Random Thoughts And Predictions

* Fraternity gang rape was a widely acknowledge problem thirty-five years ago when I was in college. Apparently, nothing has changed.

* People in the developed and developing world are having fewer children. The extent to which this is happening and the pace at which this is happening is something that most people, even educated elites, don't fully really comprehend. It isn't necessarily a bad thing. Resources will be spread over fewer people, allowing the people who are around to face less scarcity. But I'm not sure anyone has really carefully thought through how it will change society, even though, in a lot of ways, it is a very predictable thing.

* One counterbalancing factor is that I don't think people really appreciate the extent to which medical advances will transform society either. People will live longer and will be healthier during their lives. Sickness and injury, even old age, are fundamentally solvable problems.

* Much of Africa, and pockets like Afghanistan and Gaza elsewhere, are still basically undeveloped. But those pockets will predictably experience economic development and demographic transitions too, just a bit later than the rest of the world. Indeed, the rate at which they experience economic development, once it really gets going, may actually be faster, because they can learn from the rest of the world's experience.

* Fossil fuels will become irrelevant, or at least much less economically important, with renewables, a mild resurgence of nuclear power, and EVs. This will topple a lot of autocracies. This will allow global warming to level off - still at a much hotter level, but that trend won't continue forever.

* The U.S. may be a generation or two behind Western Europe in secularizing, but its getting there. How will Christianity transform as it becomes a minority religion despite being the plurality religion of theists in the U.S. for the foreseeable future?

* Maybe AI will be a transformative technology, maybe it won't. Ditto for quantum computing. 

* There will be bumps along the way, but we do seem to be on a path towards mass production scale self-driving vehicles that make a large share of all vehicles.

* So far, the path towards urbanization has been steady for two or three centuries. Will remote work change that? I don't think that remote work is going away and I expect it will only become more common.

* Will falling birth rates take the economic pressure off of a switch away from red meat, which takes the most land and water per pound of any kind of food?

* Climate change should eventually push people away from the Southern U.S. and further north, particularly to the water rich Midwest.

* It won't take too many generations for mixed race "mutts" to become the norm and for single race people to become much less common, and this will probably drive changes in the way that we classify race socially. In much the same way that Italians, Germans, Scandinavians, Irish, Dutch, Russian, Greek, English, and Scottish people all collapsed into a broad "white" category in which lots of white people don't even know which European countries were home to their ancestors, I think that we'll see similar collapsing of categories now thought of as distinct into a general "brown" category that is a bit analogous to mestizos in Mexico, but with significant East Asian, South Asian, Southeast Asian, Middle Eastern, and Polynesian contributions in addition to European and Native America, and with non-negligible African ancestry contributions.

* We've seen the future of war in Ukraine. It is hard to say if it will be stabilizing or destabilizing. What does equilibrium look like in a spy v. spy escalation of drones and AI?

Stocks

From here.

It is an open secret that the stock market in the U.S. is currently being driven by fewer than a dozen wildly overvalued tech stocks that account for the lion's share of it's growth (like the ones shown above, particularly Tesla and SpaceX).

The stock market is not particularly good at accurately estimating the true value of public held companies.

Inaccurate stock prices are an objectively bad thing at the level of the aggregate economy, because they cause investment capital to be misallocated. Too much money is allocated to investments that don't have as good of a likely return on investment, while too little money is allocated to investments that could produce better returns. And, since the stock market is huge, the economic consequences of these misallocations of investment capital on the economy are huge and negative.

Inaccurate asset prices also allocate personal wealth to people who hype their stocks to be worth more than they really are to stupid investors, basically, systemically creating immense returns to dishonesty.

Asset price bubbles aren't bad for everyone. There are two basic ways you can profit from them. One is to invest in the bubble asset despite knowing that it is overvalued, to ride its irrational surge in price, and to get out before the bubble pops. The other is to short the bubble asset and profit when the bubble pops, but this requires your short to be timed for when the bubble pops.

Why is the stock market so bad at pricing these stocks despite the fact that some of the smartest people in the country are employed to analyze and act on this data, and despite the fact that there is a lot of very good quality data about publicly held companies that can be used to value them accurately that is available?

One possibility is that a lot of investors in the stock market are on autopilot trading schemes, like index funds, that are free riding off the people who are actively trading individual stocks, that increasing numbers of ill-informed investors are actively trading individuals stocks as it has become easier to do so, and that the bad decisions of this dumb money is being amplified by autopilot trading.

Another explanation, not necessarily inconsistent with the first, is that this is a generational effect. Baby boomers are moving into their final years of employment and into retirement. They have immense stock market wealth. They are retired and bored, so they try actively trading individual stocks, and they are pouring money into the stock market that exceeds the extent to which stocks have reasonable values (as are individuals who save for retirement believing Social Security to be in peril and knowing that unlike Boomers, they have no defined benefit pensions). Due to the geriatric character of people with power who know what is going on, this is not a problem that they want to solve because they benefit from overvalued stocks in their retirement when they are living off of their investments. Political momentum for reform will come when the Boomers retire or when the bubble collapses, whichever comes first (and asset price bubbles inevitably collapse sooner or later even though the timing of when the bubble pops is notoriously difficult to estimate).

If the bubble sustains itself until the Boomers are mostly dead, the pain will be felt by Generation X and to a lesser extent Millennials (who will at least have more time to recover), in other words, by people like me.

When Will Cherry Creek Flood?

Until the Cherry Creek and Chatfield Reservoirs were built, Cherry Creek and the South Platte Rivers, respectively seriously flooded about once every thirty years and often at the same time.

From my days as a journalist, I learned that the Cherry Creek dam was not built to the engineer ordered specifications. It has nonetheless held for decades, so it isn't too bad, but it would probably fail under conditions less extreme than those it was designed to withstand.

We get more extreme weather events now than anyone expected when it was built. We will probably have what until recently was considered at 500 year weather event at least every 50 years now.

The Cherry Creek basin is mostly designed to address this risk, with green spaces and parking garages along most of its extent.

But, there is one place along its edges, where the basin has steep constraining walls, and critical infrastructure is just a few feet above the narrow walled Cherry Creek bike path. That is the Denver Health Emergency Room, Denver proper's only Level One Trauma Center.

I worry about this risk now and then, and we really should build a flood wall to protect it now, before the Cherry Creek dam fails is a "freak not freak" weather event.

Other 30-90 Year Time Horizon Predictions

In my previous post, Oil and Water, I made some predictions on a 30-90 year time horizon. 

What are some other predictions I'd make in that time frame?

* The U.S. birthrate will fall significantly from current levels, and the U.S. population will decline. Later in that time period, peak global population will be reached as Sub-Saharan Africa reaches is demographic transition, and the global population will start to fall.

* Life expectancies will rise significantly, not only in the less developed world, but in the developed world. Many diseases that are commonplace today with be virtually eliminated or will become much more effectively treatable. These include: M.S., lupus, gum disease, most common STDs, many kinds of cancer, and conditions like Down's Syndrome and cerebral palsy.

* The proportion of people who are non-religious will reach a majority in the U.S. Mainline Protestantism will take the biggest hit. Evangelical Christianity will become much less influential politically and much less conservative as it undergoes generational transitions of leadership. Mormons will experience some of the smaller declines among Christian and Christian adjacent faiths.

* Legacy communications technologies like shortwave radio, a.m. radio, landline phone service, and broadcast television will finally go dark.

* Most global military forces, including the U.S. military, will stop using manned tanks.

* Large surface combatant naval ships will become more scarce globally.

* Everyone's whole genome will routinely be recorded as an infant.

* Existing U.S. race categories will break down and be re-conceptualized as more and more Americans are mixed race.

* There will be at least one major political-economic catastrophe that greatly reduces income inequality.

* Drugs like marijuana and psychedelics which are just being legalized now, will not be re-criminalized.

* Putin's regime will collapse, possibly accompanied by a further break up of the components of the Russian state, and will be replaced by a flawed democratic regime or regimes that are still less authoritarian than the current regime.

* China and the countries of South Asia, Southeast Asia, and Latin America will join the ranks of fully developed countries.

* The Palestinian territories of Israel will cease to be. There are multiple, hard to predict scenarios regarding how this comes about. Also, since this is such a hot topic (managing fights over Israeli-Palestinian issues was the worst part of being a moderator at Politics.SE), I want to make clear that this does not reflect a preference about whether this is good or bad, and instead simply represents a prediction about what is likely to happen, particularly in light of recent geopolitical developments in Gaza and the West Bank, and in Southern Lebanon, especially since the events of October 7, 2023, and also in light of trends in Israeli-Palestinian relations during the 21st century (which we are more than a quarter of the way through, yipes!).

* Moderate and modernist tendencies within Islam will eventually start to prevail over extreme Islamist factions in most countries. This will happen earliest in countries where fossil fuel production is the least important part of the economy on a percentage basis.

* Cryptocurrencies will go out of style and will be relegated to a historical curiosity.

* The number of people employed to transport goods will dramatically decrease.

* Drones in all transportation modes, and sessile automated systems will pervasively influence both civilian life and the nature of military conflicts, transforming both profoundly.

* Global manufacturing employment will decrease to due increased automation and Africa will become a manufacturing center due to its cheap labor and permissive regulatory environment, once political stabilization is achieved.

* A much larger share of construction employment will work in factories making large subcomponents of buildings to be transported to the building site for final assembly.

* Economic growth rates will start to stagnate, especially outside Africa.

* People on Earth will launch a space probe to the nearest star, although it probably will not yet have reached its destination and will be in deep space moving very fast towards its destination. In the meantime, it will function as a deep space, space telescope.

* Social norms will increasingly devalue privacy.

* Popular consumer software will become much less buggy, and will eventually get easier to use, after somebody sees the potential for profit in improving on the widely known defects of the current leading software programs in wide consumer or business use.

* The concept of dark matter will be abandoned in favor of some gravitational law based explanation for phenomena attributed to dark matter. This will probably also be the case with dark energy, and the time period half half a century to a century when these theories were the conventional wisdom will be known as the dark ages of astronomy and cosmology.

* While it will never die entirely, I suspect that beyond the Standard Model physics research will lose a lot of luster and support and empirical evidence for it becomes more scarce with an additional generation or three of improved high energy physics experiments that further narrow the gaps where it could play a role, even though physicists will never entirely abandon this pursuit. 

* There are also at least even odds in this time period that theoretical explanations for most of the two dozen experimentally measured physical constants of the Standard Model will be found. Indeed, going towards the next point, this may be a particularly promising place for quantum computing and AI to play a role.

* Quantum computing will be developed, but it will only make much of a difference in specialized applications. Quantum computing seems particularly promising for applications like high energy physics (especially QCD), numerical general relativity capturing non-perturbative effects there, and cryptography.

* I'd be remiss not to mention it, as this time from is critical for AI, but I don't have strong predictions about the impact of AI and machine learning. It seems most useful practically in efficiently analyzing big data sets, for doing something similar to Bayesian statistical analysis to discovery hidden subtle patterns in data,  for digesting research information quickly for people who don't need to understand it in depth, in serving as an efficiency amplifier for computer programmers and other people who write text whose quality isn't important, and for automating customer service, and for automating fairly narrow tasks and jobs even if they require high level "thinking" (as opposed to more general unstructured roles). Visual image interpretation is further down the line but we're getting there. The impact of generative creative fields like art, fiction, and audio-visual presentations is hard to gauge - will it be a curiosity and fad, a tool for serious creators to increase efficiency as in other fields, or will it be transformative in ways unforeseen. And, the non-transparency of AI will continue to be an ongoing issue, although it is hard to know if its current tendency to hallucinate and have no sense of what is true or not is an early beta test version bug or if it is likely to be an ongoing issue. AI alignment as we progress toward AGI (artificial general intelligence) and artificial super-intelligence is also a key issue with some signs already emerging of consciousness and self-preservation tactics by AI models and social cooperation between AI models already starting to emerge. I don't see it as an apocalyptic or existential threat, but there are definitely serious risks involved in the technology, many of which are unknown unknowns.

* The mix of jobs in the job market will change a lot, with many traditional job categories shrinking a great deal and replaced but large numbers of new jobs in sectors that we barely even conceptualize as distinct job roles now. This structural change in the job market will have immense, but hard to predict in detail, political implications.

Oil And Water

Scarcity of oil and rising petroleum prices, and climate change driven drought, are a big deal. But there are fairly clear paths by which our society can adapt to both. Neither would be apocalyptic, even though it would drive significant, visible changes in our day to day material culture.

These matters are particularly worth thinking about on Earth Day, which is today.

Oil

A very large share of all petroleum consumption is for transportation, mostly cars, trucks, construction vehicles, boats, ships, and trains. Advances in battery technology, and EV manufacturing and infrastructure are making electric vehicle alternatives to all of those technologically viable. And, advances in renewable energy and nuclear power can replace almost all of the fossil fuels in the electrical power grid. Coal is well on its way to be phased out in the United States and much of the developed world. Alaska and Hawaii are the only U.S. states where a significant share of electricity is generated from petroleum. Heat pumps are paving the way as an alternative to heating buildings that were historically heated with heating oil in the U.S. (mostly in the Northeast). 

Heat pumps and evaporative coolers (together with better insulation) also dramatically more energy efficient than conventional air conditioning, and renewables like solar and wind combined with modern batteries are particularly well suited to meet the demand for electricity to provide cooling.

Lots of fertilizers that are petroleum based could also become unaffordable, as they have as global petroleum supplies have been interrupted by U.S. and Israeli attacks on Iran, and its counterattacks. But organic farming techniques are now well established enough that these methods pose an obvious alternative path for agriculture is petroleum based fertilizers cease to become economically viable. Dutch models of intensive hydroponic agriculture suggests another off ramp from what is now considered conventional agriculture.

There are some applications where there aren't good alternatives to petroleum, like plastics and jet fuel. But these are such a small share of total petroleum consumption that these uses could be sustained, even if they become more expensive, even if petroleum prices soar and the supplies contract greatly. 

Of course, plastics and petroleum based fabrics like nylon, have only been in wide use for about sixty years. If plastic becomes too expensive, we can revert to using metal, glass, wood, and plant and animal fiber alternatives for applications like kitchen ware and trash bins that aren't uniquely suited to plastic, as traditional alternatives becomes more affordable relative to plastic with rising petroleum prices.

The changes wouldn't be geographically neutral. A collapse in demand for petroleum driving by electric vehicles and organic farming would crush the economies of petrostates in the Middle East, in Brunei, in Nigeria, in Venezuela, and in select states within the United States. West Virginia has already seen its coal based economy collapse, as have many historically coal mining economy based regions in Europe. Wyoming will follow suit. 

On the other hand, rare earth rich areas who supply key components of modern batteries and electronics, may see mineral economy booms.

Water

In most of the arid west, marginal agricultural activity consumes 80%-90% of all fresh water, while landscaping and golf courses consume about half of the rest of the fresh water. If water becomes scarce, entire regions can eliminate their water hungry landscaping, golf courses can close or become much more expensive or use artificial grass, and marginal agricultural operations can close.

In places like the Arabian Peninsula, Greece, Utah, and California, desalination technology might become more prominent as a water source, at least for high value municipal waters uses like drinking, cooking, and bathing, and gray water systems would use non-potable water (such as salt water from the ocean or salt water lakes) in applications where drinkability wasn't important, like flushing toilets.

Climate change that produces global warming ultimately both gives and takes away arable land. It renders much of the arid West unsuitable for farming and ranching, but makes places that were too cold for farming in the past, more suitable for it. Even when climate change doesn't actually change the total amount of arable land somewhere, it may change the kind of agriculture that is appropriate in that place.

Places that used to support subtropical orange groves may freeze more often and get dryer and become more suitable for cotton and the soft wheat varieties currently grown in places north of Florida in the American South. Crops now grown in the South might start to be grown in the Midwest. The abundant corn and wheat fields of the Great Plains and Midwest might move north to Canada. The Great Plains might transition from grain farming to cattle grazing.

I'm not a climate scientist. I don't have exact models of exactly when and where climate zones that are suitable for particular crops and livestock will relocate. But that's the basic concept.

The ongoing wars across the Sahel of Africa illustrate how ugly the process of having herders ecologically forced into historically horticultural land can be without strong geographically large states to force the transition to be made with money instead of violence can look. But with strong states that remove violence as a viable option, the transition, while still massively disruptive, could be less tragic in places like North America and Western Europe.

Similarly, the skiing industry might relocate from places like Colorado and Vermont to places like the Yukon and Alaska, in North American, and from places like the Alps in Europe to the northern Urals and the Himalayas in Eurasia.

Many Sunbelt communities in places like Arizona and Texas and Florida may see the waves of migration to avoid the cold winters of the north replaced by migration north to avoid the months of hundred degree plus water in the Sunbelt which are already commonplace in cities like Phoenix and Las Vegas, while the rust belt, with its winters made milder due to global warming and abundant fresh water, may start to look more attractive, and may attract mass return migrations.

One of these days, people in the Sunbelt may return to the traditional solution of having midday siestas, inside cooler, shaded adobe insulated homes, and becoming more active once the sun goes down and the air cools late into the evening.

Coastal communities will have to build dikes or lose land area as sea levels rise, and many will have to remake their architectural landscape in the face of increasingly severe storms, something that will hit the U.S. states of Florida and Louisiana and some islands in Oceania particularly hard.

Species limited to narrow microenvironment ranges will go extinct en masse, as human encroachment upon their habitats, ecological disruption, and human predation have already done to many species already.

How fast will it happen?

We are, in 2026, at about the place on this path that we thought we'd be in the year 2006, back in 1986. Events like the transitions to EVs and heat pumps and renewables and industrial scale organic farming happened, but it took about twice as long as futurists at the time thought that it would.

Climate change, on the other hand, is happening faster than expected by a decade or three. The changes that were initially looking like they would take a century to run their course are now looking like they will occur in half of that time.

Certainly, these transitions are medium to long run trends. They will probably takes decades more to run their course. These transitions probably won't be complete in my lifetime, although they probably will run their course in the lives of my children, or at least, in the lives of my future grandchildren. Less poetically, this time frame is about 30-90 years.

But these trends are both massive and inexorable, like plate tectonics but much, much faster. Fast enough that it will be visible in future tree ring records.

Conclusion

These are huge, traumatic changes that will force mass migrations and fundamental changes in people's day to day culture. But they don't mean the end of modern life as we know it either. And falling birthrates will eventually lead to smaller global and regional populations that put less strain on scarce water and fossil fuel resources.

The MAGA-GOP Coalition Is Falling Apart

 

Trump's decade plus old hold on the GOP is slipping, because Republican political leaders they know that their prospects in the midterms look apocalyptically bad as a result of his actions over the last year.

The Complicated Story Of MAGA Politics

The modern Democratic party operates to a great extent like politics is supposed to work in Civics 101, and follow on political theory says that it is supposed to. It has found policies, that its leaders believe are good ones for the nation, that can unite a diverse big tent coalition. Democrats believe that government can be a force for good and want to use it the implement policies that make the world a better place. They go to great lengths to demonstrate with evidence that their policies do indeed do so. They aren't saints, but they also view stupidity, bad character, and malice in their leaders negatively and are generally happy to cast out leaders who demonstrate those traits.

The Republican party, in living history, was a pretty similar organization and movement that assembled a different bundle of policies to unite a different, smaller tent coalition.

But, that Republican party is almost gone and rapidly dissolving, even though most of its top leaders got their political start in that party.

The MAGA Republican party and movement, in contrast, is something else entirely. It absolutely still has its roots in the pre-FDR solid south Democratic party, in the Dixiecrats, and in the post-Southern strategy anti-civil rights Republican party. But unlike the Republican party that preceded it, it doesn't fit the Civics 101 model.

MAGA Republicans don't accept a lot of the bipartisan consensus about many aspects of policy making and governing that preceded it. It is isolationist. It is anti-trade, anti-immigration, anti-NATO, and unconcerned about alliances with foreign dictators. It has no respect for expertise. It doesn't think that government does anything good (and is oblivious to the benefits that its members receive from government), so it isn't troubled by having the government run by incompetent fools. It has strong authoritarian leanings, no commitment to democratic ideals, and little concern for the rule of law. It sees power as a tool to utilize to fight culture wars and its political opponents, rather than as a means to advance the greater good

Republican political leaders know perfectly well that most of President Trump's executive branch appointees, like RFK, Jr., are incompetent idiots whose only redeeming quality is their momentary personal loyalty to Trump. Most of them are also well aware that many of the policies that Trump is pushing for are objectively bad ones.

Then why do these Republican leaders back Trump anyway?

They can read the room. They know that they face mafia style backlash from Trump if they cross him. They also know that their not terribly bright constituents in the MAGA base firmly support Trump (or at least have until very recently within Trump's second term when they've discovered personally, the hard way, how bad his policies really are) seeing any deviation from Trump's agenda as a betray of Trump's MAGA base including them. The MAGA base also sincerely believe in a lot of the misguided elements of Trump's agenda because unlike most Republican leaders, they don't know any better.

Billionaires and the political representatives of many big businesses also know personally well that Trump is a horrible person who supports mostly bad policies who is basically trying to destroy the federal government from the inside. But, for them, the immense tax cuts that Trump has delivered to them, and the dismantling of federal laws and regulations that cost them money have seemed worth it to them so far.

The conservative leaning members of the college educated upper middle class, who used to work in think tanks formulating conservative policies that they thought furthered the national interest on a basis similar to that of their liberal peers, who served as senior civil servants, and served as professionals in roles that either supported conservative economic and religious interests, or were at least apolitical, meanwhile, have abandoned the Grand Old Party in droves, some to be unaffiliated politically, some to be libertarians, and some to become "moderate" and "neo-liberal" Democrats. Fools loyal to MAGA and Trump's cult of personality, and powerful hypocrites, have rushed in to fill the vacuum that they upper middle class conservatives left behind.

The agenda of Trump and his MAGA cult of personality isn't sustainable. But it wasn't really meant to be. The objective of MAGA is to burn it all down, and to entrench far right cultural dominance and political power now, knowing that in the long run, the democratic process and respect for the rule of law and settled political norms, run fairly, will undermine those objectives.

Destruction can be accomplished more quickly than building something that works. So, it doesn't have to last long. And, if the MAGA base comes to realize that the face eating leopard they supported ate their faces once the damage done is irrevocable, that's their tough luck in the eyes of the billionaires and far-right cranks who actually benefit from its agenda. By then, if the MAGA agenda is successful, they will have dug the United States (and even the larger world) into a hole that will be very hard to get out of again.

The system struggles to stop them. Trump has installed enough people loyal to him that share his far from the mainstream agenda in key institutions like the U.S. Supreme Court, the military, and senior government offices that he wasn't supposed to be able to oust and oust, and key policies that he wasn't supposed to have the legal right to control, that the systems and people designed to stop him aren't doing their jobs. The system wasn't designed to to stop a President who had no respect for his oath of office, no commitment to the good of the nation, no respect for the rule of law, and immense political power arising from a base brainwashed by decades of lies from clergy, Republican political leaders, and cynically manipulative conservative mass media outlets that jettisoned their journalist ethics long ago.

Of course, the willingness of the MAGA base to be manipulated and accept these lies didn't come from nowhere. It isn't that information that reveals that these are lies isn't available. It isn't that members of the MAGA base unanimously agree that Trump has good character.

They are motivated to accept a false worldview because the last half century of American progress has left them behind and greatly diminished their socio-economic status in relative terms. They are willing to take the gamble of destroying the system because of they feel that it has done nothing for them, and that they have no prospects of improving their lot within it.

Most of them made a bad bet. Trump's agenda will leave them worse off and reveal to them that they actually did have something to lose in the system that they are trying to destroy. The policies that they thought were the problem aren't the source of their dismay. Their future prospects within the system that they support destroying were better than they believed them to be. But, now that they've made that bet, a psychological unwillingness to admit that they've been duped and made a mistake, and the fact that much of the damage to both the system and the political process has already been done, makes remedying their mistake difficult.

The situation could still be turned around: If enough of the MAGA base is disillusioned fast enough. If enough old guard Republicans and conservative judges who are hypocrites wake up to the fact that the end game isn't a good one before it is too late. If Trump dies or implodes (which is a bet the left is trying to make by pushing the Epstein files issue) and no successor to Trump as the leader of the MAGA movement arises. 

But if it is turned around, the most likely failure mode for MAGA will be a dramatic collapse of the entire political movement. It will look like an economic bubble popping. It will look like the sudden death of the Whig party in favor of the new Republican party shortly before the Civil War. It will look like the collapse of Naziism at the end of World War II, or the collapse of the Soviet Union. It will look like the post-Herbert Hoover Republican Party of the 1930s. It might even look like the French Revolution with guillotines and all.

There isn't much room for a middle ground business as usual alternation of power at the margins at this point.

Military Technology Musings

Nuclear Weapons

Most of the nuclear weapons in the world are H-bombs (which create a nuclear fusion explosion from heavy hydrogen) and ICBMs (Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles that carry H-bombs) with multiple warheads that spread out over a large area, and a much greater explosive power than the Hiroshima and Nagasaki A-bombs (that created a nuclear fission explosion from uranium) that were the first and only time that nuclear weapons were used in combat in 80 years ago.

The problem with one of these typical weapons in nuclear arsenals worldwide is that blowing up everyone and everything in a major metropolitan area, irradiating that area for many years, doing significant harm to the global environmental, and risking a counterattack in kind from other nuclear powers under the Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) doctrine, is almost never a militarily useful thing to do. We justify them primarily under the MAD doctrine as a way to discouraging anyone from ever using nuclear weapons.

Even for extreme military missions like "bomb Mecca", or destroying the headquarters of an enemy government in a capital where its top leaders are located, or destroying a large military base isolated from civilian populations, or penetrating deep bunkers (such as a North Korean or Iranian nuclear facility or an ICBM missile base or an underground submarine base in China), a single warhead much less potent than a typical U.S. ICBM or SLBM (submarine launched ballistic missile) and closer in explosive power to the Hiroshima and Nagasaki A-bombs, are more than adequate in terms of explosive power.

Really, the only mission for which such powerful weapons make any military sense is planetary defense, to break up a large incoming meteor or comet into small enough pieces to burn up in the atmosphere before doing serious damage, or to divert an incoming meteor or comet from a collision course with Earth, in the basically oxygen free environment of deep space.

Indeed, one of the main reasons that nuclear weapons haven't been used again for 80 years, despite the fact that quite a few countries now have them, is precisely because they aren't a good fit to any military objectives, and not because the countries that have them been particularly ethical.

Tactical nuclear weapons, such as the backpack sized "Davy Crocket" bomb from Cold War era, are another matter. These can be as potent as, or perhaps ten times as potent as the largest conventional missiles and bombs, but can be five hundred times less massive. This makes them the right size to bust deep bunkers, sink aircraft carriers and other large warships, or destroy a large dam, bridge, or military base, or a dictator's palace while the dictator and his top lieutenants are in residence, with a single blow. This could be delivered using a small hypersonic missile, or small fast supercavitating torpedo, or small stealthy drone, or a guided bomb delivered with a stealth warplane, or by special forces soldiers disguised in a civilian boat or car or ATV, that can more easily evade air defenses that could more easily intercept a conventional sized missile or conventional bomber aircraft. If one could make a tactical nuclear weapon with a much smaller yield than even the 10-20 kiloton Davy Crocket bomb, one would even use it to make much smaller anti-armor/anti-ship/anti-fortifications weapons - with a four to ten pound mini-missile doing the damage of the two thousand pound bombs that are the largest typically used by fighter aircraft and as conventional ship and submarine launched missiles.

But, the much smaller size of the bomb is less likely to provoke a civilization ending counterattack, and, particularly if it is an H-bomb that doesn't spread uranium or plutonium all over the place, leaves a much smaller area irradiated for a shorter time period and doesn't do nearly as much damage to the global environment.

What this means for policy is another matter. 

On one hand, it suggests that investing in large numbers of multiple kinds of large modernized nuclear missiles and bombs doesn't really make sense. Optimally, one wants no more of them than is necessary to present a credible MAD deterrent. Why, for example, should you have land based ICBMs at all, when they turn those bases into first priority targets in World War III and are easier to use missile defenses against than SLBMs and nuclear bombs delivered by stealth aircraft or shorter range hypersonic missiles launched from aircraft.

On the other hand, if you create a significant arsenal of tactical nuclear weapons, particularly if other nations and insurgent groups follow your example, it is much more likely that they will actually be used in war. And, honestly, existing conventional bombs are more than adequate to destroy or disable that most heavily armored vehicles and all but the deepest and most secure bunkers, without crossing the line of normalizing the use of nuclear weapons in war.

Nuclear Batteries

Nuclear power for military applications has only been used for military submarines and large ships like aircraft carriers and mega-cruisers, in part, because they have been hard to scale down in size, and in part, because the nuclear materials in them could be used by an enemy, if captured, to make nuclear weapons.

But nuclear batteries, using lighter radioactive isotopes than uranium and plutonium (like thorium), that are not nearly as suitable for use in nuclear weapons, share the immense energy density of existing nuclear power plants on submarines (which use only 10 kg of fuel for decades), and large warships, and can be scaled down to arbitrarily small sizes (e.g. a pacemaker or watch or single automobile). Nuclear waste from nuclear batteries using lighter isotopes is also reputedly easier to dispose of than uranium. This has tremendous (I hesitate to use this overused phrase but it's appropriate here) game changing potential to reduce the logistics burden of military units. 

In fiction, this is basically the innovation that makes Iron Man's suit possible. 

Nuclear batteries facilitate quieter, lower maintenance, all electric military systems that don't need to be refueled for years, and that can also use that spare power to recharge electric devices in the unit and military lasers and directed energy weapons, and they allow fuel supplies to be decentralized to individual vehicles, systems, and equipment items. It generates no smoke or emissions smells. Combined with night vision, IR sensors, and LIDAR these vehicles could operate without lights at night. If a ship with a nuclear battery were sunk, it wouldn't create an oil slick that would endanger sailors who abandoned ship. 

The logistics burden involved in providing water to troops could be reduced as well. In coastal areas and at sea, it could power a desalinator, at least for showers and cleaning use, even if it wasn't good enough to make tasty water for drinking. In deserts, it could power a device to extract clean water from the air. In jungles and forests, it could power a water purifier that would allow local water supplies to be used. It could also power heat pumps in places that were too hot or too cold.

No more tanker ships. Propeller and rotor driven aircraft could dispense with aerial refueling tankers. No more vulnerable, unarmored convoys carrying diesel fuel. No more vulnerable fuel depots. No more reliance of distant fuel supplies whose prices are influenced by foreign powers who may become adverse to you.

And, because nuclear batteries can be much more compact than conventional fossil fuel tanks or chemical batteries, without sacrificing range, there is one less thing in the military system which can be easily struck causing the vehicle or military system to explode from its own fuel, because nuclear batteries are a much smaller target and, if properly designed with this risk in mind, aren't necessarily explosive if hit with a high explosive round.

Things That Are Hard To Predict

The mix of drones (armed and unarmed), guided bomb and missiles, active defenses including but not limited to directed energy weapons and jammers, new materials that could make armor lighter and stronger, hypersonic missiles, prototype "invisibility" cloaks, claimed (but not demonstrated) sensors that can penetrate radar stealth, and the use of artificial intelligence to organize information in the fog of war, identify incoming targets and respond before a human could react, and guide drones and guided munitions without active direction from a human controller and guide sniper weapons more accurate, all combine to make the future of warfare hard to predict.

Active defenses, particularly as used by Ukraine and Israel in recent conflicts, and by U.S. naval ships, have made securing air superiority much more challenging, intercept something like 85-90% of incoming missiles and drones reversing the one shot, one kill trend established by the first guided weapons, and could be the only thing that rescues tanks and fixed forward operating bases from obsolescence (while allowing the use of less armor since threats only countered by heavier armor can be actively intercepted). 

And, these are only in the early days. There is plenty of room to make interceptor munitions less expensive (particularly with directed energy weapons), to make them and their associated sensors smaller, lighter, and more secure, to increase the percentage of incoming munitions that are intercepted, and to increase their range.

On the other hand, countermeasures to active defenses, like AI guided and wire guided suicide drones that make jamming ineffective, are being developed rapidly too, out of necessity. So far, suicide drones have been mostly crude modification of commercial, off the shelf quadcopters, but there is also plenty of room to make them quieter, harder to see, and to make them harder to discern with radar and electronic signals.

Part of what makes the future course of these technologies so hard to predict is the constant, rapid Red Queen hypothesis evolution of measures and countermeasures. 

For example, recent efforts to develop rail guns with unguided rounds that rely purely on kinetic energy without resort to explosives or guidance systems, which were set aside because they were too difficult technologically, may receive renewed attention for their immunity to active defenses based upon jamming, lasers, or other directed energy weapons (like microwaves), and may be possible to scale down in size as heavier armor is abandoned in favor of active defenses.

Armed drones are much smaller and cheaper than comparable manned warplanes, warships, submarines, and military ground vehicles, and can be used to take much greater risks since the smaller ones are expendable. They have become the dominant weapons in the Ukraine War and in military encounters directly between Israel and Iran, and have been one of the primary weapons used in the war on terrorism carried out by the U.S. in the wake of 9/11. They can strike targets well beyond the range of slug throwing artillery, and can be effective in precisely striking the most vulnerable parts of moving targets whose exact location isn't known when they are launched, while reducing the risk of friendly fire.

So far, simple, remote controlled, flying drones have been predominant in military applications. But, we have seen glimpses of other possibilities. Large sophisticated drone fighter aircraft are smaller, cheaper, and capable of higher-G maneuvers and faster reaction times than manned fighter aircraft. Flying drones have been used to resupply troops in war zones in environments where there is too much enemy fire or the terrain is too difficult for conventional logistics convoys. Drone jet skis and speed boats filled with explosives have destroyed large warships in the Black Sea. Small, comparatively inexpensive, drone ships carrying anti-ship missiles in shipping containers have been successfully tested against target test ships. Small anti-personnel aerial drones carrying small arms or grenade sized munitions have been prototyped but not yet widely used, but could facilitate sniper-like tactics in conditions where these tactics were previously not viable.

Reconnaissance drones can identify enemy forces in ways that previously took much larger and more expensive helicopters, fixed wing reconnaissance aircraft, and satellites, at a cost and size that make them cost effective for even platoon or squad sized army units to use organically for themselves in real time. Coast guard cutters can use them to patrol far more of the sea at once, and more quickly and in more places at once, than any ship or boat could. Smaller battery powered reconnaissance drones can be similar in size, speed, and noise level to birds, making them harder to detect. The smallest insect-sized reconnaissance drones can enter buildings or clear anti-drone netting, undetected, aren't that expensive, are harder to shoot down if detected, and can be deployed in swarms. There have also been successful efforts to put cameras on actual roaches and other insects for tasks like locating survivors in the rubble of collapsed buildings. Small remotely monitored sensors can constantly monitor roads, bridges, fields, buildings, and ports with a much reduced risk of detection. And, unlike a human scout or forward observer, who is also easier to detect, they can't reveal many secrets, or create a POW hostage situation or casualty if they are captured.

Submarine drones can be on constant patrol for days or weeks for enemy armed submarines, sea mines, and enemy ships, or could follow enemy submarines to their hidden bases, while appearing to sensors like sea life. Submarine drones or mostly submerged drone ships can be used to smuggle supplies in interdicted waters, in the way that drug dealers have used them. Submarine suicide drones (or armed submarine drones) can be used to destroy enemy ships without being detected until it is too late, at distances far exceeding what is possible with a conventional torpedo.

Nuclear batteries could be used to create drones or remote sensors that can operate autonomously for years without human contact or maintenance.

It is hard to know what kind of balance and mix of technologies will emerge as experience and economics guide the choices that make sense as these technologies become more mature. 

For example, lots of drone and missile guidance systems (and military aircraft) are expensive to a significant extent, not because they are expensive to manufacture, but because a large premium is being paid for the intellectual property rights arising from the development process. So, a significant part of the cost barrier to their use is economic and could be addressed without any technological advancement (perhaps the military would be better off paying for R&D itself on a work for hire basis and retaining all of the intellectual property).

Things We Can Predict

This said, there are some predictions and conclusions that can be reached with some comfort:

* Tanks and conventional warships without active defenses are as obsolete against a near peer opponent as horse cavalry, warships with sails and cannons, swords, and bayonets. Howitzers and mortars throwing unguided slugs will follow soon.

* Large, mostly unarmored and undefended forward operating bases near "front lines" (such as they are), massed formations of ground troops and armored vehicles, and small pillbox type fortifications are obsolete tactics against near peer opponents.

* No armor, unaccompanied by active defenses, is effective against anti-armor weapons, which are increasingly inexpensive, light, and effective, making large, heavy military systems that rely on armor ineffective against near peer opponents. Armor pretty much only makes sense against enemy forces or insurgents or civilians with only small arms.

* The cost and availability of the weapons necessary to be effective, in a cost-effective way, against a big budget sovereign nation military force has greatly declined.

* National borders, national waters, and military tactics organized around front lines have limited relevance when long range strikes are widely available.

* Large nuclear weapons will continue to not be used because they don't serve useful military objectives.

* Biological weapons are unlikely to be widely used until they can be better controlled, because the risk of blow back to the user is great.

* Despite being lumped in with nuclear and biological weapons, chemical weapons, at least historically, have not been significantly more effective than conventional weapons, and have been amenable to effective countermeasures when they have been used like air sealed vehicles with positive air pressure, filters, protective clothing, and gas masks.

* Advances in modern military weapons have made great strides in destroying distant and armored targets, but drones, missiles, and guided bombs can't hold or control populated territory, which is one of the most common military objectives, without boots on the ground.

Observations Related To The Latest Conflict With Iran

In a nutshell, the most recent military conflict involving Iran, Israel, and the U.S. can be summed up as follows:

* Iran is getting close to developing nuclear weapons.

* Iran wants to remove Israel from the face of the Earth and that is why it is developing nuclear weapons.

* Iran has not very long ago launched missile and drone attacks on Israel.

* The Houthis in Yemen, Hamas in Gaza and the West Bank in Israel, and Hezbollah in Lebanon, are all Iranian proxy forces. Iran was deeply involved in facilitating the October 7, 2023 attack on Israel.

* Iran has had periodic military engagements with U.S. forces in the Persian Gulf.

* Israel carried out a major airstrike on Iran, mostly using F-35I stealth fighters with conformal fuel tanks to boost their range allowing them strike and return without aerial refueling, targeting Iran's nuclear program and key individuals in that program. Many of these targets were successfully struck and/or killed. But, one of Iran's most important nuclear facilities is in a very deep bunker in Iran.

* The U.S. used seven B-2 stealth bombers and with two "bunker buster" bombs each, to strike this very deep bunker with Iranian nuclear facilities (although probably only setting it back a few months), and used one of these and other carrier based aircraft to attack two other Iranian bases.

* It isn't clear that the U.S. has non-nuclear strike capabilities sufficient to truly destroy Iran's most secure nuclear program resources in its deepest bunker sufficiently to set its nuclear program back all that far.

* Before attacking Iran, the U.S. threatened it and evacuated personnel and ships from a U.S. naval base in Bahrain, and moved more carrier groups into the region.

* Iran counterattacked Israel and a U.S. military base in Qatar. Interceptor missiles apparently stopped all of the strikes on Qatar, and 80%-90% of the strikes on Israel, although this was not entirely successful and there was Israeli casualties. These defenses may not be sustainable, since Israel is running very low on key missile defense interceptor missiles that are part of its "Iron Dome" anti-missile and anti-drone defenses. But Iran's supply of effect long range missiles and armed drones and strike aircraft that can reach Israel is also not unlimited, and it has no quick source from which it can resupply itself (and Russia does not appear to want to get involved in this fight).

* Iran has been a major supplier of armed drones to Russia for it use in the Ukraine War.

* Iran has regularly interfered with shipping in the Persian Gulf and has a fairly impressive naval made up mostly of submarines and small missile boats, although it is building a drone carrier and has shipping container ballistic missiles as well.

* Many decades of sanctions have caused Iran to develop its own military industrial complex.

* Iran's government is officially under the supervision of a Shi'ite Islamic theocratic supreme leader since the Islamic revolution in 1979. But it has a democratic secular elected government, screened to remove candidates contrary to the regime or contrary to Shi'ite Islam, that has gradually been growing more powerful and more moderate. In part, this is because its economy is at least as dependent upon a diversified mercantile class as it is upon oil and gas exploitation (which is about 20% of its GDP) and agriculture.

* Iran is religiously diverse despite being a theocracy. It is home to many minority religions, that are tolerated, and its people are less religious in their daily lives and more secular leaning, than most countries in the Middle East, North Africa, and many other places in the Islamic world (like Pakistan and Afghanistan). Devout Shi'ite Muslims make up only a plurality of the population (about a third of the population) at most.

* Iran, not having the luxury of abundant oil wealth shared by a small population of citizens with real work done by temporary foreign laborers, like the Arab oil monarchies, has a substantial grass roots movement that wants fewer restrictions on women, more modernity, an identity that embraces its historical Persian roots rather than an exclusively Shi'ite Islamic national identity, more political freedom, and more freedom of speech. This said, there is wide grass roots opposition to and hate of Israel and the United States in Iran. In general, Shi'ite Muslims have been less backwards than Sunni Muslims in the Middle East. Iranians, and in particular, Iranian women, are also better educated than many Middle Eastern countries.

* But for its attacks and proxy attacks on Israel, its direct and indirect attacks on Persian Gulf and Red Sea commerce, its nuclear program, its military support for Russia, the sensible thing to do would be to allow Iran to percolate with its own internal conflicts and political developments without foreign interference. This would probably have led to considerable moderation and maybe even disestablishmentarianism, either politically or through a counterrevolution, sometime in the next five to twenty years. But, its violent foreign policy has made intervention more urgent.

* Israel was basically already at war with Iran and was entirely reasonable in taking action to prevent Iran from obtaining military capabilities that would be used to obliterate it.

* On the merits, U.S. military support for Israel in its strikes on Iran's nuclear capabilities was not unreasonable.

* The U.S. has, without really intending to do so, defanged Iran's main potential military opponents in Iraq and Afghanistan, through invasions of those countries, freeing up Iran's military resources to take on Israel and to interfere with Persian Gulf trade and to become an arms supplier to Russia.

* Neither the Israeli strikes nor the U.S. strikes appear to have done all that much to degrade Iran's air defenses, its air forces, its drone forces, its long range missile capabilities, its Persian Gulf navy, its anti-ship missiles, or the military industrial complex it uses to supply itself, Russia, the Houthis, Hamas, and Hezbollah. But, if the U.S. and Israel are going to be attacking Iran anyway, those seem like sensible additional targets.

* A sustained ground invasion of Iran makes no military sense. There is no likely scenario in which the U.S. sends hundreds of thousand of U.S. group troops to Iran, possibly as part of a multi-national coalition like those in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, or needs to new military draft. This a a conflict involving strikes with aircraft, missiles, and drones, and defenses against counterattacks by similar means and at sea, and in terror attacks (most likely not primarily on U.S. soil, and more like the U.S.S. Cole attack by al Qaeda on October 12, 2000 in Yemen, and Shi'ite militia attacks on U.S. forces in Syria and Jordan in the waning days of the Syrian civil war).

* It isn't at all obvious that regime change can be achieved in Iran without a ground invasion, or that killing key political and theocratic leaders in Iran would result in much of a change in Iranian policies. Indeed, attacks by Israel and the U.S. on Iran probably strengthen the regime against these common enemies in the short run. Iran has plenty of adequate potential successors to its current leaders who wouldn't seem much different in their policies towards Israel, the U.S., and maritime commerce.

* A claimed U.S. brokered cease fire hasn't really held at all, for even t twenty-four hours.

* The Israeli-U.S. strikes on Iran's nuclear program wouldn't have been necessary if Trump hadn't ended an Obama negotiated deal with Iran related to its nuclear program in 2018.

* Both Israel's leadership and the U.S. leadership have reasons to divert attention from domestic affairs to this conflict. It does have a genuine solid military motive, but the timing may very well be politically motivated.

* It isn't clear that President Trump had the legal authority to strike Iran in support of Israel without Congressional authorization which was not sought or obtained. This strike is not within the scope of the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), or any of the authorizations made in connection with the Iraq War.

* The MAGA right is divided on the desirability of this strike and it isn't clear that Trump could have promptly secured backing from Congress to make the strike if he'd asked it to do so.

* While a military strike directly on Iran from the U.S. no doubt does increase the likelihood of retaliation on the U.S. from Iran, the notion that we should be suspicious of Iranian-Americans, many of whom are medical professionals working in rural America, is very doubtful. There are probably not lots of Iranian "sleeper cells" in the U.S. who want to commit terrorist acts in the U.S.

* Political protests against Israel's treatment of the Palestinians is long standing on the American left, and has legitimate justification, particularly given an Israeli military response in Gaza to the October 7 attacks that, while understandable, particularly because Hamas continues to hold Israeli hostages and refused to surrender, has been overkill. Notably, however, the October 7 attacks had widespread support in Gaza long after the blowback it suffered from them became clear. The U.S. opposition to Israel's treatment of the Palestinians is predominantly not anti-Semitic, and isn't even predominantly anti-Zionist. It is mostly a very general pro-human rights driven movement.

* The Israeli response to October 7 in Gaza has been so completely destroyed that the enclave that it can support only perhaps a third or a half as many people as it had before the attacks (see also here). While there have been tens of thousands of Gazan deaths so far there, the clock is ticking and there will soon be either many hundreds of thousands to millions of Gazan deaths from starvation, lack of water, and illness, or a mass exile of people who are currently in Gaza, which no Islamic countries are volunteering to sponsor.

Christianity's Prospects

Globally, Christianity faces different issues in different places. In Europe (including heavily colonized formerly British Australia, New Zealand and Canada), in the U.S., and in South Korea and much of Asia, trends away from religion entirely are the biggest issue. In Latin America, the Catholic-Protestant divide is more prominent as Protestantism eats away at Catholicism although secularism is an issue too.

In the Middle East, North Africa, and much of the rest of Asia, the conflict between Christianity and Islam is center stage (except in Israel with its Jewish-Muslim conflict taking center stage and Christianity taking something of a bystander role).

As an aside, Iran despite being formally a theocratic Shi'ite Islamic state, is actually quite religiously divided and has surging levels of irreligion. This is atypical in predominantly Islamic countries which tend to be dominantly Sunni Islamic and more religious on average, by far, than predominantly Christian or Jewish countries. I have less of a finger on the pulse of the Sunni Islamic world and its prospects, however, than the religious tendencies of other parts of the world (despite having considerably more factual knowledge about Sunni Islam and these regions than the vast majority of Americans, even those with college educations). Secular, communist trends in predominantly Islamic places like Turkey, Egypt, Syria, and Iraq seem to have reversed.

Christianity in the U.S.

The continued decline "market share" of Christianity in the United States in the coming decades seems highly likely. It may drop to less than 50%, if not by the end of my life, during my children's lifetime.

This is almost certain to persist because young people are much less likely to be Christianity adherents than older people, so as older people die, the share of Christians falls, even in the absence of deconversion. 

This fall seems to be somewhat stalled in the last few years. But, there is a much lower tendency to convert to Christianity after leaving it than there is to deconvert from being a Christian. And, shifts in the percentage of people who follow a religion tend to follow a logistic curve, with the highest rate of change when the relative percentages of each category are most equal. 

We also have the precedent of Europe which is much less religious than it was shortly after World War II. So, this is almost sure to continue.

Of course, some new religious movement, more adaptive to current conditions, could change the picture dramatically.

Further, in accordance with the maxim that religions that protect threatened cultures thrive. Part of why Christianity declined in Europe is that most of those countries had state established religions which were particularly aligned with the secure, establishment culture, with exceptions like Ireland, where Catholicism was protecting Irish culture from English Protestantism, and Poland, where Catholicism was protecting Polish culture from secularizing communism.

White Catholics are on a trajectory close to that of White Protestant with steady decline associated with age, while Hispanic Catholics are on a different, more religious track, mirroring the predominantly Catholic but emerging Pentecostal trend of Latin America, as the establishment Catholicism with no culture to protect in Latin America loses it's shine but does better in the U.S. where it is protected Latin American immigrant culture.

In another illustration of this tendency, in the U.S. (and in Europe) religion thrives among recent immigrants whose homeland culture is threatened by the very different culture of their new homes, but fades as waves of immigrants assimilate.

The U.S. is more religious than Europe, in part, because it has never had an established religion, which left religious denominations from becoming as establishment, and in part, because it has such high levels of foreign born people who have non-U.S. cultures that are threatened in the new homeland that religion can protect.

 

The stall in deconversion is also related to the extent to which the large coalition of subcultures at odds with the establishment which is the Southern/Appalachian/rural subculture that is associated with the Republican party has members who find themselves in deep distress as their members are two to four times less economically productive than the members of the American establishment that is currently associated with the Democratic party, which is distinguished by its embrace of science, its acceptance of racial and ethnic diversity, its feminism, its acceptance of LGBTQ people, its acceptance of alcohol and recreational drugs, its globalism, and its lack of a culture of honor. 

Members of the Southern/Appalachian/rural coalition of cultures make up a third to half of the people in the United States. Its members are older than the rest of the U.S., whiter, less connected to the global economy, and more distrustful of science and education. One large share of them live in places that have very little racial, ethnic, religious, or immigrant sourced diversity. Another large share of them live in South and are deeply divided between conservative whites who identify as "American" and blacks who are the descendants of slaves and have not migrated to big cities who make up a large minority of the population.

Christianity in Asia

South Korea is one of most Christian nation in East Asia and Southeast, with about 23-31% who are Christian and about 60% who espouse no religion (historically classified by geographers and demographers as "Confucian" although younger generations may be less strictly Confucian than older generations).

Those only other countries in the region (and arguably these are Oceanian countries) with such a high percentage of Christians are East Timor which is 97% Roman Catholic (and 1% other Christian for a total of 98% Christian), the Philippines which is 79% Roman Catholic and 13% other Christian (for total of 92% Christian) with a notable Muslim minority.

Countries in East, Southeast and South Asia with smaller but significant Christian populations include Singapore which is 19% Christian (and about 31% Buddhist), the former territory of Hong Kong within China which is about 12% Christian, Indonesia which is about 11% Christian - about 8% Protestant and 3% Catholic (and 83% Sunni Islam), Brunei which is about 10% Christian (and 81% Sunni Islam), Malaysia which is about 9% Christian (and 63% Sunni Islam), the former territory of Macau within China which is about 9% Christian, Vietnam which is 8% Christian and 70% irreligious, Sri Lanka which is about 8% Christian and 70% Buddhist, Myanmar is 6% Christian and 89% Buddhist, Taiwan which is about 5% Christian and 35% Buddhist, China which is about 4% Christian and 65% irreligious, India which is about 2% Christian and 80% Hindu (with most of the rest split between irreligious people, Muslims, and a variety of other beliefs like Buddhism and Sikhism which originated there), Mongolia is about 2% Christian and 53% Tibetan Buddhist, Japan is about 2% Christian and about 77% a syncretic mix of folk Shinto and Buddhism. The rest of the region is less than 2% Christian.

Indonesia is a huge country with great regional variation, with Christianity being most common in Northern Borneo, West Papuan areas, and its smaller eastern islands, as well as regional pockets in its larger, eastern, predominantly Muslim islands (and with a notable Hindu enclave in Bali and a small Buddhist enclave in central Borneo).

Map from here.

In central Asia, Kazakhstan is 25% Christian and 70% Sunni Muslim, Turkmenistan is 9% Christian and 89% Sunni Muslim, Kyrgyzstan is 7% Christian and 86% Sunni Muslim, and Uzbekistan is 3% Christian and 90% Sunni Muslim.

Christianity in Africa

Islam is common in Africa in the Sahel, the Sahara, North Africa, and along much of its eastern coast. 

Map from here.

But Christianity is flourishing and growing in sub-Saharan Africa, which was historically animist. Twenty-seven Sub-Sarahan African countries (including Ethiopia and Eritrea) are majority Christian and many more have large Christian minorities or pluralities. It isn't unthinkable that Africa could be home to a plurality of Christians within the lives of my children.

What If They Get What They Want?

Suppose that Trump gets most of what he wants, just slower than he hoped, as SCOTUS takes time to overrule setbacks he faces in the lower courts, and as Congress enacts through legislation what he fails to achieve through Executive Orders.

* Massive cuts in federal government programs, even if a few of the initial cuts are rolled back as imprudent, will have a devastating effect on most red states, especially in the South and Appalachia. Federal aid is 50% of the government budget in West Virginia, for example. Local tax revenues won't be able to replace lost federal aid. 

* Special education will basically vanish there. Schools in low income communities will be deeply starved for resources. 

* More of the poor will start dying from preventable diseases in the tens of thousands a year.  Infant and maternal mortality will soar. Infectious diseases will become more common. Food poisoning will again be a concern in every day life. Increased pollution, especially in low income areas, will lead to diseases associated with dirty air and dirty water. 

* The elderly, the disabled, and military veterans won't be able to get by and will have to leave their homes to live with extended family, or will live far more meager lives of poverty and despair. Social security, realistically, won't vanish, but programs like social security disability will be much harder to access and benefits will probably be cut.

* Medical and scientific research will basically vanish. Federally supported financial aid (both grants and loans) with dry up, shutting working class and middle class students out of higher education to a great extent. International students will become much more scarce. The best professors and scientists, especially in fields not culturally tied to the U.S., like science and engineering and medicine, will emigrate. Their goal of making colleges and universities conservative will largely fail, notwithstanding witch hunts to try to root out liberals in academia. Red states will greatly reduce funding for their public colleges and universities and have few well-endowed private colleges and universities that will struggle to downsize as well. Blue states will pick up some of the loss of funding caused by lost federal support, but will nonetheless be seriously disrupted. And, even in blue states, all but a few of the most well-endowed colleges and universities will have a much larger share of upper middle class and rich students. Bright, academically capable, working class and middle class young adults, shut out of higher education, will turn to lower management and union leadership posts.

* Loyalty purges and cuts at the nation's military academies will within four or five years significantly reduce the quality of the U.S. military's officer corps in every single one of our military services. Impaired international trade and a declining domestic manufacturing sector and the loss of scientific and engineering talent will mean that the U.S. military pays more for less in military equipment procurement and produces less capable systems. But the U.S. retreat from a global military presence may mean that the new, less capable U.S. military won't be tested.

* Public schools across the nation will lay off teachers, and see their best and brightest and most caring teachers leave the profession.

* Mass deportations and trade friction and the loss of federal aid will cripple U.S. farmers, will probably cause more than half of U.S. farms to fail with abandoned farms dotting the landscape of every rural area in the country, and will greatly drive up the price of food while reducing its quality and variety. The same pressures will greatly shrink the construction industry. Working class men across the nation will see a dramatic surge in unemployment. Kids in high school and middle school will be pressured to work long hours in unskilled work to make up for the loss of immigrant labor, in the fields, at construction sites, and in the hospitality and food service industries.

* The U.S. manufacturing industry will crumble and the price of everything will surge.

* Reduced gun regulation and economic collapse will drive up crime rates. Drug dealing will rise as people try to cope with despair and that will also drive up crime rates because decriminalization will end and go backwards.

* Poverty rates will rise.

* LGBT folks will migrate away from red states to avoid active state sponsored persecution.

* New obstetrics and gynecology specialists will refuse to take positions in anti-abortion states, and a meaningful share of existing ones will also relocate, leading to greater maternal morality, more stillbirths, more unwanted pregnancies, and more congenital disorders in infants there. The loss of Medicaid funding will close down many rural hospitals and will hit labor and delivery wards especially hard.

* Financial and technology and manufacturing companies will relocate outside of the U.S., which will be a boon for places like the U.K., Ireland, New Zealand, Australia, and Canada, but will hurt the American economy greatly.

* Once conquered, Greenland and the Panama Canal, will see local military insurgencies emerge. An invasion of Greenland will end NATO and result in all European and Canadian military bases closing.

* Emboldened by a weak U.S., China will conquer Taiwan and make the Philippines a subject state, because the U.S. won't have the means or the will to fight China and China will have little to lose having been alienated in international trade from the U.S. China will also start supplying military equipment, supplies, and even troops to Russia, turning the tide in Russia's favor in the Ukraine War, despite vigorous and costly military aid to Ukraine from the rest of Europe.

* A complete U.S. withdrawal from Africa will give ISIS affiliated forces in Africa a modest boost.

* Canada will realign its economy to trade far less with the U.S. and far more with everyplace else, and will see a medium term boost as it absorbs high quality immigrants from the U.S.

* A major global economic recession will tank oil prices which will cause most U.S. oil producers to shut down and cause the U.S. to import far more oil which will be costly because the dollar will be much weaker.

* Disinvestment from the U.S. will drive up interest rates. This will squeeze the federal budget as the cost of interest on the national debt goes up, taking away lots of the gains from spending cuts, and combined with the blow to the construction industry, will make housing less affordable and contribute to homelessness. Migration for red states that are economically collapsing with less federal spending to blue states that were not so reliant upon federal spending, will also drive up blue state housing costs and lead to a surge in homelessness in blue states.

* Many immigrant professionals in medicine and tech will either leave positions they have filled in red states for blue state posts, or return to their homelands, leaving a shortage of skilled medical personnel and weakening the competitive edge of U.S. tech companies.

* Red states will start ignoring the establishment clause and have governments that are overtly Christian, leading non-Christians to migrate to blue states and making them even less tolerant of religious minorities.

* Smart and talented young people will move away to blue states at an even greater rate than they already do, leaving a lower quality work force in red states and undermining red state economic prosperity even further.

* Increased government corruption will strengthen a class of American oligarchs.

* New high speed rail and transit programs will end, almost everywhere.

* Tesla, with less government support, will wither and may even go out of business, with remnants acquired by its competitors.

* Carrying a passport on your person will become necessary for almost everyone, especially Hispanics and Asians.

* Museums and monuments documenting the history of anyone who isn't a white man will be looted with that part of U.S. history permanently lost to some extent, and minority and women's related and LGBT related books will be removed from public libraries in red states and will find themselves limited to private collections.

* Unemployment rates of minorities and women will be higher relative to whites and men than they have been historically.

* Suicide rates will increase greatly.

* The U.S. life expectancy will fall.

* Red state birth rates will rise by an amount that will offset rising maternal and infant and childhood mortality there, even as the raw number of births fall, as the number of women of childbearing age will fall as those women disproportionately relocate to blue states and immigrant populations fall, making it harder for young men in red states to find wives and partners. Birth rates will fall in blue states, partially made up for in absolute numbers of births by an increased number of young women in those states, but overall, U.S. birth rates will fall despite pro-natalist government incentives.

* The U.S. will experience a recession of a magnitude and duration not seen since the Great Depression.

* Unfair election reforms, both nationally and especially in red states, and targeted persecution of dissenters, will mute the extent to which increasingly unpopular sentiment towards Republicans translates into electoral results.

* Tooth decay will surge, but it will be harder to afford dental care.

* Income inequality will rise, and taxes will fall on the rich, although in blue states, this will be offset by new taxes that fall most heavily on high earners.

* More generally, "state capacity" will fall greatly across the U.S., and U.S. infrastructure, nationally, but especially in red states, will decay.

* Global warming will slow at a lower rate than it would otherwise, resulting in more climate change impacts in the U.S., especially in the South and the Southwest (which is more red than blue).

* The U.S., in general, but red states, in particular, will slip significantly towards losing developed country status and becoming a merely developing nation, in a collapse of economic progress unrivaled outside post-Soviet Russia. 

* The U.S. will sink further and further down in all manner of international ratings from GDP per capita, to productivity, to democracy, to corruption, to economic growth, to human development, to life expectancy, to cost of living (which will go up), to obesity, to intergenerational economic mobility, to education, and so on. The U.S. incarceration rate and crime rate will rise again.

* Tourism to the U.S. will plummet and a U.S. passport will become less valuable as other countries impose new visa requirements on Americans.