Generational Dynamics Forum - New Site

Higgenbotham wrote: Sun Apr 19, 2026 5:25 pm Seems I'm a wild optimist.

Live Science spoke with Nobel prize-winning physicist David Gross, who recently received the $3 million Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics, about the quest to unite all the forces and why humanity might not live to see a unified theory.

In the last 10 years, there are no treaties anymore. We're entering an incredible arms race. We have three super nuclear powers.

People are talking about using nuclear weapons; there's a major war going on in the middle of Europe; we're bombing Iran; India and Pakistan almost went to war.

OK, so that's increased the chance [of nuclear war]. I would really like to have a solid estimate — it might be more, and I think I'm being conservative — but a 2% estimate [of nuclear war] in today's crazy world.

TG: Do you think we'll ever get to a place where we get rid of nuclear weapons?

DG: We're not recommending that. That's idealistic, but yes, I hope so. Because if you don't, there's always some risk an AI 100 years from now [could launch nuclear weapons], but chances of [humanity] living, with this estimate, 100 years, is very small, and living 200 years is infinitesimal.

So [the answer to] Fermi's question of "Where are the civilizations, all the intelligent organisms around the galaxy, and why don't they talk to us?" is that they've killed themselves.

You asked me to think about the future, and I am obsessed the last few years, thinking about that ‪—‬ not the future of ideas and understanding nature, but of the survival of humanity.

https://www.livescience.com/space/cosmo ... wtab-en-us

Dynamite’s Destructive Side

While Nobel intended dynamite to facilitate construction, it quickly became a tool for destruction as well. Although the inventor understood dynamite’s potential use as a weapon of war, he believed that the more destructive the weapon, there was greater chance for lasting peace through deterrence. “Perhaps my factories will put an end to war. . . On the day that two army corps can mutually annihilate each other in a second, all civilized nations will surely recoil with horror and disband their troops,” he commented in 1891.

Nobel’s hope that dynamite could deter wars, however, was quickly dashed. Just three years after dynamite’s introduction, both sides in the Franco-Prussian War used it in combat, and anarchists wielded dynamite to destroy public monuments during the subsequent Paris Commune of 1871.

Dynamite made it easier to breach fortified positions and blow up defenses. In subsequent wars, armies dynamited wars, armies dynamited roads, bridges, canals and dams —the very infrastructure the explosive made possible. Nobel’s invention made warfare even more lethal as dynamite was used as an explosive in mines, grenades, torpedoes and artillery shells.

Since it was cheap, safe to transport and easy to use, dynamite also became the weapon of choice for anarchists, saboteurs and revolutionaries. From his exile in New York, Irish nationalist Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa established a “dynamite school” in Brooklyn to train volunteers in the handling and use of explosives, while anarchist newspapers described how to make dynamite bombs. “It’s an easily transportable, small-scale substance that could fit in a suitcase and do tremendous damage,” Bown says. “You can’t roll up 12 barrels of black powder and have no one notice as opposed to a tiny, triggered explosion in which all you need is a suitcase. Dynamite transformed terrorism like it did war and civil engineering.”

With access to the same firepower as nation-states, rogue actors ramped up their use of dynamite for political violence in the 1880s. Russia’s Czar Alexander II was assassinated in 1881 when a revolutionary threw a bomb at him. During Chicago’s Haymarket Riot in 1886, an unknown person tossed a dynamite bomb into a phalanx of police during a labor rally, resulting in gunfire that left at least eight dead. In the early 1880s, Irish nationalists dynamited government and civilian targets in Great Britain, including the Tower of London, House of Commons and Scotland Yard.

Live Science spoke with Nobel prize-winning physicist David Gross, who recently received the $3 million Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics, about the quest to unite all the forces and why humanity might not live to see a unified theory.

TG: Do you feel that in 50 years, we'll be closer to having some kind of unified theory that incorporates all the forces?

DG: Currently, I spend part of my time trying to tell people … that the chances of you living 50 [more] years are very small.

Due to the danger of nuclear war, you have about 35 years.

TG: Why do you think that we'll blow ourselves up, essentially, within 35 years, give or take?

DG: So it's a crude estimate. Even after the Cold War ended, [when] we had strategic arms control treaties, all of which have disappeared, there were estimates there was a 1% chance of nuclear war [every year]. Things have gotten so much worse in the last 30 years, as you can see every time you read the newspaper.

I feel it's not a rigorous estimate, that the chances are more likely 2%. So that's a 1-in-50 chance every year. The expected lifetime, in the case of 2% [per year], is about 35 years. [The expected lifetime is the average time it would take to have had a nuclear war by then. It is calculated using similar equations as those used to determine the "half-life" of a radioactive material.]

TG: So what do you suggest as remedies to lower that risk?

DG: We had something called the Nobel Laureate Assembly for reducing the risk of nuclear war in Chicago last year.

There are steps, which are easy to take — for nations, I mean. For example, talk to each other.

In the last 10 years, there are no treaties anymore. We're entering an incredible arms race. We have three super nuclear powers.

People are talking about using nuclear weapons; there's a major war going on in the middle of Europe; we're bombing Iran; India and Pakistan almost went to war.

OK, so that's increased the chance [of nuclear war]. I would really like to have a solid estimate — it might be more, and I think I'm being conservative — but a 2% estimate [of nuclear war] in today's crazy world.

TG: Do you think we'll ever get to a place where we get rid of nuclear weapons?

DG: We're not recommending that. That's idealistic, but yes, I hope so. Because if you don't, there's always some risk an AI 100 years from now [could launch nuclear weapons], but chances of [humanity] living, with this estimate, 100 years, is very small, and living 200 years is infinitesimal.

So [the answer to] Fermi's question of "Where are the civilizations, all the intelligent organisms around the galaxy, and why don't they talk to us?" is that they've killed themselves.

You asked me to think about the future, and I am obsessed the last few years, thinking about that ‪—‬ not the future of ideas and understanding nature, but of the survival of humanity.

tim wrote: Sun Apr 19, 2026 8:12 am

Higgenbotham wrote: Sat Apr 18, 2026 10:38 am Something came to mind as a result of reading the post about the 2 gay men who mocked and abused their surrogate baby. Which shows how abnormal behaviors such as these gay men typify are attempted to be quickly normalized and adopted using the Internet. The Internet gives groups who would have been shunned and ignored before its advent a way to gain attention and acceptance. Only in rare cases like this does it backfire but they can regroup and try again. Fringe groups can thus gain outsized influence.

Anyway, that led me to think about how learning to do things works in a similar way. Let's say it's the 1970s and you want to learn how to garden. Some sources of information might be:

1. Subscription to a gardening magazine,
2. Books from the library,
3. A local elderly person who has decades of gardening experience in the local area,
4. A grandparent who also has decades of gardening experience but who is not in the local area.

Now fast forward to the 2020s. Probably you go pretty exclusively to the Internet.

Having done both, the 1970s option is better. Again, the 2020s information sources can easily gain outsized influence just by showing up online. Better information sources like your elderly neighbor who is out tending her garden and the library need you to show up.

I'm on the fence on this one.

I completely understand what you're saying and agree with it at first.

Yet, the information I have been able to gain exclusively because of the internet is some of the most valuable information I have come across. I never would have found this information in books and most of it was recorded long before anyone alive today was around to pass it on to me. Even if my elders were around, many of them would have been deceived such as how they believe the polio vaccine is what ended polio and all the other fraud that was exposed through the COVID pandemic.

The information such as Generational Dynamics and the Fourth Turning all came to me through the internet while nobody I know has any clue about these subjects.

Official sources of information are highly censored, which I've only come to find out about through the internet. "Peer-reviewed" medical studies are taught to be the gold standard of research, yet it turns out you have different people funded by the same agencies or foundations that aren't allowed to do the studies that would show outcomes their benefactors disapprove of.

When I discovered traditional vaccines were never placebo tested, only tested against other "proven" vaccines I was shocked. I don't think you will find this information anywhere but the internet.

There is a lot of disinformation and bias on the internet and I wouldn't be surprised if most people were subjected to more propaganda overall because of it.

Higgenbotham wrote: Mon Sep 02, 2024 7:58 pm She asked me what I thought of AI. I said the first thing that comes to mind with regard to any new technology is whether you believe the civilization is on the ascent or the decline. If you believe the civilization is on the ascent, and you are right about that, then AI will probably on net be a positive and force for good. However, if you believe that the civilization is on the decline...at which point she interjected, "Oh, definitely!"...and then I finished my thought.

Higgenbotham wrote: Sat Apr 18, 2026 10:38 am Something came to mind as a result of reading the post about the 2 gay men who mocked and abused their surrogate baby. Which shows how abnormal behaviors such as these gay men typify are attempted to be quickly normalized and adopted using the Internet. The Internet gives groups who would have been shunned and ignored before its advent a way to gain attention and acceptance. Only in rare cases like this does it backfire but they can regroup and try again. Fringe groups can thus gain outsized influence.

Anyway, that led me to think about how learning to do things works in a similar way. Let's say it's the 1970s and you want to learn how to garden. Some sources of information might be:

1. Subscription to a gardening magazine,
2. Books from the library,
3. A local elderly person who has decades of gardening experience in the local area,
4. A grandparent who also has decades of gardening experience but who is not in the local area.

Now fast forward to the 2020s. Probably you go pretty exclusively to the Internet.

Having done both, the 1970s option is better. Again, the 2020s information sources can easily gain outsized influence just by showing up online. Better information sources like your elderly neighbor who is out tending her garden and the library need you to show up.

The sea power projection paradigm that allowed small European nations (and then the USA) to dominate and colonize the world is coming to an end. The world will never be the same, and the birth pains of the emerging next world order will be agonizing.

This period marks the retreat of European and American colonial dominance. European and American warships could still control the oceans and coasts of the world, but they could no longer penetrate deeply into colonial territory without risk.

Continuing the trend from the last US Navy gunship being driven out of the Yangtze River in 1926, the US Navy has been driven out of the Persian Gulf a century later in 2026. Iran has virtually no air force or navy left to challenge the US military, so how did this happen?

Iranian Shahed drones and ballistic missiles can now target American bases across the Persian Gulf. American sea and air power are not enough to dominate and control a major regional power like Iran.

Naval Support Activity Bahrain was the home of the 5th Fleet, but it has been abandoned. The last US Navy warships exited the Persian Gulf shortly before our February 28 sneak-attacks on Iran, and they have not returned.

2023 marked the last time an American aircraft carrier (the Eisenhower) entered the Persian Gulf. Now, the best the US Navy can do is have a pair of destroyers briefly dash past the Strait of Hormuz, and right back out, during the brief safety window presented by JD Vance negotiating ceasefire terms with the Iranians in Islamabad.

If we can’t protect our Persian Gulf allies from Iranian land-based missiles and drones, what does this mean for Asia? Does anyone seriously believe that the US Navy can come to the rescue of Taiwan, South Korea or Japan from an attack by China, if it must stay 1,000 KM from 2nd-tier Iran? (Outside of the current ceasefire period, and secondary blockade.)

These countries and dozens of others from Ireland to Australia depend heavily on Persian Gulf oil and gas to sustain their economies and standards of living. Or even their ability to feed themselves. The war with Iran that began on February 28 threatens to upend longstanding alliances from Europe to Asia.

The longer this war continues, the greater the damage that will be done to the world economy. It could result in a global great depression that could outlast the current conflict, and send entire nations into famine and starvation.

With the end of the 500-year-old Western sea power projection model, we are entering a period where every nation will have to fend for itself. With shipping supply chains collapsing, entire nations will run short of necessary quantities of petroleum products, LNG, fertilizer, and imported food. Entire nations may starve. Local and regional warlords may emerge who will threaten their neighbors with invasion.

But who can really say what will emerge as the next world order? The globe might fragment into competing regions, nations, or even parts of former nations. We could even be entering a new Dark Age, as our current “just in time” global shipping supply chain models are broken, perhaps never to be reestablished in our lifetimes.

China is winning wars and it's not even fighting

Influencers, algorithms, and Western disillusionment are reshaping the battlefield.

What these trips, and others like them, achieve is more than viral entertainment. They work to actively rewrite the story of China that Americans know through the Tiananmen Square massacre, forced labor among the Uyghurs, the surveillance state, the social credit system, and more.

Pew research suggests that while most Americans still have negative views of China, the share with a favorable view has risen six percentage points since last year and nearly doubled since 2023. Younger Americans have more positive views of China than their older counterparts, with about a third of adults under 50 (34%) holding favorable opinions of China, compared to just 19% of those over 50.

By early 2026 the effect had a name: Chinamaxxing. On TikTok and Instagram, Gen Z users began posting videos of themselves “becoming Chinese” — drinking hot water for digestion, shuffling around in slippers, queuing for congee, even adopting the occasional floral quilted jacket. NPR, The New York Times, and CNN all ran explainers on the trend, noting it reflected not just curiosity about China but deep disillusionment with American hustle culture, crony capitalism, and political dysfunction.

“Depraved EVIL”: Gay Couple Mocks Baby’s Cry for ‘Mama’ In Viral Surrogacy Video
Steve Watson
17th April 2026
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X recoils at two men laughing while their purchased infant begs for the mother they erased