Futudirection for Humanity? (was Don Davis article)

On 4/4/06, Omar E. Vega wrote:
(...)
> First, I am a South American (acually Chilean) so I would like to
> give you my oppinion from the other side of the world, looking at
> the Southern Cross instead to the Big Deeper.

I am a Brazilian, and I am surprised to see from your message that we
have many points in common. Maybe the Southern Cross induces some
similarities of thought, who knows :-).

> I don't think there will be any large war in the future. Perhaps
> only small scale wars between superpowers and small countries, like
> the ones on which the U.S. is been involved since the end of the
> Cold War. Pretty unbalanced wars indeed, and relatively easy to
> fight... for the superpower, of course.

Besides wars between superpowers and "infrapowers" I also see a
tendency of internal (civil) wars existing for some time. We are in an
world were there are still too many artificial countries that were
fabricated by empires now dead. and those countries will tend to
disintegrate into more stable units. I see that process at work now at
Iraq.

> In a global scale I see Indian and China rising, which together with
> the East Asian countries may become one of the main superpower
> coalitions of the future. I also see Europe declining, because
> countries that can't reproduce themselves simply will be invaded by
> third world foreigners, and trouble will start pretty soon, if have
> not started already. I see Europe declining to third world leves in
> one century, or before. It would recover, though. It always happens.

Nice to see someone with a cyclic view of History.

> At the same time, I believe some "third world countries", like many
> from Latin America, will become part of the "new rich" elitte, and
> will behave like that. I also believe Latin America will ally
> economically with Asia, a trend that has started alredy, and that is
> not as strange as it might be thought at first.

Well, I slightly disagree here. You are in a privileged South American
country that embraced fiercely free market and has been for a long
time gathering the fruits of this good economic policy. So maybe that
explains your optimistic view. However, most of South America has a
horrible tendency for electing governments that are either populist or
leftist, or both. In Brazil for instance our leftist government has
increased our tax load by several percent in less than four years. And
what is worse: the president (and its changing team of dark eminences)
will probably be reelected in October. It seems kind of difficult to
have a Third World economy growing at a high sustainable rate while
asphyxiated by an European-like tax load.

Nevertheless, some international analysts are more optimistic about
Brazil than liberal Brazilians like myself. There is even that acronym
BRICs for Brazil, Russia, China and India as the major economies in
the 2050. Hope they are right...

> United States will continue to be a military superpower, but it is
> very likely its economical future won't be easy. More an more the
> world will need less products and services from the U.S. simply
> because the U.S. got rid of manufacturing. Trade balances will
> continue to be a disaster, at least something radical happens. If
> not, it is not known how much the U.S. could go into debt before the
> whole system colapses.
>
> Actually, that was precisely what happened to the Soviet Union: a
> military superpower with a third world budget.

And as in the case of Soviet Union the U.S. may find out that military
power is nothing without economic power behind it.

(...)
> South America will trade directly with China, for example, without
> need of buying through American or European intermediaries.

China is already the third major commercial partner of Brazil and is
likely to become the second or even first a few years in the future.

(...)
> The west, like we know it today, won't exist anymore, but their
> legacy will remain: Democracy, Science, Free-Markets, Human Values.
(...)

Maybe I am just a gloomy, pessimistic guy, but I disagree here too. Of
the four legacies above, I think that only Free Markets are
guaranteed. And that is just because economic forces naturally favor
free market, it is a stable point toward which the system tends to
converge. Some governments and ideologies may push the system away
from free market for some time, but in the end free market will always
win...

As for democracy and human values, I see them as largely a historical
"fashion" imposed to the world because the West (where those values
were fashionable) ruled the world for the past centuries. Without the
backing of the West (because the West is likely to decline) I don't
see intrinsic reasons for those values to stay. In fact, throughout
most of human history such values were eccentric oddities here and
there; democracy in particular is new even in the West. I don't see
China for instance saying "oh, our whole five-thousand-years-old
culture was really wrong all the time, let's embrace those new alien
fashions of democracy and human rights"...

Finally, Science. The idea of endless scientific progress may not be
true. There will be a time when the cost in time and money for doing
new scientific discoveries will not be compensated by the potential
benefits of the discoveries, and at that time scientific progress will
come down to a trickle, or even stop. Some people, like John Horgan in
his book "The End of Science", think that time is near. If that view
is correct, then when Science cease to be an endless cornucopia of
answers people will again embrace religion and mysticism more openly
and thoroughly even in societies that now proclaim themselves as
secular. Given time, computers, cars, planes and spaceships will
definitely loose their aura of tech marvels, miracles of the "Science
God", and will become only tools used by deeply mystic and religious
people like water wheels, wooden ships and war machines were used by
people in the middle ages.