And they lived happily ever after

The flashlights don’t work, either, just as many other modern contraptions. Of course not. Flashlights, television sets and dinosaur-computers have been lying forsaken in our technological museums for over a century now. Because electricity is passé. But you, my dear reader of four hundred years ago, need an explanation.

This is a chronicle of the future that has reached you through a transtemporal communication medium. And the prime aim of this endeavour is to show you how erroneous you modern fairy-tale predictions were about the future. Humanity did not end in catastrophe. Perhaps four hundred years after the end of the modern age is too early to say this, but I will try to justify myself. The principal difference between reality and your fairy tales is that we are actually happy.

Towards the end of the twenty-first century, we experienced a great intellectual revolution, arguably the greatest one after the Renaissance. This wasn’t a technology-oriented revolution like the Industrial Revolution, but a science-based one. To begin with, some of the best human minds redefined the concept of “energy”. Following years of research and experimentation, electricity was replaced by an improvement of quantum electromagnetic power. Industry became much more efficient, and life easier. Of course, people all over the place made more and more machines, but the war between man and machine never happened. Thanks, Bertrand Russell.

At approximately the same time, something else happened which opened our eyes to the fallacies of existing technologies. The worldwide web crashed, along with most of the world’s security systems, resulting in a global mayhem. The repair process was rapid, but the implications of such another disaster loomed in front of us. What followed was a massive restructuring of all the information infrastructure of the world, starting from Pythagoras and the Incommensurables.

Rapid development occurred everywhere. Most of them were aimed at correcting previous mistakes before making new ones. Medical Science was one of the best affected by all these changes, though HIV did not submit itself for another hundred years, having taken a high toll. Healthcare witnessed a great change in approach from treating the disease to treating the patient. We now have medical and genetic records of every single human being on earth, and also of those who preferred purpler pastures elsewhere. Most disease, if not all, have been conquered. But our philosophers tell us that death should not, and cannot be conquered. Well, we’re not trying.

But the greatest tale remains to be told. Basic research is, and will remain man’s greatest scientific benefactor. Research into nature’s building blocks has yielded knowledge which initially left humanity flabbergasted. I cannot give you any detail about this, or any other research or technology due to restrictions in the Statutes of Transtemporal Communication, but suffice it to say that this new knowledge changed our perception of existence. And gave us technology and material to build stronger edifices, cheaply and conveniently. We could soon make distant space travel and space-living a possible reality. Human colonies now exist in places you would not have expected. We have colonised Mars, but never found ET or any little green men. As yet. Travel has taken new shapes with a new definition of magnetic levitation.

Our understanding of the universe has improved tremendously, and man is now closest to the farthest edges of the universe. “Edge?” Well, all in good time. Writing in your style has taken me nearly an hour. Of course, language has evolved too, mostly for good.

In perspective, all these technological changes have brought about the greater changes in lifestyle. We would indeed have been doomed with our addiction to machines, had our philosophers and our own senses not intervened. An integral philosophy, which was taking shape in your time in the minds of people like Wilber, evolved to give a worldview which puts all aspects of existence (even Science and Mysticism, as Eddington would have put it) together to give optimal results in the process of living. Your sinister predictions of broken families and absent human emotions never came true, and never will. Our government structures have changed too (obviously), to be quite incomparable with those of your time. Borders between most nations are too hazy to make out. And mind you, the earth is clean as ever.

This progress, both scientific and otherwise, was once considered too difficult to achieve. I leave to you to contemplate upon the scale of a revolution that could have made this possible. Science and research remain mankind’s greatest benefactors, only if used optimally and wisely.

You now know how much work you and your generation have in front of you.

Where the statue stood
Of Newton with his prism and silent face
The marble index of a mind forever,
Voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone