Oh, Oh, We May Have Blown It

By David Horrigan

This is a blog about the future. It was easy enough to predict the future. One could just feel the aspirations of those creatives around you and feel how those around them responded and voila you could see where we were going and how we would arrive. Or at least I used to. One morning I was communicating with a couple of young ladies, one who had just graduated from high school and the other, her younger sister, who had just gotten her first summer job. 

And as I have wont to do, I empathically copped a feel into their future. I was floored. I looked and looked and realized they didn’t have one! What was this? Why didn’t kids have a future? This was flabbergasting. A lifelong gift of seeing peoples futures gone. Was I broken? Were they broken? Was reality as we know it broken? I was bummed. And my frequent columns in my blog stopped coming. No more future, meant no more future insights. 

OK, lets just say I was sad. Very sad. 

I continued my explorations and discovered that this future thing was unravelling like a cheap sweater in a bramble bush. Older folks didn’t need to see the future as they reused their old futures but yes even their futures were waning. 

And then this morning the UN report on the climate crisis stated that the Climate Emergency was irreversible. 

Scientists had known it was a grim situation for some time. In the last three weeks I had read three different articles stating that we had twenty years or less before it was all gone. Whats gone you say? 

Society will be the first to unravel. We are seeing that, ever increasingly, now. I won’t get into the details. The symptoms are simple enough. When the populous bypasses the leader/organizer of something it ceases to exist. Its magic and predictable and top secret. The social structure will be set adrift, disconnected from people trying to survive or even hold on dearly to any part of the status quo. When everyone starts to buy weapons and cases of canned beans, well its not hard to see what future they see. 

Society includes business and industry as well. No jobs or customers makes for a cranky mob and a starving investor base. Pretty grim. Pretty soon. Sigh.

Life support is the next to fail. Exponentially increasing atmospheric pollutants will cause mass asphyxiations long before we are overwhelmed by sea level rise or even deadly heat levels. Air conditioning depends upon electricity which depends upon modest use. When the temperatures are at 110 so many air-conditioners are working so hard and drawing so much electricity that rolling blackouts change genres from mechanical to medical. And food, well the fish are baking or boiling and the cows are no longer popular. And there isn’t enough (or too much) water for agriculture.  Sigh. 

And for those in the know, the gulf stream disappearing, at any moment also in the news lately, is a pretty big deal for weather and food. 

And of course that silly wall won’t solve anything. Everyone will be headed to Labrador to purchase farm land. Or somewhere where they are not wanted. Sigh.

Ok, ok, I wouldn’t be writing this if I didn’t think there wasn’t a glimmer of hope. There is a glimmer.

We have to stop burning crude oil NOW. My SolidWater™ commercial ship propeller will reduce atmospheric pollution by 6% a year within 6 years. 

We have to make our air-conditioners up to the task. And use much less energy. My SolidAire™ fan will reduce atmospheric pollution and fan energy by seven eights. Thats roughly eight times as efficient as traditional rotating fans. That’s a reduction of eleven percent in atmospheric pollution. It will take roughly seven years to institute this change. And remember it will be accomplished in a chaotic social environment. 

I have developed a group of technologies that will allow the supply of water to various sites, both agricultural  and urban, in abundance. Units of eighty-eight million gallons of fresh water. At the moment the water will cost less than they are paying now. I have discovered a limitless source of offshore water close to the California coast.

This is the tip of the melting iceberg. I have over 100 breakthrough inventions that have been reduced to practice (demonstrated to work) and can be implemented expediently. 

Assuming any one cares. But we best not wait. Nineteen years isn’t that long, especially with everything else coming apart at the seams at the same time. 

And for my part, I will be sure to let you know when I see kids that once again have a future.