What is "The Great Mistake"?

[Snownova]

Some juicy hints about the great mistake from the new Brasilia interview:

Brasilia was the guardian of the reconstruction during the Great Mistake. We stood guard over the UN camps in central Asia, our planes carried the relief supplies in and the refugees out of the fallout zones, and we took down the warlords and carved out a space where an effective government could be formed. We did what the Norteamericanos or Chinese would not do. We did what the Europeans could not do. We did it because Brasilia was young and strong, and because it is the responsibility of the strong to protect the helpless. We, Brasilia, acquitted ourselves with honor. We have earned the right to settle new worlds.

So America and China went isolationist, Europe was incapacitated somehow, South America must have been largely unaffected, and there was nuclear fallout.

 

[archmagej]

I saw the part about the fallout and was wondering if that had to be from nukes or if there could be other kinds

 

[Liex]

South America must have been largely unaffected

On that:

Brasilia was severely affected by the rising sea level that flooded the Amazon. But that opened the interior of the region for trade and turned out to be not as severe as it was for the other factions.

 

[Kolbeg]

"our planes carried the relief supplies in and the refugees out of the fallout zones"

Nuclear Exchange. Perhaps mixed with many kinds of breakdowns. What caused it is difficult to guess, but that is what I´d call the Great Mistake.

 

[GenyaArikado]

I guess that means the Amazon basically sunk but since not a lot of people live there humanity wasnt really affected in SA

And well i guess that confirmed the nuclear exchange but TGM screamed that from the beggining

 

[Fabio1701]

the fallout could be forma nuclear plant disaster, doesn't have to be form a warhead exchange. if sea levels rose dramatically and some major storms damaged some dodgy reactors in south east asia? the mistake could have been building a string of dodgy cheap reactors along the indian coast to provide energy for the billions there without proper safety precautions.

 

[CaterpillarKing]

It would have to be a lot of nuclear meltdowns. A heck of a lot.


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[3of5]

If sea levels rose dramatically and some major storms damaged some dodgy reactors in south east asia?

We had that already: Fukushima. And the japanese don't usually build too dodgy. The Pakistani - Indian conflict going hot and ultimately nuclear is a dreaded only too realistic scenario even today and everything the devs said about the great mistake seriously hints at that.

If we are looking at the 21th century we can identify only too probable ressource shortfalls that will stop dead the most vulnerable countries / regions in their development, leading to the rise of extremist elements in mainstream politics. Take rampant water scarcity from aquifer overuse (leading to saltwater contamination in most coastal areas) ultimately leaving large swaths of agricultural land laying barren and the people that lived of it flocking to the cities looking for a living. At the same time, oil production can't keep up with demand and prices skyrocket, leaving developing countries unable to buy it in needed quantities. Fertilizer made from fossil fuels not only become very expensive, natural deposits of Phosphor run out too, leading to rising food prices, poor people would be unable to afford any more in a highly input dependant large scale agricultural infrastructure (due to previous land grabs in search for investment capital rent).

Nations scramble to build nuclear power plants, but they already know, that Uranium is going to become scarce only 20 years later. This would prompt existing superpowers and emerging ones to scramble for ressources much more agressively than today, leading to many conflicts.

A static and politically not fully integrated Europe would be unable to cope with scarcity induced continous recession, fueling internal nationalist tendencies and leading to the break up, or just the paralysis of the European Union, effectively removing it from the world map as a global player. The US would try to furthers its domestic ressource extraction programs, handing ever more power over to companies out of desperation, but even fracking, tar sands and huge subsidized mining operations would run dry after a short time, because technological innovation in extraction techs would fail to cope with demand. It would reduce its global military presence because of mounting pressure from its populace to cut the defense budget, gracefully stepping down from empire status.

China would not fill that gap and aside from some wars with its neighbors to grab convenient ressources (south chinese sea, Vietnam...) it would turn inwards. The collapse of demand for chinas goods on the international markets, leaves it with huge masses of urban population that would be unemployed and demanding better administration and a system with less built in corruption, blaming the party for the personal economic desaster they would be facing. This would prompt the party to step up internal security, effectively building up a police state.

Developing nations would face grim outlooks and a lack of positive perspectives for development which would lock them down in internal struggles over sellable ressources, bathing them in a wave of bloody ethnical and religious civil wars, leading to the rise of a multitude of warlords seeking to control the rent from ressource extraction. It would also reignite imperialist agendas, with all sorts of countries trying to get on the good side of these Warlords to gain extraction rights, but constant war would excerbate already existing ressource shortages.

In the developed countries economies based on ressource imports and goods exports (Europe, Japan, to some extent china) would collapse, creating an urban proletariat the likes of which have not been seen for hundreds of years leading to all kinds of problems, from nationalist to bolschewist revolutions, further removing them from the global pane and locking them in direct or indirect conflict with each other.

At the same time climate change would make large swaths of land become uninhabitable (droughts, flooding), uprooting communities and sending large masses of people on migrations to find shelter and the bare necessities for living. The global economy in its weakened state would be unable to finance even the most urgent mitigation efforts and mass migration would reignite old ethnic conflicts.

And then it gets really messy.

I didn't even get too much inspired by looking for a great mistake, thats just how i have seen the near future of mankind for years (worst case scenario though). So what IS the "great mistake"?
I dunno. Mass consumist based capitalism? Maybe?

 

[Guandao]

In Rejinaldo's speech, he mentions Brazilians helping out with refugees in Central Asia and cleaning fallout. I assume a nuclear exchange did happen in Asia between several major powers.

 

[NASAROG]

The Great Mistake?

That's Easy.

1UPT.

Moderator Action: 1 upt is not the subject of this thread. Please use the threads that exist for that discussion. Turning every thread into a 1 upt discussion is trolling
Please read the forum rules: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=422889

I LOL'd, but I think it has more to do with some kind of a post-war happenstance. A combination of things I would think. The one thing I've noticed so far is the disappearance of a religious mechanic. Maybe a religious world war, that has caused the world to abandon the old religions.

 

[3of5]

I LOL'd, but I think it has more to do with some kind of a post-war happenstance. A combination of things I would think. The one thing I've noticed so far is the disappearance of a religious mechanic. Maybe a religious world war, that has caused the world to abandon the old religions.

I'd doubt that Firaxis would take such a strong stance on something as subjective and potentialy a PR nightmare as religions. Religion is just not very prominent in science fiction (exception: Dune), so it would not feature prominently in BE (which is also a way to evade all discussion on which religion would survive/thrive until 2200, a topic that has the potential to backfire fast. I think they just adopted a "religion is personal and not political in 2200 and we don't care more than that" stance for most of the factions. This was also done beautifully in Babylon 5, if you remember that, where religion still exists, but it is portrayed in a positive albeit strictly personal context as far as earth religions are involved.

We know that for at least one BE faction religion is pretty important.

 

[NASAROG]

I'd doubt that Firaxis would take such a strong stance on something as subjective and potentialy a PR nightmare as religions. Religion is just not very prominent in science fiction (exception: Dune), so it would not feature prominently in BE (which is also a way to evade all discussion on which religion would survive/thrive until 2200, a topic that has the potential to backfire fast. I think they just adopted a "religion is personal and not political in 2200 and we don't care more than that" stance for most of the factions. This was also done beautifully in Babylon 5, if you remember that, where religion still exists, but it is portrayed in a positive albeit strictly personal context as far as earth religions are involved.

We know that for at least one BE faction religion is pretty important.

I do, I love B5. I have the boxed set and re-watch at least once a year. I watched it when it aired on t.v. back in the mid 90's.

 

[SupremacyKing]

I would venture that the Great Mistake started when nations failed to curb climate change. Big changes to the climate led to droughts and resource scarcity which caused nations to get desperate, leading to wars which eventually went nuclear.

 

[gyrobot]

Observing on Elodie's comments I will see the following happened to the following continents

Western Europe, The EU split up, most likely due to moral differences as Elodie saw in her media empire that Europe became disinterested in cultural and intellectual pursuits which crippled the governments in Europe to govern effectively. As the ecological disasters hurt Europe as some countries are too stubborn to embrace non fossil fuel alternatives. EU was ultimately disbanded as economic collapse wracks Europe which northern Europe bearing the brunt

Asia had the Korean Crises where North Korea finally provokes South Korea and nearly returns a genocidal attack that forces China to intervene, meanwhile the South Asia sea crisis also leaves people panicking as Japan attempts to militarize against US wishes and seize the islands as a place to populate their population as sea levels rise. PAC was formed in the wake of the disaster but it was too late to stop nations like India and Pakistan from declaring nuclear war on one another. The efforts of the Prophet was able to help turn what would have been a tragic episode in humanity to a last ditch effort to save their people.

South America got hit the least but still felt some of the brunt of the attack, with the Northern European nations no longer being able to maintain peacekeeping efforts OSSA took up the slack as the newfound resources in Amazon gives them ample military capabilities to handle peacekeeping operations in the wake of the great mistake. They quickly rose to power as a military power and put the years of being overthrown and living under the barrel of a gun to good use.

Africa for the first time faced a tech boom that turned the impoverished nation to a industrialized power. They were able to finally stabilize their own nation after spending so many years being used for mineral interests but the technology came at the price of precious resources for their seeding efforts. The clock is ticking and they know they need the resources more than the other nations do. Ironically this also made their people less culturally bound, as the new African are more like western culture, little belief in faith.

 

[3of5]

Elidie gives some insight into the state of earth as of 2200

It may be that our failure to live up to our moral obligations over the past three centuries have irrevocably harmed this world. A failure of political morality legitimated atrocity as tools of the state. A failure of ecological morality compounded the suffering and exacerbated the ill effects of these political failures. It has been shown empirically that we stand at a threshold where soon we will no longer possess the means to sustain neither our accustomed standard of living, nor a program of viable extrasolar colonization. Thus we must not fail this final moral test for humanity, or we shall have entirely squandered our potential as a species, and wasted the inheritance we have received from previous generations.

atrocities would include, but not be limited to the use uf nuclear weapons, the failure of ecological stewardship might allude to global warming (we do know that there is widespread flooding and migration from ARCs and Brasilias description). burdened with the difficulties of mitigate climate change effects Europe could not have been able to help those in need and devastated by wars (as alluded to by Bolivars speech).

While the "great mistake" might have been a singular well defined moment in history (i.e. the nuclear exchange) 2200 history might view as the "great mistake" the sum of events and decisions that lead to humanity shortening and squandering its launch window to become an extrasolar species. Todays ressource extraction is dependent on very sophisticated technologies and a highly specialized logistics network and manufacturing base. Any postapocalyptic civilisation would have a leg up in recovering already developed knowledge, but would find it very hard to apply it, lacking the ressources to actually build up an industrial base capable of supporting such a wide reaching space program. It would indoubtably become trapped on earth and stagnate as an educated, but mainly agrarian society, just waiting for the next planetary wide extinction event (or alien intervention).

I think that is exactly what happened to the people of earth after the seeding fleets left in a final effort to reach for the stars.

 

[KrikkitTwo]

Also, minor nuclear war + global warming would be intersting

ie minor nuclear war->brief nuclear winter
during that brief nuclear winter, green house gasses continue to accumulate (possibly driven even more by the need for power with a fear of nuclear power sources)

As the nuclear winter fades, the Earth warms very quickly
This means there is not much time to adapt (essentially civilization gets 'ecological whiplash' Earth is warming, then cooling, then warming again)

 

[3of5]

Also, minor nuclear war + global warming would be intersting

ie minor nuclear war->brief nuclear winter
during that brief nuclear winter, green house gasses continue to accumulate (possibly driven even more by the need for power with a fear of nuclear power sources)

As the nuclear winter fades, the Earth warms very quickly
This means there is not much time to adapt (essentially civilization gets 'ecological whiplash' Earth is warming, then cooling, then warming again)

from what i heard, a localized nuclear exchange would not necessarily start a nuclear winter. But the dynamics you describe would indeed be devastating, because it would shift climate pattern strongly in short periods twice.

 

[KrikkitTwo]

from what i heard, a localized nuclear exchange would not necessarily start a nuclear winter. But the dynamics you describe would indeed be devastating, because it would shift climate pattern strongly in short periods twice.

Well it depends on how localized, as well as a bunch of other factors. (basically you get more problem from the smoke from fires than from the blasts themselves... and it might only last a couple years, but that could have a major effect in terms of messing with growing seasons... food costs spike leading to social problems.... then the dust settles, remaining greenhouse gasses cause climate whiplash and food prices spike a second time)

Perhaps the nuclear winter was made worse by some geo engineering attempts (that were halted in the nuclear winter and couldn't get restarted... so they just added to the whiplash.)

 

[salocin097]

What if the Great Mistake is the human idea of practical immortality. The human arrogance that we will live on in some capacity or another. Its in our culture. Even post a apocalyptic movies. Someone survives. There's a hope. So this ideology led to us not handling climate change or whatever problems correctly. So the mistake is a fallacy in ideology of not recognizing we are not necessarily going to exist forever. That we really have to try to survive.

 

[3of5]

What if the Great Mistake is the human idea of practical immortality. The human arrogance that we will live on in some capacity or another. Its in our culture. Even post a apocalyptic movies. Someone survives. There's a hope. So this ideology led to us not handling climate change or whatever problems correctly. So the mistake is a fallacy in ideology of not recognizing we are not necessarily going to exist forever. That we really have to try to survive.

I like it... it would also explain the fervor of the seeding. I just don't think that a notion this abstract would go down in history books so undisputed and widely accepted as the great mistake obviously did.