by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
For about a decade now, I’ve weighed in my mind whenever I’m bored the conditions of what I’ve come to think of as the “impossible” scenario because it’s impossible to solve using the conditions of the scenario.
The scenario goes something like this — if extraterrestrials moved a huge number of humans to a new solar system, how would you organize the government of your new world? The reason why it’s impossible to solve is the earth, on a political basis, is actually several civilizations. If you factor in all competing goals and objectives of all the different types of countries in the world — and give them equal weight — it’s impossible to think up any way to have a “human government” on a planetary scale.
Just the United States would make it impossible to have a truly “human government” on the scale of an entire planet. The United States is so divided at the moment that half the electorate would probably rather end humanity, period, than risk any abridgement of their gun rights. I wish I was kidding.
I may have recently come up with a solution to this seemingly impossible scenario — either you have a global government that uses nations as little more than administrative districts or you do away with nation-states altogether and base your entire culture and system of government on the United States. I pick the United States not just because, duh, I’m American, but also the traditional concept of the United States is it’s an idea and not blood and soil.
As such, if humanity had aliens breathing down its neck to pick a uniform form of government, the United Sates is big enough population wise and based on an idea to the point that you could, in a sense, make all of humanity Americans. I’m not saying this would go over great with 95% of the world’s population, but if you were desperate, really desperate to unite all of humanity under one form of government on a global scale, you could do worse than basing your new new world’s culture and government on the United State’s.
Neither one of the solutions I’ve come up with fixes all of the problems of the scenario, but they come close enough to make me feel pretty good.
