Damn! Has a lot of stuff

 been happening...

 

I missed a week of updating this blog; just so much stuff happening in the world. Sometimes it seems to me like we are racing towards some significant event. In the past I've talked about what I call the 'Sarajevo Moment'; this is some single event that triggers a cascading chain reaction of other events. Maybe we are in a sort of nose dive towards such an event?

 

 

 

Do you remember when I was doing the 'Dark Future' series of pictures on Flickr? I was telling my own speculative fiction story on the near future. One of the key events in this story was going to be Sino-Pacific conflict that would be called the "47 Minute War".

I imagined a short, violent war between the People's Republic of China and a coalition of Pacific states - including the United States of America.

 



 



 

In this little war the militaries of both the People's Republic of China and the United States have largely turned over control of various strategic weapons systems to Artificial Intelligence based computer systems. The computers can evaluate situations and make strategic decisions faster than any human can.

 

 



 



 

In my story the war starts over some foolish incident on some speck of land in the middle of the South China Sea. Nobody knows who really fired the first shot but within minutes missiles are being launched, low yield nuclear weapons are going off and the near orbit space of Earth is filled with debris and death.

 

Then the war just stops. The computer systems suddenly just call it all off. The Artificial Intelligences decide that China "wins" the scenario so further destruction is pointless. The United States is suddenly relegated to being a third world country - especially since 20 minutes into the conflict several Electro-Magnetic Pulse devices are detonated in orbit above the continental United States. The country has been reduced to an economic basket case and in my story we are forced to ask for humanitarian assistance from India.

 

The scary thing for me was that some of the news in the All To Real World was bearing some of this out. The saber rattling and arms race in the Pacific Rim. Did you know that India is building modern aircraft carriers to counter the Chinese? Or that Japan is going back to some of their old militaristic ways in the face of threats from both China and North Korea?

 

And we are right there in the middle of it...

 

My story was just getting a little too real for my comfort.