So while I accept your criticism in general, and there is no doubt that my personal politics are in this map as it necessarily requires my view of what would realistically happen, at least to a degree, you have misidentified me however. I'm not a progressive leftie or anything but I genuinely think that these policies are correctly associated with their fictional political entities. Your accusation that the map (set in a fictional 1976) looks like it reflects the present day political divisions more than it does OTL 1976 is entirely correct. I believe however that cultural differences in OTL 1976 and especially in TTL's 1976 are better reflected in modern political divisions than in OTL 1976 political divisions; big city vs rural, north Vs south, white Vs black Vs Hispanic vs other ect, so I have made the boarders reflect that. This timeline was very steered, trying to find as reasonable a way as possible to get a post war UK wank but I don't think I have done anything particularly silly. Tell me is you still disagree.
Map Thread XVIII
- Thread starter FesteringSpore
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I have no horse in this fight but I think it's great that you're willing to respond to criticism and deal with it in a measured way instead of attempting to ignore it or ridicule the other person.
Is Yuma in the same spot it is IOTL? Or different?
This may or may not be the beginnings of a new timeline, but I would like to explore this idea.
So there is a region called the Salton Sink in Southern California where a rather large region sits below sea level. Right now it contains the much smaller Salton Sea which was created by accident in the early 20th century. However in the past, the Colorado River once emptied directly into the Sink, creating a massive lake
. It last dried up in the 16th century when the Colorado River shifted from emptying into the lake.
The river naturally shifts its course through natural processes, but here I made a scenario where the Colorado continues to empty into the Salton Sea into the modern era. Now with technology we can build infrastructure to prevent it from draining directly into the ocean as per OTL.
Progress...
I edited Bulgaria's borders... more clay for true Illyrians!
The border between Provence (Burgundy) and Italy was changed to reflect an earlier POD.
I have the Spanish borders more a lá otl, only that the union of Castile-Leon-Portugal-Andalusia happened in the early 15th century. I may edit the Aragonese borders, but the Barcelona kings did capture Murcia.
Poland did have a dynastic union with either Lithuania or Hungary, but didn't get very far into conquering Ruthenia (neither did Lithuania) and were eventually pushed back to more adequate Russian borders.
The German Emperors were able to keep the Teutonic order on a tighter leash and attach their lands to the Empire, but wars between the Empire and Poland/Lithuania/Russia/Sweden have given them quite a battering. Poland duting the now finished Great War regained a sea access it had lost in the 13th/14th century.
The British isles are a republic. No Cromwellian tyranny here though... the curbstomping of the papacy by the Germans and Italians has lead to many national churches, so the English, Scottish, and Irish are all speaking their own native tongues in Church and a fairly engineered English outside. The French-English wars were a littlr morr disastrous for either side and an increasing nationalism on the English side lead to a greater interest in Celtic and Anglo-saxon heritage. An increasing sentiment of monarchical incomptency lead to a similar revolution but without the anti-Irish sentiment. The Republic is divided into three parts... England-Ireland-Scotland, and are generally more industrialised, patriotic, and Christian than OTL (their anthem is something akin to a cross of Jerusalem - Onward Christain Soldiers - Rule Britannia)
France is a monarchy a la Britain OTL and even is ruled by Plantagenet descendants in an ironic twist. Very big into colonialism and rhe Med. Have lots of axes to grind with the Germans and Romans.
Hispania is a republic a la France OTL, amd had a similar revolution, but France was the one that garnered the Napoleon of this TL. Had sinilar colonies as Spain and Portugal OTL.
Here is a map with a possible thought experiment where the Dacians (OTL Romanians) allied with the Romans and were axed by the allies. An independent Serbia to counterbalance a newly created Bulgaria/Wallachia.
Illyria is given Carniola in exchange for giving the new Serbian nation sea-access. The Illyrian/Serbian (or is that Moesia?) Border more accurately reflects this TTL's Catholic/Orthodox divide.
Russia gains Moldava, while Transylvania remains in Hungarian Administration (they sided with the Germans however, as Illyria was detached from Hungary, ending their personal union)
I edited Bulgaria's borders... more clay for true Illyrians!
The border between Provence (Burgundy) and Italy was changed to reflect an earlier POD.
I have the Spanish borders more a lá otl, only that the union of Castile-Leon-Portugal-Andalusia happened in the early 15th century. I may edit the Aragonese borders, but the Barcelona kings did capture Murcia.
Poland did have a dynastic union with either Lithuania or Hungary, but didn't get very far into conquering Ruthenia (neither did Lithuania) and were eventually pushed back to more adequate Russian borders.
The German Emperors were able to keep the Teutonic order on a tighter leash and attach their lands to the Empire, but wars between the Empire and Poland/Lithuania/Russia/Sweden have given them quite a battering. Poland duting the now finished Great War regained a sea access it had lost in the 13th/14th century.
The British isles are a republic. No Cromwellian tyranny here though... the curbstomping of the papacy by the Germans and Italians has lead to many national churches, so the English, Scottish, and Irish are all speaking their own native tongues in Church and a fairly engineered English outside. The French-English wars were a littlr morr disastrous for either side and an increasing nationalism on the English side lead to a greater interest in Celtic and Anglo-saxon heritage. An increasing sentiment of monarchical incomptency lead to a similar revolution but without the anti-Irish sentiment. The Republic is divided into three parts... England-Ireland-Scotland, and are generally more industrialised, patriotic, and Christian than OTL (their anthem is something akin to a cross of Jerusalem - Onward Christain Soldiers - Rule Britannia)
France is a monarchy a la Britain OTL and even is ruled by Plantagenet descendants in an ironic twist. Very big into colonialism and rhe Med. Have lots of axes to grind with the Germans and Romans.
Hispania is a republic a la France OTL, amd had a similar revolution, but France was the one that garnered the Napoleon of this TL. Had sinilar colonies as Spain and Portugal OTL.
Here is a map with a possible thought experiment where the Dacians (OTL Romanians) allied with the Romans and were axed by the allies. An independent Serbia to counterbalance a newly created Bulgaria/Wallachia.
Illyria is given Carniola in exchange for giving the new Serbian nation sea-access. The Illyrian/Serbian (or is that Moesia?) Border more accurately reflects this TTL's Catholic/Orthodox divide.
Russia gains Moldava, while Transylvania remains in Hungarian Administration (they sided with the Germans however, as Illyria was detached from Hungary, ending their personal union)
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Nice, I live there. I hope ITTL Yuma is a much bigger city, hopefully due to more farmland due to the lake.
I am thinking about a creating a timeline to flesh out the details but I agree with your analysis. Plus Mexico is right next door, so there is opportunity there as well.
@Pressedflowers, you have an very interesting series of an Eastern Roman State which in itself is unique in the way you done it, and the world around it.
But may I ask the question of how things would look like if the Eastern Romans, the Germans and they allies had won the Great War? (Which your series so far been it being on the losing side, and an international force in Constantinople and lots of rebels.)
But may I ask the question of how things would look like if the Eastern Romans, the Germans and they allies had won the Great War? (Which your series so far been it being on the losing side, and an international force in Constantinople and lots of rebels.)
Alright, I can accept that. I still believe it is too convergent on modern-day political divisions, and to me this still looks like "present-day demographic/political trends, but accelerated and exaggerated", but I can now see that you did reason it out well. Thank you for your response.
I should have lead with praise for your original map of this world. It was a well done map which presented a complex world in an understandable way. Kudos to you, and I look forward to what else you will produce!
My original reaction was due to the very real bias shown far too often here. Any time the USA breaks apart, either the former red states or the former blue states will immediately fall to totalitarian communism or fascism and go on a murdering spree, followed by economic and political collapse. Which side proceeds on that path depends entirely on the voting patterns of the author. It is tiresome in the extreme.
Agreed.
To be fair horrible voice acting was a staple of the franchise. And compared to the „cutscenes“ in the original III almost looks good
I'm continuing to develop that "Spartacist Germany" WorldA I posted a month back, this map is from August 1920 (9 years before the original map is set.) As you can see, Germany is in utter chaos between Allied occupations, Bavarian "Free-Staters", Prussian Reactionaries, Weimar-style SocDem Republicans, and the Spartacist Republic. The Russian Civil War is raging as per OTL and quite a bit is happening. The Maroon state in the Far East is the Far Eastern Republic, the Black Army is chilling in Ukraine with a tenuous Soviet alliance, the Tambov Rebellion just kicked off south of Moscow, and the Soviets are barreling towards Warsaw. I had many tabs open at once trying to put this all into place, but I am satisfied with the level of detail. You can even see the small rebellion of King Faisal of Syria occupying Damascus if you zoom in. The Post-WWI period has captured my interest after I saw Peter Jackson's "They Shall Not Grow Old" in theaters (excellent film by the way!), and now I've got a shipment of books on the Russian Civil War and Weimar Germany coming in the mail so I'll be occupied for a bit! Not sure what I want to do next but I have a mind to map out the Russian Civil War in some full WorldA glory month by month, but we'll have to see about that one
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From my next worldbuilding project, Liberty and Honor (Libertad y El Honor) and my MoTF post:
OPERATION RETRIBUTION
With the cementing of German dominance following the Treaty of Königsberg that had taken back to the year 1917 following the Russia's defeat which had been caused by civil war that ended with victory under the hands of Rabochogressivnoye's forces but in the year 1940 since the National Progressives had taken control of Reichstag and turn itself into National Republic of German Progress (NRDF) had massively concentrated on research and development which the nation itself had massively prepared for incoming war.
But a shocking surprise came at the midnight on March 19th, 1941 when most of the Soviet fighters and bombers had immensely launched a sudden and surprise attack that had left the airspace caught off-guard and the battle would have lasted for an hour and as a result, the cities of Tallinn, Riga, Königsberg, and Warsaw had left damaged that had left dozens of civilians in four cities dead or injured or lost their homes that created a consequences in which the Mitteleuropan Alliance had triggered Third International War.
OPERATION RETRIBUTION
With the cementing of German dominance following the Treaty of Königsberg that had taken back to the year 1917 following the Russia's defeat which had been caused by civil war that ended with victory under the hands of Rabochogressivnoye's forces but in the year 1940 since the National Progressives had taken control of Reichstag and turn itself into National Republic of German Progress (NRDF) had massively concentrated on research and development which the nation itself had massively prepared for incoming war.
But a shocking surprise came at the midnight on March 19th, 1941 when most of the Soviet fighters and bombers had immensely launched a sudden and surprise attack that had left the airspace caught off-guard and the battle would have lasted for an hour and as a result, the cities of Tallinn, Riga, Königsberg, and Warsaw had left damaged that had left dozens of civilians in four cities dead or injured or lost their homes that created a consequences in which the Mitteleuropan Alliance had triggered Third International War.
America couldn't even give the Kuril Islands to Japan those greedy assholes.
Nothing too fancy, another take on that old chestnut, the retro-future.
A commission for BeatBasic: the world of today as it might be imagined from a 1990s outlook.
The weather grows more violent, storms and hurricanes multiply as global warming begins to bite. The walls of buildings gleam and shimmer with holographic images from nanoprojector paint, and people wear clothes that changes color and texture. It is a buzzing, energetic, frantic, even extreme time, and having recovered from the 2000 Slump brought about by the global plague of computer errors, the world is whizzing along faster and faster into an integrated, global, cybernetic, networked future. US politics are lurid, a form of performance art, in which the campaigns are now essentially simultaneous with the term of office, and a constant battle goes on through the ocean of media to dazzle, confuse, needle, annoy and otherwise poke in one direction or another the pin-ball of the voter. “Meme science” plays an important part in the befooling of the public, and as memes compete and multiply some theoreticians make worried noises about “meme viruses”, fears which are written off as another form of anti-technological meme. Even the violent militia terrorism that plagues several western states is another form of entertainment, unreal and incomprehensible to most. Information overload is guaranteed, with innumerable internet, cable, satellite and other channels, sites, information sources. Information gatherers and collators take mind-altering drugs to drink in information from dozens of sources simultaneously, and those with the prized ability to spot important nodal points in otherwise undifferentiated flows of information are corporate superstars.
Population growth has been slower to drop off than OTL, especially in Africa and S/SE Asia, and there will be a billion more people than in our world by the time they both reach 2020. Corporations are bigger and more internationalized than ever. Capitalism has won, and grows and swells monstrous, in India, in China, in a Europe integrating out to the Urals. The Networked (technological, scientific, ultra-capitalist) world is divided into several major blocks: the continued cooperation of the European, North American, and Western Pacific blocks so far insures their continued dominance, especially given the increasing integration of the Russian sphere with the European one, but a coalition of Southern powers is rising to challenge their dominance. It yet remains unclear whether China will join either side or attempt to go by its lonesome.
The North American Federation, the more deeply integrated heir to NAFTA, is inwards-turned, Americans being somewhat ignorant and uninterested in the rest of the globe since the end of the Cold War, more interested in their wildly gyrating culture and entertainment than in geopolitics. It still pushes for global economic integration, and supports peacekeeping initiatives abroad, but is less interested in playing Global Policeman. Europe continues to expand, but its sheer size is increasingly an obstacle to efforts to deepen and more closely integrate the union, and many are worried about bringing in the rather disorderly, anarcho-capitalist Russians (“better inside the tent pissing out than outside the tent pissing in, yes, but what do you do when they don’t even bother to aim?”) The Indo-Pacific Coordination (dontsaycoprosperityspheredontsaycoprosperityspheredont saycoprosperitysphere) is perhaps the weakest of the three, being basically an alliance against Chinese economic and political expansionism, and hampered by the fact that Japan is its effective leader but nobody wants them to be the official leader. (It’s mere _unofficial_ position has so far kept the Koreans out at least as much as their desire to not piss off the Chinese overly). It would work better as a North America-West Pacific combo, but North America’s inwards attitudes militate against that notion. Japan, OTOH, is recovering from its long slump as a new generation of entrepreneurs and inventors recreate the Japanese technology scene, and push the envelopes of computer intelligence, virtuality, and nanotech further than anywhere else. It is also more “Japan Inc.” than ever, as corporations drag power out of the palsied hands of the fossilized political establishment.
China as OTL is expanding greatly, if somewhat hampered by the continuing presence of a powerful Communist-Maoist Old Guard resistant to the continuing March of Capitalism. The Chinese have started talks on greater autonomy for Tibet, although they warn that those maps showing a Tibet 1/3 the size of China will have to go.
The Alliance of the Global South is a rather rickety coalition of coalitions whose principal interest is challenging the global dominion of European and European-derived states (plus Japan), although their dirty little secret is that corporate influence is rife in most of their major states as well.
Nanotechnology is the new Big Thing, and mysterious stuff bubbles in giant assembler vats which TV spots promise will soon revolutionize the world. Already there is nano-cloth, nano-paint, and a variety of odd new materials: will nano soon build our cars, make our food, clean out our arteries? Stay tuned! Strong AI may not have arrived yet, but computers can fool a Turing test, and a number of actors and pop stars are now entirely computer-generated. A Japanese artist has recently begun legal action to allow him to marry one the most popular Virtual Idols. (India has _literal_ Virtual Idols and online simulated deities).
The Internet is huge, and improved VR means that the three-d virtual space internet is a very busy community with its own distinctive culture, something like Ready Player One but with much more creative avatars. Oddly enough there isn’t as much in the way of OTL social media (nobody would imagine a medium as narrow-bandwidth as OTL Twitter or Facebook could be a hit, although smart nano-paper means that nowadays one can get newspapers even more personalized than your OTL internet feed).
Immune rejection techniques have improved to the point where not only are transplants far more frequent and successful, a lot of people are carrying animal organs around, and some wealthy oddballs have gone further (say, fur or horns). Cybernetic implants (of various levels of usefulness) are also something of a fad, and Tokyo and Los Angeles teens compete for the most elaborate body mods, the most important difference being that the Japanese modifications are inevitable more “kawaii.” (For the best in creepy cyber-goths, try Berlin or Moscow).
In the Middle East, the Second Iranian Revolution has swept a democratic government into power, which to everyone’s annoyance has made it clear that they still don’t like the Jews. Iran has allied with India and is moving to expand its regional influence, and is poking the Taliban hornet’s nest to the east. Saddam Hussein was finally successfully assassinated in by Iran-backed Shi’a agents in 2014, only to be replaced by “Chemical Ali”, who has made considerable progress in negotiating an end to sanctions because nobody in the US really cares anymore.
A Palestinian state has been created in the West Bank and the Gaza strip, and receives a steady stream of financial aid AKA bribe money to keep it peaceful. The hard-liners have mostly been broken, although assassinations by Palestinians of “collaborator” Palestinians making up the ruling party continue intermittently, along with assassinations by Jewish Israelis of the Israeli officials who forcibly evacuated the more indefensible settlements on the West bank. The rail and road connection between the Gaza strip and the West Bank is nice, fast, and runs in a ditch sided by 20-foot sheer retaining walls topped by barbed wire, which the Palestinians find oddly insulting.
Russia is wealthier and less repressive than OTL, but also more corrupt and gangster-ridden. The wealth gap between a few ultra-rich urban centers and much of the more rural areas is alarming, and is one of the factors interfering with efforts to join the European Union. It has also swallowed Belorussia. Siberia is the Wild East, capitalism at its most Gangsta, with its own independence movement (whose leaders come and go as they regular turn out to be in someone’s pay) and local support for a Russian plan to set aside a big chunk of land (whose inhabitants are few and not ethnically Russian) as a storage site for radioactive waste – for a reasonable rent, of course!
The World Environmental Council, founded in the early 2000s, is an increasingly important institution as nations get serious about arresting global warming and ecological decay. Currently massive loans are being raised through international financial institutions to help large and rapidly growing nations move to cleaner power systems and less polluting industry, something increasingly urgent in a world even more polluted than OTL. Refuge arks are being set up worldwide for endangered species, and efforts are ongoing to get enough cell samples for cloning every species in existence in the case of them becoming extinct.
All-AI highways are increasingly abundant in North America, Europe, Japan, and elsewhere, although Americans (and Greeks) _will_ keep trying to hack the manual override. Cyborg combat dogs and “genius” smart missiles and bullets. Everyone has google glass type glasses, with the difference of 1. Being useful and 2. Not making you look like a total dork. (Old People: always watching. And recording, at a physically remote safe site). Mammoths have been successfully cloned and grown to adulthood: no word on dinosaurs yet.
An international consortium of nations led by the US has signed on to a long-term Zubrin-type effort to colonize Mars, and has landed automated fuel-making ships on the Red Planet, and the first human-carrying ship is in orbital construction, although there’s that radiation shielding issue to perfect. The International Space station has gone through a burst of reconstruction and expansion, and the Chinese have sent a man to the Moon. Fusion power is only 20 years away.
There are plenty of problems along with the progress. Corruption and corporate capture of the political process is on the rise, the unemployed and unemployable are growing in number as more are left behind by a future speeding out of control. Terrorism – Islamic, fundamentalist Christian, Deep Green, Militia, Krazy Kults – is on the rise, as the nihilistic and the outraged find ways to network and develop their technique, although as yet there hasn’t been a show-stopper on the scale of OTL 9/11. Africa remains a mess, and international forces under UN auspices have occupied some chunks of it. Neo-Maoist revolutionary movements have cropped up in a number of nations where the governments have not done well in handling the new Global Economy, and Anachists are becoming once again a bomb-throwing menace in the first world after a century’s absence. Climate instability is leading to increased food insecurity, although the biotechnicians claim we’ll have all the seaweed bacon we can eat in a few years time.
The Taliban have spread to Central Asia, which is increasingly wracked by religious unrest. Much of Former Yugoslavia remains a bit of a mess, with Serbia now a neo-fascist dictatorship which somehow seems to have gained some WMDs for intimidation purposes (some ultra-nationalist Russian moguls are under suspicions).
Biotech workers in advanced countries are known to be doing funny things with single-celled life, the Chinese have biotech research labs where few tourists go which they claim are not labs at all, nosiree, and nature itself has not been idle: a new and more contagious version of AIDS has emerged in southern Africa, and the international community is struggling to keep it contained, terrified of the possibility of it spreading globally.
The US is corrupt, brilliant, creative, schlocky. It produces endless movies with fabulous special effects and no plots to speak of, produces endless identical boy bands and some of the blackest and grimmest alternative music outside the Germanic countries (see, Death Grunge), creates the world’s most elaborate virtual realities and the most dire reality shows. Extremeness remains in, with the fourth movie in theYoungblood Expanded Universe coming out this summer. Modern sports include Olympic Skateboarding and Battle Baseball, and, of course, Rollerball, while Surge Red Extreme Energy is available at your local grocers in the 3 liter bottle. Gated suburbs are now “walled with razor wire and motion sensors on top, plus cyborgs guard dogs” suburbs, but just try and tell the inhabitants they’re paranoid. The Republican Party is distinctly more libertarian and less theocratic than OTL, if crazy enough in other ways, while the Democrats remain stubbornly Third Way (AKA, Republicans Lite). AOL still controls a lot of internet traffic, although their transmission rates are a wee bit faster now. The Simpsons are, of course, still on the air.
A commission for BeatBasic: the world of today as it might be imagined from a 1990s outlook.
The weather grows more violent, storms and hurricanes multiply as global warming begins to bite. The walls of buildings gleam and shimmer with holographic images from nanoprojector paint, and people wear clothes that changes color and texture. It is a buzzing, energetic, frantic, even extreme time, and having recovered from the 2000 Slump brought about by the global plague of computer errors, the world is whizzing along faster and faster into an integrated, global, cybernetic, networked future. US politics are lurid, a form of performance art, in which the campaigns are now essentially simultaneous with the term of office, and a constant battle goes on through the ocean of media to dazzle, confuse, needle, annoy and otherwise poke in one direction or another the pin-ball of the voter. “Meme science” plays an important part in the befooling of the public, and as memes compete and multiply some theoreticians make worried noises about “meme viruses”, fears which are written off as another form of anti-technological meme. Even the violent militia terrorism that plagues several western states is another form of entertainment, unreal and incomprehensible to most. Information overload is guaranteed, with innumerable internet, cable, satellite and other channels, sites, information sources. Information gatherers and collators take mind-altering drugs to drink in information from dozens of sources simultaneously, and those with the prized ability to spot important nodal points in otherwise undifferentiated flows of information are corporate superstars.
Population growth has been slower to drop off than OTL, especially in Africa and S/SE Asia, and there will be a billion more people than in our world by the time they both reach 2020. Corporations are bigger and more internationalized than ever. Capitalism has won, and grows and swells monstrous, in India, in China, in a Europe integrating out to the Urals. The Networked (technological, scientific, ultra-capitalist) world is divided into several major blocks: the continued cooperation of the European, North American, and Western Pacific blocks so far insures their continued dominance, especially given the increasing integration of the Russian sphere with the European one, but a coalition of Southern powers is rising to challenge their dominance. It yet remains unclear whether China will join either side or attempt to go by its lonesome.
The North American Federation, the more deeply integrated heir to NAFTA, is inwards-turned, Americans being somewhat ignorant and uninterested in the rest of the globe since the end of the Cold War, more interested in their wildly gyrating culture and entertainment than in geopolitics. It still pushes for global economic integration, and supports peacekeeping initiatives abroad, but is less interested in playing Global Policeman. Europe continues to expand, but its sheer size is increasingly an obstacle to efforts to deepen and more closely integrate the union, and many are worried about bringing in the rather disorderly, anarcho-capitalist Russians (“better inside the tent pissing out than outside the tent pissing in, yes, but what do you do when they don’t even bother to aim?”) The Indo-Pacific Coordination (dontsaycoprosperityspheredontsaycoprosperityspheredont saycoprosperitysphere) is perhaps the weakest of the three, being basically an alliance against Chinese economic and political expansionism, and hampered by the fact that Japan is its effective leader but nobody wants them to be the official leader. (It’s mere _unofficial_ position has so far kept the Koreans out at least as much as their desire to not piss off the Chinese overly). It would work better as a North America-West Pacific combo, but North America’s inwards attitudes militate against that notion. Japan, OTOH, is recovering from its long slump as a new generation of entrepreneurs and inventors recreate the Japanese technology scene, and push the envelopes of computer intelligence, virtuality, and nanotech further than anywhere else. It is also more “Japan Inc.” than ever, as corporations drag power out of the palsied hands of the fossilized political establishment.
China as OTL is expanding greatly, if somewhat hampered by the continuing presence of a powerful Communist-Maoist Old Guard resistant to the continuing March of Capitalism. The Chinese have started talks on greater autonomy for Tibet, although they warn that those maps showing a Tibet 1/3 the size of China will have to go.
The Alliance of the Global South is a rather rickety coalition of coalitions whose principal interest is challenging the global dominion of European and European-derived states (plus Japan), although their dirty little secret is that corporate influence is rife in most of their major states as well.
Nanotechnology is the new Big Thing, and mysterious stuff bubbles in giant assembler vats which TV spots promise will soon revolutionize the world. Already there is nano-cloth, nano-paint, and a variety of odd new materials: will nano soon build our cars, make our food, clean out our arteries? Stay tuned! Strong AI may not have arrived yet, but computers can fool a Turing test, and a number of actors and pop stars are now entirely computer-generated. A Japanese artist has recently begun legal action to allow him to marry one the most popular Virtual Idols. (India has _literal_ Virtual Idols and online simulated deities).
The Internet is huge, and improved VR means that the three-d virtual space internet is a very busy community with its own distinctive culture, something like Ready Player One but with much more creative avatars. Oddly enough there isn’t as much in the way of OTL social media (nobody would imagine a medium as narrow-bandwidth as OTL Twitter or Facebook could be a hit, although smart nano-paper means that nowadays one can get newspapers even more personalized than your OTL internet feed).
Immune rejection techniques have improved to the point where not only are transplants far more frequent and successful, a lot of people are carrying animal organs around, and some wealthy oddballs have gone further (say, fur or horns). Cybernetic implants (of various levels of usefulness) are also something of a fad, and Tokyo and Los Angeles teens compete for the most elaborate body mods, the most important difference being that the Japanese modifications are inevitable more “kawaii.” (For the best in creepy cyber-goths, try Berlin or Moscow).
In the Middle East, the Second Iranian Revolution has swept a democratic government into power, which to everyone’s annoyance has made it clear that they still don’t like the Jews. Iran has allied with India and is moving to expand its regional influence, and is poking the Taliban hornet’s nest to the east. Saddam Hussein was finally successfully assassinated in by Iran-backed Shi’a agents in 2014, only to be replaced by “Chemical Ali”, who has made considerable progress in negotiating an end to sanctions because nobody in the US really cares anymore.
A Palestinian state has been created in the West Bank and the Gaza strip, and receives a steady stream of financial aid AKA bribe money to keep it peaceful. The hard-liners have mostly been broken, although assassinations by Palestinians of “collaborator” Palestinians making up the ruling party continue intermittently, along with assassinations by Jewish Israelis of the Israeli officials who forcibly evacuated the more indefensible settlements on the West bank. The rail and road connection between the Gaza strip and the West Bank is nice, fast, and runs in a ditch sided by 20-foot sheer retaining walls topped by barbed wire, which the Palestinians find oddly insulting.
Russia is wealthier and less repressive than OTL, but also more corrupt and gangster-ridden. The wealth gap between a few ultra-rich urban centers and much of the more rural areas is alarming, and is one of the factors interfering with efforts to join the European Union. It has also swallowed Belorussia. Siberia is the Wild East, capitalism at its most Gangsta, with its own independence movement (whose leaders come and go as they regular turn out to be in someone’s pay) and local support for a Russian plan to set aside a big chunk of land (whose inhabitants are few and not ethnically Russian) as a storage site for radioactive waste – for a reasonable rent, of course!
The World Environmental Council, founded in the early 2000s, is an increasingly important institution as nations get serious about arresting global warming and ecological decay. Currently massive loans are being raised through international financial institutions to help large and rapidly growing nations move to cleaner power systems and less polluting industry, something increasingly urgent in a world even more polluted than OTL. Refuge arks are being set up worldwide for endangered species, and efforts are ongoing to get enough cell samples for cloning every species in existence in the case of them becoming extinct.
All-AI highways are increasingly abundant in North America, Europe, Japan, and elsewhere, although Americans (and Greeks) _will_ keep trying to hack the manual override. Cyborg combat dogs and “genius” smart missiles and bullets. Everyone has google glass type glasses, with the difference of 1. Being useful and 2. Not making you look like a total dork. (Old People: always watching. And recording, at a physically remote safe site). Mammoths have been successfully cloned and grown to adulthood: no word on dinosaurs yet.
An international consortium of nations led by the US has signed on to a long-term Zubrin-type effort to colonize Mars, and has landed automated fuel-making ships on the Red Planet, and the first human-carrying ship is in orbital construction, although there’s that radiation shielding issue to perfect. The International Space station has gone through a burst of reconstruction and expansion, and the Chinese have sent a man to the Moon. Fusion power is only 20 years away.
There are plenty of problems along with the progress. Corruption and corporate capture of the political process is on the rise, the unemployed and unemployable are growing in number as more are left behind by a future speeding out of control. Terrorism – Islamic, fundamentalist Christian, Deep Green, Militia, Krazy Kults – is on the rise, as the nihilistic and the outraged find ways to network and develop their technique, although as yet there hasn’t been a show-stopper on the scale of OTL 9/11. Africa remains a mess, and international forces under UN auspices have occupied some chunks of it. Neo-Maoist revolutionary movements have cropped up in a number of nations where the governments have not done well in handling the new Global Economy, and Anachists are becoming once again a bomb-throwing menace in the first world after a century’s absence. Climate instability is leading to increased food insecurity, although the biotechnicians claim we’ll have all the seaweed bacon we can eat in a few years time.
The Taliban have spread to Central Asia, which is increasingly wracked by religious unrest. Much of Former Yugoslavia remains a bit of a mess, with Serbia now a neo-fascist dictatorship which somehow seems to have gained some WMDs for intimidation purposes (some ultra-nationalist Russian moguls are under suspicions).
Biotech workers in advanced countries are known to be doing funny things with single-celled life, the Chinese have biotech research labs where few tourists go which they claim are not labs at all, nosiree, and nature itself has not been idle: a new and more contagious version of AIDS has emerged in southern Africa, and the international community is struggling to keep it contained, terrified of the possibility of it spreading globally.
The US is corrupt, brilliant, creative, schlocky. It produces endless movies with fabulous special effects and no plots to speak of, produces endless identical boy bands and some of the blackest and grimmest alternative music outside the Germanic countries (see, Death Grunge), creates the world’s most elaborate virtual realities and the most dire reality shows. Extremeness remains in, with the fourth movie in theYoungblood Expanded Universe coming out this summer. Modern sports include Olympic Skateboarding and Battle Baseball, and, of course, Rollerball, while Surge Red Extreme Energy is available at your local grocers in the 3 liter bottle. Gated suburbs are now “walled with razor wire and motion sensors on top, plus cyborgs guard dogs” suburbs, but just try and tell the inhabitants they’re paranoid. The Republican Party is distinctly more libertarian and less theocratic than OTL, if crazy enough in other ways, while the Democrats remain stubbornly Third Way (AKA, Republicans Lite). AOL still controls a lot of internet traffic, although their transmission rates are a wee bit faster now. The Simpsons are, of course, still on the air.
I've been wanting to do something like this but based on what I heard growing up in the 2000s, thanks for the inspiration!
as someone growing up in the 10's, I wait for this opportunity.
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