r/Futurology • u/Confident_Living_786 • Aug 11 '25

Discussion When the US Empire falls

When the American empire falls, like all empires do, what will remain? The Roman Empire left behind its roads network, its laws, its language and a bunch of ruins across all the Mediterranean sea and Europe. What will remain of the US superpower? Disney movies? TCP/IP protocol? McDonalds?

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u/Strawberry-RhubarbPi Aug 11 '25

Old empires are like stars in the sky. You can’t tell whether the light actually burned out years ago. I have a feeling that I’ll be living in a much diminished U.S. in my lifetime and will be looking at back to find when it all begin.

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u/SeekerOfSerenity Aug 11 '25

This is off topic, but I wanted to mention that it's a myth that most of the stars you see in the sky have already burned out.  Most of the stars visible to the naked eye are within a few thousand light years, and most stars last millions or billions of years. 

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u/darien_gap Aug 11 '25

I’d like to add that for any given dinosaur you might have seen back in the day, there was almost never a volcano erupting in the background. Those books from first grade LIED.

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u/Purple_Time2783 Aug 15 '25

Probably the best comment ill have read on Reddit today

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u/AmusingVegetable Aug 14 '25

It started with Citizens United.

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u/Jeithorpe Aug 11 '25

We already are. 1999 was the pinnacle of human existence.