Humanity is well on the way to extinction by the 2060s. The band of uninhabitability at the equator continues to expand inexorably, driving surviving refugees North and South - primarily North. Western countries, in particular the United States, are well along in the process of losing basic infrastructure; electricity, clean water, and internet access are only intermittently available at best for all but the areas designated by the US military as "smart cities".
https://mwi.usma.edu/feral-cities-pandemics-military/
The vast majority of the United States is designated "feral" territory. The military's prime internal mission is to keep the population of feral areas helpless and divided though information control (propaganda), resource control, and military action. Large scale campaigns of extermination of feral population are probably initiated at this time, but are not yet implemented on a wide scale for another decade.
The primary external mission of the US military is to maintain the southern border from millions of climate change refugees, or alternatively to exterminate as many refugees as possible.
The elite continue to withdraw into highly secured areas, defended by the military as well as by private military contractors. Some of the elite retire to luxury underground bunkers, primarily in New Zealand. I lack sufficient information to speculate on the response of New Zealanders to this prospect.
Due to the lack of infrastructure as well as environmental collapse, new pandemics continue to rage through the feral population and the global South. Old diseases return with a vengeance, since crumbling infrastructure has made basic sanitation impossible for most of the world's population. Health care is, of course, unavailable in most cases.
Combined with increasingly violent weather on a scale currently unimaginable, deaths in the billions occur. Needless to say, billions of diseased and rotting bodies make ever-larger areas of the planet uninhabitable due to disease.
Some of the elite may or may not have attempted to escape to orbital habitats or colonies on the Moon or Mars. These attempts are not successful. Even if colonies are successfully established, they lack sufficient biodiversity and technological skill to survive more than a few decades at most. The same issue applies to underground bunkers; the elite believe that they are technologically capable of self-preservation and do not require a living planet to survive, but they are incorrect. They end up devouring each other in the dark, underground.
The human race becomes extinct within 100 to 200 years from this point.
There are some wildcard factors that I can't assess, such as attempts at geoengineering by one or more governments or corporations. The prospect of geoengineering warfare is an interesting one. My best guess is that any attempts at geoengineering are as likely to have unexpected negative effects as positive ones.
ReplyDeleteAnd of course the prospect of intentional negative geoengineering, either for feral population reduction purposes (although that would hardly seem necessary under the circumstances - but we're not talking about leaders who are particularly rational or intelligent) or as part of warfare can't be discounted.