Pick any two people on Earth. Find a chain from each to their heads of state, and then a chain between those two heads of state. There you have a first approximation to the shortest path between them; an approximation which can probably be shortcircuited by transnational citizen-to-citizen links anyway, unless we are starting with people in physically isolated populations.  
 
It's simply a fact that the human race is connected up in this fashion. What the actual average path length is, etc., is just a technical detail. So the number six might be a myth, but the basic idea isn't.

"India, Russia, and Indonesia are likely (these are all empires). China somewhat less likely (also an empire). Perhaps Brazil as well." 
 
You're just making this up (Brazil?). Even if you added up all the remotely plausible possibilities for secession in the countries you list, you wouldn't have anywhere near 100 new states, let alone the 800 new states you need to reach 1000.  
 
We are in an era of thriving nationalism as formerly Third World countries acquire the trappings of national power, such as cash reserves, modern weaponry, and an industrial base. That process is not assisted by breaking up the state.

"the 1,000 state sovereignty model that the world will become in the next few decades" 
 
Dream on, Kurt! Perhaps you can tell us which territorial nation-states are going to devolve or disgovern themselves so as to let this happen?

Celia Green expresses it thus: "10 billion pounds has been spent, effectively to lower the average IQ of the undergraduate population."

If the proposition is that fiction has shifted from being about epic events and exotic personages to the close-up examination of the more familiar, one factor might be the changing economics of storytelling, on all sides (production, distribution, consumption). When all those things are expensive, you're going to prefer a reliably big and instant payoff.

that ... decisions can be made by means of mathematical formulas 
 
This proposition can be interpreted in a variety of ways, e.g.:  
 
(1) That the decision-making processes of human beings "in the wild" may be completely described by "mathematical formulas".  
 
(2a) That the decision-making processes of an artificial intelligence could similarly be completely described by mathematical formulas.  
 
(2b) That the task of designing an artificial intelligence is equivalent to the task of choosing "which formulas to use".  
 
(3a) That the decision-making processes of human beings can be improved by applying some of the formal discoveries of decision theory.  
 
(3b) That the decision-making processes of human beings can be improved by making some specific model out of decision theory personally normative.

K asks me 
 
Can you really explain the meaning you ascribe to the word "exist"? 
 
"Existence" is one of those words that it's hard, perhaps impossible to define in a noncircular fashion. Eventually you have to appeal to ostensive definition. And I even think that the prevailing concept of existence may have systematic deficiencies; Heidegger has a nice passage somewhere talking about aspects of being which are frozen out of the usual conception. Still - what do you want me to say, here? I mean it exists in the sense that it "is there". I mean it exists, in the sense that it does not "not exist"! You were the one who talked about "the subjective", which I took to be another name for everything to do with consciousness; do you think the subjective exists? And if you don't, what on earth do your statements about it mean?  
 
by using this word the way you do you ALREADY ASSUME a Platonistic position 
 
Anyone who says that anything exists is a Platonist? Well, then we must all be Platonists, because something manifestly exists.  
 
If contemporary scientific materialism were "wrong" you could point to some ontological inconsistency in its results, can you? 
 
How about an inconsistency with the facts? Colors exist, there are no colors in the universe of mathematical physics (a wavelength is not a color, it's a length-scale), therefore the latter is not the whole story ontologically. - I take "contemporary scientific materialism" to be defined by the belief that the universe of mathematical physics is the whole story. (You are allowed to talk about mereological aggregates of basic physical entities, and their properties, and I'll still count you as a contemporary scientific materialist, unless you believe in some "strong emergence" thesis, in which case I'd say you're actually a dualist.)

Kevembuangga - Chalmers' hard problem is ontological, not epistemological: what you call "the subjective" does not exist anywhere in the physics-based ontology of the natural sciences. Yet it exists, therefore contemporary scientific materialism is wrong, therefore some other -ism (perhaps never yet conceived) is right. Pointing out the phenomenological facts might lead to an aha experience for somebody, but it does not, in itself, solve the problem.

I might point out that the alleged Iranian bomb is a rather peculiar entree to this topic, since the public line of the Iranian government in every forum has been: we're not making a bomb, we don't want bombs, we can't gain from their use, they are against Islam, the age of atom bombs is over, we believe in atoms for peace, etc. If one is looking for Muslim scholars who publicly promote the use of WMD, one has to look to Salafi-jihadis like al-Suri, al-Qaeda talking heads who promote it on the basis of an eye for an eye, and so forth.

Maybe GNXP has fans at the Pine Gap military base.

I nominate actress Minna Aaltonen as the Finnish repreentative.