The future of Russia

This was posted as a comment reply in YouTube.

Before we "build them up" as an ally, the non-ally has to be contained. The USSR was too large to take on, so it was contained, and it collapsed under its own weight.

One scenario is Russia losing a large number of territories to become new independent states (Ichkeria, Dagestan); other territories would return to their previous owners: Königsberg, Karelia, Abkhazia, Crimea, etc.

This is fair, and the collapse would follow the Soviet scenario almost to the letter. Russia would democratise, and will be paying reparations to Ukraine for many decades to come.

There is a more difficult scenario:

Large swathes of the Russian Far East would get returned back to China somehow, if China (the PRC) won't ever touch Taiwan in return.

This would require separate treaties: between China and the West, and China and other South-East Asian nations, requiring China to then also give up territorial ambitions elsewhere, including the nine-dash line stuff in the South China Sea.

Per treaty:
• the People's Repulic of China would recognise Taiwan as an independent state. Taiwan then becomes a UN member state.
• Plus separate and stronger protections for the full autonomy and perhaps even political independence of Hong Kong and Macau. Since they are originally Chinese territories, China would remain responsible for their defense. It should be arranged as a confederation.

Somewhere along these lines, Tibet should also become free.

Another scenario would be the West, China, and others creating an alliance to rid Russia of its grabby ambitions. This would be similar to an alliance that rid France of Napoleon, and Germany of the Kaiser (WWI) and then of nazis (WWII). It would be a very bloody war.

Another, or an additional future for Russia would be the East Germany scenario, whereby China returns its own historical territories _and_ grabs the non-Chinese lands in the Far East and Siberia that Russia had previously obtained.

This arrangement would create a lot of tension, because then, China would be occupying the territories that were never its own.

The PRC would then have to build a new Great Wall of China to keep the possession to itself.

Some of the tension would be formally relieved under the long-term "two systems, one state solution" through treaty, or another arrangement between China and the new democratic Russia in its West Germany role backed by the free world. Even then, tensions would remain, and will simmer under the surface.

Why the Engineers began cloning themselves. A hypothesis.

First posted as a comment on YouTube.

One of the possibilities for the Engineers giving up traditional reproduction might have been some kind of a biological accident.

If we assume, that after a series of upgrades comparable in fashion to Weyland-Yutani obsessively wanting to upgrade humanity, perhaps using the synthesized form of Black Goo as a possible active ingredient which the Engineers might have picked up somewhere else — either from the Deacon prototype stuck on the mural, or from the big head set in the urn chamber in the Pyramid on LV-223, or by combining both — biological reproduction then produced something awful (à la the Offspring).

The progenitors could probably no longer be fixed through state reversal, or that there was some other reason precluding any form of going back, and so, they resolved to cloning.

There may be a possibility for future stories, that the Engineer civilisation became dormant somewhere, hoping and waiting until a separate group of Engineers (maybe even that of LV-223) provides a resolution, or someone from the outside might.