Comments on Paleo-Future: Will War Drive Civilization Underground? (1942)

How interesting to note that, by 1975, the final "...

2008-01-10T15:16:00.000-06:00

How interesting to note that, by 1975, the final "spasm" of a war between east and west was recorded: namely, that of US military and administrative withdrawal from South Vietnam. Laos and Cambodia are another story...

The Cold War, having emerged in the wake of 1945's conclusions in the European theatre, qualifies with some satisfying similarities to the underground world referred to in this 1942 piece. It's not far off of H.G. Well's much earlier distopia of amnesiac human culture, preyed upon by the perverted remnants of the (troglodyte) nations that stuck it out longest in their steel caves.

It is worthwhile however, that as technical advances are generally applied (to their worst advantage) in the pursuit of efficient killing methods, and that by 1942 most of the concepts of warfare we have normalized were widely known, if novel. Radar, Rockets, Aircraft Carriers and the surprisingly effective aeroplane (trumping naval power soon enough) were well-known to tactical thinkers.

If this article seems portentious, consider that Jean Paul Marat once wrote: Watch out, for as soon as it pleases them they'll send you out to protect their gold in wars whose weapons, rapidly developed by servile scientists, will become more and more deadly until they can with a flick of the finger tear a million of you to pieces.
This would have been penned some years before his death, in 1793.
Boo!

"Sanitary problems will be handled by specialists....

2008-01-09T15:53:00.000-06:00

"Sanitary problems will be handled by specialists."

In other words, "We have no idea how to handle that problem, so we'll pass over it, and hope that others will when the time comes".

I find it wonderfully ironic that past predictions...

2008-01-09T11:30:00.000-06:00

I find it wonderfully ironic that past predictions of war increase the scale of armies, whereas now the current threats we are warned about (be they real or hyped) are from small terrorist cells...

I'd love it if zeppelins made a comeback. But tho...

2008-01-09T09:23:00.000-06:00

I'd love it if zeppelins made a comeback. But those stories have been circulating since at least the mid-1980s... along with stories about modern efficient sailing ships making a comeback, and modern efficient processes making steam engines more efficient than diesel on rails.

All may be both true and somewhat romantically nostalgic too, but none are actually likely to occur (without there first being either a major energy / infrastructure collapse and/or an efficiency improvement that is not merely incremental, but magnitudinal).

This was recapped for nuclear war in several Phili...

2008-01-09T07:09:00.000-06:00

This was recapped for nuclear war in several Philip K. Dick stories in the 1950s, in which robots either continued the war while we huddled underground... or cleaned things up and sent us faked video of the continuing
war.

See also in the 1960s Mordecai Roshwald's Level 7, Daniel Galouye's Dark Universe, and other SF novels.

wutzke: Zeppelins are making a comeback!Some cool ...

2008-01-08T23:32:00.000-06:00

wutzke: Zeppelins are making a comeback!

Some cool new designs

I can't remember where I found it, but I recently read a review of a currently operating airship service in Europe. It sounded awesome!

Science fiction writers in the 1950's and 1960's l...

2008-01-08T20:52:00.000-06:00

Science fiction writers in the 1950's and 1960's like H. Beam Piper and Vernor Vinge (in his early career before he discovered the Singularity) assumed that the next catastrophic war would destroy civilization in the Northern Hemisphere so that the handful of nations in the Southern Hemisphere had the burden of preserving and building upon the truncated share they managed to save.

I think it's fascinating that people were already ...

2008-01-08T12:36:00.000-06:00

I think it's fascinating that people were already thinking about a possible WWIII in the middle of WII. I guess it was only the first one that people were naive enough to think was "the war to end all wars".

"Sanitary problems will be handled by specialists....

2008-01-08T08:27:00.000-06:00

"Sanitary problems will be handled by specialists." I.e., even in the modern world of tomorrow, it's necessary for someone to be there to shovel the sh*t!

I like the image of the giant dirigible aircraft carriers -- and the bit about them rendering contintents defenseless. Uh, Hindenburg anyone? (I know, they could use helium instead of hydrogen -- but even then, puncture the containment vessel a few times and bye-bye birdie.)