[2400AD] Pre-Stutterwarp Trends (Part 2)
May. 11th, 2003 09:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldThis examines trends in diverse localities of Sol system.
Consolidation of Persia: After the revolution of the 2050s, the cultural integration of Persia's outlying areas into the core of old Iran took some time. (Under the Islamic League, the political and military integration of even the sovereign member-states had been internationally accepted.) Rapid economic growth established a unified society, intermixing different groups. Many outlying lingusitic minorities--the Gilaki on the Caspain Sea, the Turkmen in Khorasan, and Baluchi and Qashqai nomads in the south--were assimilated during this time period. Larger outlying populations with their own national traditions, like Mesopotamian Arabs, Kurds and Turcophone Azeris in the northwest, and Urdu-speakers on the southern shore of the Persian Gulf, took longer to integrate, though even here the prominence of the Persian language and migration to old Iran's core encouraged some assimilation.
Demographic Shrinkage in the Eastern Mediterranean: Over the 21st century, the eastern Mediterranean fitfully modernized despite serious problems like an unstable eastern border, lagging technological backwardness, and chaotic politics. The region's most spectacular problem was a precipitatous population decline. This decline was caused by a number of factors: the poverty affecting almost the entire region save Greece, continued high levels of net emigration, the persistence of patriarchal mores, and ubiquitous birth control. Greece and Israel resisted this trend thanks to their relatively high birth rates and net immigration, and their populations grew by half over the 21st century. In Egypt, however, the natural population fell by almost half to 40 million despite substantial Ethiopian immigration, while the Palestinian and Albanian populations fell by even greater levels.
Formation of the Cerean Diaspora: The decision of Industries Selfort SA to relocate most of its non-Earth-based facilities to Ceres' Demeter Station in 2063 was responsible for the creation of a new nationality. In moving its key facilities and workers to the asteroid belt, Industries Selfort installed a sort of indigenous population, composed of migrants predominantly drawn from the western Mediterranean (Catalonia, other Spanish states, southern France, and Algeria) reflecting Industries Selfort's origins and continuing links with the region. The Catalan language was adopted throughout the language, in part as a nationalistic reaction against Earth, in part because of the inability of Francophones and Hispanophones to accept that the language of the other major group should be privileged. Slowly, the sheer distance of Cereans from Earth and their dependence on a fragile colonial infrastructure consolidated an ethnic identity, marked particularly by shared use of the Catalan language (if not as a first language then as a community language) and a commitment to radical transhumanism (necessary for life on late 21st century Ceres). Using new minifacturing and fusion power technologies, Industries Selfort established permanent bases on a dozen asteroids in the main belt with a combined population of several thousands. Here, far from Earth and its controls, Industries Selfort began to redirect asteroids to cislunar space for mining purposes (mainly water and organics for the colonies, and metal-bearing asteroids for Earth), but the Pallas and Vesta stations specialized in advanced biotechnological research. As inner-system governments and corporations extended their reach into the Belt, drawing upon Industries Selfort's experience, many Cereans took part in a second diaspora out, to the Jovian and Saturnian systems and the Trojan asteroids. Cereans installed in the outer Solar System played an important role in the Mars ecopoesis project, by redirecting water-bearing Kuiper belt and cometary objects to Mars; their use of nuclear weapons to do so caused some concern on Earth.
Infosocialism: The roots of infosoicalism can be traced to the middle-income countries bordering the Indian Ocean (Persia, Thailand, Maharashtra) and their neighbours, which were largely excluded from the circles of the first-tier economies. Over the 21st century, these countries all achieved considerable growth, yet they were left behind by the hyper-advanced economies of Europe, the Southern Hemisphere, and the Pacific Rim, in large part because of the expense of acquiring new technologies and finding export markets and destinations for immigrants as the First and Second World countries closed their frontiers to the Third World.The Mumbai School of Sociology--a working group formed by several dozen of the Indian states' leading sociologists and economists--issued their famous First Manifesto in 2061, calling on countries marginalized in the new world order to simply opt out, adopting the new so-called "competitive socialist" economic model to create self-sustaining autarkic growth and renouncing intellectual copyright laws so as to allow for the rapid diffusion of advanced technologies. Subsequent manifestos sought to demonstrate that Third World countries, if they detached themselves from an exploitative world economy while adopting the school's precepts, could close the "development gap" just like Second World countries did earlier. The Sixth Manifesto of 2064 referred to this theory as "informatics-era socialism," later changed to the more compact infosocialism. By the end of the 21st century, infosocialism had become the dominant ideology of the Trans-Indian Ocean Bloc; elsewhere, it formed the main ideology of opposition to established capitalisms, absorbing traditional Marxist socialism and girding many opponents of the world system.
Integration of the Russias: Over the 21st century, the various Russian states were integrated thoroughly into the European Confederation. Immigrants from across the European Confederation soon came to outnumber ethnic Russians in all of the nominally ethnic-Russian successor states save Leningrad, while Poland and Ukraine enlarged their territories at Russian expense. Russia's vast natural resources--timber, arable soil, minerals, oil and natural gas--all saw increasingly heavy though sustainable exploitation by a European Confederation inclined towards domestic self-sufficiency. By the end of the 21st century, Russia had been thoroughly integrated into the European Union, though at the cost of marginalizing Russian culture across most of this vast territory.
Islandia: The Islandia space habitat, built at the L-4 point in cislunar space, was one of the most ambitious effort of the pre-stutterwarp spacefaring era, ranking alongside the ecopoeticization of Mars: It was the first large-scale space construction using lunar and asteroidal resources processed by space-based factories, and it was the first attempt to create a large-scale self-enclosed biosphere. The development of Islandia occurred fairly rapidly, as it became the major base for the microgravity-adapted Cerean diaspora and profitted as the headquarters for Industries Selfort SA's mining and research facilities. Islandian-based laboratories played a crucial role in the development of stutterwarp drive, with the free solar energy of space and abundant mineral resources of the Moon and relocated asteroids to support research.
Mexico in the 21st Century: After the Second Mexican-American War, Mexico went from strength to strength. Geographically, it managed to integrate an area of some three million square kilometres (most of the former United States west of the Mississippi) into itself; economically, Mexico moved into the first rank of world economies with a highly sophisticated industry and growing capacity for technological resource; socially, Mexico managed to finally bring its indigenous peoples into the mainstream of Mexican life as it absorbed millions of Asian and North American immigrants; politically, Mexico remained a stable multiparty democracy; militarily, Mexico became a major power with a battle-tested army, a deep-sea navy for the first time in its history, and a powerful aerospace force; geopolitically, Mexico was the dominant North American power and one of the five first-tier member-states of the Pacific Rim Alliance. By the beginning of the 22nd century, the 200 million Mexicans had become accustomed to wealth and power as their birth right.
Morocco: After the European Confederation sealed its southern frontiers to African immigrants, the Moroccan kingdom suffered a fatal crisis as the country's growing overpopulation and poverty was exacerbated by the loss of Europe as a "promised land" for Morocco's poor. As the gap separating Morocco from neighbouring Algeria grew, so did a populist irredentist nationalism aiming for the recuperation of the Spanish overseas communities of Rio de Oro and Ceuta-Melilla. A Moroccan attempt at annexation in 2049 caused the First Morocco War with the European Confederation; the humiliating and entirely one-sided Moroccan defeat destroyed the Moroccan kingdom, and a republic took its place. The republic was quickly taken over by Berber nationalists who were quite hostile towards the Arab cultural presence and large Arab minority in Morocco; in the second half of the 21st century, Morocco's population stagnated at 35 million as most of the country's Arab population emigrated, mainly to North America and the European Confederation. By the early 22nd century, Morocco had regained a democratic system of government, but the infosocialism supported by Moroccans (as indicated by Morocco's status as a haven for copyright violation and its affiliate membership in the Trans-Indian Ocean Bloc in 2097-2138) helped precipitate the Second Moroccan War with the European Confederation.
Resettlement of Indonesia: The Third World War reduced the population of Indonesia--the region including the major islands of Borneo, Sumatra, and Java, the peninsula of Malaya, and the smaller islands in between--to a mere four million people, scattered across the archipelagic region. The resettlement of the archipelago began in the first decade of the 21st century as private businesses imported workers from the Indian states, beginning a pattern of chain migration from the Indian subcontinent (particularly from Tamilnad and Bengal) to depopulated Indonesia. This chain migration continued even after the major Indonesian regions regained their independence in the 2020s, as the large and powerful Indian minorities maintained official open-door policies By the mid-21st century, the majority of the Malayan and Sumatran populations was of recent Indian origins, while Indian minorities formed one-third of the Javanese population and dominated the major ports of the Dayak region-states in the Bornean federation. Just as in 14th century Srijivaya, in 21st century Indonesia Indian migrants imported Indian culture and the Hindu religion to a historical frontier of the Indian subcontinent, though at a heavy cost to native cultures; only on Java did practitioners of Islam remain in a majority of the local population, while Malay languages in Sumatra and Malaya gradually gave way to Tamil, Hindi, and Bengali.
Rise of Poland: Before the Third World War, Poland was a modestly prosperous semiperipheral member-state of the European Confederation. Throughout the 21st century it enjoyed rapid growth, as Europeans interested in rebuilding Ukraine and exploiting Eurasian resources chose to use stable Poland as their base. Poland's rapid economic growth drew its eastern neighbours into a close orbit around it--Belarus was unique in voting to federate itself with Poland in 2012, the more conventional trends being the massive inflow of eastern European immigrants into Poland (some 10 million over the 21st century), the growth of large Polish communities throughout the Russias as Polish workers settled in new industrial communities, and the development of Warsaw into eastern Europe's leading metropolis. By the end of the 21st century Poland had risen to the first tier of European economies; Poland's population of 54 million was the second-largest in the entire Confederation, behind only France. As the European Confederation extended into space, Poles and Poland played a disproportionately important role.
Stabilization of China: After China was unified in the 2020s and 2030s, the country was in a truly difficult state. The Chinese population had fallen sharply from its pre-Third World War peak of 1 100 million people to a mere 150 million. Almost all Chinese cities and industrial centres had been destroyed, leaving China a nation-state of poor peasant farmers, while many outlying areas of China (Dongbei, Inner Mongolia, Eastern Turkestan, Xishuangbanna) had been detached by foreign imperial powers. The slow recovery of China from the mid-21st century on was aided by China's location at the fringe of the spheres of interest of all of the major blocs: although a first-tier member-state of the Pacific Rim Alliance China's participation in that organization was passive and limited to following the Japanese lead, while the strong interest of the Chinese in infosocialism and the Trans Indian-Ocean Bloc was limited to quiet non-compliance with trade sanctions against TIOC and an openness to Indian immigration. Relations with Korea remained tense, but by the 2150s China had succeeded in establishing friendly relationships with all of the other first-tier member-states of the Pacific Rim Alliance, while China had developed a relatively large industruial economy to support its growing population of 400 million people.
Trans-Indian Ocean Bloc: The roots of nanosocialism can be traced to the middle-income countries bordering the Indian Ocean (Persia, Thailand, Maharashtra) and their neighbours, which were largely excluded from the circles of the first-tier economies. Over the 21st century, these countries all achieved considerable growth, yet they were left behind by the hyper-advanced economies of Europe, the Southern Hemisphere, and the Pacific Rim. It seemed impossible to these frustrated upwardly mobile countries that they could ever close the gap. Other littoral states were isolated by the mid-21st century from their natural patrons--Ethiopians, for instance, could no longer move freely to Egypt, while Indians and neo-Indians were severed from Australasia and Europe. The Mumbai School of Sociology's manifestos struck a resounding audience across the region. In 2071, the Trans-Indian Ocean Bloc was formed by 19 different littoral states, including East Africa, Persia, Maharashtra, and Tamilnad but not Thailand (which had chosen to orient itself towards the Pacific Rim). Although infosocialism had become a major ideology worldwide by the end of the 21st century, TIOC's membership remained confined to the Indian Ocean basin; the 2164 expansion to Thailand and the other Indochinese states rounded its membership out. Although TIOC was marked by major divisions (between African, Islamic, and Indic member-states, between rich and poor, between liberal-democratic and authoritarian-dictatorial), TIOC's self-imposed isolation helped consolidate a general bloc identity, as migration and trade between the member-states rapidly intensified and a pluricultural bloc-wide elite formed. The introduction of technologically advanced and economically prosperous Indochina into the bloc after the Pacific War jumpstarted TIOC's economy, finally initiating self-sustaining economic growth across the region.
Trans-Solar Colonization: The diaspora into the depths of the Solar System was much less spectacular than the movements to Mars, Mercury, and cislunar space. From the outer planets, a motley assortment of Cereans, human and uplift explorers, an artificial intelligences moved out into the Kuiper belt and beyond, to some of the larger bodies detected in the Oort cloud and even to nearby free brown dwarfs and superjovians, of which some three dozen existed within 2 light years of Sol. This branch of the diaspora was much less visible, as immigration to this region of the solar system disappeared dropped after sharply after the initial diaspora, owing to the extreme separation of these areas in travel time from the inner solar system and the non-terrestrial environments prevailing at most of these destinations. Nonetheless, the cultures already established in this environment prospered, free from all but nominal League supervision, exploiting the abundant resources of their vast homeland. The underpopulation of these space-based cultures encouraged a heavy reliance on automated machineries; Kanaky and the Nouméa-8432 worlds had accumulated (through extensive use of von Neumanns) space-based industrial bases almost as extensive as those of Earth, providing these societies with near self-sufficiency. Many of these cultures were nomadic: almost as soon as a particular colonization target was settled, exploration missions were sent to points further afield. There was no set direction to these explorations, but many of these were vaguely pointed in the direction of the Alpha Centauri trinary and Barnard's Star, a sector in which dozens more superjovians and free brown dwarfs were known to be present. By the end of the 22nd century, a presence was very thinly scattered across more than 380 different major bodies (comets, asteroids, gas giant moons, free stations) in almost two cubic light years of space, with a total population of only some 3.5 million (2.5 million biological intelligences of various sorts, the remainder artificial intelligences). There was a vast diversity of cultures, ranging from AI cultures based in low-temperature superconductor matrices built from cometary organics to the neo-squid cultures in the living ice-ocean moons of the free superjovian Nouméa-8432 to the planet-based cultures on the relativley inhabitable planets of the brown dwarf Nouméa-1762. (The Nouméa-1762 worlds were unusually habitable for brown dwarf worlds, owing to their large mass, their dense carbon fioxide atmosphere, their proximity to their primary, and Nouméa-1762's youth.)
Consolidation of Persia: After the revolution of the 2050s, the cultural integration of Persia's outlying areas into the core of old Iran took some time. (Under the Islamic League, the political and military integration of even the sovereign member-states had been internationally accepted.) Rapid economic growth established a unified society, intermixing different groups. Many outlying lingusitic minorities--the Gilaki on the Caspain Sea, the Turkmen in Khorasan, and Baluchi and Qashqai nomads in the south--were assimilated during this time period. Larger outlying populations with their own national traditions, like Mesopotamian Arabs, Kurds and Turcophone Azeris in the northwest, and Urdu-speakers on the southern shore of the Persian Gulf, took longer to integrate, though even here the prominence of the Persian language and migration to old Iran's core encouraged some assimilation.
Demographic Shrinkage in the Eastern Mediterranean: Over the 21st century, the eastern Mediterranean fitfully modernized despite serious problems like an unstable eastern border, lagging technological backwardness, and chaotic politics. The region's most spectacular problem was a precipitatous population decline. This decline was caused by a number of factors: the poverty affecting almost the entire region save Greece, continued high levels of net emigration, the persistence of patriarchal mores, and ubiquitous birth control. Greece and Israel resisted this trend thanks to their relatively high birth rates and net immigration, and their populations grew by half over the 21st century. In Egypt, however, the natural population fell by almost half to 40 million despite substantial Ethiopian immigration, while the Palestinian and Albanian populations fell by even greater levels.
Formation of the Cerean Diaspora: The decision of Industries Selfort SA to relocate most of its non-Earth-based facilities to Ceres' Demeter Station in 2063 was responsible for the creation of a new nationality. In moving its key facilities and workers to the asteroid belt, Industries Selfort installed a sort of indigenous population, composed of migrants predominantly drawn from the western Mediterranean (Catalonia, other Spanish states, southern France, and Algeria) reflecting Industries Selfort's origins and continuing links with the region. The Catalan language was adopted throughout the language, in part as a nationalistic reaction against Earth, in part because of the inability of Francophones and Hispanophones to accept that the language of the other major group should be privileged. Slowly, the sheer distance of Cereans from Earth and their dependence on a fragile colonial infrastructure consolidated an ethnic identity, marked particularly by shared use of the Catalan language (if not as a first language then as a community language) and a commitment to radical transhumanism (necessary for life on late 21st century Ceres). Using new minifacturing and fusion power technologies, Industries Selfort established permanent bases on a dozen asteroids in the main belt with a combined population of several thousands. Here, far from Earth and its controls, Industries Selfort began to redirect asteroids to cislunar space for mining purposes (mainly water and organics for the colonies, and metal-bearing asteroids for Earth), but the Pallas and Vesta stations specialized in advanced biotechnological research. As inner-system governments and corporations extended their reach into the Belt, drawing upon Industries Selfort's experience, many Cereans took part in a second diaspora out, to the Jovian and Saturnian systems and the Trojan asteroids. Cereans installed in the outer Solar System played an important role in the Mars ecopoesis project, by redirecting water-bearing Kuiper belt and cometary objects to Mars; their use of nuclear weapons to do so caused some concern on Earth.
Infosocialism: The roots of infosoicalism can be traced to the middle-income countries bordering the Indian Ocean (Persia, Thailand, Maharashtra) and their neighbours, which were largely excluded from the circles of the first-tier economies. Over the 21st century, these countries all achieved considerable growth, yet they were left behind by the hyper-advanced economies of Europe, the Southern Hemisphere, and the Pacific Rim, in large part because of the expense of acquiring new technologies and finding export markets and destinations for immigrants as the First and Second World countries closed their frontiers to the Third World.The Mumbai School of Sociology--a working group formed by several dozen of the Indian states' leading sociologists and economists--issued their famous First Manifesto in 2061, calling on countries marginalized in the new world order to simply opt out, adopting the new so-called "competitive socialist" economic model to create self-sustaining autarkic growth and renouncing intellectual copyright laws so as to allow for the rapid diffusion of advanced technologies. Subsequent manifestos sought to demonstrate that Third World countries, if they detached themselves from an exploitative world economy while adopting the school's precepts, could close the "development gap" just like Second World countries did earlier. The Sixth Manifesto of 2064 referred to this theory as "informatics-era socialism," later changed to the more compact infosocialism. By the end of the 21st century, infosocialism had become the dominant ideology of the Trans-Indian Ocean Bloc; elsewhere, it formed the main ideology of opposition to established capitalisms, absorbing traditional Marxist socialism and girding many opponents of the world system.
Integration of the Russias: Over the 21st century, the various Russian states were integrated thoroughly into the European Confederation. Immigrants from across the European Confederation soon came to outnumber ethnic Russians in all of the nominally ethnic-Russian successor states save Leningrad, while Poland and Ukraine enlarged their territories at Russian expense. Russia's vast natural resources--timber, arable soil, minerals, oil and natural gas--all saw increasingly heavy though sustainable exploitation by a European Confederation inclined towards domestic self-sufficiency. By the end of the 21st century, Russia had been thoroughly integrated into the European Union, though at the cost of marginalizing Russian culture across most of this vast territory.
Islandia: The Islandia space habitat, built at the L-4 point in cislunar space, was one of the most ambitious effort of the pre-stutterwarp spacefaring era, ranking alongside the ecopoeticization of Mars: It was the first large-scale space construction using lunar and asteroidal resources processed by space-based factories, and it was the first attempt to create a large-scale self-enclosed biosphere. The development of Islandia occurred fairly rapidly, as it became the major base for the microgravity-adapted Cerean diaspora and profitted as the headquarters for Industries Selfort SA's mining and research facilities. Islandian-based laboratories played a crucial role in the development of stutterwarp drive, with the free solar energy of space and abundant mineral resources of the Moon and relocated asteroids to support research.
Mexico in the 21st Century: After the Second Mexican-American War, Mexico went from strength to strength. Geographically, it managed to integrate an area of some three million square kilometres (most of the former United States west of the Mississippi) into itself; economically, Mexico moved into the first rank of world economies with a highly sophisticated industry and growing capacity for technological resource; socially, Mexico managed to finally bring its indigenous peoples into the mainstream of Mexican life as it absorbed millions of Asian and North American immigrants; politically, Mexico remained a stable multiparty democracy; militarily, Mexico became a major power with a battle-tested army, a deep-sea navy for the first time in its history, and a powerful aerospace force; geopolitically, Mexico was the dominant North American power and one of the five first-tier member-states of the Pacific Rim Alliance. By the beginning of the 22nd century, the 200 million Mexicans had become accustomed to wealth and power as their birth right.
Morocco: After the European Confederation sealed its southern frontiers to African immigrants, the Moroccan kingdom suffered a fatal crisis as the country's growing overpopulation and poverty was exacerbated by the loss of Europe as a "promised land" for Morocco's poor. As the gap separating Morocco from neighbouring Algeria grew, so did a populist irredentist nationalism aiming for the recuperation of the Spanish overseas communities of Rio de Oro and Ceuta-Melilla. A Moroccan attempt at annexation in 2049 caused the First Morocco War with the European Confederation; the humiliating and entirely one-sided Moroccan defeat destroyed the Moroccan kingdom, and a republic took its place. The republic was quickly taken over by Berber nationalists who were quite hostile towards the Arab cultural presence and large Arab minority in Morocco; in the second half of the 21st century, Morocco's population stagnated at 35 million as most of the country's Arab population emigrated, mainly to North America and the European Confederation. By the early 22nd century, Morocco had regained a democratic system of government, but the infosocialism supported by Moroccans (as indicated by Morocco's status as a haven for copyright violation and its affiliate membership in the Trans-Indian Ocean Bloc in 2097-2138) helped precipitate the Second Moroccan War with the European Confederation.
Resettlement of Indonesia: The Third World War reduced the population of Indonesia--the region including the major islands of Borneo, Sumatra, and Java, the peninsula of Malaya, and the smaller islands in between--to a mere four million people, scattered across the archipelagic region. The resettlement of the archipelago began in the first decade of the 21st century as private businesses imported workers from the Indian states, beginning a pattern of chain migration from the Indian subcontinent (particularly from Tamilnad and Bengal) to depopulated Indonesia. This chain migration continued even after the major Indonesian regions regained their independence in the 2020s, as the large and powerful Indian minorities maintained official open-door policies By the mid-21st century, the majority of the Malayan and Sumatran populations was of recent Indian origins, while Indian minorities formed one-third of the Javanese population and dominated the major ports of the Dayak region-states in the Bornean federation. Just as in 14th century Srijivaya, in 21st century Indonesia Indian migrants imported Indian culture and the Hindu religion to a historical frontier of the Indian subcontinent, though at a heavy cost to native cultures; only on Java did practitioners of Islam remain in a majority of the local population, while Malay languages in Sumatra and Malaya gradually gave way to Tamil, Hindi, and Bengali.
Rise of Poland: Before the Third World War, Poland was a modestly prosperous semiperipheral member-state of the European Confederation. Throughout the 21st century it enjoyed rapid growth, as Europeans interested in rebuilding Ukraine and exploiting Eurasian resources chose to use stable Poland as their base. Poland's rapid economic growth drew its eastern neighbours into a close orbit around it--Belarus was unique in voting to federate itself with Poland in 2012, the more conventional trends being the massive inflow of eastern European immigrants into Poland (some 10 million over the 21st century), the growth of large Polish communities throughout the Russias as Polish workers settled in new industrial communities, and the development of Warsaw into eastern Europe's leading metropolis. By the end of the 21st century Poland had risen to the first tier of European economies; Poland's population of 54 million was the second-largest in the entire Confederation, behind only France. As the European Confederation extended into space, Poles and Poland played a disproportionately important role.
Stabilization of China: After China was unified in the 2020s and 2030s, the country was in a truly difficult state. The Chinese population had fallen sharply from its pre-Third World War peak of 1 100 million people to a mere 150 million. Almost all Chinese cities and industrial centres had been destroyed, leaving China a nation-state of poor peasant farmers, while many outlying areas of China (Dongbei, Inner Mongolia, Eastern Turkestan, Xishuangbanna) had been detached by foreign imperial powers. The slow recovery of China from the mid-21st century on was aided by China's location at the fringe of the spheres of interest of all of the major blocs: although a first-tier member-state of the Pacific Rim Alliance China's participation in that organization was passive and limited to following the Japanese lead, while the strong interest of the Chinese in infosocialism and the Trans Indian-Ocean Bloc was limited to quiet non-compliance with trade sanctions against TIOC and an openness to Indian immigration. Relations with Korea remained tense, but by the 2150s China had succeeded in establishing friendly relationships with all of the other first-tier member-states of the Pacific Rim Alliance, while China had developed a relatively large industruial economy to support its growing population of 400 million people.
Trans-Indian Ocean Bloc: The roots of nanosocialism can be traced to the middle-income countries bordering the Indian Ocean (Persia, Thailand, Maharashtra) and their neighbours, which were largely excluded from the circles of the first-tier economies. Over the 21st century, these countries all achieved considerable growth, yet they were left behind by the hyper-advanced economies of Europe, the Southern Hemisphere, and the Pacific Rim. It seemed impossible to these frustrated upwardly mobile countries that they could ever close the gap. Other littoral states were isolated by the mid-21st century from their natural patrons--Ethiopians, for instance, could no longer move freely to Egypt, while Indians and neo-Indians were severed from Australasia and Europe. The Mumbai School of Sociology's manifestos struck a resounding audience across the region. In 2071, the Trans-Indian Ocean Bloc was formed by 19 different littoral states, including East Africa, Persia, Maharashtra, and Tamilnad but not Thailand (which had chosen to orient itself towards the Pacific Rim). Although infosocialism had become a major ideology worldwide by the end of the 21st century, TIOC's membership remained confined to the Indian Ocean basin; the 2164 expansion to Thailand and the other Indochinese states rounded its membership out. Although TIOC was marked by major divisions (between African, Islamic, and Indic member-states, between rich and poor, between liberal-democratic and authoritarian-dictatorial), TIOC's self-imposed isolation helped consolidate a general bloc identity, as migration and trade between the member-states rapidly intensified and a pluricultural bloc-wide elite formed. The introduction of technologically advanced and economically prosperous Indochina into the bloc after the Pacific War jumpstarted TIOC's economy, finally initiating self-sustaining economic growth across the region.
Trans-Solar Colonization: The diaspora into the depths of the Solar System was much less spectacular than the movements to Mars, Mercury, and cislunar space. From the outer planets, a motley assortment of Cereans, human and uplift explorers, an artificial intelligences moved out into the Kuiper belt and beyond, to some of the larger bodies detected in the Oort cloud and even to nearby free brown dwarfs and superjovians, of which some three dozen existed within 2 light years of Sol. This branch of the diaspora was much less visible, as immigration to this region of the solar system disappeared dropped after sharply after the initial diaspora, owing to the extreme separation of these areas in travel time from the inner solar system and the non-terrestrial environments prevailing at most of these destinations. Nonetheless, the cultures already established in this environment prospered, free from all but nominal League supervision, exploiting the abundant resources of their vast homeland. The underpopulation of these space-based cultures encouraged a heavy reliance on automated machineries; Kanaky and the Nouméa-8432 worlds had accumulated (through extensive use of von Neumanns) space-based industrial bases almost as extensive as those of Earth, providing these societies with near self-sufficiency. Many of these cultures were nomadic: almost as soon as a particular colonization target was settled, exploration missions were sent to points further afield. There was no set direction to these explorations, but many of these were vaguely pointed in the direction of the Alpha Centauri trinary and Barnard's Star, a sector in which dozens more superjovians and free brown dwarfs were known to be present. By the end of the 22nd century, a presence was very thinly scattered across more than 380 different major bodies (comets, asteroids, gas giant moons, free stations) in almost two cubic light years of space, with a total population of only some 3.5 million (2.5 million biological intelligences of various sorts, the remainder artificial intelligences). There was a vast diversity of cultures, ranging from AI cultures based in low-temperature superconductor matrices built from cometary organics to the neo-squid cultures in the living ice-ocean moons of the free superjovian Nouméa-8432 to the planet-based cultures on the relativley inhabitable planets of the brown dwarf Nouméa-1762. (The Nouméa-1762 worlds were unusually habitable for brown dwarf worlds, owing to their large mass, their dense carbon fioxide atmosphere, their proximity to their primary, and Nouméa-1762's youth.)
