Here's Why America is still the Future...
Our greatest days may yet be ahead of us. Our nation, culture, and way of life can and should be better than ever before because of one (simple) reason: geography.
I’ll bet if you showed aliens from another galaxy a map of the world today and asked them which country has or had global hegemony recently, at least one of them would point at the USA. If these hypothetical intelligent aliens have had civilizations and power struggles like our species, they would know that the country isolated from the world on two sides by oceans and two sides by gorgeously shaped nations such as Canada and Mexico (Western Hemisphere FTW) has the best shot at winning.
Just national boundaries alone wouldn’t be enough for any smart alien to answer my question. You see if those aliens are anything like our wonderful species and I’d bothered enough aliens with my pop-question, their answers would be all over the map. But there would be that ONE alien, that one nerd, that would know to ask for more details before providing me with an answer. We all know those people who can’t seem to answer even simple questions since their answers are just more questions. Sometimes, we should all strive to be more like those people.
“How much of the land in each of these countries is arable?”
“What kind of resources do humans on Earth use to run their civilizations? And how much does each country have of those?”
“How big are the populations of these countries?”
“Was 9/11 an inside job?” (just kidding)
The answers to those questions and a map would bring my smart alien friend to the conclusion that this right here would be the greatest nation in the solar system.
Though this smart alien friend’s educated guess would probably be Madagascar, I’m only writing about the one who agreed with my point of view. That’s how it’s done.
My main point is that as a nation, the United States has a comfortable amount of arable farmland per capita. America can totally be self sufficient in terms of food production, and even be able to export the extra grub for profit. Things like “if shit hits the fan can the country feed itself or will there be massive starvation?” are what really matter for longevity of an empire. If the people are not and cannot be fed, bad things happen. Very bad things like Communist Revolutions. The modern American middle class has always had grocery stores packed to the brim with food. The empty shelves we’ve all experienced is only a “taste” of what true food deprivation is. It’s all so entirely avoidable, had our food supply chains been more localized instead of globalized. I’m sure there are some nuanced economic mumbo-jumbo reasons for why we still buy food staples from other countries, but in a really tough spot America could feed itself if it had to (see Victory Gardens from WW2). In fact I’d like to see our country nourish itself with locally grown organic fruits, veggies, beef, and tacos. How fantastic would that be?
Something I always harp on is that if you take the average middle class home, and turn off the gas, electricity, and plumping, that unfortunate family would be in the middle ages. Probably even worse off than in the middle ages since nowadays you couldn’t drop most Americans into the wilderness and expect them to survive more than a couple days (hours??). Where does the energy to produce electricity and whatever powers the pumping systems so you can flush your toilet come from? For us right now, that’s mostly fossil fuels. If the rest of the world disappeared and all that was left was America (lets say I pissed off my sociopathic smart alien friend with my ridiculous question), I’d wager that we could get our energy production right and rebuild. America is a fossil fuel-rich country. There is no good reason why we pay so much for gas right now or ever. In this slightly based hypothetical doomsday scenario, we’d be standing on enough natural gas, oil, and coal to continue living pretty awesome lives. Alternative energy solutions like hydropower, solar, wind, and mandatorily nuclear power plants would shrink reliance on fossil fuels for electricity generation in the future. Hopefully it won’t take such a scenario for the American public to wake up and demand energy independence.
Resources like rare earth minerals and metals are what make all our doohickeys and gadgets that have improved the standard of living for Americans. This laptop, that gas station smartphone you’re reading this with, your car, pretty much anything electronic that bleeps and bloops were created with things like lithium. These resources are critical to sustaining our modern way of life. We currently have one active mine in the USA. This is just a hunch, but I’m pretty sure we can find more rare earth deposits and also improve the mining process to be much more environmentally friendly. Word on the street is that Wyoming for example, has rare earth deposits:
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/10/wyoming-may-hold-key-to-the-rare-earth-minerals-trade-war-with-china.html
If I had the cash, I’d buy land in Alaska so that in fifty years I’d become a rare earth metal billionaire. Not really. But I am willing to bet there are plenty more deposits in the United States. Are we just not looking for them in earnest yet or something? Do we really need to be buying our rare earth’s from the genocidal CCP? Or is this going to be another “Elon Musk Saves Civilization” thing when SpaceX starts asteroid mining?
Population size is a trickier metric. Any strong modern nation with a respectable standard of living has a large middle class. I take that to be an extrapolation of some kind of ratio between generic “resources” and population size. Essentially it boils down to standard of living. Do you have enough food, freshwater, arable land, metals, etc for each person to be comfortable or will there be too much competition and too little resources? America has always historically had a shockingly good standard of living compared to other nations. The best thing that ever happened to a large proportion of foreign POWs during the American Revolution was getting captured. Being a prisoner on an American farm was a much better life than what the Hessians or Redcoats experienced in their home countries. I tried telling that to my smart alien friend who chose Madagascar, but he was an avid Pandemic flash-game fan for years and would not budge on his choice.
My list of reasons why the United States of America is the best place to be (potentially) could go on forever. We have it in the bag to have at least another century or two as a global superpower. We’re located politically in one of the best situations in the world, we have plenty of land to grow food, we have plenty of energy resources, and probably plenty of everything else we need to run modern society. The American People are also the nation’s greatest asset, as they have always been. We have everything we need to win globally and maintain nice things like GrubHub and respect for human rights. We only have to want to win. The best is yet to come!