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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jeffzilla" data-source="post: 9735670" data-attributes="member: 6925169"><p>I have a difficult time with this premise. It’s difficult to cite specific examples without invoking real-world politics and risking the ire of this site’s fantastic moderation team, so I’ll only say that global cooperation and commitment to international order seem to follow cycles. I think I can also safely say that we’ve seen nuclear weapons regimes and arms agreements which once seemed foundational to world order scrapped just in the last couple of decades, and that ‘the restraints we have’ today aren’t even as strong as they were twenty years ago, although I work in aerospace and understand that this is as much because some aspects of those agreements have been superseded by new technology as it is that for geopolitical reasons several major global powers simply didn’t want to comply with them any longer. On a somewhat related note, a modern developed country just announced that it’s exiting the treaty on antipersonnel land mines this year, in 2025. If that trendline continues we’ll have even fewer constraints upon the way that wars are conducted in another twenty years than we do today— let alone two hundred or two thousand or twenty thousand years in the future. So I guess what I’m really saying is that at a time when international conventions are literally on the wane— right now— and in an era when we’ve seen several nations violate old norms of international conduct and then shrug off any blowback with impunity, even to the point of becoming pariah states or experiencing total separation from global financial networks—  it seems like an anachronism to point to the world order created between the 1940s and 1990s and suggest that it’s reasonable to assume that baselines of behavior which that order established but which aren’t even being observed in their entirety today will continue unbroken into both foreseeable and distant futures. I don’t know that it’s reasonable to assume anything at all about the future. And one of the things that I really love about good science fiction is that it often finds ways to challenge those assumptions, anyway.</p></blockquote><p></p>

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