For All Mankind (AH Tv series at Apple TV)

All this would further destabilize the Middle East during our version of the Arab Spring. The scary thing is that they are almost all under 30 years old, and have no love for democracy, corporate rule, Israel, and communism, and most have lived lives of abject poverty. They will want some representation, and they can get nuclear weapons...
The Middle Eastern scenario by the 21st century is entirely different than OTL. Remember that Saudi Arabia (which has been a toxic influence on the Middle East since it's foundation) is dead and whatever arose in it's place will not have the revenue stream that oil provided.

As for North Korea, as I said before they did so because their mission was a High Risk gamble to claim First Place in the Race to Mars using the most bare bone means of doing so that was of no practical value besides saying "First" and even if succeeds would make them look like assholes, and the gamble paid off instead of having two dead men flying out into space or as a pile of ash and shrapnel strewn across the face of Mars. They're on the M7 because because the Soviets probably pushed for it because of A: symbolic reasons and B: it leads to a balance of powers. You have the United States, EU and Japan on one side, The Soviet Union, CCCS and North Korea on the other and India in the Middle as a tie-breaker. It's not even cynical politics, just pragmatic politics. The last bit is all but overtly said in the Show.

Zor
 
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What we hear about the Middle East through the series seems to confirm that things are going pretty badly there. There was the beginning of Season 3 where President Hart refused to intervene militarily to liberate Kuwait from Iraq. They mentioned that with fusion power and electric cars, the US isn't dependent on foreign oil anymore (I presume the smaller amounts they still need come from domestic sources or their closer allies like Canada or Norway). When Aleida was getting interviewed this season, the reporter mentioned that "the Saudi Arabian civil war" was still ongoing.

Overall it seems like the region has mostly been in chaos since the early 90s since the outside powers are no longer interested in involving themselves there to keep things stable, since with oil less important the region isn't anywhere near as relevant as it used to be. And things for the superpowers and their closer allies seem to have been all the more peaceful for it. There was no Gulf War, no 9/11, and seemingly no involvement in the chaos going on there now.

In all, I think the region looks a lot like in OTL, and for most of the same reasons, just that it's happening 30 or 40 years earlier in their world.
 
What we hear about the Middle East through the series seems to confirm that things are going pretty badly there. There was the beginning of Season 3 where President Hart refused to intervene militarily to liberate Kuwait from Iraq. They mentioned that with fusion power and electric cars, the US isn't dependent on foreign oil anymore (I presume the smaller amounts they still need come from domestic sources or their closer allies like Canada or Norway). When Aleida was getting interviewed this season, the reporter mentioned that "the Saudi Arabian civil war" was still ongoing.
Which also means that:
1) The people believe that both the Soviets and Americans respect dictators than the will of the people. They have rejected democracy, communist-socialism, and have called for Islamic theocracy. Weirdly enough, no mention has been made of Iran of 1979. Does that mean that the Shah is still in power?
2) The 50% of the population, who are under 35+ years old, of North Africa/ Middle East have been mainly unemployed with the sheer lack of investment in alternative industries/ technology
3) If anything, consider that Pakistan, China and North Korea could could suddenly overwhelm U.S. military resources, by simply announcing the sale of nuclear weapons to the region.
 
Hmm, there was stuff I liked and stuff I didn't about the finale (and season overall).

On the one hand the asteroid heist was a cool concept, but when you think about it it really makes zero sense. What's to stop Earth from just making a bigger mover and pushing the asteroid out of orbit next time Earth and Mars are nearby? And realistically Dev, Ed, and everyone involved should have been arrested and sent to prison, even with the asteroid in orbit they just don't have the political leverage or resources to resist Earth, especially after such a blatant act of sabotage and a riot that ended up almost killing Danni. I can stomach it because I get that they're just using it as a reason to boost development of Mars for the show, but I wish they'd done something more thought out like crashing the asteroid on Mars, and certainly hope that Dev and Ed face some consequences for going rogue. On the other hand, the riot scene was really well done, you could just see Danni and Ed's horror at the ugly reality of what the Mars outpost had degenerated to, and as Ed came to the realization that he really fucked up.

Other than that, I feel like we needed more closure on the life on Mars subplot; definitely a few threads left hanging there. Alida, Margo, and Kelly had a standout season, but aside from Margo I don't feel like their plotlines had much closure. Which, is kinda a theme for the season. Hopefully they get a season 5 and manage to close out some of them satisfactorily.
 
Look no matter what I want to see more alternate history shows.
I'm with you. We need to have more shows set in an alternate history setting. The Man in the High Castle was the first show I saw that wasn't some TV movie or a show that never got past a test viewing. It was a neat idea and had they not derailed at the end I may have watched it all the way through. For All Mankind is in my eyes the gold standard for how to make a well-made alternate history TV show. Sure it isn't always great in how it does some things but when it works it works well. Where it doesn't it's still more than enjoyable enough to keep watching.

It's my hope that when this show ends more people are willing to try to make books into shows. If we can have Nazis ruling the United States not can't we have a show when Archduke Franz Ferdinand isn't assassinated or a shown when Adolf Hitler is killed in World War 1 and so the Nazi Party never gains power in Germany?
 
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On the one hand the asteroid heist was a cool concept, but when you think about it it really makes zero sense. What's to stop Earth from just making a bigger mover and pushing the asteroid out of orbit next time Earth and Mars are nearby?
Cost, Cost and Cost.
  1. Cost in Money: The cost of building the big asteroid pusher vehicle.
  2. Cost in Time: You need to build the vehicle, test it, ship it to mars and then wait for a Launch Window, probably getting fuel at mars and then accelerating clear of mars and too earth. We're talking about years, minimum. On the other hand, the basics of mining can begin fairly quickly in Mars Orbit using their existing infrastructure. If you own an electronics factory, this benefits you sooner.
  3. Cost in Delta V: Goldilocks is in Mars Orbit and can be stabilized fairly easily by burning off speed at the right time and cutting back the apogee of an elliptical orbit (play KSP and you'll know what I mean). Pushing means adding Delta V and bringing it back down to bring over not only all the valuable minerals, but also all the worthless slag and stuff like Iron and Aluminum which are useful but not bringing in the big bucks. Processing Goldilocks in Mars Orbit and sending Ingots to earth is far less costly in terms of transport energy. There's also the fact that Mars' Orbital Speed is 24 km/s compared to earth's which is 29.74 km/s.

Zor
 
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Cost, Cost and Cost.
  1. Cost in Money: The cost of building the big asteroid pusher vehicle.
  2. Cost in Time: You need to build the vehicle, test it, ship it to mars and then wait for a Launch Window, probably getting fuel at mars and then accelerating clear of mars and too earth. We're talking about years, minimum.
  3. Cost in Delta V: Goldilocks is in Mars Orbit and can be stabilized fairly easily by burning off speed at the right time and cutting back the apogee of an elliptical orbit (play KSP and you'll know what I mean). Pushing means adding Delta V and bringing it back down to bring over not only all the valuable minerals, but also all the worthless slag. Processing Goldilocks in Mars Orbit and sending Ingots to earth is far less costly in terms of transport energy. There's also the fact that Mars' Orbital Speed is 24 km/s compared to earth's which is 29.74 km/s.

Zor

Fair enough, I'm no orbital mechanist, but it seems that between fusion power and whatever drive system they cooked up they can generate enough impulse to shift a big rock pretty darn well. Yeah it's mass inefficient to send the whole rock Earthwards, but between setting up a 20 year project to develop Mars's population and infrastructure to the point of being able to handle the rock and ship stuff back to Earth or building a couple additional pusher craft to make the $20 trillion resources more immediately accessible the economics should still be there to move the rock to Earth.
 
I'll admit I did think the show would end with them crashing the asteroid on Mars (perhaps they miss the chance for an orbital injection burn and just opt to turn and aim it directly at the planet) to give a reason to settle the planet itself (lots of surface mining towns could pop up around the impact site), and give Kelly's robots a new thing to look at. But, orbit works too, and saves them the trouble of building a space elevator. For now.

As for the consequences for Dev and Ed and the rest of the asteroid heist team, I think the main one is that they can't ever return to Earth, because if they did they would indeed be arrested the moment they landed (which is fine for them since they wanted to never go back). But the options for detaining them on Mars and forcibly returning them to Earth are rather limited. The use of intelligence assets to detain and torture people on Mars is a whole scandal (at least for the US; the USSR is probably as opaque as ever about the KGB), so anything too heavy-handed would come at a massive political cost. They could potentially just send agents to arrest them and return them to Earth (as the FBI did when a worker at McMurdo station in Antarctica attacked another with a hammer), but it looks like the majority of Happy Valley's population is sympathetic to the heist and would be very resistant to anyone from Earth coming to usurp them (even more so now that their families seem to be able to get flown out there). Building up a large enough force to subdue them, which itself would probably be a politically dangerous move given ordinary people on Earth likely either don't care about Mars or are sympathetic to the people there after the torture scandal, would also get to the level where any one country doing so would get called out by the rest of the international community for building up military assets in space (which since the events of Season 2 seems to be pretty clearly generally seen as a bad thing). Trying to starve them out until they give them up isn't really an option either; to the public that just looks even worse, Happy Valley grows the vast majority of its food itself (as mentioned by Ed in passing early in the season), and the Helios corporation is what keeps Happy Valley running. Those are seemingly all Helios ships making the supply runs between Earth and Mars, Helios workers keep the bases running and maintained, and the vast majority of equipment the base uses seems to be manufactured by Helios (you see the Helios logo on all the suits used there, no matter which country the person using it is from). Even if the countries are no longer cooperative, Helios can pretty much keep the place running all on its own, and as long as their CEO is on Mars and part of the group, they won't be inclined to stop. Unless they get nationalized, but that was already suggested in Season 3 and President Wilson balked at the idea, and by Season 4 I think they're filling the important role of a politically neutral supplier for all the M7 nations as a compromise between them, so getting nationalized by the US would be very diplomatically dicey.

So for the US, arresting them and bringing them to Earth is highly politically unpopular, would require a very large financial and material investment into a space-based military presence that would draw the ire of the international community, and they'd rather stay on the good side of the company that pretty much runs the human presence on Mars at this point (Look at the leeway the US gives to Elon Musk in OTL, for example). In other words, it's just not worth it.

For the Soviet Union, they're already inclined to be uncooperative since the coup, and now are likely about to withdraw from the M7 alliance since they probably blame the US for the asteroid heist. The Cold War is seemingly restarting (probably mirroring the deterioration in US-Russia relations after the initial era of good feelings following the Soviet collapse), and with their own large supplies of iridium at home, they're probably about to become a market competitor to Mars. For them to agree to the capture of Goldilocks, they needed a big piece of the pie and a large profit for not too much investment, which was why bringing it to Earth was so important for them. Otherwise, the dumping of a huge amount of iridium on the global market would risk wrecking their rare earth export-dependent economy. Without that, all they can really do to limit the damage is withdraw, close in the market of the global alliance they control as much as they can, and try to compete with Mars on favourable terms. Whether the CCCS follows them is another question. They must have already been very nervous about Moscow's intentions ever since the coup.

For North Korea, all their people on Mars are likely either defected (Lee Jung-Gil is finally free) or headed home; there's no way to undo the attempted storming of their section of the base and so they're all but withdrawn as a member. Given the poor relationship they had with the others no one's probably going to stand up for them either (except maybe the Soviets, but they're probably gone too).
 
Cost, Cost and Cost.
  1. Cost in Money: The cost of building the big asteroid pusher vehicle.
  2. Cost in Time: You need to build the vehicle, test it, ship it to mars and then wait for a Launch Window, probably getting fuel at mars and then accelerating clear of mars and too earth. We're talking about years, minimum. On the other hand, the basics of mining can begin fairly quickly in Mars Orbit using their existing infrastructure. If you own an electronics factory, this benefits you sooner.
  3. Cost in Delta V: Goldilocks is in Mars Orbit and can be stabilized fairly easily by burning off speed at the right time and cutting back the apogee of an elliptical orbit (play KSP and you'll know what I mean). Pushing means adding Delta V and bringing it back down to bring over not only all the valuable minerals, but also all the worthless slag. Processing Goldilocks in Mars Orbit and sending Ingots to earth is far less costly in terms of transport energy. There's also the fact that Mars' Orbital Speed is 24 km/s compared to earth's which is 29.74 km/s.

Zor
Exactly. Especially considering how cost management and investment analysis is such a big plot theme this season.
 
What about Israel /Palestine ittl? Has it been mentioned? If not, what do you think it's like there? Hopefully instead of worries about nuclear proliferation the timeline is seeing space program proliferation. Besides Brazil and China and perhaps Iran, Pakistan and Turkey who are other likely nations on that list?
EDIT I was wondering what's happened to Arianna Huffington? See use to be on tv and the internet all the time now you never see her however she is a dead ringer for the new head of Roscosmos don't you think?
 
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What about Israel /Palestine ittl? Has it been mentioned? If not, what do you think it's like there? Hopefully instead of worries about nuclear proliferation the timeline is seeing space program proliferation. Besides Brazil and China and perhaps Iran, Pakistan and Turkey who are other likely nations on that list?
EDIT I was wondering what's happened to Arianna Huffington? See use to be on tv and the internet all the time now you never see her however she is a dead ringer for the new head of Roscosmos don't you think?
In general, I'd think Israel would be doing reasonably well here. Unlike Iraq or Saudi Arabia it's economy is not based on Oil but on it's high tech sectors. I could see Israeli firms doing good work for NASA. If Israelis can make the desert bloom their skills and ideas would be value on the sands of Mars.

Zor
 
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And how are the Palestinians faring?
Much worse than OTL. Consider that in OTL, according to the United Nations, unemployment rates range from 13% in the rural regions, with urban centers with as high as c. 20%. Considering that the oil revenues have been rapidly plunging since the 1970s, the Middle East is substantially poorer than OTL.

 
Sadly, the FAM timeline while overall better than OTL still has its winners and losers. Other losers would be people in Russia, the Soviet bloc in Eastern Europe and the Baltics, Ukraine and elsewhere. They may be better off materially than OTL but as we saw this season would still be subjected to horrible situations if they opposed the powers that be,
 
What about Israel /Palestine ittl? Has it been mentioned? If not, what do you think it's like there? Hopefully instead of worries about nuclear proliferation the timeline is seeing space program proliferation. Besides Brazil and China and perhaps Iran, Pakistan and Turkey who are other likely nations on that list?
EDIT I was wondering what's happened to Arianna Huffington? See use to be on tv and the internet all the time now you never see her however she is a dead ringer for the new head of Roscosmos don't you think?
If I'm remembering correctly (I might not be) one of the recaps at the start of this season mentioned that the Oslo Accords have held in this world.
 
Sadly, the FAM timeline while overall better than OTL still has its winners and losers. Other losers would be people in Russia, the Soviet bloc in Eastern Europe and the Baltics, Ukraine and elsewhere.
In the case of Russia it's a distinction between an Authoritarian Socialist regime vs an Authoritarian Capitalist regime in OTL.

Zor
 
Okay I finished it last night And WOW what a good season. Maybe my favorite since S1. Let’s play who gets arrested?

I think Miles and Samantha are big targets. I agree Helios might be able to protect them, I just don’t know if Dev would stick his neck out for them. I guess it is a more positive ATL, I just tend not to trust rich types. I guess we will see.
 
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