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When the roman empire collapsed, do you think someone living in those times could tell where the collapse started and where it ended? It's an interesting thought experiment
Edit: or rather where they were in the collapse timeline - of course the collapse lasted longer than a single persons life.
Oh absolutely not. The collapse of the Roman empire took decades. If you limit it to the western Roman empire it started in roughly 375 and took 100 years. If you look at the full Roman empire, it took from around 375 to 1450, since we sometimes like to pretend that the Byzantine empire isn't just part of the Roman empirecthat spoke Greek more than Latin. (They called themselves Romans, were called Romans by outsiders, and it was created when an emperor split the empire to ease regional management, and both sides viewed it as still being one empire).
Beyond that, the Roman Republic lasted for hundreds of years before the empire.If we assume the US will follow the same pattern as Rome, we still have centuries of political upheaval, dictators, democracy, splits, unification and odd hats to develop before we're gone. You'll also get weird relics of our government scattered across the world, as places that get pulled into the downfall try to pick pieces up to gain some of the legitimately for using the name of the US. Something like Canada, shattered by a flailing empires attempts to exert control, sees Ontario promise protection to the supreme Court in exchange for ruling that Doug Ford is the new president of the US to legitimize the Ontario-Manitoba alliances seizure of US nuclear weapons in the upper Midwest and taking the seat on the security council. 2000 years from now the supreme Court will still be around issuing legal decrees that staunch believers will strive to live by, even though the government it came from is long gone and DC is just a weird city with insular backwards laws distinct from the surrounding nation(s).
Most of the collapse of the empire was filled with normal lives for the people in it, so that's something to take heart in at least.
I'm not an expert at all on this subject, but I'm wondering how much technology is going to accelerate our timeline in the US. Like if we looked at the technological advancement we have achieved since then and tried to quantify it. Like maybe the US is 100x more technologigally advanced than the Romans. Maybe the social consequences of that (social media, mass disinformation in every pocket, billionaire influence, etc) means we spiral downward and out of existence at a similarly more advanced rate.
Just a thought.
We are more resourceful than ever so no, I dont think it will accelerate a decline of any given nation. It does highly increase our chances of annihilating ourselves in one go, but that's another conversation.
An example is when the Suez canal got clogged up during COVID. That kind of halt in the global logjstics is the kinda thing that would have absolutely brought down an empire, but we managed.
Oh that's a cool example. Yeah that level of interruption in global trade was crazy
To the contrary, I think technology will slow it down. I imagine the government assassinating anyone who has an AI generated risk score for non compliance.
I was specifically talking about the ambiguity, it probably started before they noticed and ended before they officially called it. It's interesting to think about but I get there is the official understanding of where it started and ended.
I didnt necessarily mean a single persons lifetime but a single person within a generation trying to guess where he is in the timeline.
Even then I don't think so. It all took too long, so much so that a lot of people wouldn't even say that it had happened. Like the modern world, people in Rome consistently said that it was in dire condition and was better in the past golden era. Like, for 500 years before it fell people were saying that they were on the brink. People are really quite bad at judging where they are in broad historical terms.
Personally, I doubt this is actually the fall of the US as a superpower/empire/whatever. Too much territory with too many resources with too many people who all identify as the same broad national identity.
How history views this time is anyone's guess. Hoover, for all the damage he did, is largely mentioned because of how he pissed people off enough to elect FDR. It doesn't seem likely at the moment, but it wouldn't the first time an isolationist president has slapped dumb tarrifs on everything to blow-up an already concerning economic situation to try and protect american business while pissing off the world both economically and diplomatically, only to be followed by a president who significantly changed things and made the country better and stronger.The process of change can be so slow on the historical scale that we still don't know if FDR or trump is the weird one, and they're separated by a long and full life.
However, I will say that if Germans sack DC and depose trump that out of historical consistency we're obligated to declare the fall of the eastern American empire and send a symbolic vestige of power to California, which we will then refuse to call America.
Honestly, this comment is gold! Informative and great fun. Absolutely brilliant, especially the last part! I literally laughed out loud 😅