The Decline of Paid Employment

Slavery was an institution found in virtually all human societies in history until the modern era. Only in the last two hundred-odd years has it come to be seen as anything but an inevitable facet of life. Other similarly cruel and brutal systems, from serfdom to theocracy, have died out just as recently.

Why did these ancient institutions meet such a sudden end? For any righteous political activist growing up in the modern world, their existence must surely be seen as a terrible crime, and their end a great victory for morality.

I would however, take a much more realistic view. There is a simple truth about the world many fail to grasp, on both the left and right. One must realize that these systems did not come to an end due to any sudden moral awakening on the part of humanity. To be blunt, they ended because they became obsolete. The reason why could be summed up in one phrase - the industrial revolution.

Once more than a tiny fraction of the population could read and write, modern institutions like democracy and free markets became practical for the first time. How could you have currency or a stock market or secret ballots in an illiterate society? Such systems, we can see, are not inherently better than monarchy or feudalism in all ways. They of course have huge advantages in terms of efficiency and accountability, but they come at the cost of being sufficiently complex that they are a luxury no subsistence economy can truly afford. Only when their time has come can we confidently proclaim them 'superior'.

If we look at history, we can see that society has progressed through a number of stages to reach where it is today based on the technologies and resources available at the time. Marxists talk of the different 'modes of production' that humanity has passed through over time, like steps up a ladder. Just as we have progressed from horses to helicopters, from campfires to nuclear reactors and from canoes to battleships, the way large, advanced societies are organised sees similarly vast leaps take place. 

While definitions vary, there are generally seen to have been five different modes of production throughout history - tribal, ancient, feudalism, capitalism and finally socialism.

Tribalism - or 'primitive communism' refers to the organisation of hunter-gatherer humans into small bands who more or less share their resources and the burden of labor communally. The 'ancient' mode of production refers to the first  large, organised societies, where there was a specified hierarchy and different people specialized in different roles, ones usually determined by birthright. Slavery also traces its origins to this period.

This was followed by the 'feudal' mode of production, generally seen as a step above slavery as people are generally no longer considered one another's property. Rather, there was a somewhat more even balance of power between landlords and serfs, wherein the latter would rent land from and work for the former in return for military protection. 

In the last few hundred years we've then seen the development of capitalism, a system that, despite its flaws, is miles ahead of those before it. Working in a capitalist's factory for money rather than on a lord's land for protection certainly improved the bargaining power of the lower classes and improved social mobility, but it was not the end of the journey. From the 19th century onward, we've indeed witnessed the modern economy make a gradual transition from capitalism to socialism. 

While dogged neoliberals may remain deliberately blind to these changes, they should be obvious to everyone else. The size of the public sector of nearly all western economies has shot up dramatically in the past hundred years, now averaging 43% of GDP among OECD nations, and still rising. Government spending on everything from education and healthcare to pensions and welfare has never been higher, and this is despite the end of communist party monopolies over power in Russian and eastern Europe.

Over the same time period, the average number of hours worked by individuals has been steadily declining. It was as high as 60 hours in industrialized countries in the late 19th century, but declined to about 40 hours in the aftermath of WW2. It was 35.5 hours here in Australia as of 1978, and is just 33 hours today. Even this figure is quite high among western countries, with it being as low as 26 hours in Germany and under 30 hours in a number of others. In response, western countries have been gradually decreasing their working weeks and increasing their minimum wages as the jobs market dries up. France introduced its 35 hour week in 2000, and Sweden is now trialing a 30 hour week.

This decline has largely been driven by technology. Pre-industrial revolution anywhere from 95-99% of the population in a society had to be devoted to subsistence farming simply to produce enough food to feed itself. The industrial revolution put an end to this system however, and today in western countries only about 2% of the population works in agriculture. The reasons why should be self evident - a single worker driving a combine harvester can perform the work of a thousand peasants armed with nothing more than blades and sticks.

Despite this massive change in the nature of the employment market, other jobs for workers have generally been found so far. The period from roughly 1850-1970 saw the value of the industrial sector of the economy peak in western countries. A combination of outsourcing and improved technologies now sees the services sector predominate however, with the largest modern employers in the US being retail, accommodation, professional, technical and administrative services. Developing countries like China are still in the earlier phase, with 40% of that country's GDP driven by the industrial sector, compared to 20-25% in most western countries, but they are bound to catch up in another generation or two.

The result of all this so far is that we are working far less in paid employment, and instead devoting our time to other activities. Some 30% of people in western countries now have college degrees for instance, meaning they are well into their 20s before they properly enter the workforce in the first place. Volunteerism has also seen a rise in recent years. The number of volunteers in Australia doubled between 1995 and 2010, with unpaid labor now contributing $14 billion to the economy, and rising. Also worth noting is the more than $300 billion Americans gave to charity last year, and the record global foreign aid budget of $130 billion in 2013. Clearly then, the lack of a direct financial incentive does not stop everyone from working. There are plenty of people out there who want to contribute to our society one way or another, rather than turning into the proverbial couch potatoes people on welfare are generally perceived as.

Unemployment worldwide has remained high since the great recession of 2009, averaging 10% in Europe, and with youth unemployment more than double that figure. Not only is the unemployment rate up, but underemployment has also increased dramatically. The latter figure refers to those who are already working part-time or casual and are able and willing to work more, yet are unable to find such work. Australia's unemployment rate may be only 6%, but total underemployment is over 13%.

Even in places where the jobs market has somewhat recovered - America being an example with unemployment now having fallen back below 7%, those jobs are generally very low paying, minimum wage positions that are little better then unemployment. The country is long overdue for a minimum wage increase anyway, and with polls showing 70-80% of the population supporting such a measure, it is bound to happen soon.

In short, despite the confident predictions of many economists, unemployment has often not decreased following the crisis, even with renewed growth in the economy. Many of those jobs are, it seems, gone for good, and are not coming back. Such is the downside of new technologies. The average consumer today can expect to shop at a supermarket without any interaction with a human, using a self-serve checkout instead. Tickets at train stations are routinely bought from and validated by machines as well, and when one wants to access information, people are vastly more likely to go to Wikipedia - a non-profit website, then walk into a library.

The trend should be clear - in more and more areas, less and less labor is being required, and where there is labor, it is increasingly voluntary.

This is a long-term trend that shows no sign of reversing. There are many other breakthroughs on the horizon that will further stress the jobs market. Self-driving cars, already being tested by Google, will have a major impact. About half a million jobs in Australia are primarily based around driving a vehicle of some kind - truck drivers, bus drivers, taxi drivers, and so on. This is not to mention those that work in car insurance offices or repair shops, which will also see major cutbacks. Then there's train drivers, pilots, street sweepers, pizza delivery boys, construction workers, laborers of all kinds and yes, indeed, perhaps even the man driving the combine harvester through the fields...

We can expect that most of these jobs will disappear over the next 20-50 years. What happens to these workers is a serious question - where will they go?

While for the time being the market may provide, that will not be the case forever. Few jobs will be safe from the march of technology indefinitely, and it is this that will truly kill the free market as an institution. Paid work will eventually be replaced by two things - machines and other forms of automation, and volunteerism. A description of a truly socialist society is one where people are not coerced, through force or poverty, into performing jobs they do not want to do. This has previously been described through phrases such as - "if people do not want to go down coal mines, then we shall not mine coal..."

While impractical before now - with slavery, serfdom and sweatshops having been required to sustain the lifestyles of the affluent, this kind of society is gradually taking shape. Ultimately there will only be two kinds of labor - that done by people who are willing to perform jobs freely as they desire to do so, and that done by machines and other forms of automation. Just as slavery came to an end in the 19th century, paid employment, or 'wage slavery' as it has rightly been described, will continue to decline dramatically over the 21st century. The result will be a dramatically expanded welfare state as most people simply stop working once their labor is no longer needed.

The time-frame for this change is hard to predict, but I would hazard a guess of over the next fifty to a hundred years. It may also be unwise to try and accelerate such a change too quickly. As said above, these things depend on context. Despite its merits, implementing universal suffrage was impractical in most countries before the 20th century as the vast majority of the population was so poorly educated. Within a relatively short period of time however, this changed, and most of the world's monarchs swiftly fell from power in just a few decades.

The Communist revolutions that swept over much of the world in the early-mid 20th century can also best be described as 'premature' despite achieving a great deal in ending feudalism and lifting the living standards of millions of people. In hindsight, it seems society was not yet advanced enough for selfishness to be kept at bay, eventually causing the Soviet Union to collapse under the weight of its own inefficiencies, corruption and paranoia.

A more local example could be something like Prime Minister Bob Hawke's re-election pledge in 1987 that - "by 1990, no Australian child will be living in poverty..." In accepting such a policy as good, one is not necessarily saying that for all the previous governments up until that point to not have such a policy was fundamentally bad. Rather, the key point is that the timing was right, that by the 1980s Australia was a wealthy enough society that it could afford such a social luxury.

I would like to quote a work of fiction here as well. In Martin Scorsese's film 'The Aviator' about the life of Howard Hughes, there is a scene where the titular character is dining with a wealthy family. When the discussion turns to politics, the head of the house proclaims "We're all socialists here. We don't care about money..." to which Howard Hughes replies "Well, that's because you have it."

At the time, its portrayed as a real zinger against a group of arrogant, self-proclaimed socialists, and it is. But thinking it through to its logical conclusion, one realizes - the wealthier the world gets, the less need there is for greed and selfishness. In many third world countries if you get pulled over by the police, all you have to do is hand them a few dollar bills and they'll let you on your way. If you tried that in a first world country however, where the police are actually properly paid, it would be a sure way to get arrested. Only when we're sufficiently wealthy that no one in our society has to starve or sleep under a bridge - a state we are rapidly approaching, will human nature truly be tamed. At this point, socialism easily becomes the most practical system. In a post-scarcity economy, what need is there for greed and selfishness?

This, ladies and gentlemen, is the way capitalism is going to end. Not with the rumble of Russian tanks, or with Hammer and Sickle banners hanging over Times Square, but with the building of machines to perform out dirty work for us, reducing labor costs so dramatically than only people who will work for free will even be considered. Welfare spending, paid for on the backs of our silicon servants or through charity, will provide for the population. While it may seem jarring, one should not be scared of such a future. The vast majority of the population will finally be able to achieve what has previously only been reserved for the tiny minorities that are the landed gentry and wealthy capitalists - the right to not have to work for a living. 

There is truly no greater right. People will finally be able to fully devote themselves to what they wish to do in life - be it learning, volunteering, travelling or any of a thousand different types of leisure. Menial labor will shrink to a minimum. It is a future that certainly sounds better than working in a dreary office or dangerous work-site for forty hours every week. I realize also that in saying all this, people may make accusations that I'm advocating laziness, and assert that to live off welfare is undesirable. On the contrary, I'd say working in a sweatshop fourteen hours a day is what is undesirable.

The bottom line is that - provided society does not collapse in the near future due to some external factor such as climate change, the depletion of fossil fuels, a nuclear war or anything to that effect, most of the population will eventually be permanently unemployed. Indeed, boredom may soon become the greatest long-run problem humanity will face. Any society that can say that about itself however, is probably the best it is possible to create.

The Ladder of Civil Conflict

In any country, no matter how stable and prosperous, there's bound to be some discontentment among the populace at any given time. There'll no doubt be political debates and employment disputes, crime and income inequality. We're humans, at heart we're still a bunch of selfish, easily excitable apes, who are bound to get angry, and potentially violent, when we don't get our way.

This is one of the beauties of democracy however, and the main reason nearly every major country on Earth has adopted it as a system of government. Democracy, I think you'll find, isn't as different from a more dictatorial form of government as you'd think. People aren't inherently more peaceful and reasonable in a democracy. Their anger however, is much more easily managed. Rather than have a revolution or civil war, we bring about changes in government through elections, a much more peaceful method.

Often however, in countries democratic or not, we aren't able to agree on issues peacefully, at which point things can potentially grow violent. Having watched events such as the Arab Spring unfold in recent years, I've noticed there's a general ladder up which events tend to escalate. From protests to riots to full-blown civil wars, the way a country collapses into chaos tends to follow the same stepping stones. Here I'll try and list the various stages. Note that a society does not automatically proceed all the way up the ladder from step one, in fact it usually doesn't, but at each stage they are warning signs any government should be wary of. Placating the people by giving them what they want is usually preferable to letting such a pressure-cooker boil until it explodes completely.

So anyway, lets begin.

1 - students protests

Students, I can vouch from long experience, will protest just about anything. This is true of university students in particular. Combined with high unemployment, this is a potent mix, as countries like Spain and Greece have seen in recent years. Even in my own country of Australia, a country which one can't deny is pretty damn free and prosperous, there's never any shortage of issues for student activists to get excited about - the treatment of asylum seekers, education cuts, the carbon tax, the mining tax, logging in Tasmania, dredging on the Great Barrier Reef, fracking, the East-West tunnel, indigenous rights, the Trans Pacific Partnership, coal power in the Latrobe Valley...and that's just 2014 so far.

Believe it or not, there are about six people I know in this picture...

By and large, I don't think governments take these protests all that seriously, precisely since they're so easy to provoke. Still, I wouldn't say they serve no purpose. I find something comforting about it. It bolsters your faith in humanity a bit that there are certain sections of society who will try and protest anything they perceive as evil at every point, regardless of how reasonable or necessary it may be. Its a useful check on our own morality, and sure, people may get annoyed at groups of teenagers in bright red Che Guevara shirts holding up 'F*ck Tony Abbott' signs and screaming about how conservatives are such racists, but what else do you expect from young people? At least they're not out torching cars and ingesting crystal meth. Billy Joel, I think, put it best -

2. Worker's protests

A step above student protests, I might as well have called this 'grown-up's protests'. When you have actual adults, i.e. busy people who have full time jobs, walking around, waving signs and chanting slogans, chances are you have a real issue at hand. This could take a wide variety of forms however, including organized political rallies or workers from one industry or another marching for better working conditions. I recall a protest in Melbourne a few years ago where Taxi drivers did just that.

Workers marches are, it would seem, a lot less common in the western world now then they used to be. I would attribute this to two main reasons. First of all, a lot of the demands of worker's unions from the 19th and 20th centuries have long been fulfilled, from the minimum wage to the forty-hour work week. Secondly, due to globalisation, many workers have feared their jobs going overseas if they pushed the management too hard. Only groups like the aforementioned taxi drivers, whose jobs obviously can't physically go overseas, are exempt from this. In the third world however, where worker's rights are still stuck in the 19th century, I feel we are just witnessing the beginning of this transition. The frequency of protests in China for instance has apparently shot up tenfold over the past twenty years, to beyond 100,000 annually. These have been held to protest everything from corruption to environmental degradation to human rights abuses, often no doubt prompting action on the part of the Beijing government.

3. Strikes/sit ins

The next step up. These have also grown increasingly rare in Australia and other western countries, with the last notable one here perhaps being the Waterfront Dispute in 1998. Probably the closest America ever came to a communist revolution was in the early 1930s at the height of the Great Depression when literally millions of workers went on strike country wide. The authorities, in typical fashion, treated the protests with disdain and reacted harshly. A number of strikers and police were killed and in most cases the strikers were laid-off and the efforts of the unions failed. However, governments should take note that if thousands of people are not just peacefully marching in the streets, but actually risking their financial livelihoods, for a cause, its probably a worthy one.

4. Public worker's strikes

Similar to the category above, but potentially a lot more serious. By 'public' workers I mean people like teachers, nurses and in particular police and other armed government branches. A few years ago some fifty thousand teachers in Victoria walked off the job demanding higher pay, with most of their demands eventually being met. Police strikes in particular (not to mention the military, which is when you really run into trouble) can bring governments to their knees very quickly. Rarely does a government here in Victoria last long after getting on the wrong side of the police union for instance.

Basically, while strikes in the private sector can often be safely ignored by a government, public sector strikes are a shade more serious. If the government cannot carry out its core functions any more it won't last long. The demands of public sector workers tend to be taken a lot more seriously, as by striking they tend to cause a lot more economic damage in a short amount of time.

5. General protests

This is perhaps where things start to get very serious, where government inaction can cause things to inevitably escalate further. This is when you don't have select groups of people - from miners to factory workers to teachers, marching in the streets, but instead what you could basically call the people rising up as one. This is the point at which the Arab Spring really came into the news, with scenes from places like Tahrir Square broadcast around the world.

^ What three hundred thousand angry people look like

The key element of these protests is really just their sheer size, as well as the diversity of the participants. They'll generally still be young, angry, underemployed people, but there's no set pattern. People are simply angry at the government, and generally are calling for major political changes, if not its outright overthrow, and from here things can quickly escalate. Even if they don't, many government may be worried enough at this point to send in the military to quell the protests. Tienanmen Square in 1989 would be an example of this, although by that point, things may be overlapping with the next category.

6. Riots

The different between 'protest' and 'riot' is really just an element of violence. If people are throwing bricks through windows and overturning cars, you're got a riot. Its not necessarily October 1917 yet of course, but if people are this angry about something, any government worth its salt is going to have to react. Violent crackdowns are often a result of this where things come to a head. Either order is restored, and the state survives, or it doesn't, and the government is at risk of falling.

Think Ukraine, right about now-ish...

As far as I'm aware, nobody's been killed in riots in Australia in recent years. Even the infamous Cronulla riots in 2005 concluded without any fatalities, though there were a number of injuries and arrests. This is, of course, the stage at which those occurrences start to happen, though some arrests and the occasional injury might have occurred before this point. Having said all this however, just because a riot occurs doesn't mean the government is in immediate danger of being overthrown. Most riots tend to be small and last no more than a few hours. They are much rarer than strikes or peaceful protests, but are going to occur sometimes even in the most stable countries. Alcohol and testosterone are often their fuel, but its only when that's mixed with determined ideology that things start to spiral out of control.

7. Bombings/Assassinations

This is the stage where, rather than being merely spontaneous, you start to have premediated violence. However at this point we're still talking about isolated or small groups of individuals, often carrying out poorly planned attacks which tend to have low casualties, though they often cause a disproportionate reaction in the media nonetheless.

In Australia this is basally unheard of. Aside from the occasional act of violence by crime gangs against the police (such as the Russell Street Bombing in 1986 or the Walsh Street Shootings in 1988) rarely has anyone actually plotted terrorism against the government. Even then, such acts were generally personal rather than political in nature. One should distinguish between mere 'crime' such as assaults or murders, and actual 'terrorism' that has a political element, whether against the government or other people in society. No Australian Prime Minister has ever even been targeted for assassination as far as I'm aware.

Events like the Oklahoma City bombing would probably count, as it was motivated by a hatred of the federal government in the US. Assassinations will usually fall into this category as well, as they almost always require a degree of planning, though sometimes when the assassin is just declared plain mad rather than murderous, it may not be. It is also worth noting that in some cases this category may actually be where the ladder begins, with events escalating from here, as the case of Archduke Franz Ferdinand demonstrates.

8. Insurgency/Coup

I feel there is a need for this category, between 'bombings' and 'revolution' as it relates to the number of people involved and the scale of the changes that occur, respectively. Bombings can be carried out by lone individuals, while a civil war requires the participation of large sections of society. This is somewhere in the middle, where you have one or more groups of people, numbering anywhere from a few hundred to many thousands, waging a campaign of violence against a central government, or else plotting to overthrow it.

Bus bombing in Russia 2013, courtesy of Islamic separatists

At any given time probably dozens of countries worldwide are dealing with this level of violence from certain elements in their population. They've been at least three suicide bombings in the southern Russian city of Volgograd alone in the past few months for instance. The country is far from in a state of civil war, but there has been a sustained campaign of violence from certain groups. Other recent examples of this would be the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka or the Taliban in Afghanistan. Wikipedia has a succinct list of ongoing conflicts worldwide here - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ongoing_armed_conflicts.

Note that in the list, they distinguish between 'minor' conflicts with less than 1,000 deaths per year and 'major' ones with death tolls higher then that. The number is arbitrary, and not entirely relevant, but you get the gist of the idea. Currently they list ten 'major' conflicts and thirty-one 'minor' ones. Most of them I think would fall under this category. Syria in particular however, and arguably Iraq, Somalia and Sudan as well, fall into the category of 'civil war'.

Another event that usually falls here would be a coup d'etat, as they tend to be carried out not by lone individuals or large sections of society, but by a connected conspiracy of individuals. Looking at what happened in Egypt in 2011, we can see that following the protests in Tahrir Square (category 5/6) the government did not fall from a complete revolution, but the military removed Hosni Mubarak from power (category 8) in a swift coup and called for fresh elections (an attempt, at least, at category 9). Following the elections however, protests began anew against the newly elected Muslim Brotherhood, quickly jumping past category 5 into 6 and 7. The military then stepped in once more, and since then the Islamic insurgency in the Sinai has increased in intensity lately (both category 8). Given that Egypt is still under military rule, it has not undergone a full political revolution (category 9) but it has thankfully avoided the category after - that of a civil war.

9. Revolution

The lines between the definitions blur somewhat here, but there are differences between 'coup', 'revolution' and 'civil war' that are worthy of mention. While they do not all automatically follow each other, all three of these involve the government being overthrown, though through different means and to different degrees.

Both a coup or a revolution can be largely bloodless, but the difference is that while a coup involves a change in a specific government, a revolution generally means an outright change in the system of government. If we look at Russia in the 20th century for instance, we have seen all three occur on occasion. The February 1917 revolution, where the Tsar was removed from power and replaced by a provisional government of noblemen and liberals would be category 8. When the Bolsheviks usurped their power later in that year, and declared the formation of a Communist state, that's when we're talking a real revolution, and of course, things quickly escalated into a civil war. Russia in 1991 as well, when the Soviet Union was dissolved, would be category 9, as the country went from a one-party state to a (nominal) democracy. This occurred with no more than a few hundred casualties, mercifully low for the scale of the change.

So this is how liberty's born? With the roar of tanks...

10. Civil War

The result of this stage is essentially the same as in category 9 (or maybe even just 8) but the route there is much more winding, and generally much bloodier. This is the point when the violence is no longer isolated to certain individuals or groups in society. This is where the battle lines have been drawn, and large numbers of people within a state are fighting each other to the death. We can assume casualties are going to be in the thousands at a minimum, and often in the hundreds of thousands or even the millions. Libya got to 30,000 in six months during its brief civil war in 2011. Syria, after three years of war, is somewhere around 150-200,000.

Recent civil wars in places like Yugoslavia, Rwanda and the Congo have been even bloodier. America in the 1860s, Russia from 1917 to about 1923, or China from the 1920s right up until 1949 saw chaotic periods like this. These conflicts, as with virtually every step on this ladder, can take on political, economic, ethnic or religious undertones, as well as many others.


So there you go, an approximate ladder up which all good revolutionaries may have to climb. In addition, I'll mention here two further categories, which expand the scale of human conflict beyond the boundaries of a single state.


11. Conventional war

This can certainly overlap with a civil war, but generally doesn't. Most rebel armies fight in an asymmetric style, waging a guerrilla war against a central government. Wars between states however will tend to involve organized armies, equipped with advanced weaponry like tanks, artillery and aircraft, and fighting on open battlefields or from fortified positions. Wars like this have been much less common since 1945, as the nuclear arsenals of the great powers have made conventional fights between them far too risky, but they still occur quite regularly. The Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s is one example, or Yom Kippur in 1973. These wars can be a stalemate (Korea 1950-53) or a slaughter (Kuwait 1991). The key point is that organised armies from two different states are taking part. If the pessimists are correct, Ukraine versus Russia might be the next conflict of this nature.

12. Nuclear war

This is a stage in human conflict that is only newly emerged, and has been resorted to very rarely. It could also be called 'warfare with weapons of mass destruction' as it is not confined just to nukes, but can include chemical or biological warfare as well. It is worth noting that the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction did not really begin during the Cold War after the invention of nuclear weapons, but some time earlier. Even at the height of the Second World War neither side dared use chemical weapons like poison gas against each other for fear of retaliation by the other side. If the planes of the Luftwaffe and Royal Air Force had been carrying pellets of poison gas in their bomb-bays during the battle of Britain, many of Europe's major cities may have been rendered uninhabitable within months. Even Hitler was not mad enough to use WMD's against the Allies, although the defenseless Jews were another matter...

Well this surely means war...

Source: http://www.mediaite.com/online/ukrainian-women-impose-sanctions-on-russians-no-sex/

A future timeline of Africa

I detailed in an earlier post - http://futuregeopoliticalscenarios.blogspot.com.au/2014/03/the-coming-african-world-war.html how Africa was bound to be a place of great violence and chaos throughout the 21st century as its population quadruples, it develops economically, endures revolution after revolution politically and its newly rising powers squabble amongst themselves for the continent's dwindling resources, many of which, like its oil reserves, have already been greatly plundered by the west.

I would like to elaborate here on how these events might unfold.

Speculation of this nature is by definition going to be imprecise, but we can still take a decent stab. Imagine if you will someone trying to predict the future of Europe in the 20th century back in 1900. They could not possibly have known that a World War would break out in 1914, and be followed up by an even bloodier sequel in 1939, but they could at least have predicted such a war breaking out at some point, and further guessed at its result. It was possible to observe the rise of such powers as Germany, Italy, Japan and Russia in 1900 and extrapolate that they would come into conflict with older powers like Britain and France at some point. The growing trend away from monarchy and towards democracy would also have been apparent.

Indeed, science fiction author H.G.Wells famously wrote a book in 1933 entitled 'The Shape of Things to Come' that speculated on how the future might unfold, and was startlingly accurate in predicting that a Second World War would break out by - drum roll please - Germany invading Poland, in 1940!

After that point however, Wells' predictions swiftly proceed off the beaten track. He predicted that the two countries would be about evenly matched and thus the war would be of a static, western front-like nature fought in trenches, and would last for an inconclusive ten years (rather than the 17-day blitzkrieg it took in reality). Meanwhile the Great Depression (in its early stages at the time of the book's writing) continues to worsen and causes the collapse of most nation-states, followed by large portions of humanity starving in the 1950s.

Eventually, the world's airlines (supposedly the only groups with real global reach) get together and start rebuilding the world under a benevolent dictatorship. All religion is eradicated and English is made the worldwide Lingua Franca. Eventually, around the year 2059, the dictatorship is peacefully overthrown and the world happily moves forward into utopia...

Anyway, reflecting my own somewhat more cynical (or might that be less cynical? I'm not quite sure, maybe just less winding...) view on the world then Wells, but in much the same format, I shall have now a stab as to what a future timeline of certain African countries might look like. We'll start with Africa's most populous country, one that is predicted to contain nearly a billion people by the end of this century - Nigeria.

2010s - Citing irreconcilable religious differences, growing inequality and a history of violence, a movement forms in the country calling for the northern Islamic half to secede

2018 - After widespread protests, the Northern half declares a new government, the Republic of Sokoto, which goes unrecognized by a majority of world powers, many of whom see it as a dangerous Islamist state, reminiscent of Taliban-era Afghanistan

2019-27 - Backed by western support, Nigeria invades Sokoto, suspending democracy in the process. Five million people die in the resultant war to unify the country which rages for eight years, the vast majority of them Muslim civilians

2030s - With the war over, a growing populist movement in Nigeria calls for the overthrow of the current government, citing rampant corruption, and calling for a return to democracy

2035 - A revolution topples the government, and a new, much more populist government is installed. Declaring a philosophy of 'Nigeria for Nigerians' it calls for a halting of oil exports to the west, whose influence it sees as dangerous, in favor of exports to other countries throughout the developing world, including China and India, Incompetence, corruption and economic instability also plague the new government, with elections under its tenure still widely considered biased and unfair

2039-44 - The United States launches an invasion of Nigeria, claiming the government's belligerence is a threat to world peace. The war however turns into 'another Vietnam' and in the next five years over a million Nigerians and twenty thousand American soldiers are killed before the US finally withdraws

2046 - With the withdrawal of the Americans a new, even more belligerent government comes to power. Fearing further western interference, it hatches a plan to arm Nigeria with nuclear weapons. The first such weapon is tested in 2049, and within a few years dozens of such weapons have secretly been constructed

2050s - Now nuclear-armed and desperately short of resources to sustain its swelling population, which has recently passed half a billion, the Nigerian military launches increasingly large incursions of neighboring countries, ostensibly for peacekeeping purposes, but mostly to secure resources for the country's economy, including farmland to feed its swelling population. From Mali to Sudan, Nigerian military occupations artificially cause famines on a scale not seen in Africa in decades. Over thirty million are estimated to starve over this period

2062-67 - Displaying evidence of Nigeria's nuclear program to the world and declaring the country's regime 'the most brutal since Nazi Germany' the United States and European Union lead a coalition of UN nations in another invasion of Nigeria. Most of the country's nuclear weapons are either quickly destroyed or secured, though several are detonated in cities once occupied by the UN forces, killing hundreds of thousands of civilians and tens of thousands of foreign soldiers. Over twenty million people die in the five-year long war which engulfs much of central and northern Africa

2067-90s - The UN occupation of defeated Nigeria lasts decades. Democracy is gradually imposed on the country, which by 2100 has stabilized and become a relatively prosperous republic

This scenario may sound pessimistic, but when one considers the history of Nigeria over the last fifty years since its independence, it is really no more than a continuation of current trends, i.e. -

1960 - Nigeria gains its independence from Britain

1966-79 - A military junta seizes power in the country, suspending the fledgling democracy

1967-70 - The region of Biafra declares its independence, but is unrecognized by world powers. Over the next three years a civil war rages in Nigeria to reunify the country, between one and three million die in the resultant struggle

1983-98 - After a brief return to democratic rule, a second period of military rule follows. Even after democracy is restored in 1999, the country is marred by rampant crime, corruption and ethnic violence

2001-present - Coinciding with the introduction of Sharia law in most of Nigeria's Muslim provinces, an increasingly radical Islamist insurgency begins which claims over 15,000 lives throughout the country

2004-present~ Conflict in the Niger delta over oil production also claims thousands of lives

Ethnic clashes between Muslims and Christians in Nigeria have escalated in recent years, especially since the formation of the terrorist group 'Boko Haram' in 2002. There is also a precedent for the Islamic portion of an African country in the region declaring its independence - that of Mali, which in April 2012 saw its northern half breakaway to form the newly declared state of 'Azawad' (though a French intervention the next year saw the country reunited, violence continues...).

From all this we should conclude that a religiously-motivated civil war in Nigeria in the near future should not be ruled out, nor the sorts of violent swings between conservative right-wing and populist left-wing governments that have so dominated western history in recent centuries. There is little reason to believe Nigeria will escape such traumatic events.

Another example we could look at is Ethiopia, as well as its surrounding countries. Take this timeline for instance -

2017 - Construction is finished on the 'Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam', a project opposed by Egypt, on the Nile river just west of the Sudanese-Ethiopian border (A real dam being built, and a potential source of conflict - http://www.thestar.com/news/world/2014/03/15/egypt_ethiopia_at_loggerheads_over_nile_river.html)

2020s - A severe drought occurs across north-eastern Africa, affecting Ethiopia, Sudan and Egypt most heavily. Egypt's government demands greater amounts of water be allowed to flow through the Renaissance Dam' to provide much needed relief to Egypt's population. The Ethiopian government refuses

2022 - Citing a 1959 treaty granting Egypt the use of most of the Nile's water supply, and declaring the dam illegal, Egypt bombs the dam, destroying it and causing a major flood downriver that kills over 50,000 people, mostly in Sudan. The bombing draws widespread condemnation, though Egypt's actions are supported by the Arab League. Violent protests begin in Egypt against the military government, in a near-repeat of the Arab Spring, which are violently repressed

2023 - With Ethiopia vowing to rebuild the dam, Egypt launches a full-scale invasion of the region. Sudanese forces are able to put up only token resistance, and within a few weeks Egyptian forces have occupied the site. Over time the Egyptian army comes to occupy much of northern and western Ethiopia

2023-2032 - The Egyptian occupation lasts almost ten years, resisting poorly organised attacks by Ethiopian and Sudanese forces. Further attempts by Ethiopia to dam the river upstream are repeatedly bombed by the Egyptian air force. About a million people are estimated to have died from the war and related causes in this period

2032 - With the costs of the occupation becoming unsustainable, Egypt plans to withdraw but declares that in the occupied areas a referendum will be held on separating from Ethiopia and creating a new country. Amid widespread accusations of fraud, the referendum proceeds, with 70% apparently choosing independence in the new state of Amhara

Mid 2030s - As the Egyptian military gradually withdraws, increasing levels of unrest grip the new state, which remains largely unrecognized outside the Arab world and is yet to hold free and fair elections. A great deal of resentment for the occupation is felt by the state's Christian majority (making up about 80% of the population) against the reigning Muslim minority

Late 2030s - Violence erupts into outright revolution, with angry mobs of Christians massacring Muslims throughout the region. Hundreds of thousands are killed and millions flee, largely depopulating the region's Islamic minority

2038 - Amhara is re-absorbed back into Ethiopia, but the violence continues, this time against the largely Islamic regions in the east of the country. Religious violence ties into ethnic tensions against the Somali minority in the country. With a level of brutality rivaling that of the Rwandan genocide, angry Christian mobs carry out a sustained campaign against Somali villages. With a year nearly a million have been killed and much of the Somali population has fled across the border into Somalia and Somaliland proper

2040-48 - A UN-led intervention restores order, though efforts take a number of years. A democratic government is installed, with the first regular elections held from 2045

2050s onwards - Conflict between Christian Ethiopia and its Islamic neighbours continues for decades, but gradually subsides as the region modernises. Ethiopia's economy recovers meanwhile, largely thanks to a great deal of Chinese investment. Thousands of factories are set up over the country, taking advantage of cheap local labor. By 2065 Ethiopia is one of the world's top ten automobile manufacturers

Late 2060s - A severe global recession greatly affects the Ethiopian economy, creating millions of unemployed and causing crime rates to skyrocket. Movements on the political extremes gain power

2069 - A right-wing government seizes power, soon gaining the loyalty of the military and suspending further elections. Using the Somalis as a scapegoat, and citing historical grievances, Ethiopia launches an invasion of both Somalia and Somaliland, claiming it as a humanitarian intervention (both countries are admittedly very poor and backwards, with unstable governments still practicing Sharia law). Local Somalis are soon being rounded up and, starting with violent criminals and homosexuals, put in camps where they are sterilized en masse and routinely denied needed healthcare, having been deemed 'racially inferior' by the Ethiopian government, and indoctrinated with Christian teachings. Ethiopia soon annexes the entire region, settling it with millions of colonists

2070s - Democracy is gradually restored, but voting rights are not granted to Somalis and other 'inferiors' at first

2094 - In a repeat of the end of the apartheid era in South Africa a century before, Somalis and other minorities are finally granted equal voting rights with the rest of Greater Ethiopia's citizens, though by now they are a small minority making up only a few percent of the population. The crimes of the old regime are eventually condemned, though by then it is far too late to reverse its actions

So there you go, an Ethiopia whose coming century is dominated by regional water wars, religious conflict, economic booms and busts, and political extremes leading to ethnic cleansing. Does it sound too implausible? I feel it is all possible.

There are many other countries we could talk about of course. Nearly all major African countries have borders that have a fair chance of being redrawn - violently or peacefully, in the coming century as the continent finally sorts itself out. Just take one look at an ethnic map of the continent for instance -

Put simply, everywhere where a national border does not correlate with an ethnic or religious one, there is a potential conflict in the making. This says nothing of the political, economic and cultural divides that grip the region as well. I've heard suggestions that as many as a hundred new nations could be created in Africa throughout the 21st century. That sounds a bit steep to me, but South Sudan was clearly an early example of this trend. Somaliland and Azawad are other attempts that may eventually bare fruit. Another possibility was evident during the Libyan Civil War in 2011 when, for a period of several months, it looked like Libya might split into two countries, a western half still ruled by Tripoli and a new eastern half ruled from Benghazi.

While merely having people from two or more ethnic groups living within a nation is not necessarily a harbinger of conflict, the precedent I am merely citing here is Europe in the 20th century. Take a look at this map of Europe's ethnic divisions - 

Its not hard to see that, especially compared to the Europe of 1914, the continent today is much more precisely divided along ethnic lines. Whereas then a few large empires, notably the German, Austro-Hungarian, Russian and Ottoman, controlled much of the continent between them, dozens of new nations now exist. In fact, this process of ethnic division is still ongoing. Breakaway regions like South Ossetia and Abkhazia in Georgia and Transnistria in Moldova are still seeking greater international recognition, and as recently as 2008 we saw a further step in the breakup of the former Yugoslavia with the independence (again, partially recognized) of Kosovo. Even the current crisis in the Crimea has strong ethnic undertones, with the Crima being a largely Russian speaking part of Ukraine.

To conclude, this is just one major reason why I am pessimistic about Africa's future, and I don't think anyone should be shocked if we see the region tear itself apart multiple times in the coming century. Chances are the exact nature of these coming conflicts will only vaguely resemble the timelines I've drawn up above. Either way, I doubt the history books that will eventually be written about 21st century Africa will remain conspicuously blank. I feel the continent is in for at least as rough a ride now as Europe was at the dawn of the 20th century.

The coming African World War

Demographic change often drives conflict. Its an easy to identify trend of history. This is true not just in terms of the changing populations of different countries within a region, but of their economic growth as well.

When looking at the sort of demographic change that causes political instability, often leading to conflict, a classic example is the rise of Germany around the turn of the 20th century. Between 1870 and 1914 Germany went from a relatively undeveloped and greatly divided region to a powerful, unified and rapidly industrializing state. In steel production, for instance, Germany's went from half that of Britain's to double it over that period.

This sudden rise of a new great power in Europe greatly destabilized the continent. Britain, France, Austria and Russia had previously divided the region among themselves. Each member of this so-called 'Concert of Europe' acted as a deterrent to the ambitions of each other. The rise of Germany however, prompted a new entanglement of alliances which led directly to the semi-apocalypse that was the First World War.

The slightly later rise of countries like Italy, Japan and Russia (as the Soviet Union) greatly contributed to the Second World War as well. History shows that the rise of new great powers (let alone superpowers) is often greatly destabilizing to the world's political and economic systems. The reasons for this are basically self-evident. In any given world with a newly rising power, the older powers will already have tended to divide up the world's resources and markets into their own spheres of influence. The newer powers will rightly see this as unfair and attempt to challenge the order. Sometimes the older powers will concede this relative drop in their authority and retreat somewhat from the previous extent of their empire. Usually however, this fails to happen, or at least happen fast enough, thus igniting conflict, and conflicts between great powers tend to be very bloody indeed.

This was the ultimate cause of the First World War, just look at a map of the world in 1914. Britain and France control nearly half of the world between them. Their navies dominate its oceans and are able to bully almost any other countries into getting their way. Despite having only a few percent of the world's population between them, they are able to dominate it because of the enormous lead their recent industrialization has given them.

Along of course, then comes Germany, not to mention other rising powers like Italy, Russia, Japan and the United States. In some cases, like the US and Russia, they are states already large enough that they have little desire to seek an overseas empire (although the US did seize the Philippines, among other colonies, off the Spanish after the 1898 war). In the cases of Germany, Italy and Japan however, their homelands are relatively small and resource-poor, and there are few valuable regions overseas the British and French haven't already invested.

Hence their attempts to right this imbalance, hence, the World Wars.

Now, at the turn of the 21st century, we are in the midst of a similar transition. The 'BRIIC' countries - Brazil, Russia, India, Indonesia and most importantly China, are rapidly expanding their economies, and consequently demanding larger and larger shares of the world's resource pie. China's oil consumption has gone from virtually zero in 1970 to half that of America's today for instance.

There are plenty of signs of this new Chinese superpower grating up against its waning neighbors. World headlines were made back in 2010 when it was reported that China's total GDP had finally overtaken Japan's, no doubt contributing to the former country's sudden eagerness to dispute the sovereignty of the Senkaku islands. Within another twenty years or so, it could possibly have overtaken America's as well, though many analysts rightly question China's stability in the long run. The country's military spending is now second in the world also, though American military dominance is expected to continue until at least 2050, especially in terms of its navy.

Despite this rise however, things seem fairly stable for the time being. The Chinese do not seem liable to jump the Taiwan Strait and retake their wayward province any time soon, especially with the American navy parked right offshore. However, even if China's rise to superpower status does occur without significant bloodshed, it is only the first obstacle to world peace that will have to be jumped in the 21st century.

Africa is hardly the first place you think of when you think 'world power', but rest assured, that label will be coming to it. The extent to which Africa's status on the world stage will change over the next century is truly staggering. The demographic reasons behind it are eloquently summed up in this article -
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/07/16/the-amazing-surprising-africa-driven-demographic-future-of-the-earth-in-9-charts/

In short, Africa's population is going to boom from approximately one billion today to about four billion by 2100. The rest of the world meanwhile, is going to stay much the same. Asia's population has mostly finished growing. It is predicted to crawl from the current four to just over five billion by 2050 before declining once more, while the rest of the world has stabilized already, or even started to shrink.

This has huge implications on the world stage. Just as the idea of the Chinese and Japanese dominating world car markets would have been thought laughable in 1950, the idea of Nigerian and Ethiopian goods flooding world markets in 2050 must seem somewhat far-fetched, but it is going to happen eventually. Just as America and Europe have been hemorrhaging manufacturing jobs to China and India for the past fifty years, the same is already starting to happen to those countries in turn - this time to Africa, and other poorer parts of the world.

In terms of sheer population growth, Nigeria is the next big story, potentially almost as big as China and India were in the 20th century. In 1950 Nigeria had a population of just 38 million people, by 2000 it was 123 million and as of 2013 it is already 175 million, putting it at 7th in the world behind Pakistan. By 2100 its population could be almost a billion, behind only India and China and nearly twice that of the United States.

Three other big countries to look out for are Tanzania, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Ethiopia, all expected to have around 250 million people by 2100. These four countries will contain nearly half of Africa's population between them. Bear this in mind as we consider the other elements of the potentially perfect storm that could engulf Africa in the second half of this century.

Basically, these four countries are going to be Africa's equivalent of Germany. They are going to be very large, resource-hungry, rising powers surrounded by weaker nations. It is easy to brand such thinking as evil, but the reality is more complicated. To feed and house, let alone provide all the modern appliances we consider so essential to modern life here in the west - from cars to fridges to the internet, to their people, the governments of these countries are going to face enormous challenges. The choice they could face is one of economic depression, if not outright collapse, or aggressive conquest of their neighbors. As one may justify a man stealing a loaf of bread to feed his starving family, a government could justify invading a neighbor to provide needed resources to their desperate, not to mention angry, populations. History shows that when the risk of not acting is greater than the risk of acting, that is the basis for war.

There are many different 'resources' to take into consideration, but oil is a good example. Despite a great deal of ongoing research into alternative energy sources the world is going to be largely dependent on fossil fuels for at least the next fifty years. Coal, oil and natural gas account for 67% of global energy production, the rest is largely nuclear (13%) and hydroelectric (16%). Other sources such as solar, wind, tidal, biomass and geothermal account for just 4%. Fusion may be an option someday, but is unlikely to be viable, let alone widespread, within several decades.

While past predictions of 'peak oil' have so far proven pessimistic, with new discoveries and technologies continually allowing global production to crawl upwards in recent years, the peak will come eventually. Most current predictions tend to congregate around the year 2030. Currently the world consumes 90 million barrels of oil a day, while proven reserves stand at 1,500 billion barrels. At current rates of consumption this is enough to last about 45 years. The two big uncertainties however are future consumption trends and future discoveries of new oil fields, plus new technologies with which to harvest them. The most optimistic predictions talk of their being enough fossil fuels to power the world for as much as a 'hundred years'.

This is a much-needed breathing space for the world to have, but it is far from certain whether it will be enough. Global production can't just hold steady to supply the developing world, but will have to increase exponentially in the coming decades. The 'developed' world today has about one billion people, but by 2050 the world's population is expected to reach ten billion, and they will be more urbanized than ever. We may have enough to supply the western world until renewables or some other energy source like fusion can take up the slack (or always have the option of going full nuclear, as France has already done) however, the developing world is going to have far harsher options.

In short, the west is likely to avoid the apocalyptic implications of peak oil, but the developing world probably won't.

Even under the most optimistic scenarios, by the second half of this century there are going to be several billion eager Africans who would otherwise be on the cusp of industrializing and enjoying all the fruits of the modern world, only to be informed that the rest of the world has beaten them to it. There will not be sufficient oil to drag all of them into the 21st century, and what remains won't come cheap.

One can imagine the results of this future shock. To rising powers like Nigeria, the choice may very well come down to conquest or stagnation. One can imagine a new generation of fascist leaders, in the style of Hitler or Mussolini, coming to power in Nigeria, Tanzania, Ethiopia or the Congo, urging for the conquest of their weaker neighbors in order to provide sufficient Lebensraum for their swelling populations. We could see whole new holocausts carried out, Ethiopians throwing Somalians or Congolese throwing Angolans in concentration camps. Racial difference will be played up. A westerner may be confused. Aren't they all black Africans? But to an African, there must be just as little discernible difference between a Frenchmen or an Englishmen, or a German or a Russian, yet that never stopped them from committing genocide against one another repeatedly.

These new, expansionist leaders will point to the historical injustices that caused the current crisis, that the borders dreamt up by European Imperialists in the 19th century have no real bearing on 21st century politics, that it is the fault of the west that they have been driven to such desperation. They will point to past resource exploitation of Africa as a precedent, arguing that what they are doing now is no worse. This is still occurring in the present day in fact. One may think that Nigeria, with its large oil reserves, will have enough left over for its own uses, but this is unlikely to be the case when it is needed most. There are 37 billion barrels of proven reserves in Nigeria at present, but 2-3 million is produced each day, and most of this is exported anyway, 43% of it to the United States alone. At present rates, Nigeria's oil will run out within 45 years, comparable to the global trend, and just as its population passes half a billion.

There are plenty of other factors with could contribute to this brewing conflict, one that may be on a scale comparable to the World Wars. Africa's population by 2050 will be larger than the entire world in 1940. There is lots of room in which wars and genocides may occur. The continent is already wracked with poverty and conflicts along ethnic, religious and political lines. Nigeria is almost exactly half-Christian and half-Muslin, while Ethiopia is two-thirds Christian and one third-Muslim. Will they be able to co-exist under such strains? Climate change may be another factor in the long run, further straining already dwindling resources. By 2100 sea levels may have risen as much as a meter or two, potentially forcing millions of coastal Africans to relocate. Lagos alone houses twenty million people. Where will they be able to go?

Different political movements are bound to rise amongst this background, ones that, as always, you can broadly categorize into left and right. At the moment most of Africa is still ruled by authoritarian regimes, and even most of the nominally democratic ones have elections so biased and corrupt as to be unworthy of the name. Just as Europe and the rest of the developed world had to go through a string of revolutions, civil wars, wars of conquest and civil uprisings to bring about real democracy (England in the 1640s and 1689, America in 1776, the 1860s and the 1960s, France in 1789, 1830, 1848, 1870 and 1968, China in 1912 and 1949, Russia in 1917 and 1991, Germany in 1919, 1945 and 1989, etc) Africa will have to do the same.

Early signs of this can already be seen in the slightly more advanced Arab world with the recent Arab Spring, affecting countries from Libya to Syria to Yemen. Countries like Nigeria, Sudan, the Congo and Ethiopia will no doubt experience more revolutions like this in the near future. There will be populist uprisings against dictators, and often counter-revolutions against these movements as they grow power-hungry in turn (as happened in Egypt in 2011 and then again in 2013).

And when I say the Arab world is more 'advanced', for the most part I mean economically. In a nutshell, such revolutions are due once a people have moved beyond a subsistence economy. Previously, with the vast majority of the population toiling in the fields just to feed themselves, they were content to live under a corrupt and self-serving, but at least educated, aristocracy. Once in the early stages of industrializing however, people overwhelmingly shift towards democracy as their preferred form of government. For countries like England and France this was around the 1700s, for the Arab world it is in the present, for Africa it will be over the course of this coming century.

To conclude, the enormous level of political violence seen in the world over the past few centuries, from the French Revolution to the World Wars, may come to be seen by historians as just the beginning. They were essentially the price for the Western World to industrialize and democratize. The Western World however, only consists of around a billion people, or just 10% of the world's population (in 2050 at least). Nine-tenths of the world is still relatively poor and authoritarian. The 18th, 19th and 20th centuries each saw far higher death tolls than the century before it as the world's population grew -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYXv75o-j14

If we're lucky, and our leaders know what we're doing, hopefully we'll be able to manage this transition relatively peacefully. If not however, and I do not make this prediction lightly, I feel the 21st century is set to continue this trend. Two hundred million people died in wars and genocides during the 20th century, this is roughly double the eighty million or so that did in the 19th and four times the amount that did in the 18th. Looking at Africa so far in the fifty-odd years since most of its countries gained independence, the signs are not encouraging. In Rwanda, the Congo, Somalia and elsewhere, the first few million casualties have already occurred. Who's to say that four or five hundred million more won't have to die in order for Asia and Africa to make the same great leap of faith into the modern era that the western world has struggled with so dearly?

How We Should Really Define Planets

Following the discovery of the trans-Neptunian object 'Eris' in 2006 the globe-spanning organisation of stargazing boffins known as the International Astronomical Union decided to finally spell out a definition of what a 'planet' is for the first time. This was done to settle the question of whether Eris (with the fate of similar-sized Pluto hanging in the balance as well) would be categorized as a planet, or given some lesser label instead.

In the end, the IAU decided to create an entirely new class of objects - known as 'dwarf planets' that differ from planets in one key sense. At the moment their definition of a planet means the following -

1. That it orbits the sun
2. That it is large enough to have been rounded by its own gravity (can be anywhere from 200-900 km across, depending on its composition, also known as achieving 'hydrostatic equilibrium')
3. That its gravitational influence has 'cleared the neighborhood' of its orbit of other large objects

A dwarf planet meanwhile, is an object that has only fulfilled the first two criteria.

Given this definition, as of 2014 there are now eight planets and five dwarf planets in the solar system. The planets, which most people should be familiar with - include Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. The so-far designated dwarf planets are generally less well known, and include Ceres (previously the largest body in the asteroid belt) and Eris as well as the more recently discovered objects Haumea and Makemake. It is expected in the coming years that hundreds if not thousands more roughly Pluto-sized objects will be spotted somewhere beyond the orbit of Neptune.

Pluto itself of course was caught in the middle of this interplanetary crossfire, and was thus downgraded to a dwarf planet as well.

Some astronomers however, have disputed the IAU's definition of a planet, and its not hard to see why. Calling these objects 'dwarf planets' is obviously something of a misnomer, as the third criteria for them to fill above is not just based on their size, but also on the distance at which they orbit the sun.

To explain - 'clearing the neighborhood' means that an object is sufficiently massive that its own gravity is able to disrupt any other large objects from sharing its orbit. This is why, for instance, none of the major planets happen to orbit particularly close to each other. Venus orbits about twice as far out from the sun as Mercury, and the Earth and Mars are separated by gaps roughly as large. Saturn is similarly about twice as far from the sun as Jupiter, and Uranus and Neptune continue this trend among the gas giants. It would be impossible for any of these large planets to share orbits remotely close to one another, as within a relatively short while (geologically speaking at least) their mutual gravitational attraction would grow sufficient either for the two objects to collide, or have a near miss in which one will likely be flung out of the solar system entirely.

Originally, models of planetary formation predict, there should have been hundreds of planets orbiting the sun early in the solar system's history, but within a few million years most would have suffered either of these fates, eventually leaving us with the eight major planets we have today, as well as countless smaller bodies of course.

Now how does this upset our definition of  'dwarf planet'? Because whether a planet has 'cleared its orbit' or not is not determined purely by its size, but by the length of its orbit as well. The required size of a 'planet' will increase proportionate to its distance from the sun.

In other words, if we took a small planet like Mars, and plunked it out somewhere beyond the orbit of Neptune (or more precisely, more than 146 AU away from the sun - one AU being the average distance between the sun and the Earth) then according to the IAU, it would no longer be considered a planet at all. Even the Earth, beyond 3,000-odd AU from the sun, would drop from being a planet to a mere 'dwarf planet' without any actual change in its size.

Conversely, if any of the dwarf planets happened to be closer to the sun, they would automatically be upgraded to planet status despite not having gained an ounce of weight. In Pluto's case for instance, this would be approximately within the orbit of Venus (thus for those wishing to have the IAU reinstate its 'planet' definition, all you'd need to do is attach a rope and tow it to somewhere between the orbits of Venus and Mercury...though simply bribing them might be easier).

Therein, lies the misnomer. It is perfectly possible (one may even say likely) that in the near future we will discover one or more 'dwarf' planets beyond the orbit of Neptune that is actually larger than Mercury or Mars (or possibly even the Earth, though we'd likely have spotted it by now).

There are other problems with current nomenclature regarding astronomical bodies as well, ones that will probably not be resolved until such a borderline case is found that the IAU (or whatever future body may make such decisions) is forced to draw a line somewhere. For instance, what is the definition of a moon? There is no minimum size requirement for a moon (i.e. such an object does not have to be large enough to have been rounded by its own gravity) meaning, for instance, that every individual chunk of rock and ice in Saturn's rings could very well be considered 'moons' in their own right.

Even the dividing line between 'planet' and 'star' is vague. The general definition is based on whether an object is sufficiently large to have undergone nuclear fusion. The problem however is that there are several different types of fusion, each requiring a different amount of pressure to begin. Deuterium burning begins at about 13 Jupiter masses, Lithium burning at 65, and Hydrogen-1 fusion (the 'regular' kind) at 75-80. To deal with this problem, astronomers have created a new category between the two called a 'brown dwarf'. This includes objects of between roughly 13 and 80 Jupiter masses (the sun, by comparison, is just over a thousand Jupiter masses).

As for the issues of defining planets and moons however, here is the classification system I would be compelled to use - and which, at the very least, I intend to use in any science fiction stories I may write, and who knows? Terminology used in science fiction can sometimes permeate into the real. Apparently terms such as 'gas giant', 'terraform', 'droid', 'deep space', 'ion drive' and 'computer virus' were all invented by sci-fi writers -

http://hellogiggles.com/10-words-science-fiction-invented-that-we-use-today

Firstly, instead of 'planet' and 'dwarf planet' I would be compelled to put both kinds of objects under the umbrella definition of 'planet'. Only the first two criteria mentioned above (orbiting a star and large enough to be rounded by its own gravity) would be required.

However, I would then divide the definition of 'planet' into two categories - 'primary' planets and 'secondary' planets. The eight 'proper' planets that we currently have - from Mercury to Neptune, would be re-labelled as 'primary planets' while any dwarf planets so found would become known as 'secondary planets'.

I prefer this definition because it does not directly reference the size of the objects, although at the same time it implies primary planets are larger. It references the fact that the eight 'major' planets are privileged to be not only large, but dominant in their orbits. At the same time it still deems secondary planets as planets, as they may be just as large, but also implies that they are usually not.

Simple yes?

And while I do realize that 'primary' and 'secondary' and kinda big words, we are referring to something of a technical definition. Both kinds of objects could merely be referred to as 'planets' until there was a need to distinguish between them. School children for instance, would simply be taught that instead of there being 'eight planets - and lots and lots of dwarf planets' that there are 'lots and lots of planets - of which there are eight primary ones'. In getting them to memorize the planets, I imagine we'd still stick to having them just name the eight primary ones of course. All we're talking about is a different definition, one that is really no more complicated, and at the same time actually makes more sense.

Now as for moons, there is another divide here we should be making.

A term has come into use lately to refer to particularly tiny moons - generally in the context of the relatively small (and often short-lived) clumps of ice that have been spotted forming regularly in Saturn's rings. These have been referred to as 'moonlets'. The term has also sometimes been used to refer to asteroid moons.

I feel the term is underrated however, and deserving of an upgrade.

Currently there are 180 identified moons of the solar system's planets (and dwarf planets) however, there is a distinction that should be made here. Only a small number of those moons are 'moons' of the sort we imagine when we look up into the night sky at our own - at what is obviously an entire separate world. Most of these 'moons' are little or nothing more than captured asteroids. The two moons of Mars for instance - Phobos and Deimos, have dimensions no greater than 27 and 8 km respectively on their longest axes. This compares to the 3,500 km diameter of our own moon, which is several million times more massive than either of them.

Luckily however, there is a solution to this problem.

We can call upon the old definition that separates planets from smaller objects (what used to be called 'minor planets', but were also reclassified by the IAU in 2006 and are now 'small solar system bodies') that is - that a planet has to have been rounded by its own gravity. Objects like asteroids and comets also orbit the sun, but are declared separate to planets based purely on their size, so why not apply the same standard to objects that happen to be in orbit around a planet?

Under this definition, the nineteen of the solar system's 180 moons that have been sufficiently rounded by their own gravities would remain as - 'moons'. These include our own Moon, IO, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto around Jupiter, Mimas, Enceladus, Tethys, Dione, Rhea, Titan and Iapetus around Saturn, Ariel, Umbriel, Titania, Oberon and Miranda around Uranus, Triton around Neptune and Charon around Pluto.

The other 161 discovered moons would be re-labelled as 'moonlets'. Thus -

Of course other labels could be used. The terms 'primary' and 'secondary' moon could be used instead, though I feel that 'moon' and 'moonlet' are more memorable, and less repetitive given that we'd already be using those terms for planets.

As far as our other definitions go, I have fewer qualms. I'm quite happy with the definition of a 'brown dwarf' sitting between planets and stars. Evidently the name is something of a misnomer, as 'brown' dwarfs are predicted to actually have a reddish hue, however 'red dwarf' already refers to low-mass stars with between 75 and roughly 500 Jupiter masses, and would seem even more deserving of that label. Stars are generally categorized by their color, which most closely reflects their mass. Basically, the bigger they are, the fiercer they burn, giving them higher surface temperatures and brighter hues. Stellar evolution is a tricky subject, especially when we start talking about such bizarre forms as white dwarfs, neutron stars and black holes, but the current definitions do sound pretty sensible to me. One problem however, is whether planet-sized objects orbiting around a brown dwarf are indeed 'planets' or merely 'moons'. Personally, I am inclined to think they are the former.

Then at the other end of the spectrum we have objects smaller than planets. These are divided into a number of overlapping categories. 'Asteroid' is a commonly used term, referring to small chunks of rock not large enough to be considered planets. However, the definition sometimes blurs with 'comet' as comets are merely asteroids with significant quantities of lighter elements like water, which sublimates when approaching the sun. The definition wouldn't be too bad, except that many icy asteroids never come close enough to the sun for their surfaces to sublimate at all, making them effectively 'comets-in-waiting'.

Then there is the question of whether there's a lower bound on 'small' solar system objects. Does the definition include meteoroids? That is - objects small enough to burn up in the Earth's atmosphere (generally less than a few meters across, and also begs the question of why the Earth's atmosphere is the benchmark. It is another arbitrary unit, like measuring explosive power in 'Hiroshimas'). What about interplanetary dust as well? Or individual atoms free-floating in space?

To conclude, regardless of these rough edges, the definitions I've outlined above would give us the following solar system - one that consists of one star, eight primary planets and a large number of secondary planets (of which only five have so far been discovered) orbited by nineteen moons and 161 discovered moonlets.

Case closed.

The Arab World's Transition to Democracy

Many people have lamented the degree of bloodshed that has occurred in Egypt and throughout the rest of the Arab world since the beginning of the 'Arab Spring' in late 2010. So far at least 125,000 people have died in the subsequent revolutions and wars. The lion's share of this total has occurred in Syria (where more than 100,000 people are estimated to have died, with no end to the war in sight) and Libya (where 25,000 to 30,000 people died in an eight month long civil war that ended in November 2011). The governments of Tunisia, Yemen and Egypt were also overthrown in relatively brief revolutions with the casualties in the low thousands. In 2012 Egypt held its first ever elections (quite a milestone given the country's 5,000 year history). The election was won by Mohammed Morsi, the Muslim Brotherhood candidate.

If Morsi's election had been the beginning of a lasting democratic transition in Egypt, that would of course have been fantastic. For five thousand years of despotic rule, by one dynasty or another, to end in a newly developing nation of 80 million people in barely two weeks, and at the cost of under a thousand fatalities, was little short of a miracle. It sounded too good to be true.

Unfortunately, it was.

Several deep, structural flaws in Egypt's political system soon revealed themselves as Mohammed Morsi's administration went on. The Muslim Brotherhood, while it did 'win' the 2011 elections, did not in reality have the support of a majority of the population. In fact, it was not even close. In the first round of voting only 5,760,000 people, or just under 25% of the electorate, voted for Morsi. He received the largest individual share of the vote, but 75% of the country voted for someone else. Four other candidates won at least 10% of the vote, evidencing just how divided the country is. Even then his figure of 25% is only of those people who chose to vote. The turnout was calculated to be only 46% of all those of voting age.

In other words, a country of 85 million people elected to office a president who had the firm support of less than 6 million voters.

Whoops.

The result was predictable -

'People writing down their names on their forearms in case they get shot.'

http://rt.com/news/cairo-march-egypt-protest-574/

Much of the current tension is driven by the fact that the Muslim Brotherhood is hardly the most progressive organisation that could have come to power. We have to bear in mind this is the Islamic world we're talking about. Few politicians in Egypt have attitudes to religious freedoms, women's rights and homosexuality that would be acceptable by western standards. By and large, Europe in 1900 was little different to the Middle East today in such areas. The Muslim Brotherhood however, is generally very conservative even by those low standards. Its attitudes to and treatment of women are particularly medieval, and have drawn sharp criticism. During Morsi's brief period in office, instances of violence against women in Egypt appeared to increase sharply. Though conceivably, there may not have actually been a significant increase in violence, but just more widespread reporting of it following the end of the dictatorship. Regardless, the issue came more into the public limelight, and the government was seen to be doing just about nothing about it. Since coming to power the Brotherhood has attempted to pass legislation decriminalizing female genital mutilation, a practice it supports on religious grounds against the wishes of many Egyptians, and earlier this year vehemently rejected UN calls to ratify a declaration calling for an end to violence against women. Their reasoning? That such a declaration would lead to the 'disintegration of Muslim society'.

Seriously, I kid you not.

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2012/05/15/egyptian-lawmaker-pushing-to-legalize-fgm-in-the-name-of-islam/
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/mar/15/muslim-brotherhood-backlash-un-womens-rights

Actions such as this have alienated many women in Egypt in particular, a damaging blow to Morsi given that women made up a large portion of the protesters that helped overthrow Mubarak.

The Brotherhood is opposed by a coalition of groups. The most important by far is the Egyptian military, which is possibly the only force in Egypt capable of challenging the Muslim Brotherhood openly, as well as secularists, progressives and Egypt's Coptic Christian minority (which makes up maybe 10% of the population). Since the coup that ousted Mohammed Morsi, violence in Egypt has centered around public squares and mosques, where Muslim Brotherhood supporters have often been surrounded and massacred by the military, and government buildings and churches, where Brotherhood supporters have attempted to retaliate.

There are strong ethnic, religious and political undertones to the violence in Egypt, and the wider Arab Spring. Tempers are running so high there now seems to be a very real possibility of Egypt descending into a civil war. Given that the country is thirteen times more populous than Libya, and four times more populous than Syria, sits at the vital crossroads of Europe, Africa and Asia, contains the Suez canal, has a large minority of Christians and borders Israel, a war there would have serious geopolitical implications. The western world might even be compelled to intervene, especially in the event that Egypt's Copts face the risk of genocide. However, the sight of US planes bombing Cairo could cause tempers to flare further, leading to a regional war driven by religious conflict. This already appears to be happening in Syria, given the presence of US weapons in the hands of rebels at the same time as Iranian troops have been sent there to try to prop up Assad's regime.

The monolithic brutality of the military on the one hand, plus the medieval attitudes of the Muslim Brotherhood on the other, sums up why it is so difficult to take sides in this conflict. Looking from the perspective of a westerner, its hard to tell who the 'good guys' are. Would you prefer the military dictatorship? Or the Islamist government? Where is the option of a progressive, secular democracy? A party that supports elections, women's rights, religious freedoms (including freedom from religion) and, by the way, doesn't support trying to wipe Israel off the map. That would be nice. Where is that party?

However, despite this disappointing performance for Egyptian democracy so far, history tells us that we shouldn't act so surprised. If you look at almost any democracy, and dig deep enough into its history, you'll find that the transition to secular democracy from whatever feudal despotism preceded it, was rarely bloodless. Such wars often were in fact, among the deadliest in history.

Take England for instance, arguably the world's first modern democracy. The power of the English parliament gradually gained on the monarchy for several centuries, but finally surpassed it in the 17th century. Two events contributed most to this, the English Civil War (1642-1651) and the 'Glorious Revolution' of 1688. These two events culminated in the English Bill of Rights of 1689. Never since then has a British monarch held absolute power. But what was the cost of this 'progress'?

The English Civil War was, as a measure of the percentage of the population killed, by far the deadliest war in English history. Out of a population at the time of only five million, as many as two hundred thousand people died. The relative death tolls in Scotland and Ireland were far higher, possibly as high as 40% of the population in the latter. As a portion of England's population, this is over twice as deadly as either of the world wars.

One would think that in a war in which a despotic government was overthrown, the 'good guys' would obviously be the revolutionaries, but this is much debated. Much like Mohammed Morsi in Egypt, the man who overthrew and signed the death warrant of England's monarch Charles I was a devoutly religious, dictatorial and extremely controversial figure named Oliver Cromwell.

Between 1649 and his death in 1658 Oliver Cromwell dominated the English parliament, ruling essentially as a dictator. A devout protestant, he implemented harsh policies against Catholics in the lands under his domain. England at the time had only a small minority of Catholics, so at first his policies did not cause a great deal of harm. In Ireland however the majority of the population was Catholic, and by some estimates over half a million of Ireland's one and a half million people starved or died of disease under his rule. So hated was he by many quarters of English society, that when the Royalists returned to power in 1660 they had Oliver Cromwell's corpse dug up, hung in chains, and beheaded. Since then, England's monarchy, while its power has been greatly curtailed, has never been completely dissolved, in no small part because of the deep scars left by Cromwell's rule. Even after the English Bill of Rights of 1689 was signed, it would be several centuries before Britain would come to resemble the modern democracy it does today. It wasn't until 1928 for instance that women were finally granted full voting rights.

England is not the only country that endured such a long and bloody transition to democracy. France has an even more cringe-worthy story. The French revolution broke out in 1789 because of the ineptitude of King Louis XVI, who was executed (along with several tens of thousands of other people) during the reign of terror from 1793-94. The 'First French Republic' was promptly proclaimed. However, rather than hold elections or do anything, you know, democratic, an intense political battle soon broke out among the victorious revolutionaries. Various short-lived military juntas were set up, with names like the 'Committee of Public Safety', the 'French Directory' and the 'French Consulate'. Finally Napoleon was able to cement his power and by 1804 had founded the First French Empire. Fearing the might of revolutionary France, and also the possible spread of the revolutionary sentiment it embodied, most of Europe's other major powers spent the next decade forming coalition after coalition to try and beat Napoleon. They would finally succeed in this effort with Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo in 1815.

The French monarchy was restored, but was then overthrow again in the revolutions of 1848. The 'Second Republic' however was short-lived, and was overthrown by Napoleon's nephew when he proclaimed the 'Second French Empire' in 1851. His rule was in turn overthrown and a 'Third Republic' proclaimed in 1870. To what must have been everyone's complete surprise, this Republic actually lasted quite a while, until the Nazi occupation in 1940, when France again reverted to dictatorial rule in the form of the Vichy French Government. With France's liberation in 1944 the 'Fourth French Republic' was proclaimed. Even then the French still hadn't quite decided on whether they wanted to be a democracy, and in 1958 had to hold another Constitutional Referendum which changed the country from a parliamentary government to a semi-presidential system, and also ended France's ambitions to remain a colonial power.

There are many more examples we could go into. The United States has been relatively stable since its independence from Britain in 1776. But even its progression to a modern democracy has been a long, drawn-out affair. In the 1790 census it was recorded that almost four million people lived in the newly independent colonies, yet only 60,000 voted in presidential elections at the time, indicating that the wealthy and educated held almost as much disproportionate power as their feudal European counter-parts at the time. Slavery (by definition a very undemocratic system) was not abolished until after the Civil War in the 1860s, a war in which over 600,000 people died. Women were not given the vote until 1920, and it was not until the passage of the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965 that true voting equality was enforced nationwide.

Perhaps the country with the most appalling record of resisting a transition to democracy is, lets face it, Germany. While the English had to fight their civil war and the French had to have a series of revolutions, the Germans had to fight, and lose, two world wars before they finally accepted democracy. While the world wars were fought for a variety of reasons and can be looked at in various contexts, one very simplistic summary is to say that the hundred million or so lives they cost was the price for Europe (and Japan) to transition from monarchies and empires to modern democracies.

It seems that Egypt's military rulers are aware of this history. Justified or not, they would seem to fear that Mohammed Morsi might have turned out to be Egypt's Oliver Cromwell. In other words, a leader who rides anti-dictatorial hysteria into office only to become a dictator himself. The old phrase 'none are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free' explains the potential danger that a successful, overly-ambitious revolutionary can pose. Their legitimacy in the eyes of many allows them to cement their rule to a greater extent than any declared monarch ever could. Its much easier to justify genocide and tyranny when they are perceived as being for the greater good, rather than in the interests of a corrupt aristocracy. This is, indeed, an argument conservative Royalists have used for centuries to urge against any such revolutions. Better the devil you know...

The arguments warning against Islamist rule in Egypt have been laid out quite clearly. The worst case scenario is that Morsi might have further cemented his power in Egypt, gained influence over the military, made himself dictator for life, started persecuting (perhaps even slaughtering) Egypt's ten million Copts and then become more confrontational to Israel and the west, all in the name of appeasing his Islamist base and thus clinging on to power. Not everyone thinks such a scenario is likely, but those in Egypt who support the military's crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood, despite the many hundreds of deaths in the last week alone, clearly must fear something along those lines to justify the scale of the violence so far seen.

The Arab Spring is about the Arab World taking its next step down the, many would say inevitable, road to democratization. Women's equality, secularism and, arguably, economic socialism, are offshoots to this process if western history is anything to go by. The scale of these changes and the costs they may bring, especially in lives, are mind-boggling. The World Wars cost one hundred million lives between them, while the overthrow of the Chinese and Russian monarchies in 1912 and 1917 respectively led to decades of fighting and repression that between then claimed another 60-70 million lives. Against this potential chaos, it is perhaps understandable why many in Egypt are ambivalent over whether they should have removed Hosni Mubarak in the first place.

In the end though, the choice of sticking with an old, stable, authoritarian regime has one fatal flaw over the path to revolution, no matter how winding. It was summed up most eloquently by a certain US President in 1962 -

"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." - John F. Kennedy

This is the real dilemma countries like Egypt now face. An enormous deal of suffering came to, for instance, China and Russia after their revolutions. However, a great deal of prosperity and much needed change eventually resulted as well. The life expectancy in both countries roughly doubled during the first thirty-odd years of Communist rule. Russia was transformed from the poorest and most rural country in Europe in 1900 to one of the world's two economic superpowers by 1950. China meanwhile, has undergone the greatest and most rapid program of industrialization ever seen in any country, lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty under the rule of the communist government (though how economically communist the country truly is, is a matter of debate).

Looking back on all these revolutions, at the initial violence and then the lasting change, they could be seen as being large but necessary doses of medicine. They are akin to a national trip to the dentist, one that all kids dread at the time, but for the most part later appreciate. Even the American Revolution came at a cost of 100,000 lives (including the War of 1812) but few argue that it was a flat-out bad idea.

Put another way, can anyone truly imagine the Russian Tsars, or the Qing dynasty, managing to cope with governing in the modern world?

The Arab world is set to undergo a series of revolutions, inevitably. What we've seen so far is only the beginning. The only questions now are how quickly, and how violently, this change will occur. We must bear in mind that figure, that a hundred million people had to die in the first half of the 20th century so that Europe would become democratic. Might a hundred million people have to die in the Arab world in the first half of the 21st century for the same change to take place?