Alright Veeky Forums lets have a discussion about time and scale. Pick on of the following...

Alright Veeky Forums lets have a discussion about time and scale. Pick on of the following, and make a post about something that would reasonably happen to culture, people, geography or politics in that amount of time:
>1 year
>10 years
>100 years
>1000 years
>10000 years
>100000 years

ie: 100 years is enough for an empire no matter how large to almost completely disband.

Agree or disagree? Tell us why! (Cite real history if possible)

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ushistory.org/civ/6f.asp
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>inb4 ancheunt lawst civilization, fell tun thousend yeers ago.

>1 year
About how long it took for this board to go straight to shit.

Well at the upper limit, 100000 should be enough for human skin pigmentation to start to change (if there are available people to breed with) so that's something I guess.

Well Rome fell in like 20 years actually.
ushistory.org/civ/6f.asp

>1
new laws, new clothes
you probably experienced a change like this
>10
new leaders, generational shift, technology has progressed enough to change society at least slightly
compare today to the 90s, you could still function there, but you would be out of place
>100
completely new tech level, societies and empires are greatly changed
compare today to WW1, it represents a huge change, or compare the medieval age to the renaissance, living 100 years apart is possible but culture shock would be immense
>1000
entered a singularity, as technology and culture has progressed so much that it cannot be understood by people before it
could people from the early medieval ages hope to comprehend even the 1900s?

>compare today to the 90s,
>10 years
>90s

Hehehe

>100
>completely new tech level

Only in the past 1000 years, go back further and there are massive tracts of history with very little technological change.

I know, I think like this too sometimes.

>1 year, enough to lose your mind!

>100000 years
>aka 100 millennia
Continental drift, complete erosion of mountains, Earth being swallowed by the Sun.

>1 year
A fad happens. A mass hysteria rises up and disappears.

>10 years
A war could be fought and ended in this timeframe, though it might take a few decades if you include the leading up.

>100 years
The set of people that inhabit the world will basically be a completely different set than that of 100 years ago. Language changes become noticeable if you have records, or just an old person nearby (Old-fashioned talk)

>1000 years
Enough time for a language to no longer be mutually intelligible with its old self, unless it's an artificial language. (Written medieval latin, the pronunciation differed heavily with region and time)
For example, take the following riddle from the 10th century Old English Book of Exeter
>Ic eom wunderlicu wiht wifum on hyhte
>neahbuendum nyt; nægum sceþþe
>burgsittendra nymthe bonan anum.
>Staþol min is steapheah stonde ic on bedde
>neoðan ruh nathwær. Neþeð hwilum
>ful cyrtenu ceorles dohtor
>modwlonc meowle þæt heo on mec gripe
>ræseð mec on reodne reafath min heafod
>fegeð mec on fæsten. Feleþ sona
>mines gemotes seo þe mec nearwað
>wif wundenlocc. Wæt bið þæt eage.
Answer: Onion

10000, 100000 years
A timescale that makes the world incomprehensible to someone from that long ago. At this point I can only really refer you to wiki about things
>en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future

>1 year
A politician rises, a famine occurs, a fleet is sunk

>10 years
Most of a king's entire reign. Orchards go from freshly-planted to fruit-bearing and may be in decline if poorly managed, a sub-lietenant rises to become fleet admiral.

>100 years
A nation colonizes and mostly absorbs its neighbors. Some trees have been harvested & replanted twice, others are nearing harvest able size. Some land may have been over-farmed Ships laid down at the start of the timeframe are unusable due to old age.

>1000 years
The geopolitics of the continent are barely recognizable. Rivers have shifted.

>10000 years
Unimaginable timescale.

Or several centuries of slow decay depending on how you view it

1 year is plenty of time for an empire no matter how large to completely disband.

>100000
Wrong.

>It's accepted that the separation between the Americas and Europe/Africa is about 2.5cm/yr. 100,000yr times 2.5cm is 250,000cm, or a whopping 1.5 miles.
>"Scholars Pitman and Golovchenko estimate that it takes probably more than 450 million years to erode a mountain mass similar to the Himalaya into an almost-flat peneplain if there are no major sea-level changes." -Wikipedia page on Erosion.
>Sun will begin to expand in 5 billion years.

So you're fucking stupid.

>100 millennia
>Earth being swallowed by the Sun

Even Wikipedia knows how wrong you are. That's a 5 billion year time scale.

For an idea of how long that is, the Milky Way and Andromeda will have been fully converged for at least billion years by then.

>Milky Way and Andromeda will have fully converged for at least billion years by then

This is why I fucking love cosmic timescales. They're so insanely massive, yet simultaneous aren't when you consider how old the universe is.

>not understanding deep time
>being this much of a creationcuck

1 year: longer than it takes to gestate a human
10 years: long enough for a young person to do great deeds
100 years: long enough for their deeds to become legend
1000 years: long enough for the great hero to be deified
10000 long enough for the got to be forgotten.

I remember once skimming over the actual length of Egyptian dynasties and some Roman imperial dynasties. They actually don't last very long. I'd say around 110 on average. A lot of little guys and rarely you get a stand out that makes it 200+ years. But I've pretty much never heard of anyone making it far past 300. That seems to be some sort of natural upper limit.

Also in comparison, how long a stable continues government has lasted compared to the bar of the "young" USA whose constitution has been in continual use for 228 years. Not many. The longest legit non mythic Chinese dynasty, for example, is the Tang Dynasty at 289 years.

The idea of a continuous 1,000 year empire seems to be a mythology.

The same Imperial family has ruled in Japan since its founding. Then again, they were treated as literal gids and had little influence over the actual governence of Japan

>Pretty much never heard of anyone making it far past 300.
Byzantine, Empire of Japan, Holy Roman Empire, Zhou Empire, Ethiopean Empire, Khmer Empire all broke 500 years. It's not as rare as you'd think.

Why do the blues in the legend are different from those on the bars?

Also complicated that the Byzantine empire was considered Roman at the time, so is it that Rome fell, or that it changed?

Yeah I think the trick with the Japanese Imperial family is that they made themselves just another resource to fight over rather than a government. Far closer to being a type of church than a dynasty of rulers.

What's the difference between a dynasty and a nation? The byzantine empire, for example, is close to 1000 years, more if you count it as the roman empire, and more still if you count it as the roman nation in general, to include the republic. China, under a (admittedly somewhat loose) definition, can claim to be a nation for several thousand years.

Continuous uninterrupted government, you're right, usually ends around 250 years or so, but does that count as the nation collapsing too?

>between a dynasty and a nation

well a nation is unified by language, culture, identity and to a lesser extent ethnicity.

A dynasty is a bloodline, but a dynastic Empire is a country held together by the claim to it by that bloodline.

>Roman nation
You do realize that "nation" is a XIX century concept?

It's weird to me that no one has mentioned Britain. It's had a pretty stable form of government for almost a thousand years. It's developed and grown, and there've been some blips along the way, but it's been constant.

> that's 8760 thousand bongs m8.

What does that even mean? Romans had a concept of 'Roman Citizens' and foreign powers (such as Carthage).

China's three kingdoms all saw themselves as rulers of a single geographical area and cultural people.

The concept of a nation state is a relatively new invention. 19th Century or so.

The Roman and Chinese empires were, unsurprisingly, empires rather than nation states.

Concepts are slippery things.

Roman Citizenship was a pretty close equivalent; it was hereditary, but could also be applied for and a person with Roman citizenship was considered to have full legal protection by Roman Law, in exchange for being expected to pay taxes and obey said law; they were also entitled to popular representation through the Pleb council.

Which is more or less analogous to citizenship of any type in the modern world; if differing in the details.

There really is nothing new in heaven or earth; and the 19th century was a time of pompous condescending attitudes towards foreigners and past societies.

The concept of a 'nation state' being a relatively new invention does not preclude the idea of 'nations' and 'states' being older, merely that a 'nation' and 'state' should be the same thing. Nor does it preclude an empire from being a 'nation state'.

The idea of a nation state seems to be that the 'nation' (that is to say the cultural entity) and the 'state' (that is to say the political entity) should be the same. Since the Roman Empire had a policy of 'romanizing' it's subjects (I.E. making the members of it's state also the members of it's nation) and the Three Kingdoms had a war to re-unify China (I.E. making their state the sole ruler of the nation) I would strongly argue against the idea of 'nation states' being a 19th century idea.

But even if you believe nation states to be a 19th century idea, you could still believe in the existence of a Roman Nation.

You're still describing an empire.

No I believe in the concept of a Roman Empire because that's what it was.

Actually, since he mentioned the Plebeian Council, he's pretty much explicitly not describing an empire.

Before that it was the Roman Republic and before that it was the Roman Kingdom.

Technological progress advances according chiefly to the relative investment of production into the specific effort of developing new technologies, and until the 15th century or so, nobody anywhere really actively prioritized it, so technology developed quite arbitrarily. Thus, in a pre-modern civilization you could advance as much in 100 years as in a month, since no concerted effort is being made the process is nearly random.

That's dumb as fuck, m8. The Peace of Westphalia is almost universally regarded as the origin of the nation-state, and many argue it occurred even earlier.

>t. Masters in Political Theory

Citizenship =/= nationality. You could be a Jew and a Roman citizen. Hell, you could be a German barbarian who couldn't speak Latin and still get citizenship. There was absolutely no unity and no sense of "common fate" amongst them.

Maybe the beginning of forming them. But still France talked in hundred languages, Germany was fragmented into million feudal lands, same as Italy. Sure, it was the beginning of the modernity, but it wasn't until the French Revolution out all became real.

>100,000

Completely new way of creating food/surviving is dominant around the globe. From hunters and gatherers to industrial agriculture. Or industrial agriculture to molecular level manipulation of raw materials into food.

You're talking about the nation state. For example, until the unification of Germany under Prussia, there were numerous German states, and a more amorphous German nation (in the sense of a geographic area populated by German speaking German ethnics living in a German culture). The nation state idea was that the German nation should be living under one state, which was a new idea. We still see this difference to this day with, for example, the Anglosphere (the nation) composed of UK, Canada, Australia, and the US (the states).

>German nation
And, tell me, what XVII century "German" from Lubeck had in common with "German" from Munich?

Or even never exactly fell, just splintered and changed hands. Pretty much every system in former Roman territories was the Roman system, increasingly modified and with increasing emphasis on feudal patronage, on through the middle ages.

While I agree that most of the post-Roman world was obviously a local continuation of what had come before, I do think that you're going a bit far. If we're talking about the Empire, once it significantly broke apart it has to be said to have ended at some point. Plus, the feudal system was so wildly different to the Roman Empire that to refer to them as the same concept seems essentially meaningless.

That's just not true. Feudalism arose because a bunch of pants-wearing barbarian Fritz warlords started squatting in Roman commercial factory farms and didn't have any idea how to run them properly (of course they also destroyed the market and much of the infrastructure that made such endeavors feasible).

Peasantry was developed as a production-destroying renter class that let King Fritz and his 8 sons live it up, because that was the limit of the barbarian culture and aspiration.

Pre-feudal society was considerably more sophisticated, healthy, specialized, educated, and productive than feudal society, even discounting the Roman heights and the Dark Ages. Ancient Assyrian civilization, well known for its barbarism relative to its contemporaries, and thousands of years older, was still /much/ better organized than feudalism.

>Not genetic manipulation enabling nutrition production from radiation, sunlight, etc coupled with perfected metabolic efficiency

He smells bad, he speaks gibberish and he eat sausages made of horse offal.

>t. Upset Centurion

Then he's no different from a polish peasant

You don't even need that long. Look up a list of lost cities, some that still haven't been found. People forget where shit is surprisingly fast.