It's been a while since the last update, so here's a new one. In this update the world will see the 30th anniversary of the war come and go.
Chapter XV: Space Flight, the Rebirth of Cellular Phones and the Rise of the Internet, 2008-2014.
The world’s leading power by the close of the 2000s and dawn of the 2010s was most definitely India, despite suffering from many of the issues that Third World countries suffered from such as poverty, illiteracy, epidemics, malnutrition, homelessness, poor hygiene standards, lack of access to healthcare and so son. The country’s population, however, had reached the 1.2 billion marker by 2010 and that made it the world’s most populous country as it eclipsed China’s population by far (China’s population had grown back to 1 billion, or about its pre-war population). The vast majority of those were poor though, with middle class and upper middle class Indians constituting a tiny elite. The country has a large number of billionaires, indicating massive income inequality.
Purely in terms of gross domestic product though the Indian economy was the world’s largest national economy, accounting for 20% of the global economy in terms of purchasing power parity and 10% in nominal terms. The country had the world’s largest labour force. India’s agricultural sector and allied sectors like forestry and logging still employed over half the population despite efforts to industrialize the country. India is the largest producer of milk, jute and pulses, and has the world’s largest cattle population with 170 million animals in 2011. It is the largest producer of rice, wheat, sugarcane, cotton and groundnuts, as well as the largest fruit and vegetable producer. India is also the second-largest producer and the largest consumer of silk. The diversification of the economy, however, has decreased the agricultural sector’s share of total GDP.
After an interregnum, Rajiv Gandhi became next in line in the Nehru-Gandhi political dynasty by following in the footsteps of his mother and becoming Prime Minister of India after the 2004 general election. He reformed the public sector as part of an anti-corruption campaign, invested in upgrading and expanding modern infrastructure and utilities, invested in irrigation technology and modern agricultural practices to improve rural living standards, and made renewed efforts to improve public healthcare and education.
Gandhi also carried out economic reforms in an attempt to boost the economy’s modernization and industrialization. Using dirigiste economic policies, Rajiv Gandhi allocated government resources and funding to prioritized sectors, the manufacturing and tech sectors in particular. India was already well developed in mining and electricity, but Gandhi aspired to make India a leader in high tech. After promises of liberalization by New Delhi, several leading electronics and computer companies chose to relocate production to India to benefit from low labour costs.
One of the multinational corporations to build several factories, open offices and establish a call centre for customer service worldwide was the Finnish company Nokia. Up until WW III, Nokia had focused on forestry, cable, rubber, electronics and later also robotics. After a severe post-war crunch in the 1980s that forced the company to lay off all but the essential personnel, growth resumed in the late 90s as the company expanded its activities into the areas of telecommunications, information technology and consumer electronics. In 2008, Nokia’s newest factory in Mumbai began producing the world’s first commercially available mobile phone. Technically, the first actual one was the Motorola DynaTAC 8000X, but it had never entered widespread use because the war had erupted two months after it hit the market in September 1983.
In two decades investments into cellular telephony hadn’t been a priority, resulting in developments being put on halt until the 00s. The cell phone Nokia introduced in 2008 was therefore similar to the DynaTAC: a 25 cm long device, excluding the antenna, that weighed about 1 kilogram and had a battery life of approximately half an hour. Nokia’s monopoly on the cellular telephony market didn’t last for long: Swedish competitor Ericsson soon followed with a mobile phone of its own, also setting up production in India, in Calcutta in their case. India had become the largest producer of cellular phones in just five years by 2013.
Meanwhile, India was the second largest coal producer, the second largest cement producer, the second largest steel producer and the largest electricity producer. The mining sector was vast: India operated about 3.000 mines in 2010, half of which were coal, limestone and iron ore. India was one of the largest producers of mica, chromite, coal, lignite, iron ore, bauxite, barite, zinc and manganese. The electricity sector traditionally relied on oil, coal and natural gas, but under Rajiv Gandhi an ambitious nuclear energy program was initiated, despite the controversy of nuclear energy, to reduce fossil fuel dependence. Besides that hydroelectricity provided one sixth of the country’s energy and renewable energy sources like solar, wind and biofuels were subsidized to spur their development. India in fact became an exporter of electricity, solving the issue of power plants operating at a reduced capacity or even remaining idle as domestic demand was insufficient. India was on the verge of becoming an energy superpower by 2012.
Another milestone was the resumption of space travel thanks to an initiative also launched by India, namely the Asian Space Agency (ASA). India had cofounded this organization in 1995 together with Cambodia, Indonesia, Iraq, Japan, Malaysia, Nepal, the Philippines, Singapore, Vietnam and Thailand (they used English as their working language as that was the most practical). Taiwan couldn’t become a member because none of the eleven members of the ASA had formal diplomatic relations with it because they recognized the self-proclaimed socialist regime in control of the mainland as the legitimate Chinese government. Taiwan instead became an “associated partner” of the ASA because its electronics industry was of vital importance. These countries pooled their resources to design and construct the Agnibaan-1 heavy-lift space launch vehicle and the Aries spacecraft service module.
After fifteen years, the Asian Space Agency finally felt confident enough to test their Agnibaan-1 space launch vehicle by launching a communications satellite in 2010. It was the first of many, which was quite necessary as satellites launched in the late 70s and early 80s were beginning to approach the end of their service life. In order for telecommunications signals for television and the emerging cellular telephony network to be continued to be relayed worldwide, new satellites were a necessity. This successful launch took place from the Spaceport built on Ko Samui Island in Thailand. More satellites were launched with the Agnibaan-1 heavy lifter and in 2011 two successful test flights with the Aries module took place: the first time the flight was unmanned and the second time a trained chimpanzee was used. After completing a number of orbits, the module harmlessly splashed into the Indian Ocean, proving that its life support systems, heat shield and parachutes were all in working order.
In 2012, the first manned space flight since 1983 took place when an Agnibaan-1 heavy-lift space launch vehicle carried an Aries spacecraft service module into an orbit around the Earth. The three man crew was international as it consisted of one Indian, one Thai and one Filipino astronaut. They completed three orbits that lasted for a total of 5 hours and 24 minutes, during which they carried out small experiments while the module’s telemetric systems stored data. More flights took place and collected data concerning pressure and composition of the upper atmosphere, concentration of charged particles, photons in cosmic rays, heavy nuclei in cosmic rays, magnetic and electrostatic fields, meteoric particles and so on. Besides that, longer missions were undertaken to gain a better understanding of the effects of a longer presence in zero gravity conditions on the human body. Relatively modern research satellites carrying radio transmitters, cameras, a telemetry system, Geiger counters, spectrophotometers and a flight data recorder were launched to learn more about outer space to regain much of the knowledge had been lost during the war 29 years earlier.
In 2013, the Latin American Aerospace Organization (LAAO) launched its own first manned mission into space from their Spaceport located near Paramaribo. The LAAO had been founded by Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Peru, Suriname and Venezuela in 1997 with similar goals as its Asian competitor, i.e. to re-establish space travel for scientific purposes and exploration. Of course there was also a certain prestige attached to being a spacefaring power. They called their heavy-lift space launch vehicle Bolivar-1.
In 2016, a summit was held in the New Zealand city of Auckland attended by delegates from the member states of the Asian Space Agency and the Latin American Aerospace Organization, Australia, China, Israel, New Zealand and South Africa (it was at this time that the Chinese National Space Administration launched its first manned spaceflight, making China the third country after WW III to succeed in doing so). This meant delegations representing two dozen countries were in attendance. A number of intergovernmental agreements and treaties were signed as part of an umbrella agreement known as the Treaty of Auckland. It dealt with the construction, ownership and use of a multinational permanent space station.
In 2019, a newer Agnibaan-2 and a Bolivar-2 heavy-lift space launch vehicle were launched from Ko Samui in Thailand and Paramaribo in Suriname respectively to put the first two modules of the Global Space Station into orbit and connect them. The station was to serve as a microgravity and space environment research laboratory in which scientific research could be conducted in astrobiology, astronomy, meteorology, physics, and other fields. The GSS is suited for testing the spacecraft systems and equipment required for possible future long-duration missions to the Moon and Mars, though no plans existed to do that any earlier than 2050. The GSS is projected to be completed by 2035.
In the meantime, the Latin American Union, began cornering the burgeoning market of personal computers. Having a computer in your own house was a novelty in 1983, and after that nothing much came of it as there were much more important things to worry about like the worst economic depression in human history and other consequences relating to the Nuclear Holocaust. Starting in 2008, the Latin American Union had begun subsidizing the South American computer industry, with Brazilian companies like Gradiente, Itautec and Positivo Informatica. They founded a joint venture to develop a user friendly computer operating system called Cosmos. Cosmos One was released in 2009.
The reason was the advent of the Internet: by 2023 the internet constitutes an interconnected network of networks, hence the name, following the Internet protocol suite. It was composed of private, public, academic, business, and government networks of local to global scope, linked by a broad array of electronic, wireless, and optical networking technologies.
The early phases of the transition to the modern Internet as most people know it happened between 2010 and 2013 thanks to the linking of commercial networks and enterprises. Commercialization began to incorporate the World Wide Web’s services and technologies into a growing number of aspects of modern life in the decade that followed. A troubled history had preceded these developments: thanks to World War III the precursors to the internet had been destroyed in nuclear fire, nearly killing it in the cradle. If people in the 1980s had had the time to even fathom a global computer network – which they didn’t because of the largest economic crisis in history, nuclear fallout and the dangers of UV rays – they would’ve considered it science fiction.
The troubled history of the internet, ultimately resulting in success, dates all the way back to the Cold War in the pre-war United States. The origins of the Internet were the development of packet switching and research commissioned by the US Department of Defence in the late 1960s to enable time-sharing of computers. The primary precursor network resulting from this, the ARPANET, initially served as a backbone for the interconnection of regional academic and military networks in the 1970s to enable resource sharing. The war destroyed ARPANET and for the next twenty years that seemed to mark the stillbirth of the first and hitherto only wide-area network. Given that academia had access to ARPANET, its existence wasn’t a secret and therefore the idea of a computer network for quick information exchanges lingered on in those circles.
In Australia, the University of Sydney, the University of Melbourne, the Australian National University in Canberra, the University of Western Australia in Perth and the Queensland Institute of Technology in Brisbane had formed a network in 2001. This computer network provided university staff and students with resources and services like hypertext documents, electronic mail, IP telephony and file sharing. Similar networks were set up in the early 2000s in universities in Asia and the Americas and over the course of the next decade developed into the modern Internet thanks to commercial parties.
The Internet as of 2023 can be used for “smarts or smut” as one study concerning internet use aptly states. As of the early 2020s an increasing number of people used the internet – which they did at their home computers, or on public computers in schools, libraries and internet cafés if they didn’t have one – to look at news, weather and sports reports or to chat with online pen pals. More academically inclined audiences exchanged information with likeminded individuals through email and accessed the limited but growing number of digitized sources. An initiative undertaken by Australian, Indian, Latin American and South African universities was a free online encyclopaedia called Omnipaedia. As of 2023 it contained more than three hundred thousand articles hyperlinked and searchable through key words, after having undergone a form of peer-review prior to publishing by topic experts with credentials. Another initiative by these universities was inspired by the linguistic divisions of the web: English, Spanish, Portuguese, Hindi and Chinese were its main languages and Omnidictionary was created as a convenient and freely accessible online multilingual dictionary.
The Internet could also be used purely as a source of entertainment, with the online gambling and pornography industry exploding from 2014 onward (the “smut” as opposed to the “smarts”). These two industries constituted about 25% of all websites in the matter of only a few years. Some of the countless porn stars became rich and famous. Most, however, didn’t and quit the industry after a few years or even just a few months (with or without some kind of alcohol or drug problem). Meanwhile, Macau became the main hub of online gambling webpages.
In short, the late 00s and early 10s were a period of massive development. Something as obscure as mobile telephony began booming after a 25 year interval. An interconnected network of computers emerged, something considered science-fiction, and it suddenly seemed to make the world a lot smaller as online education, ordering, gambling and erotica connected people on completely different sides of the world in many different ways. Last but not least, humanity had made its first strides into outer space for the first time in roughly three decades.
