Sord in Prosperity - Hope Beyond the Apocalypse

EP. 118 - SORD

SORD WAS ANGRY AT his mother.

"Why should I read this crap?" he wondered. "Nothing in this ancient prose has value for where I am today. Some flipping ancestor from a hundred-plus years ago? Doesn't make sense she'd force this penance on her overburdened son. I have enough to read with school alone."

He stared upward toward the only source of natural light in his room, reflected from a series of mirrors that began at the bioplas rooftop twenty meters overhead.

"At least this guy could venture outdoors whenever he wanted. He had freedoms I can only imagine. I'm sure he never appreciated them like I would."

Sord grabbed his vidscreen pad and pressed on the file icon. The story appeared in plain text on his reader.

***

My friend. This is a start; my intended message to you. In telling you these things, I'll assume you are a direct descendant, though you don't have to be that for any particular reason. It just makes it easier to recall these tales as if I was sharing them with my own grandkids many generations later.

Since I as yet have no grandchildren, I'm projecting a bit on probability metrics. For context, it is the year 2021. What a year! Perhaps I'll give you one man's picture of what it's like, living in this time of great uncertainty, small dashes of hope and courage, and astounding cowardice, greed, entitlement, and fear on many fronts.

I prefer to start off with something fun because those topics are too heavy and burden my somatic energy. To pique your interest and keep you reading, as I'm sure segments of this long tome will readily lull you to sleep, I will begin with aliens and the possibility of other sentient beings in the universe.

Part of my intention in projecting who you are is to envision where you might be as you consume this word flux. For my convenience, I'll assume you live a hundred years from today. I'm hypothesizing that you are in a time after humanity has suffered utter devastation and near-extinction due to its inability to control the burgeoning, dynamic technological change in an otherwise diseased and dysfunctional societal state.

At this time, in fact, our species is not even remotely aware of the need to manage such change. You will encounter this perspective as a recurring theme throughout, and it is likely a foregone conclusion, a forlorn reminder, by your time.

I'm a realist, I believe. Not stupidly hopeful that humanity will muddle through this next stage or filter somehow as it always has, despite its ignorance. Our collective languor was only a minor hindrance in the recent past, but that changes quickly as annihilation technologies are democratized.

We don't get a hall pass on this one. Not this time.

In the relative near-term, I place a high likelihood on the virtual extinction of our species. Indeed, the fact that the sky is devoid of tangible signals from alien life forms, whether dead and gone or still around, is evidence that a final, conclusive Great Filter hides in wait a few clicks ahead for us.

Our species and those from which we descended have certainly passed multiple Great Filters already. RNA and DNA precursors in the primordial ooze. Cells combining symbiotically with other cells to produce mitochondria. Random evolution to multicellular entities. All the way through to fish and dinosaurs and mammals, including this not-so-great ape typing away. My species of ape is doing all it can to evade and ignore an obvious and painful future, though time now runs short.

I find no driving force in humans to ensure we have a strategy to overcome and surpass the looming menace in the next few decades, the most challenging we've ever faced. The approaching Great Filter is not associated with chance like the fortunate combination of those two ancient single-celled entities or the six-mile asteroid that wasted the dinosaurs. It is not one of fate or chance, independent from human decisions.