what's next

I've been thinking about what is next.
I am close to the end of this work, it will need more editing for a fourth edition, but I don't expect to add much.  It may, however, be early to look at what is next, but an idea has come to me.
When I became a writer, it was the fulfillment of a long held dream; but it only came when I thought I had lost everything.  It was only later, that I realized how little I had lost and then only when I thought I lost everything again.  Apparently writing for me is a function of disaster.  The more disaster, the more writing.  What motivated me the first time was the need to attempt to do something important, therefore the writings on China and later physics.
While not happy with my financial success as a writer; my finances were otherwise provided by luck and opportunity, risk and perhaps a minimum amount of talent.  And, more importantly, the content of my writing pleased me and suggested what I should work on next.
In one of my recent posts I talked about how nice it would be if we were intelligent and kind.  We are neither.  We are apes carved out of natural selection.  We survived because we were able to wipe out our competitors.  Most of our technological advances have come from studying war or from the desire to seek financial or moral dominance over others.  We remain bent on killing each other, dominating each other.  Pockets of morality are overwhelmed, the meek inherit the earth, they are buried there.
So it occurred to me that I should write what the world should be.  This is far from writing of a perfect world, for we do not live on a perfect planet.  The environment of the Galaxy, the solar system and the planet itself seek to kill us, losing the race only because it seems like we will kill ourselves first.
In looking for a model over which to design a survivable world I stated small and was unsuccessful.  A life raft had little relevance, an ocean liner slightly more, but inadequate and too much like the unsuccessful model of dominant world powers going to ruin as they rely too heavily on the labor of others.  A spaceship is tempting.  They have redundancy and we are, after all, little more than a space ship.   But what spaceship?  Apollo 13 comes to mind, but it is too restrictive of a model.  It had an attractive idea, a time limit of survivability for example, but then I realized that while we should have time limits for certain stages, for example we should hope to survive at least 10,000 years, a modest enough goal, however unlikely, but we must also have the need in our model for survival thereafter.  The model had to have potential for survival but needed to face sufficient hardship.
What I arrived at initially were three models instead of one and several others would be equally applicable.  Of the three, all survived after a fashion, but two failed and the third succeeded only by the help of others.  The three that seemed to hold the most promise as a model were England during the blitz, Germany after D-day and Japan in 1945 shortly before the atomic bombs were dropped.  Each of these represents a microcosm of our world large enough to have substantial redundancy and conflict and all were likely doomed.  To say that we have, over the short time period I will start with (10,000 years), the same 1 in 3 chance would be grossly optimistic.  I have to find the book that determined that when we cut down all our trees we would perish for a later edit of this post, but we are certain to cut down our last trees, at least statistically within the lifetime of our grandchildren if things don't change.  That means our survival even for 100 years is less likely than the alternative.  This ignores man-made or natural climate change and the plethora of disasters (again man-made, natural or galactic) likely to end life on earth, at least human life, at any moment.
I  will start, therefore, with a fanciful beginning.  I will not take the world as it is certain to be over the very short life span, 100 years or 1000, that I expect we will experience.  Instead I will say what I think a world that might survive for longer would look like.  A world designed to survive natural disasters and to avoid man-made ones.
In each of the examples chosen, there was near dictatorial rule.  In each there was fanaticism for a cause.  Each was beset with near impossible odds of survival, and yet each continued.  Each experienced different levels of dissension, but at least some.  Each survived for a time using innovation to different extents.  Each used at least a certain amount of tunneling and stockpiling and preparation for last resorts, and each one that had to rely on the last resorts, failed spectacularly.  That only one example survived does not, in my opinion, say much for it.  The survival of England would be comparable to an earthly survival only if aliens come along at the last minute to rescue us.  It is a nice thought, but if the aliens were like us, they would destroy us pre-preemptively at the first opportunity.
Hence while these make for good models to think about, they are depressing.  The 100,000 year Reich lasted for 5 years.  England survived, but at the expense of much of its prestige and culture.
It would seem that there must be some better model of what a perfect world for surviving in a harsh environment should look like.  History suggests it should be innovative, flexible, balanced, but not necessarily kind.  It has to have goals that doesn't bring it into conflict with survival.  It has to have centralized control but not absolute control.  It has to work well with others but be powerful enough to prevent power to become de-localized.  It has to protect the individual while holding survival of the state higher than the survival of any one person.  It is, strangely, something that is so unusual, there is no model for it.  Aldus Huxley's Brave world might be a good starting place for such a world, but it is hardly a model for innovation.  A static world would be safer than the erratic, greed driven one we live in, but only marginally so in the long run.  A bucolic human race living at peace with the earth can only survive if the earth is peaceful in return and we know that within the 100,000 year time frame if not within the 500 year time frame the earth will seek, probably successfully, to wipe us out.
It is a tedious problem and perhaps I will attempt to tackle it or perhaps I will decide that since my life is hardly worth the trouble, perhaps there is no other life worth it.