The Year 3052: Introduction

I did not recognize the landscape laid out before my eyes as I stood on the Catonsville highlands overlooking the City of Baltimore. A millennium of change had brought about the alteration of the outline and configuration of the Inner Harbor. The port was much deeper and extensive with sleek wind-driven cargo ships that slipped in and out of the docks. Gone was the Key Bridge that once framed the opening of the port. Gone were the ribbons of expressway that strapped the city and bound it in its history. My dream left a melancholy hole in my core as I realized that Mankind had indeed survived into the Year 3052.

When I awakened I lay still for a few minutes pondering the panorama that was now fading, its fine details blurring into the soft focus like a summer in the 1960s decade that remains more as an oral history of facts and fictions than as a real remembrance of things accomplished and lessons learned. I had that hollow empty sensation that comes when I think about the prospects of the one-way journey into a new land that immigrants made prior to the earliest days of the 20^th century when going back home was impractical if not impossible. One left, never to be seen or heard from again by they who remained, nor to see or hear them again either. It is the same with moving into the future. One becomes lost to the now present never to return.

My Sunday morning became filled with the conjuring of what the world would be like after a thousand years of change. I had to remind myself that I could not characterize the passage of time as ‘progress’ because that would be presumptive. More than likely there will have been cycles of progress and deterioration that resulted in a net improvement or net deterioration. There will have been changes to religion, social structure, race relations, medical practice, energy demands and supply, transportation, education, music, poetry and morals. Just what those changes would be certainly is a pure conjecture.

But nonetheless I postulated such developments using a few known initial parameters and propensities of the human animal. Some of those developments follow in the postings here.

3052: Education

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Off-the-Grid 3052

Off-the-Grid 3052

The future that accommodates 10 to 20 billion humans will necessarily be highly structured and orderly. The flow of daily life will not well handle exceptions. For instance, when there are hundreds of people ascending through the levels of a subway station on escalators there will be a low tolerance for anyone who stops walking when they reach a new level and step off. They will be pushed aside while the crowd continues along. A person moving in any sort of personal transportation will not be accepted if they travel too fast or too slow.  The optimum speed will need to be maintained or the system will fail.

Even though the order will have to be maintained, there will be those people who inherently resist the conformance to the policies and rules of the society. As we do today, there will be the outliers who eschew the conveniences and conformity of the established order. They will seek to live off the grid so to speak in places beyond where the commanded order prevails. 

These people will necessarily not be supported by the Establishment or any of the efforts that today allow people to live in the most out of the way places and be self-sustaining. None of the infrastructure will extend to where they dwell. Municipal water pipes will stop miles from their location. Electric and telecommunications lines will not serve their coordinates. Fortunately many of the urban systems will have adopted the sustainable practices of rooftop gardening, rain capture, wind and solar electric generation. That convergence of styles with the off-the-grid independent people will make the outlier societies far more possible.  They will live in similar environments but far less dense and far less structured by rules that are essential to accommodate that structured society.

Fortunately for the independent minded people, the government of the urban areas will not give them a second thought until and unless their actions serve to negatively impact the order and supply of the urban areas. Such an intrusion might be the diverting of too much water or impounding it too long thereby denying the larger organized areas the water they need.

Even today, we have such water use conflicts where residents of Phoenix, AZ want "Eastern Yards" with grassy lawns and deciduous trees that require periodic inundating from an irrigation system. They must compete with the classy golf courses for that water while people with "western yards" say don't take my water and curtail my use.

In some regions, gas and oil drillers consume millions of gallons of water per well even during drought conditions that leave lakes and rivers nearly empty.

As of the 21st Century there are people who think of themselves as naturalists and survivalists.  They want to grow their own food, build low-energy houses and live a simpler way of life.  By 3052, their only remaining effort will be to live in less dense areas, since it will be their pioneering efforts that eventually become adopted by the larger civilization. 

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Climate 3052

Climate 3052 

"Men come and men go, but the Earth abides." Ecclesiastes.

The climate of the Earth has been far warmer than it is now and it has been far colder too. In short, the Earth doesn't care about the average temperature of a day, a year, a decade, a century or even a millennium. When the Earth is colder sea level drops as ice builds up on northern and southern land masses. Sea level goes up as the Earth warms and land-bound ice melts and flows back into the sea. The Earth doesn't care what the sea level is or what land is exposed or submerged. This cycle has been going on for hundreds of millions of years. It is only now that humans reside on the present day coastlines and assign a monetary value to possessing a plot of that temporal real estate that there is any concern at all.

At the time of the 21st Century, sea level has been rising. A series of events and processes have been set in motion that will require a huge change in human behavior and attitudes in order to slow, stop and possibly reverse the observed changes in our climate.

"While Man may not be responsible for all climate change where the atmosphere is warmed by greenhouse gases that he discharges, he did do a lot to set it in motion. That activity has set up "feedback loops" that cascade the impacts. It is just like Man did not burn down the entire forest, but he did leave his camp fire unattended and started the conflagration."

Many theoretical but fully predictable mitigating factors could alter the steady effects of our contributions to atmospheric CO2 and Methane loading. Volcanoes are quite capable of expelling as much CO2 into the atmosphere as two decades of human fossil fuel burning. While that is a possibility so is the opposing effect posed by millions of tons of volcanic ash rising high into the atmosphere blocking the sun and cooling the planet for some period of time. Too warm or too cool will change the crop yields and oceanic life level that alter our protein sources. Ocean water too warm can breed algae blooms that toxify the water and deplete oxygen levels. 

An asteroid could strike the Earth and measurably alter its survivability by humans other plant and animal species.

Any number of viruses could evolve into an extinction level event that more than decimates the human population. Our rampant use of antibiotics and other agricultural chemicals can breed plant and microbe species that are no longer controllable and diminish our comfortable world.

Too much rain or too little ruins arable land and reduces crop yields. When we are living at the margin between having just enough to eat and not having enough to eat, we are living at a place where the Principle of Imminent Collapse can manifest and bring about a New Equilibrium that doesn’t include all of us.

This vision of 3052 does not assume horrible events and actions that brings mankind to the brink of extinction. That said, the Principle of Imminent Collapse does only need a nudge to precipitate the cascading failures that are capable of creating an apocalypse.

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