3 Commando Brigade

Will There Ever Be Another World War?

Rapidly growing global population. Finite food / water / resources. Probably. When? Who knows.

Dunno

“I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.”

Albert Einstein

This i find is very true and a bit scary

Forget religion the only thing holding us back is not using certain technologies. Embrace the tech and we could leave clowns like ISIS behind.
Nuclear energy and GM crops could solve so many problems. Ignorance surrounding those technologies and the green movement with its new puritanism so why there's so little research and development in those fields.

Nuclear power from Thorium using the Thorium-232 fuel cycle would give us a quantum leap in energy supply greater than all the others (A mere 6,600 tonnes of thorium could provide the energy equivalent of the combined global consumption of 5 billion tonnes of coal, 31 billion barrels of oil, 3 trillion cubic meters of natural gas, and 65,000 tonnes of uranium and what makes it better this stuff is everywhere.), useful "waste" like Plutonium-238 which NASA and others use to power their deep space exploration probes, isotopes used in cancer treatments. No proliferation of weapons because you don't get Plutonium-239 so you can safely give this technology to everyone. Reactors can be safer by not using those PWRs that we currently build instead using Molten Salt reactors.

GM crops can be resistant to blights and drought meaning no more pesticides and lower use of fresh water supplies with greater yields and nutrient density.

Get fresh water from the sea through desalination and you've mitigated the three main drivers for conflict in the modern era.

There's probably too much resistance against technology...but I don't think that's causing world hunger. We're already producing enough food to easily feed 7-10 billion people. We're just really, really, really s**t at distributing food (or anything, really) fairly. That's less 'religion' and more 'human nature'.

Thorium-232 is probably awesome (I honestly don't know enough about it to really have an opinion) but it probably won't help somalia turn into a stable nation. And unless somebody manages to engineer a crop that removes crazy dictators from power GMO won't feed syrian refugees. On the less extreme end, California still has golf courses....in the middle of one of their worst droughts ever.

I might be overly pessimistic here but I expect that it'll be a long time -- if ever -- before humanity becomes 'advanced' enough to really change away from this selfish base behaviour.  (N.B: I'm not excluding myself. I'm writing this on a machine I can only afford because the brutal exploitation of a massive demographic in asia is keeping prices low in our little patch of first world). For this reason I also believe that war will be around for a long time, an inevitable expression of our failure to stop being dicks to each other.

At the same time I'm fairly certain that we'll never see the "NATO vs USSR"-style WW3 that everybody was afraid of during the cold war. As others have said, we can expect a lot more proxy/independence wars happening around the globe. The cold war was a binary era, shaped by a 'us or them' style mentality. The entire world, with very few exceptions, was divided between the "east" and the "west". In that world there was strength in numbers, in unions and in military pacts. Without a cold war to force people into unions and pacts they'll naturally be more willing to experiment on their own again. Sometimes its satellite states trying to move away from their old masters, sometimes its suppressed demographics that are rebelling against their dictators who, with the end of the cold war, have lost the support of the US or USSR.

Those videos are just plain s**t and everyone you dont even have to spend a year at university, to know that this statement is not only overly simplistic but wrong on all levels.

hmmm I too thought the video was quite good actually - packaged a LOT of history and explanation, albeit simplified into a very short time... 

I always found this comment to be a bit flippant to be honest or maybe im just being pedantic. I doubt any nation that goes to war with sticks and stones would be capable of mounting a global offensive :p

The statistics mentioned in the video are wisely picked and sometimes plain wrong. It mostly references work from Steve Pinker, who made this theory popular. However some of those things are just wrong.

1. Individual conflicts are on the rise, but less people die in it.
2. The statistic does not really mention people who die of issues related to conflicts. Things like famine or people who die of illness of accidents, when they try to get away of a war.
3. Health care is better in general. You dont have to look back a lot, to get to times where chances to survive a wound after combat was rather low. Remember that 100 years stuff like Penicillin was not even around.
4. The further you go back in human histroy, the harder it is to estimate casualties of conflict. Especially civilian casualties were not mentioned at all. The general documentation was very bad and it is a mix of no documentation at all or inordinate statistics, written by the winner or the looser of a conflict to paint it in a certain light.

Another theory in this theory is that there would be less war, becaue we are getting smarter. That is kind of laughable, because it does not explain the big conflicts like ww1 and ww2 which are not far away from where we are now.

And is response if I have to "s**t on everything".

No but I dont like content that is overliy simplistic and the mentality connected with it. In these days, it is enough to make a neat little video and most people will agree of what it says, just because the presentation is good. In the end I call this s**t people and this can be dangerous. The entire theory is nothing but a nice and warm blanket for the western world. It is ignoring facts and more complex constellations for the sake of feeling less guilty and evading responsibility. I personally dont like this "tomorrow everything will be better" state of mind and I dont know why you get personally offended Kryrklin, I responded to the video and not to your person.