The Price of Progress…

The future is unwritten:

But I’d wager the following scenario is prime candidate to be a waypoint in our destiny. I’ll stick my finger in the air and pluck out a time….let’s say 12000 years from now. Despite all human trials; the conflicts, the disasters and disease we’ve managed to swell our population exponentially. Another finger in the air and another pluck and I arrive at a trillion inhabitants. All very very different in appearance to us relics of today. Those lucky to have their consciousness selected become man/machine hybrids for a rationed time. They colonise the solar system and many manufactured planets beyond. Within each being, only a few threads of humanity remain; every creation physically and mentally superior to anyone alive now. The random drift of evolution has been captured and reined for our… own self-preservation and world conservation. At least that’s how it’s portrayed to the populace. The truth is; it’s the execution of curious whims, meddling for meddling’s sake by men of weird science. Labelling themselves as Intelligent designers from our time they engender a progeny that’s a caricature of themselves…who in turn deliver their own new breed into a further future.

Many times over this repeats until we reach the aforesaid waypoint. That generation sit there.. and gaze upon US for their education, for their history, for their entertainment. Several ultra-historians I’d posit for every man, woman and child alive today and a myriad more curious enquirers. Because of the traces we’re leaving in our everyday lives, we’re easy fodder. Our physical movements, business, social, intimate and financial interactions; they’re all recorded and saved in data warehouses and archived unchanged for history henceforth…ready for recall at the flick of an impulse from a far removed descendant.

The upshot – we WILL be judged. We’ll all have our Judgement Day. Not by a mystical God of our imagination’s making. But by godlike beings of the cheap and plentiful kind–of our own engineering.

The future is written.