Due to two facts:

1. The samurai class in Japan officially lasted way later than you probably think

2. The earliest primitive fax machine existed much earlier than you probably think.

It is technically possible for Abraham Lincoln to have received a fax from a samurai.

There’s no evidence it ever happened, but it technically could have happened.

Your conscious mind does not experience reality directly.

Your conscious mind does not experience reality directly. There is no path going directly from your eyes to your conscious awareness. Rather, the subconscious collects sensory input. It uses that input to create a virtual simulacrum of the world, a big internal 3D model. That internal 3D representation is what you, the conscious part of your mind, actually interacts with and experiences.

You ever wonder how weird it is that people can have intense, debilitating hallucinations? Like schizophrenics seeing and hearing entirely fictional things. Have you ever seen a camera produce anything like that? A flash of light, a distorted image, dead pixels, etc? Sure, those kinds of errors cameras can produce. But a camera will never display a vivid realistic image of a person that wasn’t ever actually in their field of view.

Yet the human mind is capable of this. In the right circumstances, the human brain is capable of spawning entire fictional people into your conscious awareness. This shows that there is an elaborate subconscious processing layer between what our conscious mind observes and direct sensory input. Your conscious mind is basically experiencing a tiny little internal version of The Matrix, entirely generated on its own wetware. And this subconscious processing layer is what makes hallucinations possible. The processes that produce this internal simulation can become corrupted, and thus allows hallucinations.

This architecture is also what makes dreaming possible. If your conscious mind only perceived things upon direct sensory feedback from the eyes, ears, etc., how would dreaming be possible?

You are essentially experiencing reality through an elaborate 3d modeling version of an AI video generator.

Many will say that World War Three cannot happen, that nuclear weapons will prevent it. However, this assumes that World War Three has to be global thermonuclear war, rather than some repeat of the previous world wars.

Cities don’t have to be leveled for nations to fight a world war. The US fought two world wars, and we never had our cities and infrastructure decimated. What I can imagine is a future world war where all the major players fight the war in the same way the US fought the two previous wars. Both sides contribute massive resources, adopt wartime economies, throw their whole populations behind the effort etc, but at no point do the various combatants directly attack the main territory and population centers of the other side. You could have a conflict where both sides lost millions of troops fighting it out in some third party territory, but the nukes never fly as all sides realize that invading the home territory of the others is suicide.