Re: Future coltures of people?
I think the Cold War nuclear terror kinda got people to vastly overestimate how easy it is, even with nukes, to wipe out huge chunks of humanity.
People were kinda horrified at one point when the official Chinese position was that they were not scared of nukes, because it would cost them a small handful of cities at most. But... it would cost them a small handful of cities, at most. Hiroshima and Nagasaki still exist, and actually got nuked. It took a literal nation-moving 8+ Earthquake and associated tsunami before the Fukashima meldown could happen, and even after what might well be the worst case scenario, life goes on.
Of course, people overreact. They always overreact. It doesn't have to be something that can literally kill you, like a plane crash or a nuclear explosion. It could be something as simple as someone waking up and starting to read evil messages into something semipopular, be it comicbooks or rock and roll or DnD or video games or the internet or v
ideo games again. Planes crash considerably less frequently than cars, but since people ride in cars more often than planes, they have mental room to think planes are scarier. There were only ever 3 nuclear reactor accidents ever: one was deliberately mismanaged, one was completely forgettable because all the fail-safes are not a waste of time, and the other was hit with the most powerful force the Earth could bring against it, which is not exactly a common occurrence.
Scary stories about things happening to children in the news, and suddenly a generation comes up fearing that every knock on the door or even unexpected phonecalls might be a serial killer, and that everyone is probably out to get them.
It is really hard to wipe out humanity. You'd need something smarter and vastly more powerful--if the world tries to kill us, we engineer something to save us. Diseases? It might have taken a few millenia, but we survived Smallpox long enough to wipe it out. Every nuke in the world might end post-industrial civilization, if used very carefully, but wouldn't put a dent in the survival of humanity... and so long as enough people survive and remember how to build a technological civilization, even that is vanishingly unlikely.
But where is culture heading?
Well, it really seems like the whole idea of people unifying to achieve a goal is collapsing. Even outside threats aren't doing it anymore. If someone nuked Washington DC today, we'd just have one big group blaming racists and calling for more guncontrol, and the other blaming hippies and calling for more military intervention abroad, and they'd probably just fight each other if they can be bothered to do something other than post how much they hate the other group on Twitter... even though the other group had nothing to do with it and GAAAAH!
Globalization and connectedness helps people find communities they can fit in, true... but it allows people to get away from communities they don't like, and that seems to be encouraging people to separate into mutually adversarial teams that would rather watch civilization burn than work with the enemy that they hate for the crime of not waving the exact same banner as them at all times. Yeah, this has always been a failure mode of humanity... but it seemed like we might just possibly be doing something to deal with it. Probably World War II facilitated the most unity, and the Cold War kept it going (Oh, sure, the world was divided into Capitalist / Communist / the Third World, but that it could be divided into so few groups speaks volumes).
It seems like humanity is having a "we survived global war, defeated our ancient enemies Smallpox and Poleo, went 50 years without nuking anyone, and completed the experiment to see whether Stalinism or Capitalism was better... now what?" identity crisis.
You know, 10 years ago, when someone was trying to unify the west against an enem y and use nationalism to accomplish things, it did a lot to make me think those ideas were horrible. Now I'm starting to think they were only horrible because the only goal in the mix seemed to be "Invade Iraq, because a couple guys in Texas always wanted to do that". Oh, make no mistake--blind nationalism and the use of enemies as a rallying point is a very dangerous plan that could easily backfire (see World Wars again), and it certainly relies on people being idiots. But... ur... people are idiots (see the earlier point about people panicking over every little thing, hating people by designing morality t-shirts, etc).
Oh, wait. I think I just became Dr. Doom. Dangit, now Reed Richards is going to foil all my plans and force me to make several tons of robot body doubles, all while never actually using any of his amazing technology to do anything useful. I'll defeat you some day, Mr. Fantastic! Then the world shall know Doom!
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