^ That's amazing @daspaceasians you absolutely knocked it out of the park on that one! 😎👍
The Three Amigos (Collaborative TL Between Joe Bonkers, TheMann, and isayyo2)
- Thread starter Joe Bonkers
- Start date
Advance the Species
By 2010, the Baby Boomers had begun to cycle out of the workforce in numbers, passing the torch after a spectacular run to their children and the generations that followed, as the reached the time where they could retire in comfort - and indeed, they could easily do that, having spent much of the last 50 years ensuring the prosperity of the human species on a level once unthinkable. While major challenges remained (and climate change and resource scarcity was starting to bring up new ones), one think was abundantly clear - the most deadly century in human history had given way to one that was increasingly looking like it would be one of the most peaceful, and the advancement of the species, courtesy of ever-greater technological development, cultural and spiritual knowledge, communication and understanding, was moving at paces never before seen.
Perhaps the greatest advancements of the later years of the 20th Century were coming from two sectors - energy and space flight.
On the latter front, there had become three distinct paths. The United States had continued modernizing Titan and Saturn hardware even with the development of the Space Shuttle, which first flew in June 1976 (just before the American Bicentennial, which the Shuttle had been a key public project of). The process of moving from strictly chemical rockets into nuclear propulsion shift to a considerable degree with the shuttle, and despite the decades-long NERVA having created an absolutely bulletproof launch system - indeed, the engines produced by Westinghouse, General Electric, Rockwell and Combustion Engineering proved phenomenally reliable, and while weaker than chemical rockets in an atmospheric environment they far outperformed chemical systems once into space, which led to the dramatic improvements in the size and scale of satellites and space stations launched - the shuttle was an advancement on existing hardware, secure in the knowledge that the nuclear rockets once in space would absolutely blow the doors off of any chemical rocket. The Space Transportation System, whose development had begun even before the moon landing, saw the Gemini era Manned Orbiting Laboratory and X-20 Dyna Soar retired by Skylab and the Shuttle, with Skylab 1, which first entered space in March 1972, quickly being followed by Skylab 2 (an improved version of the original) and then the building of Skylab 3 beginning in 1975. The mighty Saturn V was progressively upgraded with a recoverable first stage (developed and provided by Mexico's famed Costa Rica Space Laboratories) while rockets were upgraded to F-1A and J-2S units. Even this wasn't the end, as Apollo 21 through 24 missions evolved the Saturn V into the Saturn VI, the primary difference being a man-rated NERVA engine having twice the specific impulse of any chemical rocket on its 3rd stage. With the Shuttle program's design stage basically done by the end of the Apollo program in 1975, the Skylab Future project became one of the priorities, the project expanding to a manned space station assembled in space from multiple components. The Soviets were on the same track with their Mir space station and their Buran orbiter (which didn't fly until 1988), but Soviet attempts to build a nuclear propulsion system to rival the NERVA project ultimately were unsuccessful before the end of the USSR in 1991.
The Shuttle program was seen in the 1970s and 1980s as a step towards a permanent manned presence in space, which didn't happen during that decade - though Skylab 3 and Mir would rapidly in the 1980s evolve into the plans for the International Space Station, which would come to pass in the 1990s. The Americans' nuclear rockets had power and capabilities far beyond traditional chemical rockets, the first NERVA engine having twice the specific impulse of any chemical rocket and later variants easily besting that, which would see the revival of plans for missions to Mars and Venus by the end of the 1980s. The Shuttle program ended up becoming an Amigos project - namely owing to NASA's use of Canadian-developed control systems and the Canadarm and the initial launch boosters being manufactured by Mexico - and by the mid-1980s Canadian and Mexican astronauts were training with NASA, along with astronauts of multiple other countries that were allied with the United States. The Shuttle would prove the best way by far to launch satellites in the 1980s, and its powerful engines giving the Shuttle the ability to take as much as 80,000 lbs to Low Earth Orbit and carry a crew of up to twelve in addition to the ability to launch some huge pieces of equipment, such as the Hubble Space Telescope, which was deployed by the Shuttle in May 1983. The satellites of America's Global Positioning System were overwhelmingly delivered by the Shuttle, as were multiple commercial payloads. With this, the Shuttle performed absolutely faultlessly, with the Mexican-built solid boosters actually getting more powerful as the Mexicans further improved the design. Several other countries in the 1980s, including Germany, France, Brazil and Japan, funded missions for the Shuttle and sent their own people as a result, and the European Skylab Europa module was taken to space by the Shuttle Endeavour in March 1986. The Amigos' alliance on the Shuttle led to a Shuttle being funded by Mexico (that one being named "Huracan" after the Mayan God of wind, storm and fire) which undertook its first flight (originally from Vandenburg Air Force Base in California, though subsequent flights flew from Mexico's space port at Iralaya on the border between Honduras and Nicaragua) in February 1984, the Mexican Shuttle performing so faultlessly that Mexico, in an act of both national pride and a sign of its close relationship with its northern neighbor, bought a second shuttle, that one gaining the name Tonatiuh after the Aztec God of the Sun, would be the last of the shuttles built, delivered to Mexico on its own Boeing 747 shuttle carrier (which had also been bought by Mexico) in June 1988.
The Commonwealth had by the 1980s become all too aware that they didn't want to piggyback on the Americans (and had little chance of being able to afford the huge cost of developing the nuclear-thermal engines the Americans had) and had as a result shifted its focus entirely to the development of fully-reusable launch systems, the Commonwealth Spaceflight Alliance Agency (CSAA), established in 1977, had begun development of a single-stage-to-orbit spacecraft in the early 1980s under a project initially designated Project HOTOL. By the late 1980s this evolved into Project Skylon, which was a project for a unmanned spacecraft controlled by remote control that could land and take off from runways and breathe air at lower altitudes and switch to the breathing of on-board oxygen as the craft reached the edges of space. This proved a massive challenge to develop from a propulsion front, as the need to make an engine that could perform in both space and the atmosphere proved a challenge. In 1993, the Reaction Engines Corporation, set up in 1986 to attempt to develop such an engine, announced it had indeed successfully developed an engine capable of such performance, the SABRE 5 engine producing some 500,000 lbs of thrust when needed and proving capable to taking the lightweight Skylon to space. After the SABRE 5 proved capable, development of the Skylon move rapidly, with the first test flight of the Skylon happening in June 1995 (on conventional jet engines in the atmosphere), before flight testing of the SABRE 5-equipped Skylon beginning from RAAF Darwin in Northern Australia on May 17, 1996. As that happened, plans for the future of the Skylon rapidly progressed, with the Commonwealth committing first to a collection of bases to launch it from. After the eruptions on Montserrat in 1995 to 1997 forced the evacuation of much of the island, the Canadian Space Agency (a member of the CSAA) proposed establishing its primary base for the Skylon there, with secondary bases in Belize and Trinidad. RAF Socotra quickly also volunteered, as did Cyprus. RAAF Curtin, a normally-bare base, was established as Australia's first spaceport, while Thanjavur Air Force Station in Southern India became India's base for the Skylon. Israel's massive Beersheba Air Force Base was also established as a Skylon station, as was the South African Air Force base at Swartkops, north of Johannesburg. At the same time, several emergency landing spots were established for the Skylon, and plans for its use were developed, including the development and deployment of a larger number of communications satellites and, crucially, the development of plans for the Skylon to be used to recover old satellites to return them to Earth, reducing fears of Kessler Syndrome and allowing economic recovery of older satellites. Skylon made its first flight to space, to considerable fanfare, on April 14, 1998, flying from RAF Socotra, making an absolutely faultless delivery of three commercial television satellites, with the flight being controlled from a circling jet airliner that acted as a flying control station.
The third pathway came from Russia. Having perfected their own orbiter with the Buran project and developed one of the world's most powerful launch systems ever created with the Energia project during Soviet times, the Russians after the end of the USSR, the Russians launched their first space mission on their own since Soviet times in September 1995, aiming to reactivate the GLONASS satellite system, while at the same time refurbishing the Buran/Energia system for service. It's first flight in May 2000 was a massive sign of its success, and in the years to come the Russians worked hard at improving the capabilities of the Energia system and its other launch systems, aiming to make a capable launch system. While much of the demand for commercial launches would be taken up by the Skylon, the Buran was capable of lifting a 30-ton payload from the beginning and the second Buran, completed in 2002, upped this to 36 tons, still short of the Space Shuttle (40 tons) but still substantial and enough to lift multiple satellites at once. Making a point, the first manned flight mission for the Buran in May 2000 included four Russian cosmonauts, but Roscosmos, well aware that the Americans had carried its cosmonauts to space and rescued one trapped aboard Mir, offered a seat on that famous flight to the Americans (which was indeed taken by veteran Shuttle flier Eileen Collins) and one each to Ukraine and India, which also took the Russians up on their offer. (Collins would comment that the newly-refurbished Buran was a "spectacular piece of equipment".) With Skylon active, Russia joined the European Space Agency's single-stage-to-orbit program in 2003, a decision that saw the Russians tasked with part of the development of the engines for the project, a job that turned out better than expected.
The Skylon basically rewrote the rules of space and its cost to get there, cutting the cost of space launches (in terms of cost per kilogram) by over 95%, taking space from something only accessible by nation states and huge corporations and bring it down to much smaller entities, and brought a number of ideas that had until then been the realm of science fiction, such as space-based solar power systems and asteroid mining, into conversations about their legitimate feasibility. The Skylon's success led to a American-Japanese and European projects to create successors, and knowing that the success of the Skylon would surely lead to bigger and better rivals, the Skylon consortium - made up of Vickers, Canadair, Rolls-Royce Orenda, BAE Systems, Marconi Electric, Research in Motion, Pacific Aerospace, Sinclair Research, Amstrad and Ferranti Beaulieu - quickly began working on the Skylon's successor. This created a massive move in the 2000s for future spacecraft, which dovetailed with the rapid growth in hydrogen fuel availability at airports to raise the prospect that soon future spacecraft wouldn't need dedicated spaceports but could instead fly from one of the thousands of suitable airports all around the world. While the fruits of these wouldn't be entirely seen until the 2010s and 2020s, it was clear even then that space was rapidly shifting from the "final frontier" to the next place where the human species would expand out into. Numerous airports around the world, understanding this, began runway expansions and improvements during the early 21st Century, expecting a time in the not-terribly-distant future where travelers would fly from commercial airports into space.
On the energy front, the 1990s and 2000s had seen the rapid introduction of high-temperature nuclear reactor designs, with modern reactors from a vast list of developers - General Electric, Combustion Engineering, Westinghouse and Bechtel of the United States, NECC of Canada, Navarro-Andrade of Mexico, Larsen and Toubro of India, General Atomic Company of the United Kingdom, Mitsubishi and Hitachi of Japan, Lucky-Goldstar of Korea, China Nuclear of China, AREVA Technicatome and Schneider Electric of France, Siemens of Germany, ASEA Brown Boveri of Switzerland and Rosatom of Russia - becoming available both for their own countries as well as sales abroad, with virtually all of the above (to say nothing of a number of other companies besides) offering fuel supply, removal and reprocessing services, leading an industry with literally thousands of subcontractors. By 2000 over 30 countries - including the United States, Mexico, Canada, France, Germany, Britain, Australia, Korea and Japan - generated at least 40% of their electricity from nuclear sources, with some going well beyond that - France had nuclear power producing over 75% of the country's electrical generating output. In several countries, including the United States, Mexico, Australia, Iran and Argentina, nuclear energy was being used for the desalination of water on vast scales.
The Desert Reclamation Project, opened in Neenach, California, in September 1994, was the largest water desalination facility on Earth when opened and, when combined with the rest of the Western Water System, had proven so phenomenally successful that the system had allowed for tens of thousands of square miles of desert being turned into productive farmland in California, Nevada and Arizona as well as in Sonora and Chihuahua in Mexico, while also allowing California to famously bring what had at one time been the largest freshwater lake in America west of the Mississippi, Lake Tulare, back from the dead - from a farmed lake bed (though with serious surface subsiding issues) in 1965 to a spectacular lake in 1990 which, when the Central Valley Waterways Project was completed in 1991, became a destination for pleasure boaters. Today's California Grand Prix for Powerboats is merely the sign of what has become for Tulare Lake, and like the Salton Sea 270 miles to the Southeast (which was ably resuscitated in the 1980s mostly through redirection of water sources from the Colorado Aqueduct and highly-treated wastewater from the city of Los Angeles) and Lake Mead, these places became safety valves for the water needs of the exploding population of the Southwestern United States. It was a similar story in Mexico, whose population on the Mexican Altiplano had been swelling since the 17th Century and water had long since become an acute problem, leading to Mexico building a clone of the Desert Reclamation Project at Limoncito Hills north of Puerto Vallarta, the Planta de Producción de Agua Del Oeste beginning operations in 2001. The Mexican project also involved what was the largest water pumping project in the world to do so, as while the pipeline was only 226 km in length from the plant to the big city of Guadalajara, the water had to climb an astounding 1550 metres to do so, a system that necessitated one of the largest pumping systems ever built to handle the water. Despite this challenge, the pipeline projects were almost entirely done by the Mexicans themselves, and the pipeline's completion in 2001 saw it legitimately spoken about as one of the world's greatest feats of engineering.
Australia had taken what had been done in California to another level. Having worked with the UK on its gas-cooled high-temperature reactor projects in the 1960s and 1970s, Australia opened what was at the time the world's largest high-temperature reactor near Karumba in northern Queensland in 1977, with the facility being equipped with nearly-identical desalting trains to what was in use in California at the time, providing vast quantities of water for northern Queensland - and true to form, the water was capable of irrigating over two thousand square miles of land, turning what was rather arid land (though further away from the mostly-clay coastal regions) into very good farmland, and the efficient design of these systems resulted in the avoidance of major negative effects on wildlife in the region.
The success of what had been termed the "Nuclear Bradfield Scheme" led to similar projects being developed in Western Australia, South Australia and New South Wales in the 1980s and 1990s, with the projects making Australia's quantities of arable land absolutely explode. By the end of the 1980s, Australia had used nuclear-powered desalination to create water sufficient to double its population, or provide water to over 35,000 square miles of irrigated farmland, with more on the way. Following the California example (and Australian sensibilities) the projects mandated the efficient use of the water, with the project's year-round water proving most useful in western New South Wales, where the Menindee Lakes and several smaller lakes along the Great Darling Anabranch were turned into major aquifer recharge points and flood control bodies, as the Australian authorities soon discovered just what was possible to improve the environment of the region - by 2000, the Darling-Murray River system was in better health than it had been in decades, as the vast quantities of water brought to it from the ocean and desalination plants made it possible to use the water to improve both the region's agriculture and its environment. It was a similar story in western and northwestern Australia, where vast landscapes were steadily turned from vast deserts into vibrant fields, with Australia also taking the California example of developing a wide variety of crops spread out in patchwork fields and creating vast numbers of orchards, finding that orchards tolerated the heat of the region better and were better able to adapt to the local soil. The Pilbara region of Northwestern Australia was the biggest such development of all - over two million irrigated acres came out of the development of such projects in the 1980s and 1990s, though this would end up resulting in one of the largest environmental cleanup projects of all time at Wittenoom, as the asbestos mining of the area (that had continued until 1966) left vast quantities of asbestos in the local environment that the irrigation projects threatened to spread all over the place. The American and Australian experiences had led to similar to developments in North Africa, Iran, the Middle East, Sub-Saharan Africa (particularly South Africa and Namibia) and in many cities in water-short areas but had access to coastlines.
Until the development of commercial graphene desalination in the late 2000s, this was the state of the art of nuclear and water desalination technology - huge high-temperature reactor projects, namely of fast-breeder types and molten salt designs, built to produce vast quantities of electricity and fresh water as well as hydrogen - but the VHTRs of the 1990s and 2000s changed that.
First developed by Bechtel in the United States in the late 1980s, the first commercial VHTRs were smaller installations meant to be integrated into major energy sucks such as oil refineries - and indeed, one of the true groundbreakers in this regard was the Hyperion Island reactor, which was first powered up in Los Angeles in March 1992. These facilities made district heat almost a given, produced electricity at amazing efficiencies and could (and were) used for the production of both fresh water and hydrogen. Even as the boom in the building of smaller hydroelectric facilities, wind turbines and solar cells that began in the 1990s and 2000s continued, the nuclear power facilities continued to advance, to the point that by the late 2000s that most of the warships produced by the Amigos, starting from the Canadian Province Class of missile destroyers (which were fitted with Prismatic-Block reactors mounted inside of a specialized container, which was in one piece lowered into the ship) which first commissioned in 2007. Likewise, commercial vessels soon began to be built with such reactors in ever-larger numbers, with noble gas cooling (most often helium) being preferred by the shipbuilders and operators due to its not being made radioactive by exposure to ionizing radiation. Likewise, these projects also led to the development of installations for such reactors for everything from icebreakers to remote towns to disaster response units to armed forces.
The development of thorium reactors in the 1980s and 1990s also had a side effect that proved unexpected but welcome - gandolinium, which was regularly produced as a by-product of Thorium production, saw the development by several firms as a way of it becoming a material used in magnetic refrigeration. By the late 2000s, companies in India, Mexico and China had perfected this technology, which offered major energy savings over conventional refrigeration technologies, which saw these units become very common in commercial refrigeration through the 2010s, the ability to use less energy-intensive technology also mixing with the ability of such units to avoid the use of conventional refrigerant - these technologies had moved from the old Freon-based units to R-134 systems in the 1980s, and then moved again to HFO-1234yf refrigerants starting in the mid-2000s, both switchovers coming out of a desire to reduce the release of chemicals that would contribute to ozone layer difficulties - though the problems with HFO-1234yf - namely, its breaking down over time into persistent organic pollutants - would contribute to its being the refrigerant of choice being an honor that was short lived. By later in the 2010s, virtually all residential systems had switched over to the use of liquified carbon dioxide as a refrigerant, with liquid CO2 becoming increasingly readily-available as a result of efforts to reduce industrial emissions.
Indeed, the 21st Century's desire for environmental improvement only spread further and faster as time went on, and began to be seen in increasingly-ingenious ways. In the Amigos, while power generation from coal had ended with the closure of the Petacalco Generating Station in Mexico in 2004, natural gas-fueled facilities, major industrial facilities and incinerators still produced emissions, and these facilities began to have emissions capture systems worked into them. This technology, first seen in the Amigos on a commercial scale with Ontario Hydro's rebuilt Nanticoke facility when it re-opened in 1988, gathered up its industrial emissions in order to both reduce pollution but also gather up potentially-valuable feedstocks from it. Like the carbonfiber industry born from the Anthracite of Pennsylvania, this idea of killing two birds with one stone appealed to private companies, utilities and governments alike, and the recovered products from these emissions - most of all carbon dioxide and sulfuric acid, but there were a number of others - would prove to be viable products for many commercial firms.
Likewise, by this point most urban areas had advanced recycling programs that allowed massive growth in the recovery of many materials, with most jurisdictions by the 21st Century offering payments for the return of not just alcohol containers but also glass drink bottles, aluminum and tin cans, plastic containers of many different kinds and electronic waste (which was overwhelmingly broken down into its constituent materials), while lots of other environmental remediation operations got ever more inventive and intelligent, from the practice of reburying culm into worked-out anthracite mines in Pennsylvania that became almost de rigueur in Western nations, turning open pit mines into water supplies and even hydroelectric power plants, using bottom ash from incinerators as material for road building and recovering waste leftovers for other purposes. Having seen disposal by landfill of liquid hazardous waste banned outright in the Amigos in the 1980s, incineration developments proved useful and such facilities began to grow in number as their need grew, as disposing of hazardous materials in landfills began to be widely seen as just kicking the problem down the road, which to many was unacceptable. Some other novel developments, such as cleaning up sites contaminated with TNT through genetically modified plants to the development of fishing nets that could be cut open and resewn by remote-controlled underwater vehicles (to allow fishermen to reduce their impact on the ocean ecosystem), it was clear that the Gen X and Millennial generations had taken to heart many of the triumphs of the Boomer generation and said "Great Work, Now Watch This."
By 2010, the Baby Boomers had begun to cycle out of the workforce in numbers, passing the torch after a spectacular run to their children and the generations that followed, as the reached the time where they could retire in comfort - and indeed, they could easily do that, having spent much of the last 50 years ensuring the prosperity of the human species on a level once unthinkable. While major challenges remained (and climate change and resource scarcity was starting to bring up new ones), one think was abundantly clear - the most deadly century in human history had given way to one that was increasingly looking like it would be one of the most peaceful, and the advancement of the species, courtesy of ever-greater technological development, cultural and spiritual knowledge, communication and understanding, was moving at paces never before seen.
Perhaps the greatest advancements of the later years of the 20th Century were coming from two sectors - energy and space flight.
On the latter front, there had become three distinct paths. The United States had continued modernizing Titan and Saturn hardware even with the development of the Space Shuttle, which first flew in June 1976 (just before the American Bicentennial, which the Shuttle had been a key public project of). The process of moving from strictly chemical rockets into nuclear propulsion shift to a considerable degree with the shuttle, and despite the decades-long NERVA having created an absolutely bulletproof launch system - indeed, the engines produced by Westinghouse, General Electric, Rockwell and Combustion Engineering proved phenomenally reliable, and while weaker than chemical rockets in an atmospheric environment they far outperformed chemical systems once into space, which led to the dramatic improvements in the size and scale of satellites and space stations launched - the shuttle was an advancement on existing hardware, secure in the knowledge that the nuclear rockets once in space would absolutely blow the doors off of any chemical rocket. The Space Transportation System, whose development had begun even before the moon landing, saw the Gemini era Manned Orbiting Laboratory and X-20 Dyna Soar retired by Skylab and the Shuttle, with Skylab 1, which first entered space in March 1972, quickly being followed by Skylab 2 (an improved version of the original) and then the building of Skylab 3 beginning in 1975. The mighty Saturn V was progressively upgraded with a recoverable first stage (developed and provided by Mexico's famed Costa Rica Space Laboratories) while rockets were upgraded to F-1A and J-2S units. Even this wasn't the end, as Apollo 21 through 24 missions evolved the Saturn V into the Saturn VI, the primary difference being a man-rated NERVA engine having twice the specific impulse of any chemical rocket on its 3rd stage. With the Shuttle program's design stage basically done by the end of the Apollo program in 1975, the Skylab Future project became one of the priorities, the project expanding to a manned space station assembled in space from multiple components. The Soviets were on the same track with their Mir space station and their Buran orbiter (which didn't fly until 1988), but Soviet attempts to build a nuclear propulsion system to rival the NERVA project ultimately were unsuccessful before the end of the USSR in 1991.
The Shuttle program was seen in the 1970s and 1980s as a step towards a permanent manned presence in space, which didn't happen during that decade - though Skylab 3 and Mir would rapidly in the 1980s evolve into the plans for the International Space Station, which would come to pass in the 1990s. The Americans' nuclear rockets had power and capabilities far beyond traditional chemical rockets, the first NERVA engine having twice the specific impulse of any chemical rocket and later variants easily besting that, which would see the revival of plans for missions to Mars and Venus by the end of the 1980s. The Shuttle program ended up becoming an Amigos project - namely owing to NASA's use of Canadian-developed control systems and the Canadarm and the initial launch boosters being manufactured by Mexico - and by the mid-1980s Canadian and Mexican astronauts were training with NASA, along with astronauts of multiple other countries that were allied with the United States. The Shuttle would prove the best way by far to launch satellites in the 1980s, and its powerful engines giving the Shuttle the ability to take as much as 80,000 lbs to Low Earth Orbit and carry a crew of up to twelve in addition to the ability to launch some huge pieces of equipment, such as the Hubble Space Telescope, which was deployed by the Shuttle in May 1983. The satellites of America's Global Positioning System were overwhelmingly delivered by the Shuttle, as were multiple commercial payloads. With this, the Shuttle performed absolutely faultlessly, with the Mexican-built solid boosters actually getting more powerful as the Mexicans further improved the design. Several other countries in the 1980s, including Germany, France, Brazil and Japan, funded missions for the Shuttle and sent their own people as a result, and the European Skylab Europa module was taken to space by the Shuttle Endeavour in March 1986. The Amigos' alliance on the Shuttle led to a Shuttle being funded by Mexico (that one being named "Huracan" after the Mayan God of wind, storm and fire) which undertook its first flight (originally from Vandenburg Air Force Base in California, though subsequent flights flew from Mexico's space port at Iralaya on the border between Honduras and Nicaragua) in February 1984, the Mexican Shuttle performing so faultlessly that Mexico, in an act of both national pride and a sign of its close relationship with its northern neighbor, bought a second shuttle, that one gaining the name Tonatiuh after the Aztec God of the Sun, would be the last of the shuttles built, delivered to Mexico on its own Boeing 747 shuttle carrier (which had also been bought by Mexico) in June 1988.
The Commonwealth had by the 1980s become all too aware that they didn't want to piggyback on the Americans (and had little chance of being able to afford the huge cost of developing the nuclear-thermal engines the Americans had) and had as a result shifted its focus entirely to the development of fully-reusable launch systems, the Commonwealth Spaceflight Alliance Agency (CSAA), established in 1977, had begun development of a single-stage-to-orbit spacecraft in the early 1980s under a project initially designated Project HOTOL. By the late 1980s this evolved into Project Skylon, which was a project for a unmanned spacecraft controlled by remote control that could land and take off from runways and breathe air at lower altitudes and switch to the breathing of on-board oxygen as the craft reached the edges of space. This proved a massive challenge to develop from a propulsion front, as the need to make an engine that could perform in both space and the atmosphere proved a challenge. In 1993, the Reaction Engines Corporation, set up in 1986 to attempt to develop such an engine, announced it had indeed successfully developed an engine capable of such performance, the SABRE 5 engine producing some 500,000 lbs of thrust when needed and proving capable to taking the lightweight Skylon to space. After the SABRE 5 proved capable, development of the Skylon move rapidly, with the first test flight of the Skylon happening in June 1995 (on conventional jet engines in the atmosphere), before flight testing of the SABRE 5-equipped Skylon beginning from RAAF Darwin in Northern Australia on May 17, 1996. As that happened, plans for the future of the Skylon rapidly progressed, with the Commonwealth committing first to a collection of bases to launch it from. After the eruptions on Montserrat in 1995 to 1997 forced the evacuation of much of the island, the Canadian Space Agency (a member of the CSAA) proposed establishing its primary base for the Skylon there, with secondary bases in Belize and Trinidad. RAF Socotra quickly also volunteered, as did Cyprus. RAAF Curtin, a normally-bare base, was established as Australia's first spaceport, while Thanjavur Air Force Station in Southern India became India's base for the Skylon. Israel's massive Beersheba Air Force Base was also established as a Skylon station, as was the South African Air Force base at Swartkops, north of Johannesburg. At the same time, several emergency landing spots were established for the Skylon, and plans for its use were developed, including the development and deployment of a larger number of communications satellites and, crucially, the development of plans for the Skylon to be used to recover old satellites to return them to Earth, reducing fears of Kessler Syndrome and allowing economic recovery of older satellites. Skylon made its first flight to space, to considerable fanfare, on April 14, 1998, flying from RAF Socotra, making an absolutely faultless delivery of three commercial television satellites, with the flight being controlled from a circling jet airliner that acted as a flying control station.
The third pathway came from Russia. Having perfected their own orbiter with the Buran project and developed one of the world's most powerful launch systems ever created with the Energia project during Soviet times, the Russians after the end of the USSR, the Russians launched their first space mission on their own since Soviet times in September 1995, aiming to reactivate the GLONASS satellite system, while at the same time refurbishing the Buran/Energia system for service. It's first flight in May 2000 was a massive sign of its success, and in the years to come the Russians worked hard at improving the capabilities of the Energia system and its other launch systems, aiming to make a capable launch system. While much of the demand for commercial launches would be taken up by the Skylon, the Buran was capable of lifting a 30-ton payload from the beginning and the second Buran, completed in 2002, upped this to 36 tons, still short of the Space Shuttle (40 tons) but still substantial and enough to lift multiple satellites at once. Making a point, the first manned flight mission for the Buran in May 2000 included four Russian cosmonauts, but Roscosmos, well aware that the Americans had carried its cosmonauts to space and rescued one trapped aboard Mir, offered a seat on that famous flight to the Americans (which was indeed taken by veteran Shuttle flier Eileen Collins) and one each to Ukraine and India, which also took the Russians up on their offer. (Collins would comment that the newly-refurbished Buran was a "spectacular piece of equipment".) With Skylon active, Russia joined the European Space Agency's single-stage-to-orbit program in 2003, a decision that saw the Russians tasked with part of the development of the engines for the project, a job that turned out better than expected.
The Skylon basically rewrote the rules of space and its cost to get there, cutting the cost of space launches (in terms of cost per kilogram) by over 95%, taking space from something only accessible by nation states and huge corporations and bring it down to much smaller entities, and brought a number of ideas that had until then been the realm of science fiction, such as space-based solar power systems and asteroid mining, into conversations about their legitimate feasibility. The Skylon's success led to a American-Japanese and European projects to create successors, and knowing that the success of the Skylon would surely lead to bigger and better rivals, the Skylon consortium - made up of Vickers, Canadair, Rolls-Royce Orenda, BAE Systems, Marconi Electric, Research in Motion, Pacific Aerospace, Sinclair Research, Amstrad and Ferranti Beaulieu - quickly began working on the Skylon's successor. This created a massive move in the 2000s for future spacecraft, which dovetailed with the rapid growth in hydrogen fuel availability at airports to raise the prospect that soon future spacecraft wouldn't need dedicated spaceports but could instead fly from one of the thousands of suitable airports all around the world. While the fruits of these wouldn't be entirely seen until the 2010s and 2020s, it was clear even then that space was rapidly shifting from the "final frontier" to the next place where the human species would expand out into. Numerous airports around the world, understanding this, began runway expansions and improvements during the early 21st Century, expecting a time in the not-terribly-distant future where travelers would fly from commercial airports into space.
On the energy front, the 1990s and 2000s had seen the rapid introduction of high-temperature nuclear reactor designs, with modern reactors from a vast list of developers - General Electric, Combustion Engineering, Westinghouse and Bechtel of the United States, NECC of Canada, Navarro-Andrade of Mexico, Larsen and Toubro of India, General Atomic Company of the United Kingdom, Mitsubishi and Hitachi of Japan, Lucky-Goldstar of Korea, China Nuclear of China, AREVA Technicatome and Schneider Electric of France, Siemens of Germany, ASEA Brown Boveri of Switzerland and Rosatom of Russia - becoming available both for their own countries as well as sales abroad, with virtually all of the above (to say nothing of a number of other companies besides) offering fuel supply, removal and reprocessing services, leading an industry with literally thousands of subcontractors. By 2000 over 30 countries - including the United States, Mexico, Canada, France, Germany, Britain, Australia, Korea and Japan - generated at least 40% of their electricity from nuclear sources, with some going well beyond that - France had nuclear power producing over 75% of the country's electrical generating output. In several countries, including the United States, Mexico, Australia, Iran and Argentina, nuclear energy was being used for the desalination of water on vast scales.
The Desert Reclamation Project, opened in Neenach, California, in September 1994, was the largest water desalination facility on Earth when opened and, when combined with the rest of the Western Water System, had proven so phenomenally successful that the system had allowed for tens of thousands of square miles of desert being turned into productive farmland in California, Nevada and Arizona as well as in Sonora and Chihuahua in Mexico, while also allowing California to famously bring what had at one time been the largest freshwater lake in America west of the Mississippi, Lake Tulare, back from the dead - from a farmed lake bed (though with serious surface subsiding issues) in 1965 to a spectacular lake in 1990 which, when the Central Valley Waterways Project was completed in 1991, became a destination for pleasure boaters. Today's California Grand Prix for Powerboats is merely the sign of what has become for Tulare Lake, and like the Salton Sea 270 miles to the Southeast (which was ably resuscitated in the 1980s mostly through redirection of water sources from the Colorado Aqueduct and highly-treated wastewater from the city of Los Angeles) and Lake Mead, these places became safety valves for the water needs of the exploding population of the Southwestern United States. It was a similar story in Mexico, whose population on the Mexican Altiplano had been swelling since the 17th Century and water had long since become an acute problem, leading to Mexico building a clone of the Desert Reclamation Project at Limoncito Hills north of Puerto Vallarta, the Planta de Producción de Agua Del Oeste beginning operations in 2001. The Mexican project also involved what was the largest water pumping project in the world to do so, as while the pipeline was only 226 km in length from the plant to the big city of Guadalajara, the water had to climb an astounding 1550 metres to do so, a system that necessitated one of the largest pumping systems ever built to handle the water. Despite this challenge, the pipeline projects were almost entirely done by the Mexicans themselves, and the pipeline's completion in 2001 saw it legitimately spoken about as one of the world's greatest feats of engineering.
Australia had taken what had been done in California to another level. Having worked with the UK on its gas-cooled high-temperature reactor projects in the 1960s and 1970s, Australia opened what was at the time the world's largest high-temperature reactor near Karumba in northern Queensland in 1977, with the facility being equipped with nearly-identical desalting trains to what was in use in California at the time, providing vast quantities of water for northern Queensland - and true to form, the water was capable of irrigating over two thousand square miles of land, turning what was rather arid land (though further away from the mostly-clay coastal regions) into very good farmland, and the efficient design of these systems resulted in the avoidance of major negative effects on wildlife in the region.
The success of what had been termed the "Nuclear Bradfield Scheme" led to similar projects being developed in Western Australia, South Australia and New South Wales in the 1980s and 1990s, with the projects making Australia's quantities of arable land absolutely explode. By the end of the 1980s, Australia had used nuclear-powered desalination to create water sufficient to double its population, or provide water to over 35,000 square miles of irrigated farmland, with more on the way. Following the California example (and Australian sensibilities) the projects mandated the efficient use of the water, with the project's year-round water proving most useful in western New South Wales, where the Menindee Lakes and several smaller lakes along the Great Darling Anabranch were turned into major aquifer recharge points and flood control bodies, as the Australian authorities soon discovered just what was possible to improve the environment of the region - by 2000, the Darling-Murray River system was in better health than it had been in decades, as the vast quantities of water brought to it from the ocean and desalination plants made it possible to use the water to improve both the region's agriculture and its environment. It was a similar story in western and northwestern Australia, where vast landscapes were steadily turned from vast deserts into vibrant fields, with Australia also taking the California example of developing a wide variety of crops spread out in patchwork fields and creating vast numbers of orchards, finding that orchards tolerated the heat of the region better and were better able to adapt to the local soil. The Pilbara region of Northwestern Australia was the biggest such development of all - over two million irrigated acres came out of the development of such projects in the 1980s and 1990s, though this would end up resulting in one of the largest environmental cleanup projects of all time at Wittenoom, as the asbestos mining of the area (that had continued until 1966) left vast quantities of asbestos in the local environment that the irrigation projects threatened to spread all over the place. The American and Australian experiences had led to similar to developments in North Africa, Iran, the Middle East, Sub-Saharan Africa (particularly South Africa and Namibia) and in many cities in water-short areas but had access to coastlines.
Until the development of commercial graphene desalination in the late 2000s, this was the state of the art of nuclear and water desalination technology - huge high-temperature reactor projects, namely of fast-breeder types and molten salt designs, built to produce vast quantities of electricity and fresh water as well as hydrogen - but the VHTRs of the 1990s and 2000s changed that.
First developed by Bechtel in the United States in the late 1980s, the first commercial VHTRs were smaller installations meant to be integrated into major energy sucks such as oil refineries - and indeed, one of the true groundbreakers in this regard was the Hyperion Island reactor, which was first powered up in Los Angeles in March 1992. These facilities made district heat almost a given, produced electricity at amazing efficiencies and could (and were) used for the production of both fresh water and hydrogen. Even as the boom in the building of smaller hydroelectric facilities, wind turbines and solar cells that began in the 1990s and 2000s continued, the nuclear power facilities continued to advance, to the point that by the late 2000s that most of the warships produced by the Amigos, starting from the Canadian Province Class of missile destroyers (which were fitted with Prismatic-Block reactors mounted inside of a specialized container, which was in one piece lowered into the ship) which first commissioned in 2007. Likewise, commercial vessels soon began to be built with such reactors in ever-larger numbers, with noble gas cooling (most often helium) being preferred by the shipbuilders and operators due to its not being made radioactive by exposure to ionizing radiation. Likewise, these projects also led to the development of installations for such reactors for everything from icebreakers to remote towns to disaster response units to armed forces.
The development of thorium reactors in the 1980s and 1990s also had a side effect that proved unexpected but welcome - gandolinium, which was regularly produced as a by-product of Thorium production, saw the development by several firms as a way of it becoming a material used in magnetic refrigeration. By the late 2000s, companies in India, Mexico and China had perfected this technology, which offered major energy savings over conventional refrigeration technologies, which saw these units become very common in commercial refrigeration through the 2010s, the ability to use less energy-intensive technology also mixing with the ability of such units to avoid the use of conventional refrigerant - these technologies had moved from the old Freon-based units to R-134 systems in the 1980s, and then moved again to HFO-1234yf refrigerants starting in the mid-2000s, both switchovers coming out of a desire to reduce the release of chemicals that would contribute to ozone layer difficulties - though the problems with HFO-1234yf - namely, its breaking down over time into persistent organic pollutants - would contribute to its being the refrigerant of choice being an honor that was short lived. By later in the 2010s, virtually all residential systems had switched over to the use of liquified carbon dioxide as a refrigerant, with liquid CO2 becoming increasingly readily-available as a result of efforts to reduce industrial emissions.
Indeed, the 21st Century's desire for environmental improvement only spread further and faster as time went on, and began to be seen in increasingly-ingenious ways. In the Amigos, while power generation from coal had ended with the closure of the Petacalco Generating Station in Mexico in 2004, natural gas-fueled facilities, major industrial facilities and incinerators still produced emissions, and these facilities began to have emissions capture systems worked into them. This technology, first seen in the Amigos on a commercial scale with Ontario Hydro's rebuilt Nanticoke facility when it re-opened in 1988, gathered up its industrial emissions in order to both reduce pollution but also gather up potentially-valuable feedstocks from it. Like the carbonfiber industry born from the Anthracite of Pennsylvania, this idea of killing two birds with one stone appealed to private companies, utilities and governments alike, and the recovered products from these emissions - most of all carbon dioxide and sulfuric acid, but there were a number of others - would prove to be viable products for many commercial firms.
Likewise, by this point most urban areas had advanced recycling programs that allowed massive growth in the recovery of many materials, with most jurisdictions by the 21st Century offering payments for the return of not just alcohol containers but also glass drink bottles, aluminum and tin cans, plastic containers of many different kinds and electronic waste (which was overwhelmingly broken down into its constituent materials), while lots of other environmental remediation operations got ever more inventive and intelligent, from the practice of reburying culm into worked-out anthracite mines in Pennsylvania that became almost de rigueur in Western nations, turning open pit mines into water supplies and even hydroelectric power plants, using bottom ash from incinerators as material for road building and recovering waste leftovers for other purposes. Having seen disposal by landfill of liquid hazardous waste banned outright in the Amigos in the 1980s, incineration developments proved useful and such facilities began to grow in number as their need grew, as disposing of hazardous materials in landfills began to be widely seen as just kicking the problem down the road, which to many was unacceptable. Some other novel developments, such as cleaning up sites contaminated with TNT through genetically modified plants to the development of fishing nets that could be cut open and resewn by remote-controlled underwater vehicles (to allow fishermen to reduce their impact on the ocean ecosystem), it was clear that the Gen X and Millennial generations had taken to heart many of the triumphs of the Boomer generation and said "Great Work, Now Watch This."
In the summer of 2017, a casual traveler would have been well advised to avoid the city of Zurich in Switzerland, for it would have been all but impossible to get a hotel room there. The Swiss city, usually better known for hard-nosed business dealings than for spiritual discussions and public prayer, was swarming with clerical persons of all stripes. They had gathered for a meeting that had been some four years in the making, the planning for which had begun by Pope Francis upon his accession to the Holy See: the Worldwide Interfaith and Interreligious Council.
The Council was planned as the first of a series of meetings among faith leaders the world over to promote cooperation and discussion on issues relating to faith. Along with the Roman Catholic Church, the Council included representatives of the World Council of Churches (including many Protestant denominations), the Orthodox Ecumenical Council, the leadership councils of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormons), the American Jewish Committee and other Jewish ecumenical organizations, the Council for a Parliament of the World’s Religions, the Islamic International Committee (established during the time the Middle East was allied to the defunct Soviet Union, and now representing Muslims of those nations as well), the Hindu Council, the International Buddhist Council, representatives of the Shinto faith, and many more – nearly fifty interfaith organizations in all, with many targeting specific faith issues such as the world’s poor, behavior and morals, or world peace.
The Council was deemed a success, with numerous proposals for interfaith cooperative programs introduced and channels for continued dialogue across the world’s faiths to be implemented or strengthened. The Pope especially praised the Muslim attendees for their eagerness the negative image that still clung to Islam in many quarters due to the former actions of extremists (sponsored mostly by the fallen regimes of the Middle East) to promote “holy war” against other faiths. The imams, for their part, were equally responsive, with the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Muhammad Ahmad Hussein, calling the Pope “a true man of God.”
In the back rooms, however, away from the television cameras, an even more dramatic series of discussions were taking place. Cardinals of the Catholic Church met with the Archbishop of Canterbury and other Anglican bishops, and with patriarchs of the Orthodox Church, to discuss the possibility of eventual return of those churches to full communion with the Catholic Church.
Of all Christian denominations which were considered “not in full communion” with the Catholic Church, the Orthodox and Anglican churches were closest to the Catholics in terms of doctrine. The Anglicans differed from the Catholic church primarily in allowing married priests; fewer books of the Bible, with a number of books removed from the accepted Anglican version of the Old Testament, including 1 and 2 Maccabees, Tobit, Wisdom, and Sirach; the Book of Common Prayer, used as the basis for Anglican services (though not differing substantially in doctrine from Catholicism); allowing Communion to be received by persons belonging to other Christian churches; in having fewer sacraments; and in some details regarding transubstantiation (in other words, the belief in the Real Presence of Christ in the bread and wine of Communion), the immaculate conception of Mary, and the assumption of Mary bodily into heaven. The Orthodox churches were even closer doctrinally, with the main difference being the ”filioque” – the statement in the Nicene Creed in the Catholic Mass that the Holy Spirit “proceeds from the Father and Son” rather than simply “from the Father.” One of the major programs to emerge from the 2017 Zurich Council was the establishment of interdenominational working groups to discuss formulae by which some of these questions might be resolved.
The main point of disagreement, of course, remained what it had been for the Orthodox Church since the 11th Century, and for the Anglicans since the 16th Century: the primacy of the Pope, and particularly the doctrine of papal infallibility (a much-misunderstood doctrine that states ONLY that the Pope’s statements are infallible when he specifically invokes the doctrine, and that the doctrine can ONLY be invoked regarding faith or morals). The discussions at the Council, however, offered the beginnings of a possible way to resolve this issue.
Some groundwork had already been laid. In 1982, Pope John Paul II had approved a “pastoral provision” that allowed some groups of Anglicans to enter the Catholic Church en masse while preserving their structure as churches and maintaining elements of an Anglican identity. In the United States, a number of individual parishes took this route, and in most cases the Catholic Church dispensed the married Anglican priests who served those parishes from the requirement of celibacy so that, after their reception into the Catholic Church, they could receive the Sacrament of Holy Orders and become Catholic priests.
Later, in 2009, Pope Benedict XIV, responded to requests from Anglicans to establish “sacramental union," established a new procedure which would form “personal ordinariates” – essentially, dioceses without geographical boundaries. The bishops would normally be former Anglicans, although, respecting the tradition of both the Catholic and Orthodox churches, candidates for bishop must be unmarried. While the Catholic Church did not at that time come to recognize as valid Anglican Holy Orders, the new structure allowed Anglican married priests to request ordination as Catholic priests upon entry into the Catholic Church. Former Anglican parishes would be allowed to preserve “elements of the distinctive Anglican spiritual and liturgical patrimony.”
These were obviously baby steps, and they had their critics on both sides; but they represented a possible way to begin sliding the door open. Could it be possible for a formula to be negotiated under which the dissenting denominations could one day be allowed to function as a sort of sub-denomination within the Catholic Church, practicing their own specific liturgies, but ultimately in a framework of “ultimate communion” with Catholics? Could formulae be found under which the questions of papal primacy versus the autonomy of congregations, and of doctrinal differences, could someday be worked out – maybe even, in some as-yet-unforeseeable time, the larger differences that divided Catholics from other Protestant groups (sola scriptura, justification by faith versus works, the existence of Purgatory, the Real Presence in the Eucharist) could be resolved to everyone’s mutual satisfaction? The answers to these questions were clearly a long way off, if they existed, and certainly no one intended to proceed rashly, and absolutely not without the surety in their hearts that their decisions were being directed by the Holy Spirit – which, in turn, meant long hours of prayer and discernment. But, as the faiths had grown and grown together in the last 100 years, it seemed like the seed of an answer might be planted – a notion that led the working groups addressing these questions, referring to a parable of Jesus, to become popularly known as the “Mustard Seed Committees.”
The optimism that shone around the Zurich Council in 2017 was common in faith communities worldwide. Nearly every faith community worldwide was growing, with no signs of stopping. The Third Great Awakening that had begun in the United States in the 1960s and blossomed fully in the 1980s was now spreading throughout the world, bringing, for example, churchgoers back to many a European church that had been considered mostly a museum piece before. And with that growth in worldwide church attendance came a concurrent growth in charitable giving and charitable organizations, with hospitals, schools, homeless shelters, and numerous other nonprofits enjoying generous budgets like nothing they had ever seen.
Indeed, the growth in faith was such that at least some of the more out-of-mainstream theologians were by the 2020s speculating that, perhaps, the Millennium – the thousand-year rule of Christ specified in the Revelation of St. John – was upon the world. This interpretation was not widely shared (Revelation had always been fertile ground for wild speculation), but the Pope and so many other leaders of all faiths expressed in many public statements and writings how good it was to see so many people embracing the love of God.
The presence of so much charitable giving, in fact, coupled with the gradual eradication of much of the world’s poverty through the peaceable world that gradually emerged from the conflicts of the 20th Century, actually made the objects of charity increasingly rare commodities – truly poor people were becoming genuinely harder and harder to find! There are always those who suffer in one way or another, though, and focus began to increase on ways of alleviating the pain of people suffering in less obvious ways, because of medical issues, or because of emotional traumas, or because of simple loneliness or personal despair. With so much love to give, new ways of giving it were emerging.
This dynamic had begun by the 21st Century to manifest itself in all sorts of ways. One item that was remarked upon by some commentators – a small item, but in some ways a telling one – was the gradual decline in the amount of graffiti and vandalism one observed, especially in major cities. To those who remembered the 1960s and 1970s, with graffiti on concrete walls and New York subway trains that was all but ubiquitous, the increasing cleanliness and lack of vandalism was a profound change. There were any number of reasons why, but at least one was the simple fact of respect: More of humanity believed they were meant to love one another; and part of love is respect, and one doesn’t show respect for others by damaging or defacing everything in sight.
(Of course, respect ran both ways, and another reason for the lack of unwanted graffiti is that many cities gave particular concrete walls under overpasses and the like over to graffiti artists, to allow them to do their thing in an allotted space. The result was often a colorful addition to an otherwise blank space, rather than simply a blank wall.)
It was a small thing – but so is a mustard seed.
The Council was planned as the first of a series of meetings among faith leaders the world over to promote cooperation and discussion on issues relating to faith. Along with the Roman Catholic Church, the Council included representatives of the World Council of Churches (including many Protestant denominations), the Orthodox Ecumenical Council, the leadership councils of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormons), the American Jewish Committee and other Jewish ecumenical organizations, the Council for a Parliament of the World’s Religions, the Islamic International Committee (established during the time the Middle East was allied to the defunct Soviet Union, and now representing Muslims of those nations as well), the Hindu Council, the International Buddhist Council, representatives of the Shinto faith, and many more – nearly fifty interfaith organizations in all, with many targeting specific faith issues such as the world’s poor, behavior and morals, or world peace.
The Council was deemed a success, with numerous proposals for interfaith cooperative programs introduced and channels for continued dialogue across the world’s faiths to be implemented or strengthened. The Pope especially praised the Muslim attendees for their eagerness the negative image that still clung to Islam in many quarters due to the former actions of extremists (sponsored mostly by the fallen regimes of the Middle East) to promote “holy war” against other faiths. The imams, for their part, were equally responsive, with the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Muhammad Ahmad Hussein, calling the Pope “a true man of God.”
In the back rooms, however, away from the television cameras, an even more dramatic series of discussions were taking place. Cardinals of the Catholic Church met with the Archbishop of Canterbury and other Anglican bishops, and with patriarchs of the Orthodox Church, to discuss the possibility of eventual return of those churches to full communion with the Catholic Church.
Of all Christian denominations which were considered “not in full communion” with the Catholic Church, the Orthodox and Anglican churches were closest to the Catholics in terms of doctrine. The Anglicans differed from the Catholic church primarily in allowing married priests; fewer books of the Bible, with a number of books removed from the accepted Anglican version of the Old Testament, including 1 and 2 Maccabees, Tobit, Wisdom, and Sirach; the Book of Common Prayer, used as the basis for Anglican services (though not differing substantially in doctrine from Catholicism); allowing Communion to be received by persons belonging to other Christian churches; in having fewer sacraments; and in some details regarding transubstantiation (in other words, the belief in the Real Presence of Christ in the bread and wine of Communion), the immaculate conception of Mary, and the assumption of Mary bodily into heaven. The Orthodox churches were even closer doctrinally, with the main difference being the ”filioque” – the statement in the Nicene Creed in the Catholic Mass that the Holy Spirit “proceeds from the Father and Son” rather than simply “from the Father.” One of the major programs to emerge from the 2017 Zurich Council was the establishment of interdenominational working groups to discuss formulae by which some of these questions might be resolved.
The main point of disagreement, of course, remained what it had been for the Orthodox Church since the 11th Century, and for the Anglicans since the 16th Century: the primacy of the Pope, and particularly the doctrine of papal infallibility (a much-misunderstood doctrine that states ONLY that the Pope’s statements are infallible when he specifically invokes the doctrine, and that the doctrine can ONLY be invoked regarding faith or morals). The discussions at the Council, however, offered the beginnings of a possible way to resolve this issue.
Some groundwork had already been laid. In 1982, Pope John Paul II had approved a “pastoral provision” that allowed some groups of Anglicans to enter the Catholic Church en masse while preserving their structure as churches and maintaining elements of an Anglican identity. In the United States, a number of individual parishes took this route, and in most cases the Catholic Church dispensed the married Anglican priests who served those parishes from the requirement of celibacy so that, after their reception into the Catholic Church, they could receive the Sacrament of Holy Orders and become Catholic priests.
Later, in 2009, Pope Benedict XIV, responded to requests from Anglicans to establish “sacramental union," established a new procedure which would form “personal ordinariates” – essentially, dioceses without geographical boundaries. The bishops would normally be former Anglicans, although, respecting the tradition of both the Catholic and Orthodox churches, candidates for bishop must be unmarried. While the Catholic Church did not at that time come to recognize as valid Anglican Holy Orders, the new structure allowed Anglican married priests to request ordination as Catholic priests upon entry into the Catholic Church. Former Anglican parishes would be allowed to preserve “elements of the distinctive Anglican spiritual and liturgical patrimony.”
These were obviously baby steps, and they had their critics on both sides; but they represented a possible way to begin sliding the door open. Could it be possible for a formula to be negotiated under which the dissenting denominations could one day be allowed to function as a sort of sub-denomination within the Catholic Church, practicing their own specific liturgies, but ultimately in a framework of “ultimate communion” with Catholics? Could formulae be found under which the questions of papal primacy versus the autonomy of congregations, and of doctrinal differences, could someday be worked out – maybe even, in some as-yet-unforeseeable time, the larger differences that divided Catholics from other Protestant groups (sola scriptura, justification by faith versus works, the existence of Purgatory, the Real Presence in the Eucharist) could be resolved to everyone’s mutual satisfaction? The answers to these questions were clearly a long way off, if they existed, and certainly no one intended to proceed rashly, and absolutely not without the surety in their hearts that their decisions were being directed by the Holy Spirit – which, in turn, meant long hours of prayer and discernment. But, as the faiths had grown and grown together in the last 100 years, it seemed like the seed of an answer might be planted – a notion that led the working groups addressing these questions, referring to a parable of Jesus, to become popularly known as the “Mustard Seed Committees.”
The optimism that shone around the Zurich Council in 2017 was common in faith communities worldwide. Nearly every faith community worldwide was growing, with no signs of stopping. The Third Great Awakening that had begun in the United States in the 1960s and blossomed fully in the 1980s was now spreading throughout the world, bringing, for example, churchgoers back to many a European church that had been considered mostly a museum piece before. And with that growth in worldwide church attendance came a concurrent growth in charitable giving and charitable organizations, with hospitals, schools, homeless shelters, and numerous other nonprofits enjoying generous budgets like nothing they had ever seen.
Indeed, the growth in faith was such that at least some of the more out-of-mainstream theologians were by the 2020s speculating that, perhaps, the Millennium – the thousand-year rule of Christ specified in the Revelation of St. John – was upon the world. This interpretation was not widely shared (Revelation had always been fertile ground for wild speculation), but the Pope and so many other leaders of all faiths expressed in many public statements and writings how good it was to see so many people embracing the love of God.
The presence of so much charitable giving, in fact, coupled with the gradual eradication of much of the world’s poverty through the peaceable world that gradually emerged from the conflicts of the 20th Century, actually made the objects of charity increasingly rare commodities – truly poor people were becoming genuinely harder and harder to find! There are always those who suffer in one way or another, though, and focus began to increase on ways of alleviating the pain of people suffering in less obvious ways, because of medical issues, or because of emotional traumas, or because of simple loneliness or personal despair. With so much love to give, new ways of giving it were emerging.
This dynamic had begun by the 21st Century to manifest itself in all sorts of ways. One item that was remarked upon by some commentators – a small item, but in some ways a telling one – was the gradual decline in the amount of graffiti and vandalism one observed, especially in major cities. To those who remembered the 1960s and 1970s, with graffiti on concrete walls and New York subway trains that was all but ubiquitous, the increasing cleanliness and lack of vandalism was a profound change. There were any number of reasons why, but at least one was the simple fact of respect: More of humanity believed they were meant to love one another; and part of love is respect, and one doesn’t show respect for others by damaging or defacing everything in sight.
(Of course, respect ran both ways, and another reason for the lack of unwanted graffiti is that many cities gave particular concrete walls under overpasses and the like over to graffiti artists, to allow them to do their thing in an allotted space. The result was often a colorful addition to an otherwise blank space, rather than simply a blank wall.)
It was a small thing – but so is a mustard seed.
The Commonwealth of Nations
The Commonwealth is the organization that was formed originally as a way of the United Kingdom retaining some influence over its former colonies and dominions after World War II, when it was abundantly clear that Britain was simply incapable of maintaining its colonial empire from the perspective of everything being run from London. Legislation to create the organization from its earliest days in 1949 made a distinction between those nations who wanted to have some ties and those who wanted the deeper ones, with the initial membership of the "Central Commonwealth" being made up of Great Britain, Ireland, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, who all passed legislation allowing for the citizens of the individual countries to have rights in all of the others with regards to residency, investment, property and intellectual rights. As all were highly-developed economies with majority-white English-speaking populations and close ties to the British Crown, this wasn't a particularly hard sell when the Central Commonwealth came into being in the early 1950s, but the organization, it's goals and successes would shift dramatically over time, as Britain changed with an ever-larger number of arrivals from its former Empire came to its shores looking for a better life and the ranks of its former Empire that made it to the status of developed nations swelled.
The Energy Crisis led to the first high-profile example of unity even when faced with issues from abroad - as the Commonwealth wholeheartedly supported Britain, France and Israel's actions against Egypt after its taking by force of the Suez Canal in 1956, that decision landing particularly Canada in a bit of diplomatic hot water with Washington (at first, though President Kirk rapidly changed his tune once the invasion was successful and Nasser's control over the canal was removed) but the Commonwealth supported Britain both diplomatically and by having nations of the Central Commonwealth use their navies and armed forces to reduce British commitments, allowing the Brits to have more forces on hand to handle Nasser. This act led directly to virtually all of the Commonwealth being hammered by the Energy Crisis (and Moscow making an earnest attempt to split India from the Commonwealth, which didn't succeed - Nehru had his own plans for India's place in the organization), which would have major effects in the 1960s and 1970s, as Australia joined in the nuclear power boom and then the nuclear desalination boom as well. The military success (and Washington's initial consternation) led to the Commonwealth's decision in 1957, in the famous White Paper, to continue to expand and prioritize the aerospace and armed forces industries of the Commonwealth. (For Canada, this meant British support for the Avro Arrow project, which assured both its completion and its being used by several other air forces in addition to the RCAF.) Australia and New Zealand were quickly brought on board, and Canada wasn't hard to convince, even as this meant that both Vickers and Boeing battled bitterly over orders from Canadian customers in the 1950s and 1960s.
With the growing economic ties came a need for the economics to change. Long satisfied by the former Dominions being resource producers and markets for British products, World War II had ended that possibility, and with the growing industrialization and the modern manufacturing concerns in these countries came greater exports of such goods. Canadian-built trucks and farming machinery began showing up in the British Isles in the 1950s, Australian counterparts not long after. As more people moved between the nations more of the local cultural elements began to follow, as Canadian, Australian and New Zealander foods and clothes began appearing in British shops and vice versa. Discovering that their bread-and-butter cars couldn't handle the conditions of the Dominions Leyland established subsidiaries in both countries to develop vehicles tailored to those conditions in the early 1960s, while Westland-Reynard began making cars in Britain in 1964, their operations expanding dramatically when they purchased the Rootes Group from Chrysler in 1979. Rugby made its way to Canadian shores, ice hockey to British ones and Aussie rules football to both, with the Rugby and Aussie rules growth in the 1960s and 1970s leading Canada up to the ranks of the world's great nations at Rugby by the 1980s and a fairly-tale run to runner-up in the 1991 Rugby World Cup. (They lost to Australia.) At the same times, New Zealand's successful bringing of its Maori minority into its society (and indeed, Maori culture becoming a highly-recognizable part of the culture of New Zealand) and Canada's Treaty of Orillia and its majority-black Caribbean island provinces led Australia and Britain to use New Zealand and Canada as templates for how to bring its indigenous populations fully into its society. These lessons were also absorbed by many of the newcomers, and after the Asheville Treaty led to major Commonwealth deployments to Israel in the late 1970s, many of those lessons began to learned and accepted by the Israelis, as in the years after the Treaty Israel's Arab population was brought into the society of the Jewish state in ways that before then had been inconceivable.
The Commonwealth's 1964 Heads of State Meeting, held in New Delhi, India, saw the visit of Chinese leader Chiang Kai-Shek and the first use of the organization to help settle global geopolitical disputes, and the meeting of the heads of state two years later in Brisbane, Australia, created a series of additional requirements that a nation would have to have in order to qualify for membership in both the Commonwealth itself and in its Central Commonwealth core. In the aftermath of South Africa's suspension from the Commonwealth in 1961 (a situation precipitated by on-going racial issues in the country), a functioning democracy that made no distinctions between the political rights of citizens became a requirement, along with respect for human rights and decency. In the years afterwards, the free investment rights of Commonwealth citizens became a key reason for Britain's economic transformation in the 1960s and 1970s, and with it came a desire to expand these changes to allow the British a larger foothold in other nations. (This went both ways, mind you - all of the nations involved had similar goals. The end of racial segregation laws in South Africa in 1974 saw its return to the Commonwealth the following year, and the Commonwealth's involvement in the Treaty of Asheville and the settling of the Israel-Palestine conflict in the late 1970s saw the first calls for expansion of both the Commonwealth and its Central core, with Israel, Singapore and South Africa becoming part of the Central Commonwealth on January 1, 1989.
Britain's normalization of its outside lands in the 1980s and 1990s - settling the differences that separated the Falklands, Socotra and Hong Kong with regards to London and countries around them - added to the Commonwealth's territories. China and Britain's Joint Communique with Respect to Hong Kong in May 1995 saw Beijing forever renounce its rights to Hong Kong (this had been done by Chiang in the run up to the Vietnam War in 1966, but the legality of it had often been questioned in the years since) and Hong Kong's accession to the Central Commonwealth on July 1, 1997, and the agreement between Somalia, Yemen and Britain over Socotra in March 1997 saw Socotra become part of the Central Commonwealth on June 1, 1998. Britain, confident in the semi-autonomous positions of its largest overseas possessions, rapidly integrated the small ones they still directly ruled - Bermuda, the Falklands, St. Helena, Diego Garcia, Gibraltar - into the United Kingdom, including making important investments in these places - St. Helena's Airport, for example, opened in June 1992. Malta, having voted to remain with the UK in 1964, gained autonomous status in 1988, creating a template subsequently used by the UK and Commonwealth for Socotra and Hong Kong. Socotra and Hong Kong both, as part of their changes, elected their first governments in 1997, with the celebrations of Hong Kong's new era (where Queen Elizabeth II personally swore in Hong Kong's newly-elected Chief Executive, Lady Anson Chan, in front of a crowd over 150,000 strong) and the following year (when her Majesty repeated the action with Socotra's new Governor) became highlights of the 1990s for the United Kingdom.
The Central Commonwealth started gaining members in the years after the Middle East War with rapid pace as nations made their way up to Western standards economically and in terms of government stability and democracy. Cyprus became part of the Central Commonwealth in 1995, with Namibia and Botswana following the following year and Malaysia and Fiji following in 2000. Such was the influence and wealth of the Commonwealth that nations which hadn't technically ever been British colonies began to seek involvement, with the Netherlands being invited to the Heads of State Meetings in Cape Town, South Africa, in March 1990 and Chile following two years later, with Chile becoming part of the Central Commonwealth in 2007.
All the way along, the Commonwealth's roles expanded. Canada established the first "Commonwealth Office" in 1959 specifically to allow Commonwealth citizens to gain information and advice on Canadian laws, regulations, customs and requirements, with this good idea being rapidly copied by the other nations. India also followed this with its Commonwealth Department being established in 1976, with New Delhi seeking a greater position within the Commonwealth. The Cape Town Summit in 1990 led to the establishment of "Commonwealth Tribunals" to sort out differences between nation states or citizens of them, something that had become increasingly necessary with the ever-larger amount of travel between the various countries and the massive economic investments - by 1990, Canadian and Australian investors had an estimated $325 Billion invested in Britain alone - being seen as something that merited such a response. By the early 1990s, in virtually all of the countries of the Commonwealth - not just the Central Commonwealth, but most members of the organization - had a "Commonwealth Minister" whose responsibility was just the organization, and said people were almost always seen as major up and comers in the governments of the countries in question - the first Canadian Commonwealth Minister, Jamaican Edward Seaga, leaped directly from that position to becoming Canada's Prime Minister in 1984, and several other future leaders of Central Commonwealth nations - Peter MacKay, Masuima "Tokyo" Sexwale, Tony Leon, Jacinda Ardern, Emily Lau, Merav Michaeli, Gordon Brown - would serve in the position.
The Commonwealth is the organization that was formed originally as a way of the United Kingdom retaining some influence over its former colonies and dominions after World War II, when it was abundantly clear that Britain was simply incapable of maintaining its colonial empire from the perspective of everything being run from London. Legislation to create the organization from its earliest days in 1949 made a distinction between those nations who wanted to have some ties and those who wanted the deeper ones, with the initial membership of the "Central Commonwealth" being made up of Great Britain, Ireland, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, who all passed legislation allowing for the citizens of the individual countries to have rights in all of the others with regards to residency, investment, property and intellectual rights. As all were highly-developed economies with majority-white English-speaking populations and close ties to the British Crown, this wasn't a particularly hard sell when the Central Commonwealth came into being in the early 1950s, but the organization, it's goals and successes would shift dramatically over time, as Britain changed with an ever-larger number of arrivals from its former Empire came to its shores looking for a better life and the ranks of its former Empire that made it to the status of developed nations swelled.
The Energy Crisis led to the first high-profile example of unity even when faced with issues from abroad - as the Commonwealth wholeheartedly supported Britain, France and Israel's actions against Egypt after its taking by force of the Suez Canal in 1956, that decision landing particularly Canada in a bit of diplomatic hot water with Washington (at first, though President Kirk rapidly changed his tune once the invasion was successful and Nasser's control over the canal was removed) but the Commonwealth supported Britain both diplomatically and by having nations of the Central Commonwealth use their navies and armed forces to reduce British commitments, allowing the Brits to have more forces on hand to handle Nasser. This act led directly to virtually all of the Commonwealth being hammered by the Energy Crisis (and Moscow making an earnest attempt to split India from the Commonwealth, which didn't succeed - Nehru had his own plans for India's place in the organization), which would have major effects in the 1960s and 1970s, as Australia joined in the nuclear power boom and then the nuclear desalination boom as well. The military success (and Washington's initial consternation) led to the Commonwealth's decision in 1957, in the famous White Paper, to continue to expand and prioritize the aerospace and armed forces industries of the Commonwealth. (For Canada, this meant British support for the Avro Arrow project, which assured both its completion and its being used by several other air forces in addition to the RCAF.) Australia and New Zealand were quickly brought on board, and Canada wasn't hard to convince, even as this meant that both Vickers and Boeing battled bitterly over orders from Canadian customers in the 1950s and 1960s.
With the growing economic ties came a need for the economics to change. Long satisfied by the former Dominions being resource producers and markets for British products, World War II had ended that possibility, and with the growing industrialization and the modern manufacturing concerns in these countries came greater exports of such goods. Canadian-built trucks and farming machinery began showing up in the British Isles in the 1950s, Australian counterparts not long after. As more people moved between the nations more of the local cultural elements began to follow, as Canadian, Australian and New Zealander foods and clothes began appearing in British shops and vice versa. Discovering that their bread-and-butter cars couldn't handle the conditions of the Dominions Leyland established subsidiaries in both countries to develop vehicles tailored to those conditions in the early 1960s, while Westland-Reynard began making cars in Britain in 1964, their operations expanding dramatically when they purchased the Rootes Group from Chrysler in 1979. Rugby made its way to Canadian shores, ice hockey to British ones and Aussie rules football to both, with the Rugby and Aussie rules growth in the 1960s and 1970s leading Canada up to the ranks of the world's great nations at Rugby by the 1980s and a fairly-tale run to runner-up in the 1991 Rugby World Cup. (They lost to Australia.) At the same times, New Zealand's successful bringing of its Maori minority into its society (and indeed, Maori culture becoming a highly-recognizable part of the culture of New Zealand) and Canada's Treaty of Orillia and its majority-black Caribbean island provinces led Australia and Britain to use New Zealand and Canada as templates for how to bring its indigenous populations fully into its society. These lessons were also absorbed by many of the newcomers, and after the Asheville Treaty led to major Commonwealth deployments to Israel in the late 1970s, many of those lessons began to learned and accepted by the Israelis, as in the years after the Treaty Israel's Arab population was brought into the society of the Jewish state in ways that before then had been inconceivable.
The Commonwealth's 1964 Heads of State Meeting, held in New Delhi, India, saw the visit of Chinese leader Chiang Kai-Shek and the first use of the organization to help settle global geopolitical disputes, and the meeting of the heads of state two years later in Brisbane, Australia, created a series of additional requirements that a nation would have to have in order to qualify for membership in both the Commonwealth itself and in its Central Commonwealth core. In the aftermath of South Africa's suspension from the Commonwealth in 1961 (a situation precipitated by on-going racial issues in the country), a functioning democracy that made no distinctions between the political rights of citizens became a requirement, along with respect for human rights and decency. In the years afterwards, the free investment rights of Commonwealth citizens became a key reason for Britain's economic transformation in the 1960s and 1970s, and with it came a desire to expand these changes to allow the British a larger foothold in other nations. (This went both ways, mind you - all of the nations involved had similar goals. The end of racial segregation laws in South Africa in 1974 saw its return to the Commonwealth the following year, and the Commonwealth's involvement in the Treaty of Asheville and the settling of the Israel-Palestine conflict in the late 1970s saw the first calls for expansion of both the Commonwealth and its Central core, with Israel, Singapore and South Africa becoming part of the Central Commonwealth on January 1, 1989.
Britain's normalization of its outside lands in the 1980s and 1990s - settling the differences that separated the Falklands, Socotra and Hong Kong with regards to London and countries around them - added to the Commonwealth's territories. China and Britain's Joint Communique with Respect to Hong Kong in May 1995 saw Beijing forever renounce its rights to Hong Kong (this had been done by Chiang in the run up to the Vietnam War in 1966, but the legality of it had often been questioned in the years since) and Hong Kong's accession to the Central Commonwealth on July 1, 1997, and the agreement between Somalia, Yemen and Britain over Socotra in March 1997 saw Socotra become part of the Central Commonwealth on June 1, 1998. Britain, confident in the semi-autonomous positions of its largest overseas possessions, rapidly integrated the small ones they still directly ruled - Bermuda, the Falklands, St. Helena, Diego Garcia, Gibraltar - into the United Kingdom, including making important investments in these places - St. Helena's Airport, for example, opened in June 1992. Malta, having voted to remain with the UK in 1964, gained autonomous status in 1988, creating a template subsequently used by the UK and Commonwealth for Socotra and Hong Kong. Socotra and Hong Kong both, as part of their changes, elected their first governments in 1997, with the celebrations of Hong Kong's new era (where Queen Elizabeth II personally swore in Hong Kong's newly-elected Chief Executive, Lady Anson Chan, in front of a crowd over 150,000 strong) and the following year (when her Majesty repeated the action with Socotra's new Governor) became highlights of the 1990s for the United Kingdom.
The Central Commonwealth started gaining members in the years after the Middle East War with rapid pace as nations made their way up to Western standards economically and in terms of government stability and democracy. Cyprus became part of the Central Commonwealth in 1995, with Namibia and Botswana following the following year and Malaysia and Fiji following in 2000. Such was the influence and wealth of the Commonwealth that nations which hadn't technically ever been British colonies began to seek involvement, with the Netherlands being invited to the Heads of State Meetings in Cape Town, South Africa, in March 1990 and Chile following two years later, with Chile becoming part of the Central Commonwealth in 2007.
All the way along, the Commonwealth's roles expanded. Canada established the first "Commonwealth Office" in 1959 specifically to allow Commonwealth citizens to gain information and advice on Canadian laws, regulations, customs and requirements, with this good idea being rapidly copied by the other nations. India also followed this with its Commonwealth Department being established in 1976, with New Delhi seeking a greater position within the Commonwealth. The Cape Town Summit in 1990 led to the establishment of "Commonwealth Tribunals" to sort out differences between nation states or citizens of them, something that had become increasingly necessary with the ever-larger amount of travel between the various countries and the massive economic investments - by 1990, Canadian and Australian investors had an estimated $325 Billion invested in Britain alone - being seen as something that merited such a response. By the early 1990s, in virtually all of the countries of the Commonwealth - not just the Central Commonwealth, but most members of the organization - had a "Commonwealth Minister" whose responsibility was just the organization, and said people were almost always seen as major up and comers in the governments of the countries in question - the first Canadian Commonwealth Minister, Jamaican Edward Seaga, leaped directly from that position to becoming Canada's Prime Minister in 1984, and several other future leaders of Central Commonwealth nations - Peter MacKay, Masuima "Tokyo" Sexwale, Tony Leon, Jacinda Ardern, Emily Lau, Merav Michaeli, Gordon Brown - would serve in the position.
As someone who was born in the commonwealth (I was born in Australia) this seems pretty accurate
Thanks. 🙂 Australia and Canada here entered the Commonwealth with the goal of having more influence on the UK, and they had it by the mid-60s, and Australia has a quite similar economic history to Canada - gather up huge amounts of natural resource wealth earned through selling all kinds of things, use it to build the world's best infrastructure and build up sizable home-grown industries to add to the exports and jobs for Australians. While Australia's largest Commonwealth trading partner in modern times is India, the connections are very much real and enduring.
Here, Australia fully embraces nuclear energy early on (early Australian nuclear facilities are mostly British in origin, but later ones are developed there) and uses it to not only generate electricity but also desalinate water in vast amounts, turning tens of thousands of square miles of the Pilbara and Kimberley regions, southern WA, the Eyre Peninsula, huge sections of the Murray and Darling River Basins and western Queensland into farms and orchards. This has led to something of a move of people away from Australia's handful of coastal big cities and made a lot of smaller and medium-sized towns and cities rather bigger - count Broken Hill, Dubbo, Kalgoorlie, Port Hedlund, Mount Gambier, Menindee, Whyalla, Port Lincoln, Broome, Katherine and Alice Springs, as well as smaller-sized cities like Darwin, Cairns and Townsville that ended up growing substantially. Owing to the higher cost of the desalinated water the use of it is much more efficient, and it is used more often for orchards and less water-intensive crops.
No. They have no desire to, and Washington has very long standing relationships with Canada (obviously), Britain (the special relationship is a real thing ITTL) and Australia (relations are very good here too) which means they have no difficulty with influencing the Commonwealth if they feel they need to.
It had first happened under Chiang in the run up to the Vietnam War - he was trying to get support from the West to fight the Chinese Communists, and that was one of the conditions of the help.
The second time was a new Chinese government (and China's first democratically-elected President) wanting to score a large amount of brownie points with the Commonwealth (and, by extension, Washington) and doing something that in the greater scheme of things cost them nothing, and it was Beijing's opinion that sorting out the Hong Kong situation for good would be good for China owing to Hong Kong being an important trade center. Beijing's decision here was indeed the correct one - London DID very much appreciate it, China got better deals from the Commonwealth on the grain, iron ore, oil, minerals and agricultural goods they buy from the Commonwealth countries.
I'm pretty sure that handing a Chinese city over to Westerners would be a massive vote-loser for any democratically elected Chinese government, and might even discredit democracy entirely in the eyes of Chinese voters.
Is there a reason they couldn't just cut off water and food to Hong Kong?
Even if it is a city that technically wouldn't exist without those Westerners? Remember that it happened long before democracy came to China, and Hong Kong is entirely tied to China.
Could they? Yes. But what does China gain by antagonizing the Commonwealth? One city isn't worth aggravating the world's power blocs, especially when you can use it to get better deals for yourself with said power blocs.
A Future, As It Was Foreseen
The 2000s were a time of dramatic changes in the world's technology, as the huge growth of fiber-optic and satellite communications technology combined with an ever-growing number of mobile phone users (and the growing capabilities of such phones, as they rapidly evolved into computers with the ability to make calls over the 2000s) and the growth of the internet dramatically shrunk the world in the early decades of the 21st Century. the continued expansion of electric grids that went all the way back to the 1950s in many cases continued with little slowdown, pushed along by the growing number of electric cars, trucks, trains and mass transit vehicles. As more and more nations jumped into the world of high-speed rail - Brazil, Iran, Russia, India, Argentina, Turkey and Australia joined this party in the 2000s, and more was to come - the world of travel shrunk as well, as hydrogen-fueled airliners became a greater reality and more short-haul airliners began to move to new markets, displaced by trains from many of their bread-and-butter roles as city-to-city carriers.
While the end of the USSR and the transformation of the Middle East had been the biggest - and ugliest - times of the 1990s, the 2000s would be dominated by social progress that nevertheless saw major bumps in the road, often courtesy of Mother Nature. The immense Boxing Day Earthquake and Tsunami, caused by an immense 9.1-magnitude megathrust earthquake off the coast of Sumatra on December 26, 2004, won the title of the ugliest of these, the massive Earthquake and its giant resulting tsunami wreaking devastation across Indonesia, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, India, Thailand, Myanmar, Bangladesh and the Maldives and causing damages in Somalia, Socotra, Kenya, Madagascar, Tanzania, the Seychelles, Australia and South Africa, claiming nearly 120,000 lives and untold damages across much of the Indian Ocean region. Of course, for the world, such a situation was simply not something that couldn't be responded to with vigour, with the television pictures of the destruction in India, Sri Lanka, Thailand and Indonesia making headlines all over the world. Indeed the Amigos were directly effected by the tsunami in a way, as American destroyer Bulkeley and Canadian frigate Ville de Quebec, along with British frigate Westminster and South African supply ship Drakensberg, were making a port visit to Phuket in Thailand when the Tsunami hit, with disastrous results - Bulkeley was thrown into Ville de Quebec by the tsunami with such force that it cut the frigate completely in half, Drakensberg ending up upside down in a swimming pool area of a resort and Westminster ended up nearly a mile inland on Phuket island, all four vessels being destroyed and the four vessels combined losing nearly 450 of their crews.The videos and the knowledge of the lost naval vessels was followed within an hour by a more-positive event, as the US Navy's Task Force 85.1, centered on aircraft carrier United States and battleship Arizona, had been transiting to a port visit in Singapore when the disaster happened, and the ships were among the first to respond to the losses in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, the USN's crews, boats and helicopters proving instrumental in rescue efforts in these places in efforts that ultimately saw three Navy Crosses awarded to sailors, one of whom, Petty Officer First Class Michael Robinson, died in the process of rescuing a family near Campbell Bay. (The Indian Navy would famously name a new Kolkata-class destroyer Robinson, that ship being commissioned in 2011, and would join in the poignant arrival to Phuket on the tenth anniversary of the disaster of the namesakes to the lost naval ships.)
Within hours, the disaster response teams from the Amigos (and similar teams from Japan, Korea, Australia, Germany and France) were on the move, and the days after the disaster would see countless remarkable feats of heroism by locals and outsiders alike and remarkable deployments of help from the world over. Mexico's famed Emergency Rescue and Recovery Battalions, formed in the aftermath of the devastating earthquake in Mexico City in 1985, would be among the legends of the recovery, as the nearly four thousand men of these units worked themselves to the bone in eastern Sri Lanka, leading to a famous reputation among the Sri Lankan Tamils about the Mexican rescuers and recovery efforts, while Canada's DART teams and all eight of their flying hospital aircraft were sent to Banda Aceh in Indonesia, joined by vast support from the nations of Asia - Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Vietnamese and Filipino rescuers shared aircraft space and cargo ship space, flew each other's personnel and equipment and co-ordinated on what to send and where - Famously, China's first aircraft carrier, Fujian, hadn't yet gotten its aircrew so instead the ship was sent to Taihoku to gather up Japanese helicopters to deliver to Indonesia, something the Japanese enormously appreciated and escorted the carrier there.
Within a month of this, of course, came the idea of a repeat of the famous Live Aid Concerts of July 1985 which had become such a world-changing event. While its unknown who was the first to come up with this idea, it is well known that Sir Bob Geldof had a major hand in its gestation and its goals, and once again the efforts to help in Asia got major traction just as it had in 1985, and just like the first series of concerts, those sending supplies were proudly congratulated and appreciated for this by the organizers, and with the 1985 concerts being such a legendary event, their 2005 successors were sure to be a big deal indeed. More than a few of the companies who had been so instrumental in the success of the human spirit in 1985 leapt at the chance to do so once again, and many others joined in. Food providers sent food shipments, and gathering them in the Amigos was proudly done by multiple different railroads and trucking firms. Arthur Andersen, whose management of the relief efforts in 1985 had been absolutely instrumental in their success, came through a second time, though this time what was needed more than anything was equipment and supplies to rebuild areas devastated by the disaster, which led a whole new generation of companies to jump into the mix. Construction equipment from Caterpillar, JCB, Kubota and Liebherr, trucks from Mack, Pacific, Freightliner and Volvo, huge quantities of structural-grade steel and construction cement from US Steel, Bethlehem, Vale, Cemex and Lafarge, farming and cultivation equipment from John Deere, New Holland, Robinson and Massey Ferguson and supplies for rebuilding from hundreds of other companies all were gathered up and shipped out to Indonesia, Thailand, India, Sri Lanka, Madagascar and the Maldives, with the likes of United States Lines, Mitsui OSK, Canadian Pacific, Hapag-Lloyd, China Shipping and Persian Ocean taking on the job of delivery with immense pride.
The concerts themselves swelled some in number. Wembley Stadium in London, the Skydome in Toronto, Estadio Azteca in Mexico City, the Memorial Coliseum in Los Angeles and the Cricket Grounds in Melbourne once again rocked to the sounds of one of the greatest concerts ever, while the newly-rebuilt Olympic Stadium in Berlin and the two-year-old Theodore Kollek Stadium in Jerusalem would see the two cities from 1985 also return for another go. Tokyo Stadium, which had hosted the Tokyo concert in 1985, was in the process of being demolished at the time (as a new stadium was being built to take its place), resulting in the Tokyo Dome taking its place, while John F. Kennedy Stadium in Philadelphia was similarly undergoing renovation and was unavailable, resulting in the West Side Stadium in New York City taking its place. Development around the Parthenon had made the 1985 Athens site unfeasible, but the Circus Maximus in Rome filled in here, and there would be four prominent newcomers to the concerts - FNB Stadium in Johannesburg, South Africa, the Estadio de Maracana in Rio de Janeiro, Shanghai Stadium in Shanghai and Red Square in Moscow. The venues in South Africa and Brazil meant all six continents of the world would be represented in the second Live Aid, which went with the same name.
A vast collection of the artists of the first edition of the Live Aid, including many of the headliners of 1985 - The Beatles, Elvis Presley, Michael Jackson, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Lionel Richie, U2, Billy Joel, AC/DC, Madonna, Prince, Pink Floyd - and virtually all of the Asian performers of 1985 made return appearances, including Anita Mui, Priscilla Chan, Teresa Teng and Loudness, the Hong Kongers getting the honor of being the headliners in Shanghai. The lineup would be joined by a vast collection of modern chart-toppers - Mariah Carey, Shakira, Kelly Clarkson, Ciara, Green Day, Gwen Stefani, Usher, Jennifer Lopez, John Legend, Alicia Keys, Destiny's Child, OutKast - who took over many of the North American shows. The Spice Girls reunited in their entirety for the first time since 1998 for their performance at Wembley, while the Johannesburg show was originally going to be an affair almost entirely for Africans until several North American Hip-Hop and R&B groups asked to get in on the show in South Africa, with The Black Eyed Peas, Boyz II Men, Barrington Levy and Sean Paul appearing in Johannesburg. Toronto, which had become an electronic music hotbed, would mix many of the legendary rockers of 1985 with a lot of the newcomers in the electronic music world (and Kraftwerk, which played among the electronic artists in Toronto as a symbolic passing of the torch to the newcomers) and include several fast-rising artists - with two of these, seventeen-year-old Robyn "Rihanna" Fenty and nineteen-year-old Aubrey "Drake" Graham, making two of their earliest big performances in what would be chart-topping careers. The "Fusions" of the 1980s and 1990s were in evidence here as well, as Michael Jackson had deliberately chosen to play at Wembley to be able to do his songs with the Beatles, and classic guitarist Carlos Santana combined with modern rocker Rob Thomas for amazing versions of their hits "Maria Maria" and "Smooth", and rapper Jay-Z and Alicia Keys finished their set in New York with the very-first performance of their hit "Empire State of Mind" which was said to be among the best finishers of the whole concert. The width and breadth of the Latin Music scene was seen in vivid detail in Mexico City and Rio de Janiero, which were every bit the equal of the English-language shows in the United States, Britain, Canada and Australia.
While the 2005 Live Aid may not have had the "Everything felt different" effect of the 1985 original - its debatable whether that would even be possible, given the effect on the world the concerts of July 13 and 14, 1985, had - but the concert series were every bit the success of the originals from a financial and interest point of view. For many of those who played both concerts, it was felt by many of them to be a symbolic passing of the torch to the next generation, and the incredible performances by such a collection of the modern chart toppers showed that the spirit of the 1985 show had lived on - and indeed, many of those who performed at the shows said as much, with American Hip-Hop Artist Andre "Dr. Dre" Young, whose rousing performance of his 1991 hit "Let Me Ride" in Los Angeles was one of the high points of the show, poignantly saying "This is the sort of event that, if you love music, it opens your eyes, expands your senses, gives you a greater appreciation for all that was done before us, and what music can and does do to our lives."
If the tsunami response was a sign of what could happen when humanity works together, what could happen when the human spirit runs free was everywhere in the decade. The rapid advancement of consumer electronics wasn't merely limited to smartphones, as it also applied to many other fields. GPS navigation units, initially taking advantage of just the Amigos-run Global Positioning System satellite network, quickly adapted to make use of both the Russian GLONASS system and the European Galileo satellite constellation, which improved the accuracy of the devices to the point where they could pinpoint a location to within 18 inches, while the old cathode-ray tube televisions, the standard since the 1950s, quickly disappeared across the 2000s as they were replaced first by plasma televisions (which had been commercially available since the late 1980s, but which gained rapid commercial acceptance in the 2000s) and then by lower-cost (and less power-intensive) Organic LED televisions and displays, while Microsoft's alinging of the North American electronic industry to challenge the Japanese dominance of the video game industry with the XBox, introduced in February 2002, would end up being a place few expected the electronics giant to go but which ended up being enormously lucrative. Videotapes disappeared in favor of DVDs, and by the end of the decade new technologies such as Blu-Ray and HDDVD technologies pushed the boundaries further.
For larger-scale entities, the development of the Skylon project led to the projects to develop a rival to the Skylon, with one led by Airbus and the other by McDonnell Douglas, the former using European electronics and Russian engines (NPO Energomash did a superb job on this) and the latter being an American-Mexican-Japanese project, with Vasquez-Figaro Aerospace Technologies of San Luis Potosi, Mexico, getting the job of building the engines for the McDonnell Douglas MDS-16, which quickly gained the nickname "The Starship Enterprise", the name ultimately sticking to the MDS-16. While the Skylon had been fairly conventional in its design, both the Airbus AS600 "Michaelangelo" and the McDonnell Douglas MDS-16 "Enterprise" were both huge blended wing body aircraft that were considerably bigger than the Skylon, meant to haul a larger load and do so more efficiently, while the blended wing body designs allowed for much more space for the volumous but lightweight liquid hydrogen fuel used by both spacecraft. Both were designed from the start to be human crewed and flown from specially-strengthened runways, and while the engine work by Vasquez-Figaro and NPO Energomash proved a scientific push (as were the engine intercoolers, which were made by MTU Freidrichshafen for Airbus and Chrysler Aerospace for McDonnell Douglas), the massive market for the Skylon in the 2000s - and the massive profits for the companies involved in its creation - ensured that regardless of the costs and technical difficulties, both projects would be finished. The MDS-16 flew first, making its first (unmanned) flight from McDonnell Douglas' plant in Long Beach, California, on September 16, 2007, beating the AS600 by five months, it flying from Tolouse for the first time on February 14, 2008. Of course, by then over fifty Skylons had been built, and its successor was very much on the drawing board, and that replacement would be in many ways inspired by its very different new rivals.
The success in the technical fields in the world made dramatic changes to the world in the 2000s in terms of person-to-person communications, the gestation of the internet leading not only to smartphones but also social media, the latter becoming an increasingly-powerful force in the 2000s. This was harnessed remarkably well in Canada by the government of Prime Minister John Gilbert "Jack" Layton (who was Prime Minister from 2001 to 2009) and by the rapid rise of Samantha Robertson from pretty, charismatic Colorado Congresswoman all the way to the Presidency, which she assumed after being victorious in the 2008 elections on January 20, 2009. That same year, Layton stepped down as Prime Minister of Canada (following a cancer diagnosis), and the 2009 Canadian elections were won by Conservative Party leader Peter MacKay, who would go on to a fabulous rapport with Robertson - they would go on to be good friends after their times leading their respective countries, and their personal relationship did indeed have effects on the policies of their nations.
For America, the social media era led to a massive shift in the United States' elections. Having seen issues with voting rights and power be a regular theme in American politics going back to the 3/5 compromise at the very beginning of the Republic, one of the great events of the late 2000s and 2010s was the equal rights amendment finally being ratified in 2008 (Robertson was a major supporter of this for her entire career, and the success of it quite likely contributed to her election to the Presidency) and the Rights of Citizens Amendment and the Voting Procedures Amendment, both of which were introduced in 2007. Those amendments amendments mandated that the rights written into the US Constitution since its entering into force in 1788 were to be limited to human American citizens (specifically writing out corporate bodies), while cleverly establishing corporate bodies as having separate rights and responsibilities, while the Voting Procedures Amendment would make for the automatic registration of all American citizens as voters, make federal election days a mandated holiday, expand the United States Congress from 435 members to 700 and the Senate from 104 members to 156 (this being introduced under the intention of making it easier to access their representatives) and mandating a maximum limit that one would ever have to wait in line to vote at a much smaller number, all meant to expand the number of people who voted in American elections. Initially getting a cool reception from Washington, the popularity on social media of these amendments dramatically expanded the support for it among the governing class, and progress moved rapidly after Robertson's ascension to the Presidency. Both parties saw it as a benefit, and once it was clear that it could be passed, Congress lept on board with it - in the minds of many in Congress, the amendments would dramatically reduce the time spent fundraising, which would be a major stress reducer for them, and the argument that it would dramatically improve access to representatives was widely accepted as being an inevitability. It cleared Congress easily - over 80% of Congress voted in favor of both amendments - and President Robertson signed them both on January 24, 2010, kicking the ball to the states' court - and sure enough, they knew what was coming as well and supported it as well, with states fighting over which would be the 35th state to vote in favor of it and put it over the 2/3 mark. That honor would eventually fall to Missouri for the Rights of Citizens Amendment, whose ratification of in on April 26, 2010 made it law, while the Voting Precedures Amendment only had to wait another week before Georgia voted to ratify it, voting overwhelmingly to do so on May 2, 2010.
The effect would be a wild 2010 midterms, as now each state would be voting for at least one new Senator and the states all had to come up with new district maps. Despite that, both the Democratic and Republican parties were up to the challenge, and sure enough while the Republicans made gains in the 2010 Midterms (and claimed the House of Representatives), control of the Senate didn't change, as the new Senators ended up 30-22 in favor of the Democrats. The elections also sent to Congress a number of newcomers who would have major effects on the governance of the United States in the coming years, including the new Senators from Illinois (Barack Obama), California (Antonio Villaraigosa), Kentucky (actress Ashley Judd got elected to this seat), Florida (future president David Chavez, who left the position of Governor of Florida to run for this seat) and Georgia (Jon Ossoff). The House of Representatives got rather more raucous over the following two years, but that was nothing compared to the 2012 Presidential Election.
The first Presidential Election under the new rules, Robertson and running mate Christopher Evans (OOC: made-up name, wasn't sure who we wanted to have as VP) led the Democrats to victory over the Republican ticket of John Huntsman Jr and Mitt Romney on November 4, 2012. These new realities in the election also led to a massive surge in voter turnout, ensuring that while Robertson's victory over Huntsman was fairly small - she won 29 states to Huntsman's 23 - both candidates got far and away more votes than any presidential candidate that had ever come before them and the get-out-the-vote efforts were intense on both sides. Knowing that this was sure to be the case, the Vice-Presidential candidates became important players in the race (and both Evans and Romney served as key assets to their campaigns) and the push to get one's own voters into the voting booths by raising their enthusiasm at a stroke virtually ended many of the negative aspects of previous campaigns - neither side had the time or inclination for it, and in all fairness Huntsman and Robertson had known each other for many years and Romney, while new to politics, was one of the country's most successful businessmen and resigned the position as the Chairman and CEO of American Motors to be the VP candidate. The 2012 election was indeed a stunning success in terms of its logistics, and both candidates ran throughout the campaign on ideas and hopes for the future, a signal that those running for Congress and the Senate took to heart as well. One result of this in 2012 was a long list of ballot initiatives and proposals, which in turn helped drive turnout even further.
Changes in politics hadn't been limited to the United States. The successes of Ed Broadbent and Jack Layton made Canada into a country where there were three dominant parties, as the Conservatives under MacKay, Liberals under new leader Justin Trudeau and the Progressives under Thomas Mulcair (who succeeded Layton as the leader of the Progressive Party in 2010) managed to all carve out major strongholds, making a traditional parliamentary majority for any one party almost impossible to achieve. This, in turn, led to a number of smaller parties emerging into Canada's federal politics, with the Green Party of Canada, National Party of Canada (which gained its strongest support in the Caribbean and Atlantic Canada) and the Reform Party (which got its strongest support in Western Canada) all making their way into the government of Canada. Mexico took that further still, as their once-famously-broken National Assembly had by the 1970s arranged themselves into a number of alliances of parties, something that at times got troublesome (Lopez Obrador pushed that system to its very limit during his time in office) but overall had allowed both parties to have differences in policy but also a level of stability that helps with the governance of the country.
One of the greatest engineering successes of the latter years of the 20th Century and early in the 21st, along with the dramatically-shifted policies on electricity generation and the growth of biofuels, was the rebirth - and rebirth isn't too strong of a word to call it - of passenger rail travel in the Amigos. At the time of the Energy Crisis, rail passenger traffic had been rapidly falling as a result of automobiles and airliners, and while the Energy Crisis had saved many a passenger train, it had been the birth of the National Passenger Rail Corporation - Amtrak to most - in 1963 that shifted the goalposts dramatically. Having taken over the rail passenger assets of all of the major North American railways by the mid-1970s, Amtrak found themselves discovering the successes of many of the regional routes, particularly across the Northeast, Empire, Keystone, Dominion, Peachtree, Piedmont and Sunshine State corridors (all of which were very busy by 1980), as well as the continued success of operations like several of the long-distance runs. Amtrak rapidly established fast (125 mph) services across the Midwest, but the Tokaido Shinkansen, Texas Express and California High-Speed Rail System had led to the Acela project, which had been a railroader's dream in the 1980s as the world's engineers chased a dream stateside. The launch of the Acela Express in 1984 had led by 1988 to high-speed tracks running all the way from Canada to New Orleans, and the "Crescent" across the Carolinas, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana was astoundingly successful, with services between Atlanta and Miami being so successful that by 1995 that the run from Atlanta to Miami via the Peachtree Corridor to Savannah and then along the Brightline Corridor via Jacksonville, Saint Augustine, Daytona Beach, West Palm Beach and Fort Lauderdale rated some twenty-one trains a day, and that didn't count the coach services of the long-distance runs that could be used along the route, these trains by then being effectively merged pairs of Pioneer V trains that stretched 22 cars in length and had a passenger capacity of over 1800, and the long-distance runs of trains often would add coaches at Atlanta to add to the capacity.
Amtrak so loved this (and the success of the California HSR and Texas Express, the former by the early 1990s including Sacramento, San Diego and Las Vegas as part of its system, and with an extension to Phoenix under construction and the latter by then running not only between the three big cities of Texas but also to Oklahoma City and Tulsa, Galveston and Corpus Christi, and with a line between Houston and New Orleans via Lafayette and Baton Rouge under construction, only added to their plans) that by the 1990s they had begun building HSR lines across the Midwest, with the first Acela Midwest services to St. Louis, Milwaukee and Detroit having begun operations in March 1989 and the expansion being constant since then. The Presidencies of Robert Kennedy and Dave Heinz - both Northeasterners - had helped to push for the growth of Amtrak, and by the time Bill Clinton took office in January 2001, Amtrak's momentum was enormous, and by that time the company was turning a profit - helped along by the immense usage of its trunk lines, which were as vital as any airport in the country by then. Amtrak's HSR service growth continued unhindered by Clinton and Robertson, leading by 2010 to the Midwest being criss-crossed by high-speed rail lines and their services. The 125-mph trains were bumped to support routes as the fastest trains arrived, and the development of gas turbine-powered units in the 1990s by Bombardier (originally to replace Canada's aging LRCs, but Amtrak quickly took notice too), led to fast train services reaching out to cities and locations where full HSR lines weren't cost-effective and where electrified lines didn't yet exist - Des Moines, Green Bay, Grand Rapids, Duluth-Superior, Charleston, Wheeling, Omaha - and as the Amtrak services reached Kansas City, the Texas Express reached Wichita, leading to both building north and west to Topeka and Lawrence, Kansas, closing the gap between the Texas Express and the Midwest, service on this route beginning in May 2011.
The fast trains had the effect one imagined it would. The low cost and ease of the travel between the cities expanded everyone involved's traveling, and by the late 2000s a resident of St. Louis saying they were "going to Chicago for the weekend" was a highly common occurence. New Yorkers going to Montreal, Torontonians going to Detroit, Birminghamers going to Atlanta, Houstonians going to New Orleans - all became a regular occurence. All of these cities had built magnificent passenger stations in the heyday of train travel in the early 20th Century, stations which were now as busy as ever and with this gained new amenities and connections. New York, Toronto, Montreal, Boston, Indianapolis, Miami, Atlanta and Charlotte had built their sports arenas in close proximity to (In Toronto's case, directly on top of) their central stations, making travel to these venues very easy indeed, and the stations all gained transit terminals, hotels, car rentals, restaurants and other amenities for travelers all in close proximity. Following the example of New York's two magnificent terminals (Grand Central and New York Union) and Washington Union Station, the beautiful older stations one after the other got rebuilt in the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s, with the crowning glories being Detroit's Michigan Central Terminal (which was completely reconstructed in magnificent fashion in the 1980s and re-opened with the Detroit HSR service in March 1989), Buffalo's Central Terminal (which was re-opened after a complete rebuild in September 1996), Toronto's Union Station (which was totally rebuilt as part of the building of the Air Canada Centre over its trainshed, the project completed in June 1998) and Atlanta's Peachtree Center Station (which re-opened after a nearly $650 million renovation in July 2002).
The 2000s were a time of dramatic changes in the world's technology, as the huge growth of fiber-optic and satellite communications technology combined with an ever-growing number of mobile phone users (and the growing capabilities of such phones, as they rapidly evolved into computers with the ability to make calls over the 2000s) and the growth of the internet dramatically shrunk the world in the early decades of the 21st Century. the continued expansion of electric grids that went all the way back to the 1950s in many cases continued with little slowdown, pushed along by the growing number of electric cars, trucks, trains and mass transit vehicles. As more and more nations jumped into the world of high-speed rail - Brazil, Iran, Russia, India, Argentina, Turkey and Australia joined this party in the 2000s, and more was to come - the world of travel shrunk as well, as hydrogen-fueled airliners became a greater reality and more short-haul airliners began to move to new markets, displaced by trains from many of their bread-and-butter roles as city-to-city carriers.
While the end of the USSR and the transformation of the Middle East had been the biggest - and ugliest - times of the 1990s, the 2000s would be dominated by social progress that nevertheless saw major bumps in the road, often courtesy of Mother Nature. The immense Boxing Day Earthquake and Tsunami, caused by an immense 9.1-magnitude megathrust earthquake off the coast of Sumatra on December 26, 2004, won the title of the ugliest of these, the massive Earthquake and its giant resulting tsunami wreaking devastation across Indonesia, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, India, Thailand, Myanmar, Bangladesh and the Maldives and causing damages in Somalia, Socotra, Kenya, Madagascar, Tanzania, the Seychelles, Australia and South Africa, claiming nearly 120,000 lives and untold damages across much of the Indian Ocean region. Of course, for the world, such a situation was simply not something that couldn't be responded to with vigour, with the television pictures of the destruction in India, Sri Lanka, Thailand and Indonesia making headlines all over the world. Indeed the Amigos were directly effected by the tsunami in a way, as American destroyer Bulkeley and Canadian frigate Ville de Quebec, along with British frigate Westminster and South African supply ship Drakensberg, were making a port visit to Phuket in Thailand when the Tsunami hit, with disastrous results - Bulkeley was thrown into Ville de Quebec by the tsunami with such force that it cut the frigate completely in half, Drakensberg ending up upside down in a swimming pool area of a resort and Westminster ended up nearly a mile inland on Phuket island, all four vessels being destroyed and the four vessels combined losing nearly 450 of their crews.The videos and the knowledge of the lost naval vessels was followed within an hour by a more-positive event, as the US Navy's Task Force 85.1, centered on aircraft carrier United States and battleship Arizona, had been transiting to a port visit in Singapore when the disaster happened, and the ships were among the first to respond to the losses in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, the USN's crews, boats and helicopters proving instrumental in rescue efforts in these places in efforts that ultimately saw three Navy Crosses awarded to sailors, one of whom, Petty Officer First Class Michael Robinson, died in the process of rescuing a family near Campbell Bay. (The Indian Navy would famously name a new Kolkata-class destroyer Robinson, that ship being commissioned in 2011, and would join in the poignant arrival to Phuket on the tenth anniversary of the disaster of the namesakes to the lost naval ships.)
Within hours, the disaster response teams from the Amigos (and similar teams from Japan, Korea, Australia, Germany and France) were on the move, and the days after the disaster would see countless remarkable feats of heroism by locals and outsiders alike and remarkable deployments of help from the world over. Mexico's famed Emergency Rescue and Recovery Battalions, formed in the aftermath of the devastating earthquake in Mexico City in 1985, would be among the legends of the recovery, as the nearly four thousand men of these units worked themselves to the bone in eastern Sri Lanka, leading to a famous reputation among the Sri Lankan Tamils about the Mexican rescuers and recovery efforts, while Canada's DART teams and all eight of their flying hospital aircraft were sent to Banda Aceh in Indonesia, joined by vast support from the nations of Asia - Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Vietnamese and Filipino rescuers shared aircraft space and cargo ship space, flew each other's personnel and equipment and co-ordinated on what to send and where - Famously, China's first aircraft carrier, Fujian, hadn't yet gotten its aircrew so instead the ship was sent to Taihoku to gather up Japanese helicopters to deliver to Indonesia, something the Japanese enormously appreciated and escorted the carrier there.
Within a month of this, of course, came the idea of a repeat of the famous Live Aid Concerts of July 1985 which had become such a world-changing event. While its unknown who was the first to come up with this idea, it is well known that Sir Bob Geldof had a major hand in its gestation and its goals, and once again the efforts to help in Asia got major traction just as it had in 1985, and just like the first series of concerts, those sending supplies were proudly congratulated and appreciated for this by the organizers, and with the 1985 concerts being such a legendary event, their 2005 successors were sure to be a big deal indeed. More than a few of the companies who had been so instrumental in the success of the human spirit in 1985 leapt at the chance to do so once again, and many others joined in. Food providers sent food shipments, and gathering them in the Amigos was proudly done by multiple different railroads and trucking firms. Arthur Andersen, whose management of the relief efforts in 1985 had been absolutely instrumental in their success, came through a second time, though this time what was needed more than anything was equipment and supplies to rebuild areas devastated by the disaster, which led a whole new generation of companies to jump into the mix. Construction equipment from Caterpillar, JCB, Kubota and Liebherr, trucks from Mack, Pacific, Freightliner and Volvo, huge quantities of structural-grade steel and construction cement from US Steel, Bethlehem, Vale, Cemex and Lafarge, farming and cultivation equipment from John Deere, New Holland, Robinson and Massey Ferguson and supplies for rebuilding from hundreds of other companies all were gathered up and shipped out to Indonesia, Thailand, India, Sri Lanka, Madagascar and the Maldives, with the likes of United States Lines, Mitsui OSK, Canadian Pacific, Hapag-Lloyd, China Shipping and Persian Ocean taking on the job of delivery with immense pride.
The concerts themselves swelled some in number. Wembley Stadium in London, the Skydome in Toronto, Estadio Azteca in Mexico City, the Memorial Coliseum in Los Angeles and the Cricket Grounds in Melbourne once again rocked to the sounds of one of the greatest concerts ever, while the newly-rebuilt Olympic Stadium in Berlin and the two-year-old Theodore Kollek Stadium in Jerusalem would see the two cities from 1985 also return for another go. Tokyo Stadium, which had hosted the Tokyo concert in 1985, was in the process of being demolished at the time (as a new stadium was being built to take its place), resulting in the Tokyo Dome taking its place, while John F. Kennedy Stadium in Philadelphia was similarly undergoing renovation and was unavailable, resulting in the West Side Stadium in New York City taking its place. Development around the Parthenon had made the 1985 Athens site unfeasible, but the Circus Maximus in Rome filled in here, and there would be four prominent newcomers to the concerts - FNB Stadium in Johannesburg, South Africa, the Estadio de Maracana in Rio de Janeiro, Shanghai Stadium in Shanghai and Red Square in Moscow. The venues in South Africa and Brazil meant all six continents of the world would be represented in the second Live Aid, which went with the same name.
A vast collection of the artists of the first edition of the Live Aid, including many of the headliners of 1985 - The Beatles, Elvis Presley, Michael Jackson, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Lionel Richie, U2, Billy Joel, AC/DC, Madonna, Prince, Pink Floyd - and virtually all of the Asian performers of 1985 made return appearances, including Anita Mui, Priscilla Chan, Teresa Teng and Loudness, the Hong Kongers getting the honor of being the headliners in Shanghai. The lineup would be joined by a vast collection of modern chart-toppers - Mariah Carey, Shakira, Kelly Clarkson, Ciara, Green Day, Gwen Stefani, Usher, Jennifer Lopez, John Legend, Alicia Keys, Destiny's Child, OutKast - who took over many of the North American shows. The Spice Girls reunited in their entirety for the first time since 1998 for their performance at Wembley, while the Johannesburg show was originally going to be an affair almost entirely for Africans until several North American Hip-Hop and R&B groups asked to get in on the show in South Africa, with The Black Eyed Peas, Boyz II Men, Barrington Levy and Sean Paul appearing in Johannesburg. Toronto, which had become an electronic music hotbed, would mix many of the legendary rockers of 1985 with a lot of the newcomers in the electronic music world (and Kraftwerk, which played among the electronic artists in Toronto as a symbolic passing of the torch to the newcomers) and include several fast-rising artists - with two of these, seventeen-year-old Robyn "Rihanna" Fenty and nineteen-year-old Aubrey "Drake" Graham, making two of their earliest big performances in what would be chart-topping careers. The "Fusions" of the 1980s and 1990s were in evidence here as well, as Michael Jackson had deliberately chosen to play at Wembley to be able to do his songs with the Beatles, and classic guitarist Carlos Santana combined with modern rocker Rob Thomas for amazing versions of their hits "Maria Maria" and "Smooth", and rapper Jay-Z and Alicia Keys finished their set in New York with the very-first performance of their hit "Empire State of Mind" which was said to be among the best finishers of the whole concert. The width and breadth of the Latin Music scene was seen in vivid detail in Mexico City and Rio de Janiero, which were every bit the equal of the English-language shows in the United States, Britain, Canada and Australia.
While the 2005 Live Aid may not have had the "Everything felt different" effect of the 1985 original - its debatable whether that would even be possible, given the effect on the world the concerts of July 13 and 14, 1985, had - but the concert series were every bit the success of the originals from a financial and interest point of view. For many of those who played both concerts, it was felt by many of them to be a symbolic passing of the torch to the next generation, and the incredible performances by such a collection of the modern chart toppers showed that the spirit of the 1985 show had lived on - and indeed, many of those who performed at the shows said as much, with American Hip-Hop Artist Andre "Dr. Dre" Young, whose rousing performance of his 1991 hit "Let Me Ride" in Los Angeles was one of the high points of the show, poignantly saying "This is the sort of event that, if you love music, it opens your eyes, expands your senses, gives you a greater appreciation for all that was done before us, and what music can and does do to our lives."
If the tsunami response was a sign of what could happen when humanity works together, what could happen when the human spirit runs free was everywhere in the decade. The rapid advancement of consumer electronics wasn't merely limited to smartphones, as it also applied to many other fields. GPS navigation units, initially taking advantage of just the Amigos-run Global Positioning System satellite network, quickly adapted to make use of both the Russian GLONASS system and the European Galileo satellite constellation, which improved the accuracy of the devices to the point where they could pinpoint a location to within 18 inches, while the old cathode-ray tube televisions, the standard since the 1950s, quickly disappeared across the 2000s as they were replaced first by plasma televisions (which had been commercially available since the late 1980s, but which gained rapid commercial acceptance in the 2000s) and then by lower-cost (and less power-intensive) Organic LED televisions and displays, while Microsoft's alinging of the North American electronic industry to challenge the Japanese dominance of the video game industry with the XBox, introduced in February 2002, would end up being a place few expected the electronics giant to go but which ended up being enormously lucrative. Videotapes disappeared in favor of DVDs, and by the end of the decade new technologies such as Blu-Ray and HDDVD technologies pushed the boundaries further.
For larger-scale entities, the development of the Skylon project led to the projects to develop a rival to the Skylon, with one led by Airbus and the other by McDonnell Douglas, the former using European electronics and Russian engines (NPO Energomash did a superb job on this) and the latter being an American-Mexican-Japanese project, with Vasquez-Figaro Aerospace Technologies of San Luis Potosi, Mexico, getting the job of building the engines for the McDonnell Douglas MDS-16, which quickly gained the nickname "The Starship Enterprise", the name ultimately sticking to the MDS-16. While the Skylon had been fairly conventional in its design, both the Airbus AS600 "Michaelangelo" and the McDonnell Douglas MDS-16 "Enterprise" were both huge blended wing body aircraft that were considerably bigger than the Skylon, meant to haul a larger load and do so more efficiently, while the blended wing body designs allowed for much more space for the volumous but lightweight liquid hydrogen fuel used by both spacecraft. Both were designed from the start to be human crewed and flown from specially-strengthened runways, and while the engine work by Vasquez-Figaro and NPO Energomash proved a scientific push (as were the engine intercoolers, which were made by MTU Freidrichshafen for Airbus and Chrysler Aerospace for McDonnell Douglas), the massive market for the Skylon in the 2000s - and the massive profits for the companies involved in its creation - ensured that regardless of the costs and technical difficulties, both projects would be finished. The MDS-16 flew first, making its first (unmanned) flight from McDonnell Douglas' plant in Long Beach, California, on September 16, 2007, beating the AS600 by five months, it flying from Tolouse for the first time on February 14, 2008. Of course, by then over fifty Skylons had been built, and its successor was very much on the drawing board, and that replacement would be in many ways inspired by its very different new rivals.
The success in the technical fields in the world made dramatic changes to the world in the 2000s in terms of person-to-person communications, the gestation of the internet leading not only to smartphones but also social media, the latter becoming an increasingly-powerful force in the 2000s. This was harnessed remarkably well in Canada by the government of Prime Minister John Gilbert "Jack" Layton (who was Prime Minister from 2001 to 2009) and by the rapid rise of Samantha Robertson from pretty, charismatic Colorado Congresswoman all the way to the Presidency, which she assumed after being victorious in the 2008 elections on January 20, 2009. That same year, Layton stepped down as Prime Minister of Canada (following a cancer diagnosis), and the 2009 Canadian elections were won by Conservative Party leader Peter MacKay, who would go on to a fabulous rapport with Robertson - they would go on to be good friends after their times leading their respective countries, and their personal relationship did indeed have effects on the policies of their nations.
For America, the social media era led to a massive shift in the United States' elections. Having seen issues with voting rights and power be a regular theme in American politics going back to the 3/5 compromise at the very beginning of the Republic, one of the great events of the late 2000s and 2010s was the equal rights amendment finally being ratified in 2008 (Robertson was a major supporter of this for her entire career, and the success of it quite likely contributed to her election to the Presidency) and the Rights of Citizens Amendment and the Voting Procedures Amendment, both of which were introduced in 2007. Those amendments amendments mandated that the rights written into the US Constitution since its entering into force in 1788 were to be limited to human American citizens (specifically writing out corporate bodies), while cleverly establishing corporate bodies as having separate rights and responsibilities, while the Voting Procedures Amendment would make for the automatic registration of all American citizens as voters, make federal election days a mandated holiday, expand the United States Congress from 435 members to 700 and the Senate from 104 members to 156 (this being introduced under the intention of making it easier to access their representatives) and mandating a maximum limit that one would ever have to wait in line to vote at a much smaller number, all meant to expand the number of people who voted in American elections. Initially getting a cool reception from Washington, the popularity on social media of these amendments dramatically expanded the support for it among the governing class, and progress moved rapidly after Robertson's ascension to the Presidency. Both parties saw it as a benefit, and once it was clear that it could be passed, Congress lept on board with it - in the minds of many in Congress, the amendments would dramatically reduce the time spent fundraising, which would be a major stress reducer for them, and the argument that it would dramatically improve access to representatives was widely accepted as being an inevitability. It cleared Congress easily - over 80% of Congress voted in favor of both amendments - and President Robertson signed them both on January 24, 2010, kicking the ball to the states' court - and sure enough, they knew what was coming as well and supported it as well, with states fighting over which would be the 35th state to vote in favor of it and put it over the 2/3 mark. That honor would eventually fall to Missouri for the Rights of Citizens Amendment, whose ratification of in on April 26, 2010 made it law, while the Voting Precedures Amendment only had to wait another week before Georgia voted to ratify it, voting overwhelmingly to do so on May 2, 2010.
The effect would be a wild 2010 midterms, as now each state would be voting for at least one new Senator and the states all had to come up with new district maps. Despite that, both the Democratic and Republican parties were up to the challenge, and sure enough while the Republicans made gains in the 2010 Midterms (and claimed the House of Representatives), control of the Senate didn't change, as the new Senators ended up 30-22 in favor of the Democrats. The elections also sent to Congress a number of newcomers who would have major effects on the governance of the United States in the coming years, including the new Senators from Illinois (Barack Obama), California (Antonio Villaraigosa), Kentucky (actress Ashley Judd got elected to this seat), Florida (future president David Chavez, who left the position of Governor of Florida to run for this seat) and Georgia (Jon Ossoff). The House of Representatives got rather more raucous over the following two years, but that was nothing compared to the 2012 Presidential Election.
The first Presidential Election under the new rules, Robertson and running mate Christopher Evans (OOC: made-up name, wasn't sure who we wanted to have as VP) led the Democrats to victory over the Republican ticket of John Huntsman Jr and Mitt Romney on November 4, 2012. These new realities in the election also led to a massive surge in voter turnout, ensuring that while Robertson's victory over Huntsman was fairly small - she won 29 states to Huntsman's 23 - both candidates got far and away more votes than any presidential candidate that had ever come before them and the get-out-the-vote efforts were intense on both sides. Knowing that this was sure to be the case, the Vice-Presidential candidates became important players in the race (and both Evans and Romney served as key assets to their campaigns) and the push to get one's own voters into the voting booths by raising their enthusiasm at a stroke virtually ended many of the negative aspects of previous campaigns - neither side had the time or inclination for it, and in all fairness Huntsman and Robertson had known each other for many years and Romney, while new to politics, was one of the country's most successful businessmen and resigned the position as the Chairman and CEO of American Motors to be the VP candidate. The 2012 election was indeed a stunning success in terms of its logistics, and both candidates ran throughout the campaign on ideas and hopes for the future, a signal that those running for Congress and the Senate took to heart as well. One result of this in 2012 was a long list of ballot initiatives and proposals, which in turn helped drive turnout even further.
Changes in politics hadn't been limited to the United States. The successes of Ed Broadbent and Jack Layton made Canada into a country where there were three dominant parties, as the Conservatives under MacKay, Liberals under new leader Justin Trudeau and the Progressives under Thomas Mulcair (who succeeded Layton as the leader of the Progressive Party in 2010) managed to all carve out major strongholds, making a traditional parliamentary majority for any one party almost impossible to achieve. This, in turn, led to a number of smaller parties emerging into Canada's federal politics, with the Green Party of Canada, National Party of Canada (which gained its strongest support in the Caribbean and Atlantic Canada) and the Reform Party (which got its strongest support in Western Canada) all making their way into the government of Canada. Mexico took that further still, as their once-famously-broken National Assembly had by the 1970s arranged themselves into a number of alliances of parties, something that at times got troublesome (Lopez Obrador pushed that system to its very limit during his time in office) but overall had allowed both parties to have differences in policy but also a level of stability that helps with the governance of the country.
One of the greatest engineering successes of the latter years of the 20th Century and early in the 21st, along with the dramatically-shifted policies on electricity generation and the growth of biofuels, was the rebirth - and rebirth isn't too strong of a word to call it - of passenger rail travel in the Amigos. At the time of the Energy Crisis, rail passenger traffic had been rapidly falling as a result of automobiles and airliners, and while the Energy Crisis had saved many a passenger train, it had been the birth of the National Passenger Rail Corporation - Amtrak to most - in 1963 that shifted the goalposts dramatically. Having taken over the rail passenger assets of all of the major North American railways by the mid-1970s, Amtrak found themselves discovering the successes of many of the regional routes, particularly across the Northeast, Empire, Keystone, Dominion, Peachtree, Piedmont and Sunshine State corridors (all of which were very busy by 1980), as well as the continued success of operations like several of the long-distance runs. Amtrak rapidly established fast (125 mph) services across the Midwest, but the Tokaido Shinkansen, Texas Express and California High-Speed Rail System had led to the Acela project, which had been a railroader's dream in the 1980s as the world's engineers chased a dream stateside. The launch of the Acela Express in 1984 had led by 1988 to high-speed tracks running all the way from Canada to New Orleans, and the "Crescent" across the Carolinas, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana was astoundingly successful, with services between Atlanta and Miami being so successful that by 1995 that the run from Atlanta to Miami via the Peachtree Corridor to Savannah and then along the Brightline Corridor via Jacksonville, Saint Augustine, Daytona Beach, West Palm Beach and Fort Lauderdale rated some twenty-one trains a day, and that didn't count the coach services of the long-distance runs that could be used along the route, these trains by then being effectively merged pairs of Pioneer V trains that stretched 22 cars in length and had a passenger capacity of over 1800, and the long-distance runs of trains often would add coaches at Atlanta to add to the capacity.
Amtrak so loved this (and the success of the California HSR and Texas Express, the former by the early 1990s including Sacramento, San Diego and Las Vegas as part of its system, and with an extension to Phoenix under construction and the latter by then running not only between the three big cities of Texas but also to Oklahoma City and Tulsa, Galveston and Corpus Christi, and with a line between Houston and New Orleans via Lafayette and Baton Rouge under construction, only added to their plans) that by the 1990s they had begun building HSR lines across the Midwest, with the first Acela Midwest services to St. Louis, Milwaukee and Detroit having begun operations in March 1989 and the expansion being constant since then. The Presidencies of Robert Kennedy and Dave Heinz - both Northeasterners - had helped to push for the growth of Amtrak, and by the time Bill Clinton took office in January 2001, Amtrak's momentum was enormous, and by that time the company was turning a profit - helped along by the immense usage of its trunk lines, which were as vital as any airport in the country by then. Amtrak's HSR service growth continued unhindered by Clinton and Robertson, leading by 2010 to the Midwest being criss-crossed by high-speed rail lines and their services. The 125-mph trains were bumped to support routes as the fastest trains arrived, and the development of gas turbine-powered units in the 1990s by Bombardier (originally to replace Canada's aging LRCs, but Amtrak quickly took notice too), led to fast train services reaching out to cities and locations where full HSR lines weren't cost-effective and where electrified lines didn't yet exist - Des Moines, Green Bay, Grand Rapids, Duluth-Superior, Charleston, Wheeling, Omaha - and as the Amtrak services reached Kansas City, the Texas Express reached Wichita, leading to both building north and west to Topeka and Lawrence, Kansas, closing the gap between the Texas Express and the Midwest, service on this route beginning in May 2011.
The fast trains had the effect one imagined it would. The low cost and ease of the travel between the cities expanded everyone involved's traveling, and by the late 2000s a resident of St. Louis saying they were "going to Chicago for the weekend" was a highly common occurence. New Yorkers going to Montreal, Torontonians going to Detroit, Birminghamers going to Atlanta, Houstonians going to New Orleans - all became a regular occurence. All of these cities had built magnificent passenger stations in the heyday of train travel in the early 20th Century, stations which were now as busy as ever and with this gained new amenities and connections. New York, Toronto, Montreal, Boston, Indianapolis, Miami, Atlanta and Charlotte had built their sports arenas in close proximity to (In Toronto's case, directly on top of) their central stations, making travel to these venues very easy indeed, and the stations all gained transit terminals, hotels, car rentals, restaurants and other amenities for travelers all in close proximity. Following the example of New York's two magnificent terminals (Grand Central and New York Union) and Washington Union Station, the beautiful older stations one after the other got rebuilt in the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s, with the crowning glories being Detroit's Michigan Central Terminal (which was completely reconstructed in magnificent fashion in the 1980s and re-opened with the Detroit HSR service in March 1989), Buffalo's Central Terminal (which was re-opened after a complete rebuild in September 1996), Toronto's Union Station (which was totally rebuilt as part of the building of the Air Canada Centre over its trainshed, the project completed in June 1998) and Atlanta's Peachtree Center Station (which re-opened after a nearly $650 million renovation in July 2002).
Thank you very much.
A few other things that I would consider part of the vision for TTL's world:
-The high-speed rail systems that TheMann mentions above would of course be supplemented by a plethora of conventional passenger trains, light-rail systems, and the like. Generally speaking, in the wake of the 1950s energy crisis, the public transit systems, including rail, bus, streetcar, what have you, of North America continued their wide reach of prior years and in 2023 are as extensive as those of OTL Europe and Japan. The Interstate Highways exist as a tolled system.
-The strength of the economy and the productivity of workers is such that by 2023 not only is the unemployment rate negligible in most of the world's industrialized countries (and not far behind in the rest) but four-day workweeks are becoming increasingly common - which, of course, only serves to enhance the "weekend getaways" TheMann mentions above.
-A brief word on streaming services circa 2023: After an initial flurry of competing services, by 2023 streaming services have pretty much settled down into a relatively small number of services, all of which can generally be purchased in package form through one's Internet provider for a single price. In the spirit of the type of competition that exists in TTL - not cutthroat, but friendly and cooperative while still vigorous, in keeping with the way spirituality has seeped through the society in places you wouldn't expect - streaming services have pretty much "allocated" legacy TV shows among themselves, so that there is virtually no overlap between the shows offered by the various services. Put together, the streaming services are well on their way to making literally all television shows that are possible to put out there available to viewers (sadly, some tapes have been lost or destroyed) without holdups due to copyrights and the like; those issues are smoothly resolved. The competition exists more than anything else in the production of new shows for streaming services to go alongside (not in lieu of) the vast anthology of television shows available dating all the way back to the 1950s.
I suspect very well, especially since the world of the Three Amigos is one where people have much more time and energy to devote to pursuits beyond working and will most definitely have an easier time finding the support needed to make a career out of it. We haven't really sorted that question entirely out just yet.
I should also point out that Joe's comments about the stronger economy and reduced unemployment that results from that (under 2.5% in Canada and under 3% in the United States and Mexico) is also influenced by the entrepreneurism that exists across the Amigos, which has resulted in a massive plethora of small and medium-sized businesses virtually everywhere, from the largest cities to the smallest towns, which also influences both the low unemployment rate and the working conditions, as all three countries allow movement of people between them to chase working and personal advancement opportunities, and the low unemployment rate means that the places that get the best workers are those that are best to work at. This, in turn, is influenced in the world of the Three Amigos by a large number of factors - the pay for the job of course has an effect, but the obvious and not-so-obvious perks also factor heavily into the decision. Depending on the workplace and industry, some of the perks on offer can be impressive, with there being a number of companies that have opened up in various places in the Amigos simply because somebody in the company wants to live there. Many big employers make a point of locating in spectacular buildings and in desirable neighborhoods, and with the growth of mobile working (which in the Amigos ITTL began happening with the growth of laptop computers in the late 1980s) "going to the office" in the Amigos in modern times rarely means going to one's cubicle in an office building but rather going to one's common space (or private office for those with more rank) and setting up their computer to work, with meeting rooms often more resembling lounges with comfortable couches and chairs. (One result of this, in addition to that, is that virtually any office building built after about 1992-93 is designed to be able to be quickly and easily switched for mixed-use purpose if it is desired by the owner or tenant.)
The average size of stores in the Amigos is somewhat smaller as a result of the trends (though still larger there than in most places in the world), but there is a mountain more of them. Big box stores like Wal-Mart, Target, Costco and the like do exist but have a much more limited footprint, particularly in Canada and Mexico, while department stores still exist, most of them in individual chains that serve those of higher incomes and, with the advent of online shopping (particularly the likes of Amazon) have become much more places for these chains to show off their merchandise to potential buyers, with sales staff there almost always saying "If we don't have your size here, we can get it for you from our warehouse and ship it to your door." This is different for smaller businesses, of course, as these will tend to have more stock. As people are somewhat less materialistic in this world (though the number of people able to be a part of the luxury markets in many goods in the Amigos is way, way bigger than OTL), the real losers are the fast fashion companies (many of which never exist here) and cheaper goods stores, which do still exist though they have but a fraction of the scale of OTL, which in turn also influences the growth of second-hand stores. From a mountain of vintage clothing stores (whose owners openly and widely advertise that they will buy and sell old clothing and saleable items), online retailers aimed at small sellers and artisans like Etsy, Artfire, Bonanza and Localmotion and a vast collection of designer clothing makers (particularly in fashion and design centers like Atlanta, Charlotte, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Guadalajara, Toronto and Havana), the result is that while the number of goods bought is rather lower, the quality of said goods is way, way higher than OTL and there is much less waste in these sectors. This has, in addition to the above benefits, provided a panache to many of the "special markets" of North American cities, with the famed open-air markets of Mexico (colloquially known as the tianguis) being rivalled by famous places like the Pike Place Market in Seattle, Royal Street in New Orleans, Kensington Market in Toronto, The West Portal in San Francisco, Packard Market in Detroit and the Strip District in Pittsburgh which are attractions in their own right.
In addition to the above, the focus on keeping "strategic industries" in business in the Amigos that have been supported actively by their governments (to some extent, virtually every first world country does this) and the desire to keep local production going has kept a large amount of manufacturing of capital goods in North America very much active - if you buy an Apple smartphone, tablet or computer, odds are its made in California, and that's true with a vast collection of other makers of electronics and electronic components - if you buy a product made by the likes of Zenith, RCA, Atari, Microsoft, Kodak, Motorola, IBM or Cisco Systems, it's manufactured in the United States, and the same is true with Canada and Mexico. The electronics industry is one of the biggest examples of the mentioned-above trend of having as many offerings available to see and using warehousing to keep stores available for displays, as almost all major retailers in this industry offer a vast range of products.
Food is one area where things are a touch different, primarily because of a reverse influence - convenience stores, which had primarily been introduced to Asia by western servicemen during the years after World War II, were mastered particularly by Japanese companies 7-Eleven (which bought the American founders of the chain out of bankruptcy in 1991), Lawson (itself descended from an American firm that by that time was defunct in North America) and FamilyMart, which came to North America with a vengeance in the 1980s, offering vastly-better fare than what was available to customers of traditional convenience stores and at better prices. By the end of the 1990s, both small stores and chains of such stores alike had gotten the memo, and dozens of regional distributors acted as helpers to these stores, allowing virtually any street corner to be a place where one could buy good, nutritious food at excellent prices in addition to the grocery store chains, which responded to this challenge by improving their own offerings and making so that their stores had products and selections that would be impossible at the chains of smaller stores, in effect creating a world where the quality and convenience of the Asian stores and their being on every street corner was matched by the ease and selection of the grocery stores of the North American standard. This "Asian Invasion" (as it was often referred to in the 1980s and 1990s, though some objected to this designation for obvious reasons) also involved many of the newcomer companies introducing many of the products sold in the Asian markets to wide distribution in North America, such as Onigiris (rice balls with a variety of fillings), savoury buns, dumplings (of both the Chinese and Japanese Gyoza varieties), bento boxes (which grew rapidly in popularity in some parts of North America) and many new kinds of drinks, while also American companies who chose to jump into the Asian markets did the same in reverse.
The average size of stores in the Amigos is somewhat smaller as a result of the trends (though still larger there than in most places in the world), but there is a mountain more of them. Big box stores like Wal-Mart, Target, Costco and the like do exist but have a much more limited footprint, particularly in Canada and Mexico, while department stores still exist, most of them in individual chains that serve those of higher incomes and, with the advent of online shopping (particularly the likes of Amazon) have become much more places for these chains to show off their merchandise to potential buyers, with sales staff there almost always saying "If we don't have your size here, we can get it for you from our warehouse and ship it to your door." This is different for smaller businesses, of course, as these will tend to have more stock. As people are somewhat less materialistic in this world (though the number of people able to be a part of the luxury markets in many goods in the Amigos is way, way bigger than OTL), the real losers are the fast fashion companies (many of which never exist here) and cheaper goods stores, which do still exist though they have but a fraction of the scale of OTL, which in turn also influences the growth of second-hand stores. From a mountain of vintage clothing stores (whose owners openly and widely advertise that they will buy and sell old clothing and saleable items), online retailers aimed at small sellers and artisans like Etsy, Artfire, Bonanza and Localmotion and a vast collection of designer clothing makers (particularly in fashion and design centers like Atlanta, Charlotte, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Guadalajara, Toronto and Havana), the result is that while the number of goods bought is rather lower, the quality of said goods is way, way higher than OTL and there is much less waste in these sectors. This has, in addition to the above benefits, provided a panache to many of the "special markets" of North American cities, with the famed open-air markets of Mexico (colloquially known as the tianguis) being rivalled by famous places like the Pike Place Market in Seattle, Royal Street in New Orleans, Kensington Market in Toronto, The West Portal in San Francisco, Packard Market in Detroit and the Strip District in Pittsburgh which are attractions in their own right.
In addition to the above, the focus on keeping "strategic industries" in business in the Amigos that have been supported actively by their governments (to some extent, virtually every first world country does this) and the desire to keep local production going has kept a large amount of manufacturing of capital goods in North America very much active - if you buy an Apple smartphone, tablet or computer, odds are its made in California, and that's true with a vast collection of other makers of electronics and electronic components - if you buy a product made by the likes of Zenith, RCA, Atari, Microsoft, Kodak, Motorola, IBM or Cisco Systems, it's manufactured in the United States, and the same is true with Canada and Mexico. The electronics industry is one of the biggest examples of the mentioned-above trend of having as many offerings available to see and using warehousing to keep stores available for displays, as almost all major retailers in this industry offer a vast range of products.
Food is one area where things are a touch different, primarily because of a reverse influence - convenience stores, which had primarily been introduced to Asia by western servicemen during the years after World War II, were mastered particularly by Japanese companies 7-Eleven (which bought the American founders of the chain out of bankruptcy in 1991), Lawson (itself descended from an American firm that by that time was defunct in North America) and FamilyMart, which came to North America with a vengeance in the 1980s, offering vastly-better fare than what was available to customers of traditional convenience stores and at better prices. By the end of the 1990s, both small stores and chains of such stores alike had gotten the memo, and dozens of regional distributors acted as helpers to these stores, allowing virtually any street corner to be a place where one could buy good, nutritious food at excellent prices in addition to the grocery store chains, which responded to this challenge by improving their own offerings and making so that their stores had products and selections that would be impossible at the chains of smaller stores, in effect creating a world where the quality and convenience of the Asian stores and their being on every street corner was matched by the ease and selection of the grocery stores of the North American standard. This "Asian Invasion" (as it was often referred to in the 1980s and 1990s, though some objected to this designation for obvious reasons) also involved many of the newcomer companies introducing many of the products sold in the Asian markets to wide distribution in North America, such as Onigiris (rice balls with a variety of fillings), savoury buns, dumplings (of both the Chinese and Japanese Gyoza varieties), bento boxes (which grew rapidly in popularity in some parts of North America) and many new kinds of drinks, while also American companies who chose to jump into the Asian markets did the same in reverse.