Updates, Questions

[gothwalk]

I am back on my feet again after a few days of an unpleasant throat infection. While any illness makes me rather brain-dead, I did manage to force a few thoughts for Starbound through between sleeping and staring blankly at the TV. One of these gives rise to a question, part historical, part... actually, I can't even categorise it, I'll just ask it.

How global are global events?

Consider, for example, World War II. If you lived in England or Continental Europe, you could not miss it - even if you were in a serious outback area, chances are that you were affected by rationing, drafting, or troop movements. If you lived in the West of Ireland, though, you might not have experienced much change. Parts of the USA would have experienced little difference for most of the war. Sub-Saharan Africa was probably not much affected, and South America likewise. Places like the Phillipines were definitely altered, but there were probably some Pacific islands to which it made no difference. India? I have no idea.

How realistic is that assessment? Is there a theshold beyond which an event has a (possibly knock-on) effect on everyone? How would you measure it?

And yes, I know there are going to be differences for an interstellar setting. I want to figure out how things work here first.

Comments

[salith.livejournal.com]

There would most likely be daily news coverage in those parts not affected, but news agencies would probably jump on the band wagon of getting as many viewers as possible for their news feeds.

[wechsler.livejournal.com]

This presumes a global news/information network, which wouldn't have existed in the 1940s.

Its existence in a hypothetical future universe depends on the existence of FTL or instantaneous communication.

[mollydot.livejournal.com]

There must be some threshold, because I can think of some things that would kill everyone, so they're obviously beyond the threshold. But I don't know where it would be.

[mollydot.livejournal.com]

It probably also depends on how you define "affect" (or is the amount of affecting what you want to measure? Or the numbre of people affected?).

If, for example, there was a really enourmous volcano erruption that meant the sky went dark everywhere for at least a day, that would affect everyone in that, at a minimum, everyone who wasn't blind or stuck indoors without windows would see it, and those who couldn't see it would be affected by other peoples reactions. If the sky went dark for a year many people (& animals) would starve do to lack of plants, never mind deaths caused by pyschological reactions to it.

An incredibly contagious and long lived (both in & out of the body) illness that had the air as one of its vectors would eventually infect everybody. But if it didn't cause much damage it wouldn't affect people all that much.

[silja.livejournal.com]

I agree with that assessment. have you ever read The PLot Against America? It's an alternative history novel about what would have happened if Charles Lindbergh, the flying ace who wa sa Nazi sympathiser, won the presidential election he ran in. Very interesting.... part of it is about how the USA didn't understand/ believe the horror of what happened in Europe.

[ulaire-daidoji.livejournal.com]

There's also the whole conspiracy theory about the American government both provoking and allowing the attack on Pearl Harbour in order to outrage the American public.

[niallm.livejournal.com]

The higher the tech level, the more effect events have.

A nuclear explosion will have effects right around the world, whereas simple chemical explosions (as per WWII) wouldn't.

[mollydot.livejournal.com]

Plus the speed of information will increase knock-on effects.

[juanfandango.livejournal.com]

Indeed. pre-1945 steel is prized for use in very sensitive scientific instruments, as it's not irradiated.

[giftederic.livejournal.com]

World War II has shaped the world enormously in the past 50 years. Even if a place remained relatively unscathed during the war, there are few areas on the planet that have not been affected by it's aftermath... The creation of the United Nations, the Treaty of Rome, the cold war etc, etc..

Even concepts like the Declaration for Human Rights and the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty...

Iran had but small involvement in WWII, but is being affected by UN inspectors, and having signed a certain piece of paper, both of which owe their genesis to the war.

[ulaire-daidoji.livejournal.com]

A cynics viewpoint:

The vast majority of people are Me Feiners. Look at the state the world is in today. The vast majority of people have never been more than 20 miles from their houses and live in poverty. There was no year of the 20th century where there wasn't a war declared somewhere. The Middle East is basically on fire.

Yet some of the most important things effecting Irish people are how much is the price of a pint and how is my football team doing in the champions league.

[loupblanc.livejournal.com]

Well if you think about Global Warming, while the effects are different throughout the planet, there are still effects nontheless, some small, some huge. That's one global thing I would say does affect everyone

[malinaldarose.livejournal.com]

Oddly enough, my grandparents were talking about the war Monday night at my mom's birthday gathering. Grampa was talking about only being allowed 5 gallons of gas, which would just about get my great grandfather's huge car around the block (in Grampa's words); he was on leave and wanted to take Grama for a drive. Grama was talking about how she and her aunt would trade ration cards -- she'd give Aunt Dot sugar coupons and get meat coupons in return. And the rationing went on for a long while after the war ended. So that was in southwestern NY, and I don't know if that's the sort of place you'd envision being much affected by the war.

[wyvernfriend.livejournal.com]

As a west of Ireland native I have to point out a few things about the Emergency. Less stuff was available and it was quite expensive, during the period my grandfather developed the farm to be as self-sufficient as possible, the only thing they had to out-source were things like sugar and tea and apparently they were quite expensive and re-using tea-leaves was apparently quite common.

There are a few stock books that my granddad had for the local co-op which ran for a few years around World War I, raided twice by the tans, for goods and a refusal by Lloyds of London to pay up on the insurance (it was apparently an act of war!) it had no option but to close but the stock book lists Bananas (many people born during WWII remember the first time they saw bananas or oranges and remember it as being a major event), 3 kinds of pen-nib and other fairly exotic bits and pieces. There were a group of people who grew up with a greater poverty of resources during WWII which continued into the 50's as Ireland struggled with developing some sort of economy. Some of the rules and regulations regarding imports of goods also isolated Ireland a great deal. There also seemed to be a great poverty of ideas coming from outside, partly because other countries were more inward looking during the period and partially because of governmental policies.

Not to mention that a lot of men went to war against the Nazi scourge and many would have had family in the US who would have volunteered.

There are often almost unseen knock-on effects of war and sometimes what looks isolated isn't quite.

[caturah.livejournal.com]

I have to agree with this. My Dad grew up in Limerick, and he didn't get to see his first orange till he was 14, and it was quite a major thing for him then.

[hobbitblue.livejournal.com]

I'm a bit hazy on African countries but there was fighting in Africa, plus many of the African nations were still under the rule of the various colonial powers at that point so would have been called on for troops/resources presumably, though how far this stretched across parts of the entire continent, no clue. Same with India, still a British-ruled place, there were whole regiments of Indian troops sent to fight. Now whether people in the tiny villages up in the mountains were affected I'm not sure, but I think the World War aspect is a relevant one, certainly for countries where fighting took place in or around them. With the USA, the political/media machine was in force, war bonds, patriotism, films about "our brave boys fighting over there", young soldiers joined up from the smallest of small towns, places where they might not even have heard of half the European countries involved, so even if things like rationing or bombing weren't part of their daily lives, it would be hard to miss the rest. I am woefully ignorant about any aspect of South America, sorry.

[ragnvaeig.livejournal.com]

My Chilean grandfather served in the Argentinian army during WWII, in counterintelligence; the woman who later became his wife was working at the Argentinian embassy. Both my other grandparents were medical personnel and served in Europe. You will always get the sort of people who will make it their business/crusade. Additionally, you'll get profiteers, who seek to benefit by playing both sides.

The recent mass availability of information has had a massive impact on "global" events. Mobilisation and deployment are quicker, for both war and rescue. In areas where you'll have great dissemination of information, people will at least be aware, even if the court of public opinion has ADD. Intelligentsia will always theorise and discuss in the abstract. The layman may have a strong opinion, but unless there is a vector for direct involvement, like wanting to "join up," he probably won't do anything about it.

[smarriveurr.livejournal.com]

I think most major events have an insidious sort of ripple effect that eventually does, in fact, impact the world. This may be quite delayed, in fact, but it will be there.

Let's go to WWI for global impact. Prior to the War, the US had the world's third largest navy. They had, however, less than the 100,000 man strength Congress authorized for the Army in 1902. The US Army was about 6% the size of the French army. 5% of the German force. The Americans wanted to believe themselves impartial, and the Midwest largely remained so, yet the growth of the US Military complex is really kicked into high gear to prepare for the Great War. The US as a military superpower, one could claim, traces back to a man being shot and killed in June of 1914 (to ludicrously simplify matters, of course), and so I'd say the taxes those midwesterners pay to support military spending is one impact. Likewise, whenever you see the US bullying a nation today, intervening in a foreign nation to suppress/cause violence, to fund/starve a movement, there's the global impact. When the nations that current US leaders destabilize or prop up interact with their neighbors, it is, in a way, a result of the World Wars in effect going on a century later. Or consider the domino-chain impact of military spending, diplomatic action, etc, of the Cold War era, and the way it still shapes policy and society.

The effects might not be immediately visible to a nomad in sub-saharan Africa, but the borders they sometimes get hassled crossing... probably an aftereffect. The same for any war-torn nation in the world where money has been siphoned from one side or the other for rebels, insurgents, what have you, where money that might have given humanitarian aid instead funds one extremist or the other to keep "The Evil Empire" (whichever) out.

So... in a way, given enough time, I think even supposedly trivial events become global, if you consider not just the event, or its immediate effect, but also the chains of events it sets off... Kinda butterfly-effect-ish, but less trite.

Wow, that's a long, rambly, vague post from someone not even on your F-list. Blame ragnvaeig, she pointed me this way. ;)

[mollydot.livejournal.com]

From http://community.livejournal.com/peak_oil/355379.html?thread=2336819#t2336819

I started reading "The Little Ice Age: How Climate Changed History from 1300-1800" recently and it points out that the Black Death and Year Without a Summer occured during this period. The mess began with a big eruption in South America, and was made worse when Tamboora went off (another volcano). Crops failed, droughts, etc. Agriculture was iffy and a lot of people died.