The Second Age of Exploration
TLDR at Bottom
If you have followed me for a while, you probably know that I don’t think humanity will be able to out-tech its way out having a dwindling amount of finite resources, and that in general I’m fairly pessimistic. While I don’t modern human society is destined to last much longer (perhaps another 2-3 decades at best), I don’t think humanity is doomed. In what will probably be a fairly short post, I just want to delve into my thoughts a bit and hopefully provide some reasons to be optimistic for the (distant) future and to avoid doomerism, as if you like my notes and posts, you are probably prone to bouts of doubt regarding the future and why you should bother caring about all the bread and circuses we are presented with on a daily basis.
As international, then intranational trading systems begin to contract and decay over the following the century, communities will begin to parochialize more and more over time. As this happens, they will shift significantly from theoretical & well-rounded to the immediately applicable, IE math and science up to what is necessary for maintaining the present infrastructure, only enough English for functional literacy, no art, music, civics, history/geography (except for local and what is needed to maintain local customs). We will most likely revert to a pre-industrial community model where the overwhelming majority of people will have travelled no more than couple dozen miles outside of their communities (assuming they have adopted a sedentary rather than nomadic structure) and they only have knowledge of what is happening within that same distance.
This is the point in time (if I had to guess somewhere around 2125) where we get to the title of the post. As conditions & populations start to stabilize, and local polities start cementing themselves. As they do so, like most other civilizations before them they will begin to explore and expand. Nations all across the country will have started sending expedition parties back into the long abandoned cities for scrap metal to forge, trinkets to trade, and the long forgotten knowledge in the books in libraries and universities that managed to survive the past century. Once the cities nearby and given nation have been reclaimed to whatever extent they can be, they will start pushing farther outwards to aim for new land to settle.
Texan and Californian nations will seek out what lies beyond the Chihuahua and Sonora deserts, and with some luck get rich off reintroducing cocoa and avocadoes/guacamole back into the continental US. Various minor nations and city states form along Mississippi River; while an Egypt of the US unlikely to form due to the various cultural differences up and down the Mississippi along with the lack of a protective desert to the east and west, nothing is certain in this new world. Cascadian and Great Lakes nations with their abundance of timber and water access, either through uncovered knowledge, or trial & error, rediscover how to construct the Viking longship (or something akin to it), and set out to find the lands of Asia and Europe that they have heard about from ancient textbooks. Southern Florida, being largely cut off from the rest of the US by the swamps and marshes that reclaimed the hundreds of miles of roads, becomes both a trade and pirate haven for itself, the caribbean and central america.
That doesn’t even take into account the more fantastical things that could potentially happen as ancient ruins of vastly technology superior country would be left behind. A new power bloc could spontaneously form out nowhere if an untouched weapons cache is discovered at an old base. A nations population could explode in a few years after discovering some GMO seeds hidden away somewhere that double or triple their crop yields. Whoever ends up settling near Ft. Knox could become the wealthiest nation in this hemisphere overnight after finally breaking through its walls and suddenly gaining access to thousands of tons of gold (assuming the gold is actually there :3). Lord knows what could happen after the mormons unearth whatever’s hidden away in area 51.
We often lament how there isn’t much for man to do now except for slaving away his entire life so that he can afford to have family who will end up doing the same thing he did. This leads to the despondent attitude that many people end up having as they don’t see any hope of change. To anyone who maybe feeling that way, I just want to say that you don’t have to operate within the system, you don’t have to become a millionaire or the next political revolutionary (if that’s your goal by all means go for it, just saying that it doesn’t have to be what you aim for) to do well in life. You can reject the system entirely and seek to return to the land and prepare yourself for what’s to come. I’m not advocating for you to abandon politics or society completely, moreso that we’re in a decaying society and while you can temporarily halt it, you cannot reverse it. I believe in a cyclical nature of history, and we had the misfortune of being born into the decay part of that cycle, regardless, our ancestors have persisted through far worse so it’s our obligation not only to them, but our future descendants to give it utmost effort to forge the best possible opportunity possible for our lineage to thrive in the future, whatever it may bring. All that to say, there is a crazy amount of shit that can happen in the future, and even if we won’t be alive for it, we can at least help prepare our kids, grandkids, and communities for it
As always, thank you for reading and have a Wonderful Day :3