LOL America '14

When America burns the world, future dystopian historians will hopefully, one day far, far from now, discover that it was just a small percentage of Americans who managed to destroy the world so thoroughly. 27% in fact. Americans who of course were an exceedingly small percentage of humans worldwide.

But probably not. We're all awash in the doom we bring down upon everyone. Yay!

Not a manual

Sadly, I think there are some Repuglicans who read 1984 and said "Whoa! Awesome ideas! Let's do that!". And they are doing it. When you read the book as an instruction manual, it's terrifyingly effective.

Orwell was a prophet of the modern age, and his prophecy, and the reality, is DOOM.

To Date

 As always, click for big. This is, in the new, hip style, an infographic of every mission beyond Earth. You can see where we (humanity, meaning mostly the USA, USSR, and the EU) have collectively put our priorities, to date. My big takeaway is look how few missions to Saturn there have been, and yet one of them - Cassini - is incredible beyond belief. And still going!

Fret plenty, however, since as Russia has taken a nosedive, and America's looking to do the same, who knows how many future missions to space at all lie in our collective future. I fear perhaps we are on the edge of a rollback of human progress. Maybe China will save us all. Maybe not.

But, let us not worry about that now. Instead, behold, every single human rocket:

While impressive, collectively and each in their own way (think of the effort that went into every one), it's also mildly depressing. It takes so much effort to simply go the 60 or so miles (straight up) to get to the very edge of space. Alas! Such is the reality of living at the bottom of a gravity well.

And perhaps there's more hope for our future than I admit, at the moment. Private enterprise is blazing paths governments feared to tread. If the profit is there, and our infrastructure on Earth stays relatively stable, we might still have our space mining, asteroid living future. But then, it will be profit driven, and no doubt that asteroid will be owned by Yoyodyne or some such, and all the folks involved will be playing according to their dime. Which can be summarized in the Ferengi Rules of Acquisition, and not in any kind of Utopian Trek "What's money, man?" Directive. And so we'll simply export our Dystopia to space.

Alas!

You'll make a great dystopia

On the big scale, any desert city has to be considered fragile and vulnerable - they exist in defiance of nature, kept alive only by constant (and expensive) efforts to fight back nature. Water is the obvious weakness. This is the Burj Tower in Dubai, just a fantastic building - tallest in the world, for now. But like most/many skyscrapers, it was built more because of ego and status than actual need. Thus, as soon as the underlying reasons for Dubai begin to buckle - and you can bank that this will be related to the Oil Economy - then buildings like the Burj, and so much more, will suddenly be very vulnerable to the economic winds of change. Once the economy falls, the house of cards collapses, and we have what should be an awesome dystopia in the wings - imagine being part of some post-apocalyptic caravan, trekking through the Wastelands, and you come upon Dubai, still gleaming amid the sand-dunes and wreckage. Awesome!