So this week's foray in to the twisted mind palace of Mr 
Esquire's #weekendengagement posting topics, sees me pondering:
Explain what you believe our world and society may be like in 250 years from today. How has humanity progressed or regressed, what's the financial situation, how has the environment coped or changed with the passing of 250 years and what technologies have we gained or lost. Is humanity better off now or then? Explain your answer. You can write a fiction if you like, or give us your personal views.
I am going to approach this quandary and give my response using a couple of differing styles, this will make perfect sense when I am finished.
Written by Apple Delta Wood II, using excerpts from the memoirs of my Great, Great, Grandfather Steven Wood.
Steven and his eldest daughter Jade, circa:1992, some 280 years ago.
My Great, Great Grandfather Steven, talks at great length in his many, many, many writings on the topic of 21st century culture on planet Earth. Some of the topics he covers are so bizarre to imagine today, who knew that life in 2272 could be so very different?
Back then people used what was known as currency, it was essentially scraps of paper and lumps of metal, somehow they could denote the different value of goods and services that each one could buy based on etchings on them.
Thank god for the crypto wars of 2057 when the evil entities known as 'the bankers' were finally overthrown for good by a guy named Musk and his 7th wife Kylie a tiny entertainer from a continent once known, if I understand correctly, as Austratasmania. I could never get my head around this odd concept of 'money'.
Back then, some people had much less than everyone else and some did not even have enough sustenance rations to stay healthy. This was a time when humans ate a thing known as solid foods rather than liquid vit-shots, it sounds disgusting if you ask me, essentially, people used to grind up bio matter using their teeth... Ugghhh, it sounds so creepy.
There are reports (although I'm sure they can't possibly be right), that humans ate dead animals after a guy called Mcdonald threw them in a fire and coated them in a Mcflurry solution.
Nutrition was very different back then, this was before the transhumanist revolution when almost nobody had implant chips, except a subset of humanity named 'supermodels', although I am not sure if their implants could detect solar-flares or a drop in barometric pressure like those we have today.
Back then people used to engage in overt acts of aggression at a national and local level. If people didn't like one another or the colour of the national flags, (this was long before the global peace accords), many of us have seen the banned pictures of the annual event known as war that took place in the 21st century, this was before use of that word was outlawed by the supreme global matriarch in the early 22nd century.
it occurs to me that our ancestors did not place the same premium on the value of human life that we do today, I have read some reports that suggest taking of life was a sport known as reality TV in the late 21st century and was actively encouraged and rewarded.
The barbarism of the past is something I couldn't even begin to comprehend. In some, parts of society back then, people were looked at differently because of erroneous factors such as the colour of their skin, their gender or the class level they originated from, they used a classification system known as race before we had the wisdom to know that all people are essentially the same. It occurs to me that our ancestors were primitive, unenlightened and clearly had smaller less-developed brains than we enjoy today.
Before the Earth erected the colossal sunscreens and skynet systems we are so familiar with today, there was fears that the earth was getting too hot, too fast. The first supreme global matriarch, Greta the first, was thrown out of her esteemed office after only 12 days by the great science council for making scurrilous claims that we had only 3 months left till Earth-death.
I would have loved to see the Earth back then, I hear that there was almost 10 billion people who lived there in it's heyday, before the fertility crisis caused a population reversal. Humanity's number now settled at a constant 550 million over the last couple of decades has produced a small, peaceful, close knit, wholly connected population with enough resources to go around for everyone for the foreseeable future.
That was before the craze of moving off-world of course. The Martian colonisation program which began, as we all know from the annual, global holiday, in 2059, was just the first of many such exodus level events. The discovery of the 'Hawking Bezos galaxy' intersecting our own, created so much excitement because before those new understandings regarding dark-light, humanity couldn't even see it was there, that's crazy to believe now.
My parents tell me about the buzz at discovering almost 200 other sentient species, in our cosmic neighbourhood, I wish I could have been there. New understanding from the Kuazong reptilians led to humanity eradicating all disease almost overnight. They recycled huge killing machines, known as nukkies, into vast stores of strontillium-c which enabled humanity to achieve eternal clean power stores at no cost.
The greatest achievement of the evolution of humanity over the last couple of hundred years of course, the one that stand head and shoulders above all of mankind's other great achievements is the re-introduction of the dinosaurs to the newly terraformed, climate enhanced Antarctica. It was a long, laborious task plagued with controversy, many false starts and the longest ethical moratorium in history but eventually successful.
I wonder how things will be in the next 250 years? My Great, Great Grandfather Steven had some very interesting ideas of what lay ahead for us. I'm sad he is not here today, I would dearly love to have a conversation with him about such things...
Sadly though, he died a few days ago, just shy of his 300th birthday... His great sadness at having used every word ever known to man was simply too much to bear and forced him to enter euthanasia protocol 5, he was never really the same after the classification of alcohol as a banned substance...
Meanwhile, in an alternate timeline caused by a few small decisions by mankind.
The acrid smoke billowed from among the ruined skeletal of buildings that once made up many metropolitan cityscapes. Sirens still sounded for all to hear. Alas the sound was heard by no-one.
They had teetered so close to this very precipice so many times, leaders always happier flexing their metaphorical muscles than communicating as mutually respecting equals with their counterparts around the fractured, dissevered, sequestered planet.
The projectiles stuck out of the scorched, black earth at contorted angles for as far as the eye could see.
Their arrogance always led them to believe that it could never quite come to this... But like huge, grotesque metal birds, they flew overhead from first, one continent, then another, then another, until...
Nobody left to disagree with.
Nobody left to make war with.
Nobody left to... Nobody left!
Just like 99.97% of all the species who had inhabited the planet before them, they too had reached extinction. They did, however, have the sad honour of being the first species to die out due to hubris, arrogance and mutually assured self-destruction...
A solitary white deer lazily watched the cockroach scurry by as the once magnificent creature lay on the ground, taking fewer and fewer shallow breaths, the beautiful animal close to death, one more casualty of the most dangerous and destructive beast of them all...
For a species with so much promise, so much potential, we head off down some incredibly dark roads from time to time.
I do however, have a very real belief that even at an individual level, we can make choices as to how we engage with our fellow human beings that can have a profound ripple-effect.
If enough good people make enough good decisions on a day to day basis, maybe that could be enough to steer us onward down the correct road?
Maybe I am wrong but I certainly don't think there could be any harm in trying, right?
Thank YOU for taking the time to read my post and if you're one of those amazing people who like to hit the comments section... Then I doubly thank YOU!
Either way I want you to know that you are appreciated!
