Dear Future Civilizations...

An Open Letter From the Near Future to the Distant Future

Dear future civilizations,

We were so close.

As a species we had been around for a couple hundred thousand years, but we only really started getting a handle on anything in the last, I dunno, five to ten thousand or so. In about the last thousand years our knowledge started to snowball, and then in the past couple hundred we really started ramping up the advancements. Then over just the past ten or twenty years, we figured out so much so fast that the ramp started looking more like a cliff. Seriously, the things we’d learned how to do were mind-blowing. They would have seemed like pure sorcery only a generation or two prior. With the knowledge we’d accumulated, we could have ensured that all of us – literally everyone alive – had a decent quality of life with their basic needs met. We really should have had it made.

But then...

Well, if you’ve found this collection of 1s and 0s, and managed to decode and translate it, that obviously means you yourselves are advanced enough that you’ve figured out the gist of what happened next. And you probably have questions. And given what you’ve presumably figured out, those questions probably aren’t about what, when or who; they’re probably about how and why. Because let’s face it, given the way it went down, how could any future civilization not wonder about those things?

Furthermore, you might reasonably expect that those of us who lived through the thick of it could give you at least some marginally insightful answers to those questions. So if that’s what you’re expecting, well, I’m sorry to say that this is probably not the last time we will disappoint you.

We were very good at being disappointing.

Some say it was simply the nature of our species, and there never could have been any other outcome. Others say it was because we acquired too much knowledge too quickly, without the wisdom to know what to do with it. Some were eager to shoehorn the various events into the prophecies and predictions of their preferred mythologies. And some say it was a simple case of bad luck – really, really fucking bad luck.

One thing our historians were in general agreement about was that as a species, we had a predictable habit of just kinda losing our collective minds about every 50 to 100 years or so. Large groups of us would put great, concerted, communal effort into killing other large groups of us for a few years, until we all remembered that oh yeah, that’s a shitty way to live, and we’d settle down again until the next big flare-up. So doesn’t it just figure that our period of greatest advancement, of coming so close to actually figuring it all out, would coincide with one of those times when we just went completely off the fuckin’ rails? And so all these things that we’d figured out, that we could have used to make life better for everybody? Yeah, you guessed it: instead we used them to destroy each other. Eight billion of us, all with pretty much the same basic needs, and for all the amazing things we’d figured out, we couldn’t figure out a way to divvy up our bountiful resources in a way that everybody could live with, and just leave each other in peace. We were a highly advanced, exceedingly sophisticated population of idiots.

What I can tell you is that we all saw it coming. I mean, some earlier than others, sure. But by the time it all really started to unravel, the trajectory was clear. It was like watching a train wreck slowed down to about a thousandth of its actual speed. And if that makes you ask then why didn’t anybody stop it, well then, congratulations; welcome to the billion-dollar question that those of us who made it through are asking ourselves and each other every damn day.

As you sift through the incalculably massive digital trash heap we left behind, one thing you’ve no doubt noticed is a weird disparity that happened just in our last few decades: that our knowledge seemed to be simultaneously advancing and regressing. While the most advanced of us were figuring out new things, an increasing number of us started either forgetting or else just suddenly ceasing to believe a bunch of stuff that we had figured out way earlier. I’m talking super basic stuff like the shape of our planet, or where diseases come from and how to prevent them – things that we had figured out back when we were still using oil lamps for light and animals for transportation, fer cryin’ out loud. If that seems unbelievable to you, just know that it didn’t seem any less unbelievable to us. Of course by “us,” I mean those of us who escaped that affliction or regression or whatever you want to call it.

The funny thing is, it crept up slowly enough that for a while we just laughed it off. It was so rare that we were able to chuckle and dismiss that tiny handful of people as silly and wrong, but ultimately inconsequential and harmless. But then what happened, of course, was that once we had developed ways for everyone on the planet to be able to communicate with everyone else instantly and effortlessly, that tiny handful of silly, wrong people all found each other. And just like all the other groups of people with shared interests that suddenly found each other, they started forming communities – their own little microcosms of civilizations. And while the rest of us chuckled and paid no attention, those communities grew. If it seems ironic to you that the things they denied were the embodiment of the very advancements that allowed their communities to form and flourish, believe me, the irony was not lost on us either. Remember, I’ve never claimed that we made any sense.

But the upshot is that we had become advanced enough that we could effectively pick and choose what reality we believed and lived in, and our advancements could actually insulate us from the consequences of those beliefs when they deviated from, you know, actual reality – at least, for a little while. But of course, actual reality is far more powerful than we were, and we could only keep it at bay for so long. And when it came calling, wow, was it ever pissed, and not terribly precise or discriminating in the consequences it meted out.

So I’m afraid there’s nothing I can say that will make it make any more sense than that. We were absolutely the architects of our own undoing. None of us wanted it, but... well, it’s tempting to say that none of us could figure out how to stop it. But the truth is, plenty of us knew how to stop it; what we didn’t know was how to convince those with the most power to do what needed to be done to stop it, what with us all living in our own individual, incompatible realities and all.

I truly wish you better luck, and more importantly, better sense than we had.

But man, we were so close...

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