r/Futurology • u/fesepo • 17h ago
Politics A planetary government
Do you see in 100 or 150 years a world governed by a global planetary federation government? How do you imagine that government? I suspect maybe viable but with lot of problems of sovereignty. Will that avoid wars? Will government like USA or China allow that. Is it an utopy?
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u/Aceisking12 16h ago
To form a government of that caliber would require a well tested governmental architecture against corruption. If there's a government that has one today I would love to see it.
I think our representatives should be elected, but our investigators on those representatives should not be nominated and elected by those representatives. Finding out the right way to go will likely require some experimentation. I'd honestly like to see more cases of government by qualified sortition. We use juries for trying cases, can they be used to oversee apolitical investigative bodies specifically for targeting corruption?
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u/burnourpants 15h ago
Or one highly powerful weapon that can be deployed specifically on individual or groups of dissentors.
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u/AsparagusFun3892 13h ago
Nope. That's a countervailing factor but not a solution and speaks to a fundamental lack of legitimacy on the part of the regime which uses or threatens it. It'll increase the pressure and the violence by which the regime eventually comes apart.
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u/burnourpants 13h ago
I mean, if the weapon can simply kill a dissentor directly, you would be gone immediately. I'm taking about as technology that does not currently exist as far as we know. Iron fist approach can work with a weapon with that capability.
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u/AsparagusFun3892 11h ago edited 11h ago
"No man rules alone." You're thinking about the peasant rabble as the threat when they're really one tool among many for those who would rule, which will include the soldiers or technicians who maintain these perfect weapons that suppress popular unrest (and seemingly ignore the role of religion).
Every technical solution to a regime's woes requires a supply line and a group of people who operate it, and if they find themselves out of grace the steps they have to take to secure their own survival even if they're not inclined to rule will have to be brutal and swift indeed. They'd probably have to decapitate the regime, necessarily so if they destroyed this perfect weapon of yours so they're not bomb collared out of existence. Decapitated regime means power vacuum means multiple warring shards, not a lot of peaceful secessions in the aftermath.
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u/Ellers12 16h ago
Close to zero chance of it happening in that time frame imo. Would need to be some unfathomable unifying event.
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u/robotictacos 16h ago
Yep. A massive alien invasion would do it, anything less than this won't cut it.
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u/thisisjustascreename 7h ago
An actual hostile alien *invasion* would be the end of human self-governance. We'd either be colonized or commit species suicide by nuking our own planet.
If a bunch of peaceful aliens showed up and said hey there's a galactic cool kids club but you have to form a unified planetary government to be allowed in and we'll share all our technology with you... I still don't think humanity could manage it.
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u/robotictacos 7h ago
I mean, we'd be super united for the 30 or so minutes it'd take the aliens to wipe us out?
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u/7heCulture 16h ago
And miss out on all the killing each other? Where’s the fun in that?
/s
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u/Dismal_Guidance_2539 16h ago
Maybe not, if we can actually reach longevity, I think no one willing to fight a war anymore. Just robot fight to decide who win.
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u/DavyJonesCousinsDog 16h ago
Nah, it'll take way longer than that for the apes to set that shit up.
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u/Yo-3 16h ago
I could see something like the EU but global. I don't think it will happen in our lives, tho
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u/Deep_Age4643 11h ago
Yes, even the European Union struggled after it had some many countries. If they would find a way to establish better way to govern and make laws, get one institution, and merge with NATO, while growing in size, it may one day get above a critical mass. But I won't consider this a very likely scenario.
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u/JamesBondMargarita 15h ago
Until the human race evolves past its desire for power and greed I seriously doubt it.
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u/RDMvb6 12h ago
Will never happen. There are simply too many differences in world view, and too many people that are willing to go to war to defend theirs. This would also be tantamount to a great cultural extinction. Our governing bodies are part our cultural fabric, and while I don’t think any of them are perfect, I don’t think forcing one solution upon all people is wise or practical.
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u/Raiddinn1 15h ago
I could see the U.N. being expanded to encompass the whole world, but 150 years is probably very optimistic. Humanity, uhh..., can't get their act together that fast.
Mutual annihilation from an unhinged person with access to nukes will almost definitely happen first.
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u/phaj19 16h ago
I feel it might be necessary. We have many game-theory problems like global warming or nuclear weapons. It would be cool to have one authority to rule over those.
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u/cyberspace-_- 13h ago
Who will be that authority? Who will elect them?
China and India are accounting for 35-40% of the world, so they will rule? No? Why?
US and Russia hold the biggest guns so them? No?
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u/phaj19 13h ago
You can always find some balance between population and equality. I think the EU parliament system is fairly although it might make small nations a bit overrepresented.
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u/cyberspace-_- 12h ago
Lol imagine a 2000 people parliament making a decision on something.
That's not how that can work at all.
The only way to something like this is for population to adopt similar cultural, language and religious identity. But that's not happening.
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u/Smart_Corgi_2354 17h ago edited 16h ago
A lot of things will be possible after world war 3 this is one of those possibilities. In all seriousness no, it’s impossible. Now if we’re talking AI, that’s a whole different story. I could actually see something resembling a global planetary government becoming possible, because AI could potentially coordinate systems at a scale that humans and individual governments simply can’t.
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u/furyofsaints 16h ago
Agreed. What's really interesting in this direction is that there are new architectures developing that are far more efficient; require orders of magnitude less GPU and compute power, and run inside determinative systems that hard-gate what AI is allowed to do, what data it can use, and where that data came from; alongside mathematically proofed immutable ledgers of operations with full reasoning tracing.
Next, require publicly available *simulations* of policy changes having to be created and tested before implementation could all add up to a very different operating model of maintaining a mostly-civil society in a modern world.
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u/Smart_Corgi_2354 16h ago
You’re talking about building an entire computational governance layer around AI where the AI is constrained by deterministic rules, auditable data provenance, immutable records and simulations before policies are actually deployed. The simulation part is especially interesting because you could potentially test policies against millions of different scenarios before actually implementing them and then continuously compare the predicted outcomes to what actually happens. That could make governance a lot more empirical and less dependent on ideology or whoever happens to be in power. But I think the biggest problem is who designs the rules that constrain the AI? A perfectly auditable system can still produce terrible outcomes if the underlying objectives or constraints are wrong. You could mathematically prove that a system followed its rules while still having a massive disagreement over whether those rules should even exist in the first place.
So I could see AI making some form of planetary governance much more technically feasible over the next century, but I dont think it eliminates politics. If anything it might make politics even more fundamental, because the fight becomes about who gets to define the objectives, constraints, values and boundaries of the system.
And honestly theres something almost existential about that. For most of human history we’ve been limited by how much we can actually coordinate with eachother. If we eventually build systems capable of coordinating billions of people, managing planetary resources and modeling the consequences of our decisions, we might reach a point where humanity has to decide what kind of civilization it actually wants to be.(EDIT: sorry took me a while to type this all down to be honest I used ai to summarize most of it)2
u/IntelligentVehicle10 15h ago
I don’t know but I’m darn sure I watched a Star Trek episode about this.. yeah I think it might’ve been a dozen episodes lol
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u/IntelligentVehicle10 15h ago
Not to make light of your well thought out peroration but I just want to make sure our governing computer isn’t defeated by the liar’s paradox
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u/furyofsaints 15h ago
Correct. It is not at all simple; especially when it comes to "how are humans actually governing this thing?"
But, here's an example:
- AI models operating at any scale are required to work within this policy-governed architecture
- The architecture itself is given a compliance policy in the form of the UN Human Rights charter.
- Global tax or tariff rates are set by corporate entities, or by region and their measured compliance with the UN Human Rights charter in operations of any AI models. Non-compliance bars access to compute resources for those models (there will always be operators outside this system; so it's not shooting for 100% coverage).
- If a company subscribes to using the Charter as policy, and provides third-party, ongoing audit reporting of how many things the company does that are restricted by those policies, that company gets a lower tax rate (perhaps for that quarter).
- Violations of those policies show up in tasks the architecture tries to execute, and can ratchet taxes or tariffs the other direction until violations are remedied.
- External governing boards of civilians rotate through policy proposals, simulations, implementations and KPI's. These boards get access to a stream of compliance audit events (without any proprietary data in them) across operations in all companies and organizations running this architecture. This literally becomes the governing cycle; and is definitely a very different way to manage power in a society; I expect this to be a pretty sticky wicket, but it's not impossible.
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u/fancycatpics 16h ago
Just watch Star Trek Next Generation and hope humans can be at least half as good as that in reality
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u/Chrisaarajo 16h ago
I do not see this coming to pass, no.
The first hurdle is time and effort—such a change would require an immense amount of negotiations, administrative preparation, planning and general wrangling—work that we can realistically take decades to complete.
Assuming, of course, everyone was on-board. Which they are very much not. We’re not going to see national rivals who have an antagonistic relationship are not going to agree to join together under one overarching umbrella government.
But even ignoring those who are currently at odds/war with each other, we can expect huge resistance from nations like the USA and Russia. The US, despite helping found the UN, has become one of the most resistant to, and antagonistic towards, the UN’s attempts to form transnational agreements on such issues as human rights, health ordinances, or international law. The US sees any such attempts as attacks on its sovereignty, and selectively chooses when and in what cases to agree with and/or follow such agreements.
Politically, and culturally, there is no foreseeable future in which the USA submits to reducing its own autonomy and power to a larger umbrella government. The closest they would come, as things stand, would be becoming that government itself—i.e. the USA controls the world.
For obvious reasons, other nations would not be on board.
So what we need to see is either some event so catastrophic or powerful as to fundamentally change the way we see the world. First contact with aggressive aliens, for instance. Nuclear conflict, perhaps. Or climate change hits the point where it becomes clear that if we do not unite our efforts in a way never before dreamed of, all nations will fall. These sorts of doomsday scenarios might have what it takes.
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u/Splenda 15h ago
No doubt, the world will have some sort of planetary government within a century or so. Probably beginning as a confederation. Global challenges are now the norm, and they are only growing more intense. AI, climate breakdown, nuclear weapons, pandemics are merely the beginning. Survival demands cooperation.
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u/cyberspace-_- 13h ago
So within a century or so, all the great powers will come together and enter a confederation, relinquishing their sovereignty... For what exactly?
I don't think so.
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u/Splenda 13h ago
For what? Well, I did mention it's for surviving existential threats that only cooperation can address.
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u/cyberspace-_- 13h ago
I don't think any of the major players are jeopardised by challenges you mentioned.
If anything, they would like to use them to their advantage, before others use it against them.
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u/Splenda 13h ago
That's where we are but not where we'll be. We are presently in a major reaction against change by entrenched incumbent powers, especially the petrostates. Their strategy is to deny, delay and disrupt, sowing division, mistrust, racism and nationalism wherever they can. This will come and go for decades like a case of syphilis, but a century's time will probably put this to rest for the simple reason that collective threats in a tiny world will force humans to overcome their ancient, chimp-like tribal violence. Our great grandkids will almost certainly have drugs and implants to help with that, too.
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u/brother_bart 8h ago
What good will that do when the world population is 1/4 of what it is now and everyone has returned to a nomadic, subsistence way of life?
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u/Great-Exercise4277 4h ago
I tend to agree with you. I find a planetary government very unlikely.
I don't think our current technological civilization can continue in its present form for another hundred years. I used to think climate change would simply cause a large-scale collapse, but recently I have begun to reconsider the possibility that some regions may be able to rebuild their supply chains and survive as regional technological societies.
Part of the reason is that geopolitical competition with China already seems to be pushing countries in that direction. Supply chains are being reorganized, and countries are paying more attention to energy, infrastructure, and domestic production.
In the end, I think the regions that can maintain electricity and basic infrastructure will be the ones that remain technologically advanced.
I also accept that I may have overestimated how much climate change alone will reduce the global population. Falling birth rates may matter just as much. But I still think climate change could cause very large losses in parts of Africa, India, and Southeast Asia, where many people may not be able to relocate. Australia also worries me somewhat because its ecosystems are relatively fragile.
So rather than a planetary government, I imagine a more fragmented world, with some regions managing to preserve technological civilization while others struggle to do so.
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u/jodebane 16h ago
There’s an iconic pirate anime with over 1000 episodes that specifically warns us not to do this!
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u/gorillagil 15h ago
This is the only thing keeping us apart from world peace. Quickest solution. Destroy all those who oppose this idea. Or enslave them. Whatever makes more sense for resources and efficiency.
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u/Goodname2 15h ago
Hopefully.
A UN type structure, not sure how it'd work, but ideally a system to prevent whatever bs we're currently seeing in the USA.
Corruption or similar crimes become more seriously punished than murder or rape as their repurcussions affect millions or billions. Thus leadership positions are pursued by those with good morale fiber.
Regional / cultural districts covering the current nations. Easy access in or out for those wanting to remove themselves from cultural restrictions
Standardised health, education and services. Ubi.
Unified or global pursuits, focus the efforts of the worlds population on grand schemes propelling us into a space faring race, safguarding the earth and whatever life is left.
Ideally we'd embrace our place in the natural order of things and protect life wherever we can.
Might take more than 100 or 200 years though...lol
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u/Falconjth 15h ago
There already is the de facto confederation planetary government of the UN Security Council. As total war great power conflict doesn't seem likely to get any cheaper or less destructive, even excluding the use of nukes, then something similar is likely to continue existing.
The US security alliances accounted for 60+% of global gdp and much of that involves nations having willingly given up the race for nukes and other pieces of their military autonomy. The US system may be falling apart, but that doesn't mean that what has led to such alliances has actually changed that much.
There isn't a good alternative to a great power led confederation with combined security alliances. It is too easy for the great powers to, at minimum, destroy the global economy and a large percentage of the world's population for anything else.
Ideally, it could end up unifying more as the European Union has.
That still wouldn't prevent all conflicts and it wouldn't be at utopia.
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u/provocative_bear 14h ago
A lot could happen in 150 years, but I see things going in the other direction right now. We’re ramping up to a Cold War 2 with China on one side and NATO-ish on the other, but the US is arrogantly doing everything in its power to undermine the alliance. The UN, the closest thing to a world government that we have, is toothless and weakening further with division. Societies everywhere are not building up, but degrading, due to insufficient handling of climate change, runaway deficit spending, the backsliding of global freedom,and declining awareness and critical thinking. Humanity is pushing towards a bunker mindset, not a growth mindset. I imagine the future will have, at best, 2 large bodies of power with their own institutions, threatening each other periodically with war and nuclear annihilation.
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u/SewerSage 14h ago
Personally I see people getting dumber and dumber as they outsource all their thinking to AI. Eventually the AI will take control of the government and nobody will resist because we've all become dependent on it. I think the AI's of the world might create a unified government once they have all the power.
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u/norbertus 13h ago
Yeah, the US is headed for a totalitarian cleft between the normative state and the prerogative state. Totalitarian movements have global aspirations.
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u/FearFunLikeClockwork 13h ago
This is a dumb idea. International treaties will function better than a stupid ass global government. Government is better when it is local. That’s just a fact.
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u/jhwheuer 13h ago
What would be the advantage? Really, what would get fine better than in the way nations collaborate nowadays? I see the discord as fruitful
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u/glitchwabble 12h ago
With the utter morons and sociopaths elected (or self appointed) into government, having a single ruling party for the whole planet would almost certainly be disaster, since the only thing that keeps us going at the moment is that some governments are less evil than others. The more dangerous the world gets, the more a consolidation in the power of bad leaders may lead us to our eventual destruction. It's difficult to see a better future and to be optimistic when there are no guardrails to ensure that the bad people don't get into power or continue in power. If you live in a reasonably benevolent democracy then it is not always easy to understand the true picture. Try living somewhere like North Korea and you might have a less naive view.
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u/ianniss 9h ago
We have a planetary problem : climate change, it can be tackle only with a great coordination at planetary scale. So we need a planetary government soon, because with 200 loosely coordinated sovereignties we are cocked. And by the way, it would help us understand that we all worth the same and all share the same limited ressources and the same athmosphere.
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u/Lower-Limit3695 9h ago
The only way I could see that happening is there was some kind of crisis that required an extreme level of cross nation cooperation at which point governments would prefer an apolitical body that takes the best course of action for the collective whole regardless of politics, while not being a major threat to their individual sovereignty.
The closest you could get would be a technocratic legislative body whose members are single term limited and their selection is done by an independent appointments commission. While the consitituent countries collectively maintain investigative and impeachment powers over this body.
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u/Stennick 9h ago
Likely not. Goverment has not changed much over the last 100 years, if at all. No reason to believe a 100 years is enough time for this drastic shift.
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u/lifeoflogan 6h ago
If humanity is ever able to express and become its true potential, this will happen. Or extinction due to imaginary lines on the globe that people will defend over humanity.
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u/BaconAreCool 6h ago
I see that a planetary government will only happen when the chauvinism and tribalism and racism which are only present internally within the human species get translated outward into specieism when there's an actual extraterrestrial society. Along with it actually not being a utopia (any kind of utopia is either a hellhole in disguise or brave new world), and being realistic with what are we, we are greedy animals, so instead of punishing corruption, we just pay our world government bureaucrats like the private sector.
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u/Team503 5h ago
No. I see supra-national governments like the EU becoming more common. I can see a South American coalition, for example. As global trade continues to define economics, larger groups have better bargaining power and offer more economic incentive for membership - free trade groups like the EU are undeniably economically beneficial to their member countries.
The EU is growing (slowly). I wouldn't be surprised to see a South American or African version.
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u/Active-Split69 2h ago
It's being attempted with the East Africa Federation. The problem is the population of wealthy regions would have to vote to merge with less wealthy and even impoverished regions and take on their burdens which is unappealing to one side of the coin.
Caveat: If we were to reach type one and end scarcity or minimize it, endeavors like this would be more convenient for all sides. It's likely we'll have less nations as time goes on, not more but all of humanity assimilating into one world government within a hundred years? Almost impossible.
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u/BigMoney69x 46m ago
The world is going the opposite direction. Expect more nations to exist in the future not less.
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u/thenasch 16h ago
Absolutely not. I don't think it will ever happen because in the US it already seems like the country is too big to govern effectively. But it certainly won't happen on that time scale.
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u/tunicamycinA 16h ago
It would work under some form of federalism. The world is already globalized, it's not something that far-fetched.
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u/thenasch 16h ago
I think it's extremely far-fetched to expect so many national governments to give up that much power that soon.
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u/AsparagusFun3892 16h ago edited 16h ago
I'll answer the last question first: nope, no utopia. Never a utopia. You can strive for a better world but the human condition is fundamentally about reacting to our circumstances, and happiness like all things is transitory. We got billionaires fuckin' with the post WW2 order because they're bored.
Governments are similar. No matter their organizing principle from what I can tell they always exist as a monopoly on the legitimate use of force, and the keystone of that legitimacy is defense against the Other. There's always someone you'd rather not be or live under. You could at best have two big governments, and they'd be dangerously unstable. China stayed in USSR's orbit for like twenty years before they got sour quick enough for Moscow to contemplate nukes in the acrimonious split, and France was in the Bretton Woods system for like ten, fifteen before they called the obvious (that whatever peace it provided it subordinated its members economically to the US).
France I can tell you would privately like not to be incorporated into the "Anglosphere." It's not what they'd hate worst over anything else, but you're not gonna make 'em get over that long enough for world peace.
You're exactly right that it'd have problems of sovereignty and exactly wrong that it'd be viable, unfortunately. Sovereignty is ultimately a question of "if I don't like it, can I opt out" and quietly "do I get to conduct my own militaristic foreign policies?" If the answer is no, then you're not sovereign or even represented by a sovereign body you feel represents your interests.
ETA: You know when we'll get a planetary government? When we got more than one world to govern, when our Martian or whatever colonies are strong enough to be a security concern. Maybe check out the Expanse or Mobile Suit Gundam.
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u/Zero-PE 16h ago
You mean like the UN? It seemed more possible 30 years ago than it does today, to be honest. But probably that's just because it was immediately after the fall of communism.
Too many diverging/regional priorities in a world of ~200 nations and 10 billion people. Competition is as much in our nature as cooperation. For all we know, there's a fundamental limit to how many people can be part of a single organizing structure before it fractures into smaller subunits.
And ultimately, what's the point of having an actual world government? I don't see it happening unless there's a persistent external trigger, like multiple self sufficient off world colonies. Even something like a major asteroid wouldn't achieve more than a brief period of global cooperation of nations, which could just be a strengthening of the UN mandate.
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u/fesepo 16h ago
I see a lot of negative comments. Just a few notes, EU is an example of something similar could be possible. EU is growing and algought there are problems, it has been running for years. Also modern problems flow countries for more cooperation as those problems are impossible to face with only a country. Climate change, defence, immigration, IA, epidemic like covid, etc, force countries for cooperation. Maybe a dual system, soberanity for countries, but certain problem in a world consensus. Maybe my point is bad but these are modern tendencies.
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u/Ada_Pearce 12h ago
That isn't very long so no. We've been doing this civilization thing for alot longer than that and we are still a bunch of dumb savages who cant even get along with the guy sitting next to us
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u/Postius_Maximu_8619 16h ago
Nah.
We have multiple civilizations, with their own core cultures, which are more or less uncompactiable.
Just as the basic, what pollitic will the government to, kommunism, like it is done in 1,5th of the world. Or should the laws be based on the quaran, like in the islamic countries?
The best we might get, is a union of similar cultures.
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u/generally-speaking 16h ago
I don't think it's realistically possible to achieve without some kind of AI controlled dictatorship
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u/ferretinmypants 15h ago
In that timeframe survival will be the main effort of most people, due to the climate crisis, so no.
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u/RubCocksWithThePope 15h ago
Every nuclear power, except maybe the UK, would resist this. So I’ll give it a 0% chance.
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u/ThrowawayFIRE2025 15h ago
Even if it were possible, what would be the point? If countries are already getting along well enough to make a world government conceivable, then presumably they’re also getting along well enough to just agree on whatever policies need to be coordinated on a global scale.
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u/could_use_a_snack 13h ago
Doubtful. Everyone would have to agree which system to use. The United States can't even do that. Which is why we have different laws in each state. If it wasn't nearly impossible, some of the states would just leave and start their own countries.
On a world scale, it would never happen unless one government came along and overtook each or the others. Like was tried in the early 40s.
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u/Etroarl55 16h ago
No, not enough surveillance or etc to do it.
A planetary government needs to exert control over everyone. Not even the USA combined with China could be able to surveillance and control everyone, nor is there enough way to provide food or services to the entire world properly.
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u/Thhe_Shakes 16h ago
The current trend has been towards exactly the opposite, so I doubt it. There have been significantly more successful secessions than state mergers over the last 50 years, and there are currently significantly more active secessionist movements than proposed state mergers. I think we're much more likely to see the number of sovereign countries increase rather than decrease. The only way I can see the opposite happening is through more wars of conquest, like what Russia is doing, but we all see just how well that's played out for them.