[nostrademons]

Personally I'm highly optimistic about the post-war period of ~2035. Wars usually bring about extremely rapid development and adoption of new technologies. I suspect that my kids, if they survive, will enter a world I can only dream about. Plus, killing off several billion people will alleviate resource pressures on the planet, and likely reverse global warming through nuclear winter. And world wars usually bring about the downfall of governments and major institutions, which have been major blockers to the adoption of technology on a societal level and development of a social structure that fits the world of today rather than the world of 1945.

It's going to be a pretty grim 10-15 years in the near future. I think a 50% chance of them being alive in 2120 is pretty darn optimistic; I'm figuring they have a 20-30% chance of surviving to adulthood. But if they make it, life after a population bottleneck is usually pretty good for the survivors.

[KineticLensman]

> life after a population bottleneck is usually pretty good for the survivors

One example of a population bottleneck I can think of is the plague (black death) in 14C Europe [0]. This contributed to the collapse of serfdom and wage rises, along with significant social change, which was arguably a good thing. But a big difference compared with today is that 'infrastructure' wasn't itself destroyed and existing technologies and raw materials remained available. Food was grown locally, and most industry, such as it was, could continue as before (except where labour wasn't available). A modern war on the scale you are suggesting, killing off several billion people (!!!), would entirely disrupt our globalised society. Reconstruction to pre-war levels of technology and health would be extremely hard if not impossible.

> likely reverse global warming through nuclear winter

Hardly. Nuclear winter wouldn't magically remove carbon from the biosphere, and the disruption of ecosystems and agriculture would be massive.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consequences_of_the_Black_Deat...

[nostrademons]

Right. Other examples of a population bottleneck include Communist China's Great Famine + Cultural Revolution (killed ~5% overall, up to 18% in some provinces), and WW2 (~3.5% overall, 15-18% in some regions like Poland, Lithuania, and the Soviet Union). In WW2 the infrastructure was destroyed, and that led to the post-WW2 boom (even in losing countries!) as it was rebuilt with modern technology.

WW3 will result in the collapse of globalization, but it's very unlikely that it'll affect all regions equally, just like how the U.S. ended up as the big winner because it was all fought on foreign soil. Whichever regions manage to stay out of WW3 will likely enjoy the economic fruits of increased technology + being the engine of rebuilding for the remnants of the rest of the world.

[KineticLensman]

> In WW2 the infrastructure was destroyed

But it was rebuilt partly using massive Marshall plan investment which wouldn't exist in a world where several billion people have just died.

[nostrademons]

Why wouldn't a similar Marshall plan exist in a post-WW3 world? Wars don't affect all areas equally, and don't kill everybody. Even if you assume that 50% of humanity dies (way worse than WW2, and worse than every known war in history), that still leaves a population of 4 billion, which is what it was in 1975, 30 years after the Marshall plan.

[KineticLensman]

> Why wouldn't a similar Marshall plan exist in a post-WW3 world? Wars don't affect all areas equally, and don't kill everybody.

Agree, but the Marshall plan only worked because it's provider (the US) was essentially unaffected by the war and had money to burn. I can't see that a war that killed billions wouldn't damage the superpowers, who would be the primary providers of post-war aid.

[nostrademons]

The U.S. wasn't a (geopolitical) superpower before WW2, although it was definitely a strong rising economic power. Britain was considered the world's superpower, with other major Great Powers being the U.S, France, Germany, Italy, Russia, and Japan. The U.S. became a geopolitical superpower by virtue of being the most undamaged of the Great Powers after the war.

Similarly, it's likely that whichever industrialized high-tech region that's unaffected by WW3 would take on the role of the post-war superpower. I can't tell what that be - it could be a country like Brazil, Australia, New Zealand, Scandinavia, Kenya, or a region of an existing superpower like California, Ireland, or the Pearl River Delta - but it's likely that there will be some portion of the globe that is not destroyed and yet still retains enough technical knowledge and capital base to rebuild the rest of the world.

[pavlov]

Yours is a grim vision and I hope it doesn’t come to that.

I can’t disagree more on this point:

”governments and major institutions, which have been major blockers to the adoption of technology on a societal level”

After all we’re having this conversation on a global network originally created by government grants, not on AOL or some other commercial alternative.

Re: 50% of being alive in 2120, it does seem optimistic. It’s actually an official projection by the National Statistics Institute of Finland taking into account birth year and gender.

[cplusplusfellow]

This network may have been created on a government grant but one need only review the broadband tax placed upon us 30 years ago versus broadband paid for by the tax to understand what is happening.