2050 – Utopia on Earth

Slovak version

Crying in my bed again and I cry ’cause you’re not here… This damn morning. Although this Cranberries hit is at least 50 years, it still strikes a chord with its audience. Martin being one of them. Despite his recent coming of age, this old song from the turn of the millennium has become his morning wakeup call for the last year and a half. „It is May 13, 2050, Martin, wake up, you’re graduating!” said a pleasant female voice. It strongly resembled the voice that has become the mother of all similar devices – the voice of Scarlett Johansson in the movie Her. Despite human ingenuity, some things should not have changed even after 50 years of progress. Dang! Friday the thirteenth. He hasn’t even realized that his graduation exam happens to be on this day.

Scar, I would like fried egg, bread with cheese and pork feat for breakfast. The word “feat” is a portmanteau expression coined by blending the English “fruit” and “meat”. It designates protein-rich fruits that grow on trees and are the result of genetic engineering. “Feats” solved humanity’s problems by providing plenty of delicious meaty food that was environmentally and psychologically clean and nutritionally optimized for the consumers’ needs. What’s more, the word “feat” had yet another connotation in English that people liked – it was an abbreviation of the word “feature” – that is, a prerogative.

In the beginning, people were still had partly prejudiced by the genetic modifications of plant life. However, when it became evident that one can engineer plants with no adverse side effects on the nature – and their fruit is even healthier and tastier than real meat – the convincing results silenced even the biggest critics of bioengineering and genetics.

People no longer had to worry about the mistreatment of animals raised for meat. Gradually, the wild carnivores living close to human settlements or farms growing feat developed a liking for feat it and killing for food came to an end even in the animal kingdom in some cases.

While the home android was preparing breakfast, Martin jumped into his swimsuit and swam his obligatory 10 lengths in the pool that could be accessed from his room through a terrace.

He found a message from his mother on the table, who left some two hours ago because she worked as an anchor at the local TV station. She wished him luck in picking the graduation questions. Martin had a non-residential father.

According to the Family Code, which was adopted in 2045, the father and mother of a child should live together at least for the first 16 years of the child’s life. And this period elapsed two years ago. Like most couples who had children, they split after fulfilling their responsibilities.

Since people had an almost infinitely-long life span in a young and healthy body thanks to science, several things had to be readjusted in human life – the concept of a lifelong marriage being one of them.

The potential overpopulation of the planet was addressed by regulating the birth rate – only so many children could be born every year for the planet to sustain them in a relatively consumerist lifestyle. Although science progressed relatively quickly and the number of births was far from small, some people opposed such a policy and high hopes were put into the terraforming of Mars and, following recent discoveries, there emerged a viable possibility for building residential orbital stations around Earth and Venus.

One such huge orbital station, Eden, grew right above their heads – directly above Earth. Martin was fascinated by these new discoveries and scientific advances – his very father was involved in the construction of Eden, and he even took Martin to the unfinished station once. It was a colossal human achievement, a potential dwelling place for 5,000 people. Eden was a colossus with a diameter of over 20,000 meters, it generated its own gravity by rotation at a rate of about 500km/h, and allowed the future space pioneers to function normally in orbit. At Eden, the East and West of the Earth could be observed eight times an hour, so most of Eden’s superstructure was covered in glass that projected a background at 24-hour intervals, which allowed the people to feel like on Earth. Thanks to the huge 3D printers placed in orbit, it took 5 years to build the basic superstructure of Eden. Eden was fully equipped to sustain life for the colonizers of space. Virtually every procedural step at the station was recycled, and the only thing that made it dependent on Earth was the supplies of food.

At the core of Eden there was a fusion power reactor that supplied it with sufficient amounts of energy. Since 2035, when the first commercially successful fusion process was introduced, the generation of fusion energy has been greatly improved, and a fusion reactor the size of a larger piece of furniture could generate enough power for all 5000 potential inhabitants of Eden and all its operating systems.

After a delicious and hearty breakfast, Martin cleaned his teeth, dressed up, summoned a drone and was airlifted to school. Visiting school was an extraordinary event – most instruction was provided remotely with the help of virtual reality. After a five-minute flight, the drone landed in the school yard in the center of Nitra.

End of first part

Epilogue

I’m writing these lines on October 22, 2020. Everything in the story dated to a later date, or dating back to the past in a nonfactual manner, is sheer fiction. First and foremost, I intended this story to be enjoyable for myself – that is, to incorporate what I think I know about the near and more distant future and what I calculated and inferred with a high probability from the past – and blend it into a text, which would make the general readership ignorant of the earthly realities feel like fact that actually occurred.

The primary focus of this story is to promote visible money and the book Quantum Consciousness, which I’m currently writing – and help both off to a successful start. I consider visible money to be a project that resets the coexistence of people in a way that is worthy of the third millennium. It is likely that the introduction of visible money becomes a necessary precondition for the peaceful and equitable coexistence of people on this planet.

Therefore, if you’re interested in the story and what follows, or just want to learn more about the Visible Money project, sign up for the newsletter at https://visiblemoney.org

Thank you,

Peter Boško

Author

You can read whole story here.