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Comment by renewiltord | Hacker News Reader

Funny how dominant languages of the past have died but now the lingua angla feels forever. I wonder if that's how it feels to be at the height of some culture's age: it feels immortal. Then it falls and is only remembered as the past: either as humorous, or as sophisticated, but not meant for normal use. We shall cement this one by creating AIs in the American image.

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That cement will always crumble, but the next empire will probably be built with it's pieces. It's no accident that the current global language is a derivative of the last 'worldwide' language, Latin, which itself flourished from its relationship to Alexander's Greece, a language which stole its alphabet from the semitic empires. Nothing new under the sun.

The same can be said for empires in general. Dominance seems forever until it isn't, and often the "higher you go the faster you fall" idea plays out.

There are plenty of signs that the US could be in the midst of its own empire failing. Whether that actually plays out is something we wouldn't know for decades or centuries, but there sure are a lot of parallels to failed empires of the past.

The question we need to ask isn't whether Pax Americana is dying, but who is going to succeed it.

So far it seems like it'll be China on account of there being no other country or bloc able to compete at that level, but that would be very unpleasant for us westerners.

Uncomfortable situations are seed for evolution. Westerners has no real need to do audacious steps, because they don't feel threatened. When China will take over from USA, I would not be surprised that there will be some ingenious way how Western civilization will rebuild itself.

The west, especially the US, likes to view China as our big rival these days. I'm still not sold, economically we're highly dependent on each other and militarily it doesn't make sense.

If the US and China really were to get into direct conflict, the bigger question may be who on earth was least impacted by nukes rather than which of the two countries "wins" (in quotes because we all lose in war).

In all likelihood, I'd expect it to be a country or a group of countries that we would never really have expected.

Unfortunately I don't think the US would go down quietly if the empire really is failing. Another major war wouldn't be out of the question, clearing the board for a lot of change to take place.

Without a war though, and one can only hope this is the case, I don't see China pulling it off. I both don't think they really have that motivation, and I don't expect they really could transition from such a totalitarian state to an empire driving anything near the level of US dominance.

When the US empire fails, and it has to eventually even if we aren't currently walking that path, the question is whether it falls apart or fails violently. You could point to many parallels with the Roman Empire and guess that it will just fall apart, even if there are fringe wars along the way.

The view from Disunited Nations seems likely. There need be no successor peace. There could just be a broken ocean. Europe, in particular, has long failed to contribute to the peace it prospers in. The US periodically has to go and pacify the place since they are practically barbarians who will start killing each other in massive genocides given a few moments alone. When the US withdraws, weakened and bruised, no doubt they will turn on each other.

They already did, and the US had to blow up a pipeline to keep them in line. But that capability won't last forever.

There's a very real question hidden in there though, is it even the US's role to "pacify" the "barbarians"?

There's a lot rolled up in such a small idea. What makes another population barbarians, and how is it so different from the US? Assuming there are groups of adversarial barbarians around the world, why should the US step in to "fix" it and how can they even define what the fix is?

I guess that's fair. Americans see it as their role to prevent other people from their recurrent Holocausts. You leave Europe alone for a century and a genocide will ensue. Leave Europe alone for a decade and a war will ensue. Leave Europe alone for a year and violence will ensue. I suppose one could let that happen. But it's hard to say that the extinction of some racial group is a generally acceptable thing.

Irrespective of the origins of America, that is a categorical difference in the scale of death and destruction. To Americans, that is barbarism, but it's possible that Europeans do not see it as such and perhaps see civilization as inherently violent.

They are foreign to us here and speak different languages so perhaps their true minds are forever opaque to us, but we can see their actions: and that is repetitive quarrels with their neighbours with frequent attempts at ethnic extinction. From that, some conclusions can be drawn.

The Roman Empire seemed forever for those living within it too!

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