Alien Arms Empire.

Chapter 1880 1881 Unknown Future

Millions of captives are busy building the Tang Empire in the East Continent, and tens of millions of people in the West Continent have begun preparing to celebrate the coronation ceremony of their Emperor.

No one could suppress this feeling, and they really did it. They unified the world and turned the entire world into one country.

The dragon flag of the Tang Empire fluttered everywhere. From now on, all people and all races had only one country. There was no more threat of war and no limitations of borders.

What a great thing this will be!
Many places are decorating with lights and colors, and preparing for celebrations. However, there are still many people busy working for this unified world... What they have to face is a future that has never appeared before.

For many people, unification is a great thing, but for some people, unification is not so comfortable.

Since the birth of human beings, or humanoid races, they have always faced a problem, the problem of population growth. This problem has been solved in the past by means of "famine", "disease" and "war".

Land conflicts, a seemingly simple issue, actually have complex social roots. When land resources cannot support the growing population, social stability will be broken and chaos will break out.

This chaos is like a merciless storm, swallowing up those who cannot find living space on the land, while the rest seek stability in the ruins and continue their lives. In ancient times, those glorious dynasties often failed to solve this fundamental problem, so they could only experience rise and fall again and again, and go to destruction over and over again.

The population gradually evolved from a bonus to a disaster, eventually engulfing a prosperous dynasty, and then the next empire was rebuilt on the ruins.

The problem of disease is also easy to understand. Due to the backwardness of medical technology, civilization has always been passive in the prevention of disease, and the effect is minimal.

A large-scale epidemic is enough to reduce the population to a relatively safe level. In history, plagues that kill millions of people are common. These diseases seem to be a sterilization method of nature, destroying the intelligent creatures that parasitize on them, just like bacteria.

As for war, the reason is even more obvious. When the population grows to a certain extent, in order to solve the contradiction between people and land, it is necessary to expand the living space. Occupying other people's land and killing other people's population is undoubtedly the most cost-effective way.

Of course, if the war fails, it is actually not a big deal, because a large number of surplus population have been lost in the war, and there will naturally be no problem of land shortage among the remaining people. This is also a situation where everyone is happy.

However, in modern society, the world-unifying empire established by the Tang Empire has blocked all the ways to resolve the contradiction between people and land since ancient times. The Tang Empire has achieved global unification, so in a short period of time, it has no possibility of launching wars and expanding territory.

This means that the old method of reducing population through war is no longer applicable. In this unified world, people must find new ways to resolve the contradiction between people and land to avoid the tragedy of history from repeating itself.

At the same time, through its unremitting efforts and innovative research and development, Datang Group has successfully launched a series of advanced drugs that have significantly improved people's medical care level.

Today, the average age of the population of the Tang Empire has significantly increased by seven or eight years, and this number will undoubtedly continue to rise in the future. With the continuous advancement of medical technology, the average life expectancy of civilians is expected to further increase to seventy or eighty years old, or even eighty or ninety years old.

However, what will follow will be the population pressure faced by the Tang Empire, which will become enormous and unimaginable.

At the same time, the population explosion has also brought another problem. Since the arable land area is limited, as the population continues to increase, the pressure on arable land will also increase.

If food production could not meet the needs of the growing population, internal unrest in the Tang Empire might break out completely.

Fortunately, Tang Mo still has time to deal with this challenge, because the global population is not yet so large that hidden dangers have already appeared. At present, the Tang Empire is still in a state of vast land and sparse population, and there is still a lot of arable land to be developed. There is still a lot of room for agricultural development, which provides huge potential for future food production.

In history, there is a fundamental difference between the Tang Empire and previous empires. This difference is that the Tang Empire is not only a powerful industrial empire, but in the future, it may also become a powerful information empire, and may even open a new cosmic era.

The development of industry and technology requires a large population to support it, and these people provide countless jobs for the country. Therefore, the land pressure of the Tang Empire is not as great as people imagine. As long as the output of food products is sufficient to meet consumption needs, the large population is not a real problem for the Tang Empire. Because under Tang Mo's governance, the population has been divided into two categories: non-agricultural population and agricultural population.

In fact, in an industrial country, the number of people who are not engaged in agricultural-related work can be three times or even more than the agricultural population. Therefore, even if the population of the Tang Empire increased by another billion, it would not necessarily feel too much population pressure.

However, the problem of war consumption is a thorny problem. The Tang Empire has not found a truly effective solution. Tang Mo can't just start a civil war to consume the population without any actual need, right? Such an approach is obviously irrational.

Therefore, after Tang Mo raised these questions, the smiles on the faces of Chu Muzhou, the current vice-chancellor of the empire, and Nangong Hong, who was about to take over the position of vice-chancellor of the empire, seemed less natural.

Even though they were all outstanding and extremely intelligent superiors, they still lacked sufficient experience when facing the Tang Empire that unified the world.

This is similar to the situation Qin Shi Huang faced back then: the empire had already defeated all powerful opponents, so what should it do in the future? He himself didn't know, and neither did his officials, so everyone could only take one step at a time.

Did the Qin Dynasty fall because of tyranny? If we simply interpret Qin Shi Huang as a tyrannical, crazy, and perverted person, it is obviously one-sided. He is definitely not a fool who sits in his position and thinks about how to destroy his people and amuse himself with mountains of corpses and seas of blood every day... If he is, then what kind of people are the heroes of the six kingdoms who were killed by him?
Part of the reason for the Qin Dynasty's demise was its lack of experience. There was no centralized, unified dynasty before it, so after annexing the six states, Qin showed obvious symptoms of maladjustment.

Even Qin Shi Huang himself was unable to solve the problem due to his lack of experience, so he and his ministers could only adopt the method with the least risk: follow the rules.

This is why the Qin State used its own laws and experience, and directly attached the wartime economy and organizational structure of the Qin State to the Qin Empire, which was supposed to recuperate after unification.

As a result, the civilians of the conquered six states certainly felt that they were being abused by tyranny: a bunch of rules that had never existed in the past were imposed on their heads, and there were threats like death for those who failed to comply, plus the aristocratic classes of the six states were dissatisfied with the Qin's embellishments... The image of Qin was passed down like this.

After much difficulty in unifying the country, in order to maintain the wartime economy, they fought across the desert in the north and the mountains in the south, built wonders and constructed magnificent cities... This was not simply a desire for quick success and instant benefits, but an unstoppable militarism driven by the system and the economy.

Could Qin Shi Huang stop? If he stopped, there were so many officials waiting to be promoted, so many favors waiting to be distributed, who would dare to stop?

Who can explain to those arrogant soldiers who have gone crazy and like to cut off ears as a credit, "The country has no land to distribute to you, so why don't you forget about your military merits? Go home and live a peaceful life..."

It is easy to let the common people who built the Great Wall go home, but is it so easy to let the officials who were guarding the common people while building the Great Wall and waiting for them to make achievements in this way go home?

This thing has been used since the Shang Yang era. Qin Shi Huang did not have the courage or ability to change it. Li Si and his ilk did not have the courage or ability to change it either. Everyone is waiting to die holding on to this outdated thing. The final outcome is only death.

Don’t ever think that it is easy to deny your past successful experiences. In fact, similar mistakes have been made countless times in human history, but there are very few people who stand up to face the entire interest group and correct the mistakes.

The generals of the Japanese Navy during World War II were not fools. They believed in big ships and big guns, which were their unrivaled success until the second they failed. Who would dare to question it?

By the same token, in the real world, Western countries have already turned their societies into what they are today. Who is willing to stand up and question whether the "family rules passed down by our ancestors" can be changed?

The Tang Empire is now facing similar problems: Tang Mo and his men are facing an unknown era of unification, and they have to rethink how to solve the "class problem", how to solve the "population pressure", and how to solve the "wealth distribution".

Things that could be accomplished through violence and brutality in the past can now only be accomplished in a subtle way, which in itself is a test for those in power.

Before the annexation of the East Continent, these issues were not a problem, but after the dragon flag of the Tang Empire was planted all over the world, Tang Mo had to consider some things that he had never thought about before.