It'll take a thousand years for Americans' DNA to get so thoroughly mixed that it's a single ethnicity, and it will only happen if society doesn't collapse back into the stone age. Without modern transportation, a Minnesotan would almost never meet a Texan, and over a thousand years their language would diverge.
It's fascinating to think about how cultural evolution would develop if industrial civilization gradually declined back into an agrarian paradigm.
I say gradually, because if it collapsed overnight the vast majority of humans would be doomed to starve to death. And billions of people starving to death would proceed to utterly ravage the environment consuming anything edible, until there's nothing left.
We still have a very long way to go until peak oil of course, and I'm cautiously optimistic about nuclear, hydroelectric, and geothermal power eventually replacing fossil fuels. But if that fails to happen, and we end up un-developing slowly enough to avert the aforementioned nightmare scenario, the various cultures that develop in the former US are gonna be absolutely wild.
Has it taken a thousand years for the Anglos and Saxons to become English? Has it taken a thousand years for the Boer to stop being Dutch?
This is my issue, modern transportation isn't going anywhere, society isn't going to revert to the stone age (in fact such collapses almost never happen in all of human history, and typically only happen in highly isolated societies or societies that are already filled with people partly in the stone age. Even then, as you mentioned "modern transportation"; the roads themselves tend to remain.
Due to interconnectedness, and no regulation against ethnic intermarriage, I'd suspect a self-evident American ethnic group is likely in less than 200 years.
And again, ethnic groups are not just larger genetic groups, but cultural groups as well.
England and South Africa have tiny landmasses compared to America. Even the entire UK has a tiny landmass compared to America, and it's home to at least four distinct ethnicities (English, Welsh, Scottish, and Irish).
There has been no ethnostate of comparable inhabited landmass to the US in human history.
And technology does get lost, particularly when advanced societies collapse. The Greeks had analogue computers and Greek fire, unknown in the middle ages. By WW2, we had reinvented analogue computers, but the closest we've ever gotten to reinventing Greek fire was napalm, which wasn't invented until the Vietnam war. Modern concrete is still inferior to Roman concrete. The Romans had steam engines, didn't exploit them fully, and then they were lost and reinvented 1400 years later. The Egyptians could build giant pyramids that the Romans, Greeks, Chinese, and pre-industrial Europeans could not. We could just barely build them, but the cost would be extreme.
I didn't say technology wouldn't get lost, but even with the fall of whole civilizations, it is rare to see a destruction of infrastructure that would prevent connectedness without it's intentional destruction like the Invasion of the Sea Peoples, or the fall of the Assyrian Empire.
Past civilizations didn't have cars and planes, which are highly complex technologies we wouldn't be able to maintain after a collapse, and we depend on them for everything. If we lost those and had to go back to using horses and sailboats, the size of our continent and the presence of mountains would become significant obstacles, even if the Interstates remained for centuries. Going from New York to Los Angeles would take months, like it did in the 1800s.
It'll take a thousand years for Americans' DNA to get so thoroughly mixed that it's a single ethnicity, and it will only happen if society doesn't collapse back into the stone age. Without modern transportation, a Minnesotan would almost never meet a Texan, and over a thousand years their language would diverge.
It's fascinating to think about how cultural evolution would develop if industrial civilization gradually declined back into an agrarian paradigm.
I say gradually, because if it collapsed overnight the vast majority of humans would be doomed to starve to death. And billions of people starving to death would proceed to utterly ravage the environment consuming anything edible, until there's nothing left.
We still have a very long way to go until peak oil of course, and I'm cautiously optimistic about nuclear, hydroelectric, and geothermal power eventually replacing fossil fuels. But if that fails to happen, and we end up un-developing slowly enough to avert the aforementioned nightmare scenario, the various cultures that develop in the former US are gonna be absolutely wild.
Has it taken a thousand years for the Anglos and Saxons to become English? Has it taken a thousand years for the Boer to stop being Dutch?
This is my issue, modern transportation isn't going anywhere, society isn't going to revert to the stone age (in fact such collapses almost never happen in all of human history, and typically only happen in highly isolated societies or societies that are already filled with people partly in the stone age. Even then, as you mentioned "modern transportation"; the roads themselves tend to remain.
Due to interconnectedness, and no regulation against ethnic intermarriage, I'd suspect a self-evident American ethnic group is likely in less than 200 years.
And again, ethnic groups are not just larger genetic groups, but cultural groups as well.
England and South Africa have tiny landmasses compared to America. Even the entire UK has a tiny landmass compared to America, and it's home to at least four distinct ethnicities (English, Welsh, Scottish, and Irish).
There has been no ethnostate of comparable inhabited landmass to the US in human history.
And technology does get lost, particularly when advanced societies collapse. The Greeks had analogue computers and Greek fire, unknown in the middle ages. By WW2, we had reinvented analogue computers, but the closest we've ever gotten to reinventing Greek fire was napalm, which wasn't invented until the Vietnam war. Modern concrete is still inferior to Roman concrete. The Romans had steam engines, didn't exploit them fully, and then they were lost and reinvented 1400 years later. The Egyptians could build giant pyramids that the Romans, Greeks, Chinese, and pre-industrial Europeans could not. We could just barely build them, but the cost would be extreme.
I didn't say technology wouldn't get lost, but even with the fall of whole civilizations, it is rare to see a destruction of infrastructure that would prevent connectedness without it's intentional destruction like the Invasion of the Sea Peoples, or the fall of the Assyrian Empire.
Past civilizations didn't have cars and planes, which are highly complex technologies we wouldn't be able to maintain after a collapse, and we depend on them for everything. If we lost those and had to go back to using horses and sailboats, the size of our continent and the presence of mountains would become significant obstacles, even if the Interstates remained for centuries. Going from New York to Los Angeles would take months, like it did in the 1800s.