World Economies
The depression gripping the western world in 2011 never abated. The European states continued to fall one-by-one, Iceland, Ireland, Greece, Portugal, Italy, and Spain had all failed, to one degree or another by 2012. The housing market in the US, Britain and Canada never recovered and every year there were fewer and fewer good jobs for a growing number off out-of-work people. Much of the western worlds populations were increasingly spending their incomes on a disproportionately larger and larger food and fuel bill and had less and less for the consumption that had driven their economies for decades.
The world never really recovered from the western worlds depression of the twenty-teens and by 2018, as the Chinese economic giant, often based on cheap exports, was faced with the two-pronged threat of greatly reduced foreign markets and rising energy and food costs, the depression spread to them and by the end of the year enveloped every nation on earth.
Increasingly economies are diverging and the prices of commodities are diverging with them. The economic price convergence that had begun with Islamic trade between Europe and Asia millennia ago and which was greatly accelerated first by the European naval-military complex and later the rise of steam and fossil-fuel based shipping was finally starting to unwind. No longer was it affordable to grow a nations food in a far-away nation or continually import manufactured products from far away; shipping costs were just too great. Globalization was being replaced with localization. In twenty-twenty five some shipping companies had begun exploring the use of sail-based shipping and this was found to be, in the new economy, fairly cost-effective, truly illustrating how far we had fallen. Todays oceanic shipping continues to be, for the most part, sail-powered.
The fossil-fuel based manufacturing which dominated in the twenty-first century, by twenty-twenty was falling apart. Thorium atomic power and solar and wind-derived energy could provide some continuance of modern industry but their energy was so sought after that any product reliant upon energy for its production soon became much too expensive for anyone to afford. By twenty-third hand tools were replacing power tools, and what remained of heavy industry were moving as close as possible to where their raw materials and markets were located. Petroleum-based fibers were soon replaced by organically grown natural fibers, be they animal or plant and local labor-based manufacturing producing cloth, blankets, sails and ropes boomed. A general return to homesteading and self-sufficiency did create a market for wood lot, seed sales, draft animal breeding, bicycle manufacture and other businesses in that scale.
Larger extra-territorial corporations or governments are all closely tied to some source of energy production, be it atomic, solar or more rarely wind. These sources of energy are closely guarded and certainly worth developing militaries to protect. It is not a long leap of imagination to think that these militaries, in turn, would offer protection and organization to the surrounding homesteads, as well as whatever manufactured products they may produce in exchange for their food and often, labor. Smaller scale warlords performing the same function are common. The division of populations according to these localized industries and the formation of military power around localized energy production has, of course, led to the splintering of many of the worlds larger nations (as well as the smaller) with economic prosperity highly variable geopolitically.
Ultimately the worlds manufacturing and commerce, with a few notable exception upon which the few powerful elite build their influence, has returned to some semblance of what it was prior to the industrial revolution
or nearly so.
Technology
The technology of twenty-one-hundred, despite all that has happened, has advanced beyond what our ancestors of twenty-ten would recognize. There is a social and ideological difference in its implementation and dispersal however. It is rare to see technology openly shared among those capable of understanding it. The advantage a nation holds in military or manufacturing prowess is a closely guarded secret; too much desperation, too much hard-times have made people suspicious of their neighbors envy.
One notable new development has been the introduction of direct cybernetic interface between an individuals neuronal system and non-biological devices. For example, an individual might plug-in to a remote camera and see what it sees or a vehicle and pilot it with only a thought. The technology is, for the most part, only very rudimentary and incredibly expensive; only the smallest number of elite powers possesses such technology.
Computing, to varying degrees, has advanced considerably. Photonic (or optical) computing is much faster than electron-based computing and serves as a quantum leap in capacity and speed of computing. First-generation optical computing uses binary data storage, and while superior to pure electronic computing, do not offer the speed and data storage capacity of optical to optical computing. Again, few governments and corporations have access to this technology and those that do are reluctant to admit as much.
Cermets are the fusion of metals and ceramics. Advanced cermets typically have the best properties of both these materials and are used in bio-mechanical interfaces as well as industry, where they serve as effective cutting and brazing tools or protection from high thermal stresses. Additionally they have growing use in military applications where advanced forms of the material are said to be used in personal and vehicle armor providing both ballistic and especially thermal protection.
to be continued
Bio-steel
Nano-scale manufacturing
Politics, Rise of the Mega-Corporations, Wars and Conflict
i am open to a LOT of ideas here. I foresee canada and russia becoming superpower and subsequently collapsing and i've outlined a bit when some nations are going to return to pre-industrial levels... but otherwise things are wide open. I REALLY like the idea of nations being divided by ideologies and methods of survival more then race or language and can easily imagine that modern languages will probably evolve VERY quickly in the years between present and 2100. the same goes for culture.
