study of ecology and meteorology we are coming to master biology and the medical biotechnology that flows from that knowledge.

Maybe we'll have another century or two of significant scientific advancement and technological breakthroughs. Maybe we'll proceed two steps forward and one step back with an apocalypse or two along the way and progress will be delayed for a century or two. But science and technology are ratchets. It doesn't take many seeds for it to revive itself after even a very severe setback.

Call me an optimist, but I see a future where humanity has come to a full scientific understanding of the physical world at all scales, and has developed technologies that more or less fully exploit this scientific understanding, as a more likely one than any other possible future for humanity. 

With the room for technological innovation muted and our home planet's climate susceptible to our precise and intentional manipulation, we will soon after, probably before the year 2500 CE,  settle into a stable equilibrium that will last for thousands of years, not unlike our many tens of thousands of years as hunter-gatherers, the thousands of years of the early Neolithic era, or the millennium long periods of the Copper Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age-Classic era, and the Middle Ages, respectively.

The world of 4500 CE will look more like the world of 2500 CE than the world of 2024 looks like the world of 1824.

My China Prediction Was A Bit Off

On September 27, 2012, I predicted a Great Depression class economic downturn in China that would start prior to 2024. Specifically, I said that:

My prediction is that there is a 68% chance that China will experience its own first, post-Cultural Revolution Great Depression (defined by standards similar to those used by first world economy financial journalists to distinguish between a mere recession and a true depression) sometime between 2015 and 2023.

China is currently hitting a bump in the economic road and has hit others in the relevant time periods, but none that severe in this time frame.

Stray Thoughts

* Firetrucks should have lead blankets to assist in dealing with radioactive materials.

* Humans are gradually becoming like Tolkien's elves, long lived, with few children, and high cultural development. Unlike many other technologies based upon physics which are nearing their theoretical limits, medical technology and biotech has immense potential without hitting any hard scientific barriers. We already know all of the physical laws pertinent to biology and chemistry more or less exactly We have proof of concept and possibility in various existing plants and animals. We have increasingly solid understandings of many diseases, of genetics, of biochemistry and anatomy, and of the aging process itself. We have the power to remake ourselves in almost any image we imagine. 

* We are fast approaching peak human population, and have the potential to gradually reduce the globe's population without coercion and in the process increase the amount of natural resources per capita while becoming more efficient so we need fewer natural resources per capita.

* Seattle has lots of roundabouts and narrow city streets. More intriguing is why it has so many independent small businesses. Its diversity and large share of immigrants come to mind. Its downtown architecture, on the other hand, is dismal. Liquor in grocery stores is nice. Its high level of environmental consciousness and traffic safety measures are probably good on balance, but inconvenient. It seems to be doing a decent job of infill development.

* Cultures of honor are outdated in the modern world, unless it backslides. Christianity with its doctrine of forgiveness was a way to end blood feuds and get past cultures of honor to a more adaptive society. But we may be backsliding, if civilization can't work well enough.

* Imagine how utopian the world could be without dogs and without guns.

China Is Unlikely To Start A War

With Russia knocked down a peg by its disastrous performance in the Ukraine War, Afghanistan fallen to the Taliban, none of the usual candidates in the Middle East coming forward publicly to try to pounce on Israel in the face of its intense response to an Iranian supported Hamas massacre and Hezbollah rocket attacks from Lebanon, and North Korea lobbing nuclear ready missiles in tests but taking no conventional warfare steps and its leader shaking hands with South Korea's leader, all attention has turned to China.

As a country with 1.4 billion people, a gross national product that is 76% of the size of the U.S. GNP, and decades of intense economic growth, China's has had the resources to fund a large and advanced military, without even seriously militarizing its society with large numbers of soldiers relative to its population or seriously straining the ability of its government to pay for it. 

China's merely regional aspirations also allow it to concentrate its military resources. China hasn't tried to mimic the United States and Russia by deploying a large blue sea navy far from its coast, or by trying to serve as a "global policeman". China has some blue sea navy capabilities with modern aircraft carriers, surface combatants, and longer range than coastal submarine, it has long range missiles (some of which carry nuclear missiles), and it even has some reasonably long range military aircraft. But China has shown little interest in flexing its military muscles further from home than the Philippines, Southeast Asia, the Western Pacific Ocean, and the East China Sea. 

China certainly has no plans to invade any country in the Americas, or to repeat the mistake that Japan made in World War II when Japan attacked Hawaii in 1941.

There is no indication that China has any intention of starting hostilities to the North, with Russia or Mongolia or on its borders with the former Soviet Republics in Central Asia. 

Despite some border skirmishes over worthless, almost uninhabited mountain territory on its border with India, this conflict seems to be more about pride and honor than anything substantive. China shows no indication that it wants to seize meaningfully inhabited parts of Pakistan, India, Nepal, Bhutan, or Myanmar. China seems to have bitten off as much as it can chew when it conquered Tibet and now thinks better of any other campaigns to repeat that experience.

China could easily have conquered the communist regimes in North Korea, Cambodia, Laos, or Vietnam outright, but appears to be content to merely leave them as tributary states in its sphere of influence that emulate it and kowtow to it. 

In part, China appears to have concluded from the troublesome resistance its has received from ethnic minorities in semiautonomous regions like Inner Mongolia, and from ethnic minorities like the Uyghurs, the Tibetans, and the Manchurians, that it prefers to be a nation-state dominated by a Han Chinese core to being a sprawling multi-ethnic, multi-lingual, multi-cultural empire.

China doesn't really want to have to absorb Japan or North Korea or South Korea or Vietnam or Laos or Cambodia or the Philippines or Indonesia or Thailand, let alone Australia or New Zealand or Papua New Guinea. 

China isn't even grumbling about trying to unify Chinese diaspora populations in Western influenced places with large Chinese minorities, like Singapore or Malaysia. It swallowed up Macao easily enough, when its 99 year lease expired, but has found that even trying to absorb Hong Kong without destroying what makes it valuable has been highly challenging, even when the British handed it over without a fight when its 99 year lease expired.

China has a large and technologically advanced Army ground forces with no place to go. It has state of the art tanks and anti-tank forces, but no plausible conflicts, other than an invasion of Taiwan or a campaign to put down North Korea's regime if it gets out of hand, to use it. 

It is conceivable that China might need to fight a counterinsurgency conflict in its own territory, or to aid one of its tributary states in doing so. But there is no way that any plausible insurgent force in these places could acquire "near peer" conventional military force weapons to its own forces in any meaningful amount in the foreseeable future.

The United States also has large, technologically advanced ground forces in its Army and Marines, but unlike China, it has used those ground troops as expeditionary military forces to fight foreign wars on a regular basis since at least World War I. China hasn't been involved directly in a foreign war on an expeditionary basis since World War II, even though it supported proxy Communist regimes in Korea and Southeast Asia.

Since the 1980s, China's military ambitions have focused largely on regaining control of Taiwan (which itself arrogantly claims sovereignty over mainland China, an ambition that has been futile for seven decades) and expanding its dominance in the portions of the seas near it, some closer to the Philippines and Japan than to its own coast, that the rest of the world considers to be international waters.

Taiwan is attractive because it is very close to mainland China, and it is predominantly ethnic Chinese, which makes it feel to the People's Republic of China like a territory that it could assimilate in a manner similar to its current effort to reintegrate Hong Kong into the People's Republic of China. 

The prospect of a military conquest of Taiwan is also attractive to China's military leadership, much as it is the military leadership of the United States, because it justifies immense expenditures for naval forces, air forces, and ground forces who can participate in an amphibious assault on the island of Formosa.

If China's barriers to this conquest were primarily military, it would have happened long ago. The People's Republic of China has something like 70 times more people than Taiwan does, vastly more economic resources, and can focus on this single front without fearing distractions from some other conflict at the same time. Taiwan's economy is more technologically advanced and developed than China's but that gap has fallen steadily, and when it comes to military technology, they are close to parity with China potentially having the edge at this point. Even if China had to incur three or even ten times the casualties as Taiwan did in an offensive war against it, ultimately, China has a greater capacity to bear those losses than Taiwan does. 

This said, however, one of the reasons that the last significant amphibious assault in the history of the world was seventy years ago in the Korean War is that military technologies have shifted in a way this makes this strategy which has always been extremely challenging and costly, even more difficult to carry out effectively. It is just too easy with modern anti-ship missiles, submarines, sea mines, and more to sink amphibious assault surface combatants with hundreds or even thousands of ground troops on them before they even reach the shore. And as military technologies mature and advance, the balance continues to shift, again and again, against warships and toward military forces that want to stop warships. Ukraine has managed to seriously bloody Russia's Black Sea fleet, despite not having any real navy to speak of at all.

Taiwan does have the United States, with the worlds largest and most advanced military force and nuclear weapons as it patron. But a reasonable Chinese military strategist could wager, and would probably be correct, that the United States, while it would provide as much support in conventional warfare to protect Taiwan as it could, would not be willing to start a global nuclear war with China to protect Taiwan's sovereignty, something that Taiwan itself blows hot and cold on in its own domestic politics. Likewise, while China would very much like to have Taiwan as a jewel in its crown, it seems unlikely that China would risk starting a nuclear war with the United States to get it. Nuclear missiles are blunt instruments that serve few legitimate military purposes in the hands of rational military leaders in positions of high command. And, unlike the leaders of North Korea, China's leaders have consistently shown themselves to be calculating and rational, rather than insane and reckless, for the last half century or so since the Cultural Revolution ended.

Instead, the main barrier to a Chinese invasion of Taiwan is that fact that both countries "live in glass houses." Modern China's economy and prosperity is rooted in its export oriented manufacturing base, which is increasingly moving up the chain of technological sophistication. Taiwan, likewise, has an export based commercial economy that, most famously, it the global center of advanced computer processor manufacturing. China and Taiwan even have significant and strong trade ties with each other.

Unlike Russia, which has survived global economic sanctions and boycotts with only minor cuts and bruises so far, because the only exports that are very important to the health of Russia's domestic economy are natural gas and oil, both China and Taiwan have economies which are heavily reliant on international trade, much of it with rich Western countries. 

In an all out war, the sophisticated high tech factories that make that export based economy possible would be completely wiped out for decades in Taiwan, although the heavy capital investments of mainland China would be harder to really devastate. But it also isn't just physical capital investments that matter. You can't manufacture world class computer processors with unwilling serfs. The prime exports of both economies require the voluntary, and indeed, enthusiastic participation of legions of sophisticated engineers, factory managers, technicians, financial and managerial professionals, and more generally a health, decentralized, reasonably economically free commercial sector and social class. All it would take for China to kill the goose that lays Taiwan's golden eggs would be quiet work to rule, "quiet quitting" type behavior from its managerial, professional, administrative, and technical classes. No flashing explosives or armed resistance would be necessary.

Equally important, if any significant part of the developed world decided to boycott Chinese exports because of a Chinese invasion and conquest of Taiwan, as part of a general mobilization against it akin to the general mobilization against Russia that took place in the immediate wake of its invasion of Ukraine, the impact this would have on China would be far more severe than the impact these sanctions had on Russia.

China wouldn't lose all of its trading partners. It could still keep selling its ware to the communist regimes of Southeast Asia and to Russia, for example. But its trade to those countries is already close to maxed out, because it is a leading global exporter. There is no place it could sell its wares that could replace its immense exports to developed Western capitalist countries around the world, if it lost access to those markets, which it likely would, at least in the medium term.

The economic blowback that China would experience in reaction to an invasion of Taiwan from the developed Western capitalist countries of the world would be at least as bad as the Great Depression was in the United States, if not worse. Hundreds of millions of ordinary Chinese people would lose their jobs and would be trust into abject poverty. Factories up and down China's densely populated eastern coastal regions would be shuttered. People who managed to hold onto jobs might see their incomes cut in half. The massive progress China has made in the past couple of decades in eradicating extreme poverty globally would be undone.

In an economy already heavily driven by extravagant public works projects, there would be little room to boost an economy facing collapse from a sudden interruption of its export trade with more spending on public works and infrastructure. A loss of access to supplies of imported raw materials would further cripple Chinese manufacturers ability to export goods even communist or formerly communist countries that continued to support China, and to manufacture goods for domestic consumption. Imported comforts would dwindle to the consternation of Chinese business elites that now snap up second homes in Vancouver and foreign educations and travel for their children and have acquired expensive and exotic tastes. 

Also, despite its vast population, now more or less tied with India, in China, lives are no longer cheap. The average Chinese woman has less than one child in a lifetime. Many young men in China are not just only children, but are also the only grandchild of four grandparents. A historical preference for boys as China experienced its demographic transition in the face of its one child policy have left China with a surplus of military service aged men, although it has barely tapped it since it has so many young men relative to the needs of its military. 

China is far removed from places with the demographics of places like the Gaza Strip, where almost 50% of the population is under the age of eighteen, couples tend to marry in their early twenties, and women generally have many children in their lifetimes. Too many mouths to feed and too few jobs to support them isn't a problem that China has at the moment. Every young adult man and woman is precious in the eyes of modern China, so each life lost in a war to take Taiwan would have an amplified social impact. China is not psychologically prepared to lose the millions of lives and hundreds of sunken ships that it would have to expend to take Taiwan.

Given the current situation of China and Taiwan, the only way it would make sense for China to conquer Taiwan would be if it could accomplish this in an almost bloodless fait accompli in a matter of days, which the Taiwanese people collective gave up and accepted as inevitable at the outset, much like the sudden, nearly bloodless Russian conquest of Crimea in 2014 that was basically over before the world had time to react to it, or come to Ukraine's aid.

But while the Taiwanese people do predominantly speak a Chinese topolect, and do have strong cultural ties to mainland China, the similarities between Crimea and Taiwan end there. Modern Taiwan's is the product of a society of Western leaning exiles from the Maoist Communist revolution in mainland China. The Chinese speaking people of Taiwan are the majority and have been in opposition to the communist regime of mainland China from the start, unlike the Russian speaking people of Crimea who were a minority in Ukraine and felt cultural and political kinship with their post-Soviet co-ethnics in Russia proper. 

There is no reason to think that Taiwan would accept their new Chinese overlords quietly or peacefully with resignation and obedience to the new regime. This would be a war of people with nowhere else to go in Taiwan defending their home, who have been preparing for this fight for much longer than the Ukrainians prepared for a Russian invasion, and with all of the ferocity of the Ukrainians defending their territory. And, like Ukraine, the Taiwanese would have ample military and economic support from Western-leaning allies including the United States, Japan, South Korea, and Australia with technologically modern military forces. So, the only scenario that would make the price that China would have to pay to take Taiwan simply isn't a plausible possibility.

Thus, the only ground war that China has shown any interest in fighting would be far too costly to China, even if it wins, to make the fight worth it to China. And, because China's leadership is rational and pragmatic enough to realize this fact, it is extremely unlikely that China will invade Taiwan.

Really the only military actions that it seems plausible for China to undertake in the near future is a continuation of its low grade, gradual efforts to use its naval and air power, and ground troops on artificial islands, to extend its dominance in the international waters of the East China sea and the Western Pacific as far as the international waters near the Philippines. The prizes here are fishing territory, oceanic mineral resources, greater control of the East Asian shipping industry, and national pride at a modest military cost. And, these are prizes which the allies of Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan are unwilling to exert the level of overwhelming trade, diplomatic, and military power necessary to completely thwart China from achieving these aims.