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Have an election. Winner is president, runner-up is vice-president, like how it used to be. And you know, I kinda wish they did it like that nowadays.

I think the old politicals wouldnt be able to cope well, thye would be used by both parties as propagandists and have political appointments.

Probably. It would be a hard shock to many in what the Founding Fathers truly meant. Or at least the ones that are still living.

What it interesting is when the whole world has to play catch up.

Oh, god. Can you imagine them seeing even our destroyers sailing up? Hell, get the old Iowa-class battleships out of mothballs.

Ships that move anywhere they want, when they want and where they want without wind with them being made of metal and far larger than any ship of the line or frigate could ever be.

You do not even need missiles. Five inch guns with high explosive shells can do plenty of damage to a wooden sailing ship. All outside of their canon's range. Of course the look of the ship will completely different from what they are used to.

We like to think 1800 being advanced but they really are not that far removed from Roman times with the only advantages would be the military.

McAvoy wrote:Ships that move anywhere they want, when they want and where they want without wind with them being made of metal and far larger than any ship of the line or frigate could ever be.

You do not even need missiles. Five inch guns with high explosive shells can do plenty of damage to a wooden sailing ship. All outside of their canon's range. Of course the look of the ship will completely different from what they are used to.

We like to think 1800 being advanced but they really are not that far removed from Roman times with the only advantages would be the military.

Hell, let's have some ultralight airplanes fly over them.

Tinadrin Chelnor wrote:I imagine there will be a marked decline in population, due to disease and food shortages. I'm not sure whether the US is a net importer of food, but they do waste about around 40% of the food they produce (I am quite surprised, I thought it was around 20-30%) so I guess food-wise if they curtail waste as much as possible then disease will likely be the biggest issue.

The us is a net exporter of food, and beyond that I think we tend to also ship out mostly high energy density stuff like grain in exchange for stuff like strawberries in January and trendy Italian sodas. It also takes a lot more calories of grains to produce all the calories of meat we consume. We've also taken to turning our crops into plastics and fuel instead of food. And as you noted we throw out a whole lot of "all of the above".

And we have a lot of land that could be turned into farmland, it just isn't economic to do so (luckily there are some government programs protecting that land from development or destruction of the topsoil, though they're losing popularity).

So all in all we're position pretty well food wise for time travel schenanigans...or the more likely scenario of global warming induced global crop failures coupled with rising global populations.

I'll miss the strawberries in January though...

But it's gonna be pretty chaotic for a bit, until we figure out what's happened.

Economy will crash and things will be hectic until the country can find an equilibrium but still be strong enough to repel any European invaders without much trouble.

Hell, trying to replicate even a M-16 rifle or similar will take a couple of years let alone making them in large numbers. I wonder if they could even make the bullets.

McAvoy wrote:Economy will crash and things will be hectic until the country can find an equilibrium but still be strong enough to repel any European invaders without much trouble.

Hell, trying to replicate even a M-16 rifle or similar will take a couple of years let alone making them in large numbers. I wonder if they could even make the bullets.

I forget the exact numbers. But there are more guns in America than people. And with fear of losing 2A rights still rather high people are still buying up andhoarding weapons and ammo as fast as companies can make them. So while those aren't proper military weapons they're still vastly superior to what people in that time had.

There would be an economic reshuffling. The lack of oil will probably be the biggest challenge.