Originally posted by Morpheus
In school we have discussed many times how the U.S. may be following the patterns of great ancient civilzations such as Rome and Greece in the sense that the all start humble, grow, reach a "Golden Age", and eventually fall.
I think we have passed our "Golden Age" and are on the downfall now. I believe our Golden Age was around the middle to late part of the 20th century. I think that our government is having more and more problems and it will only get worse. One big one is the fact that our foriegn enemies are getting worse and worse, especially in the Middle East. I believe that they will play a part in our downfall. Also issues such as the level of violence in society rising such as homicide and also violence in the media.
There are many parellels between the great ancient civilizations and the U.S.. Things such as the fact that all were the greatest, most advanced civilizations of the time. We are the most powerful to date. All had great armies. We have the best army int he world. All exercised dominance over the rest of the world in some way or another, such as us marketing our goods all over the world and having embassies and troops in many foriegn countries. The Middle East can be seen as perhaps the "barbaric" Northern Europeans that helped cause Rome to fall. Reasons to believe a similar fall will come to us.
I think when the end comes someone is going to fire off nuclear warheads, both us and them and send the world into chaos. I also believe that by that time our government will have become badly corrupted and the quality of life here will have slowly declined. I think that it will happen in the next 200 years and will not only destroy our country but lead the human race itself to struggling to survive, with a very large of percentage of people wiped out. Perhaps revert to a state of existence seen in the time of early humans, perhaps even prior to the Neolithic Revolution (hunting and gathering changes over to farming, dawn of civilizations). A complete rebirth of mankind, or perhaps mankind's self-destruction.
That's my opinion and I would like to know if anyone else has differing opinions on the topic or agrees with me.
you say this as if it were a bad thing. conventional war doesn't control the population like it used to. human kind has infested this planet like the rat and mice plagues of australia, only on a global scale. i don't think a catastrophic blast back to the dark ages is such a bad idea for the survival of the planet as a whole.