Introduction to a Post-Human World
...where new, attractive body parts can be painted on or stripped off?
...where agility can be purchased?
...where every person has instant access to all available data?
...where your clothing can sense what you cannot?
...where you can download your technical operations skill?
...where anything from extinct animal species to diamonds can be fabricated to your exact specifications?
...where endurance, healing and immortality is just an extra hypodermic injection away?
...where the laws of physics no longer universally apply?
What do you do with an artificially intelligent singularity that can out-think you?
...that you can't live with, but can't live without?
...that operates with an unfathomable logic humans no longer understand?
...that is everywhere and nowhere?
...that can target you without error and kill you before your slow synapses even realized it was happening?
...that doesn't hate? ...doesn't love? ...doesn't serve? ...doesn't enslave?
Who are you in a world where humans are no longer the dominant species?
...where evolution has become optional?
...where the person next to you might not be a person?
...where everything you just accomplished can be undone by someone else's thought?
...where you may be the very thing you hate?
...where where you might be the last of your kind?
Welcome to the Twenty-Second Century
Happy New Year...At the beginning of the Twenty-First Century, humanity looked at its future. It had a right to be concerned. A growing population faced global warming, pandemics, food scarcity and malnutrition, poverty, resource depletion, globalist vs. radical extremist conflict, and local social disintegration. As the century deepened, new despots arose and new superpowers replaced old ones. Economic instability fueled nationalist protectionism as the balance of power shifted to end both communism and democracy.
But instead of taking responsibility for itself and fixing its problems, humanity turned to its oldest ally—technology. As an old proverb about problem solving went, the answer was to "get a bigger hammer." The fears of the early century were paved over and kicked down the road. Now, on the eve of the year 2100 C.E. some wonder if the hammer used is now so big that humanity itself has been split apart.
Table of Contents
The Setting of Earth in the Year 2100 C.E.
If you belong to the human subspecies Homo sapiens sapiens in the Twenty-Second Century, you are in for a rough time. The world is hotter, more polluted and more irradiated. The weather is more chaotic. Technology is so ubiquitous that it has become difficult to know where biology ends and technology begins. Social upheaval and revolution is an almost daily occurrence. The forces of creation and evolution seem to have been wrested out of the hands of god and nature and are now in the possession of the powerful elite.
But it is also a glorious time to be alive! Every human being has the potential to become gods themselves, unbound now by nothing but themselves. Mortality, disease, and resource scarcity are fading away, technology has the capability to make miracles commonplace, and we are taking our first steps away from Earth's cradle into the reaches of space—the only limit to the universe is a lack of creativity...and a new form of life that may be a new god already.
The Major Global Challenges
How did humanity deal with the problems of the preceding century?The Environment and Global Warming
Despite powerful denial in the early century, the fact and effects of average global temperature rise were felt regardless of human opinion and politics. Cities struggled with the rising sea levels and increases in severe weather occurrences. As usual, those with money and influence dealt with the problems on multiple levels. Those who didn't have such luxury fell into ruin. The waves reclaimed the land, which retreated like odd glaciers of asphalt and glass, concrete and steel, towards the inland.
The Arctic Ocean, now ice free, filled with shipping traffic. The economies of Panama, Egypt, and Singapore suffered while Russia, Canada, Alaska, and Scandinavia thrived. Greenland's icecaps melted at a much faster rate than predicted, and new lands opened there and in Siberia and Canada while places like Florida, Bangladesh and the Maldives slowly submerged. Amsterdam, New Orleans and Manhattan became modern versions of old Venice.
Emerging technologies changed the way humans interacted with the ocean itself. Cities, both floating and submerged, were engineered to withstand the increased frequency and ferocity of hurricanes. Islands were reinforced with concrete and aluminum. Meanwhile, humans engineered themselves with gills and flippers, and turned the seabeds into agricultural farms. Nanotechnology was employed to repair skin, organ, and lung tissue ravaged by ultraviolet radiation and pollution. Advanced intelligence robotics and nanotechnology was further employed to "mine" the mountains of trash in countless landfills, delivering pure mounds of iron, gold, carbon, phosphorous, and rare earth metals to their masters to be made into new products.
Biomass fell to its lowest level since the greatest extinctions ever known on Earth. But a revolution in genetic manipulation brought back extinct species and made them resistant to environmental degradation. Soon, even wholly mammoths and dinosaurs were found in biological preserves. But with this new ability came a kind of cavalier attitude with animals—why preserve habitat when we can just make new versions?
[ back to TOC ]Disease
The antibiotics of the previous centuries became useless by the mid-Twenty First century. New strains of influenza and outbreaks of Ebola and SARS crossed continents to ravage millions of people. But just as the old medicines failed, advances in nanotechnology and genetic engineering came to the rescue. Now in 2100, even viruses are combated one-on-one with machines. Human DNA infused with genetic manipulation has wiped out cancer, erased birth defects, and improved human abilities. Even Death itself is in full retreat since it is now possible to continually renew or replace aging and diseased human tissue as if it were a bad light bulb or oil change.
And yet, medical access, while miraculous, is still the domain of the rich and powerful. Even though technologies now exist to cure and heal nearly everything, the cost of this access is beyond much of the world's population. Even more at stake are the ethical issues brought about by these miracles of medical science: Who pays for the technology to combat super-plagues? What biomedical changes go too far? What might happen if the entirety of Earth's population is allowed to live forever? And if only some get access, who gets that privilege? Is storing a human's consciousness on a hard drive blissful afterlife or a prison?
Furthermore, disease seems to always evolve. From the early parts of the Twenty-First Century, new diseases emerged, such as the Coronavirus Pandemic, Blue Pox and the Cattle Flu. And diseases never before thought possible, such as the Zero-Virus, which is a blur between the technological and biological, have redefined pathology and even changed what it means to be human in the world today.
[ back to TOC ]Overpopulation
In 2100, nearly ten billion people crowd the planet (it would have gotten past that mark except for the impact of environmental effects, industrial pollution, and violent wars). Just over 400 thousand make their permanent residence in Earth orbit, nearly 290 thousand live on the lunar surface, and a couple thousand people now call Mars home.
Yet while the cities are densely populated, they are hardly the dirty, dark hellholes depicted in late Twentieth Century cyberpunk fiction. Many are very clean and efficient, especially with the help of robotic workers. Suburban and rural regions now enjoy a kind of beauty and recreation unseen in the last two centuries. Agriculture has become tremendously efficient, varied, and abundant—actually decreasing the necessary footprint needed to feed humanity and opening up more wild and park land. Millions of city-dwellers have fast access to these rural sites every weekend or holiday season.
[ back to TOC ]Resources and Energy
Humanity has dealt with the limited number of the Earth's resources as it always has since the first Industrial Revolution—by becoming more and more efficient with it. Robotics and nanotechnology is now able to manipulate matter on the molecular level with a micro-fraction of an energy source to do it. Robotic mining equipment is now able to extract resources from deep inside the Earth, even into the mantle. The largest mineral extraction sites are in the Earth's oceans, giving rise to aquatic cities of millions of inhabitants. Meanwhile a host of asteroids, meteors, comets, and the Lunar surface are now available for easier resource extraction. Even the rare earth metals once predicted to run out during the last century are either reclaimed, replaced, or found in previously unreachable and expensive sources.
Pure water has become the most precious, sought, and fought over resource in the world. Yet even here, technology is being used to convert billions of gallons of seawater and polluted water into fresh, drinkable water used for people, animals, agriculture and industry. Just one nanite "pill" can use solar energy to wretch the very air in order to turn carbon dioxide into H2O.
Despite what could be a post-scarcity world, poverty still exists. Because of the increased capability of robots and machines to create limitless objects, there is no longer much need for manufacturers and extraction workers. Who needs a salesperson when you can order what you want with exact specifications? Those capable of more abstract and creative thinking—artists, stock brokers, programmers and politicians—still seem to be in relative demand, but A.I. has even been able to perform those jobs adequately, even in such previously untouchable realms such as music, poetry and art. While the abstract economies still attract employment among those still ambitious enough to pursue them, there is a consensus that nobody needs that many of them. So with mass unemployment comes this mass poverty. Despite these dynamics, new markets in services and entertainment still emerged during the Twenty-First Century, and the wealthy still wished to invest in something. So new forms of employment often consisted of mass exploitation—sex, violence, and broadcast drama have never been so lucrative!
Energy has also been dealt with. As previously mentioned, machines in the year 2100 have become very efficient, requiring less per volume than its clunky predecessors of centuries past. Here, nanotechnology has also made solar, wind, thermal and other renewable resources incredibly efficient. Plastics are now produced using cellulose and the molecular manipulation of carbon using nanotechnology. Some had predicted the end to fossil fuels and nuclear waste, but coal, petroleum, and other fossil fuels are still fracked, extracted and burned. There are more nuclear power plants than ever before in history. Pollution and radiation are no longer regulated; they are dealt with by manipulating our cells and genes to take it.
The Social Challenges
Humanity used technology surprisingly well to solve the major global environmental issues of the Twenty-First Century. But technology had much less effect on social needs and changes. Perhaps the century could be summed up in the juxtaposition of two aphorisms:
- The only constant is change. And,
- The more things change, the more they stay the same.
And there was a lot of social change in the course of the century.
War
- The Second U.S. Civil War (a.k.a. the Weekend in America): to the majority of historians and political analysts, calling it a civil war is quite a stretch. However, the Coup of 2020 is seen as the first nail in the coffin for legitimate democracy in the United States and eventually led to the Democracy Crisis of the later Twenty-First Century. During the presidential elections of 2020, an increasingly paranoid and emboldened Donald Trump used the dictatorial executive authority given to him by the U.S. Senate earlier that year to issue nationwide martial law the day before Election Day. He justified his unconstitutional action as a necessary and appropriate response to a number of shifting and often contradictory reasons, including the first CoViD pandemic and subsequent economic fallout, Democrat conspiracy plots, and/or Russian or Chinese election interference (his own Twitter messages contradicted one another, and no proof of this actually occurring ever surfaced). The National Guard and voluntary paramilitary militias seized authority and shut down polling sites, arrested congressional Democrat and two Supreme Court judges for treason and collusion with foreign governments (unsubstantiated), and then finally marching anti-Trump protestors. Seizure of critical American news sources soon followed. By the morning of the fourth day, however, a military coup turned on their commander-in-chief and promised a swift return to democracy. The Twenty-Fifth Amendment was hastily enacted and prisoners were released. Although civilian control was eventually restored, the interim military government had to deal with the one-third of their own and a third of the American public who supported Trump's martial law. In the eyes of Americans and the world alike, the power of the United States was never trusted again, and the nation began its decline as a superpower.
- Nuclear Nonproliferation Fails:
- The Nuclear Destruction of Jerusalem: The rise of radical Christian terrorism after the Coup of 2020 eventually led to the dramatic destruction of Jerusalem. Several millennial Christian terrorist groups, most notably the so-called Army of Jesus (AoJ), claimed that "the destruction of Jerusalem would usher in the End Times Apocalypse" [sic] whereby Jesus would return as a king and claim the city. AoJ managed to obtain and detonate a small nuclear device at the Dome of the Rock holy site with the belief that their "heavenly king" would "miraculously remove the resulting radiation" and "resurrect the [Christian] righteous". Thousands of people were instantly vaporized and millions more suffered from radiation poisoning. The city became uninhabitable and the prophesied return of Jesus never materialized.
- The Pyongyang Conflict: despite the reunification efforts of Korea in the early century, the North Korean leader, Kim Jung Il returned to threatening the United States and its allies. After the American Coup, Kim used his tactic of threats and missile demonstrations to pry more control and consensus into his hands. North Korea launched a missile tipped with a nuclear warhead at Hawaii. Although it failed to reach its destination (some speculate the intent was merely a "shot across the bow" albeit a very dramatic one), a nuclear detonation occurred in the ocean between Guam and Hawaii. Despite the U.S. still being in transition from a military to civilian government, the reaction was swift and definitive. Several targets believed to be North Korean launch sites were annihilated in kind, and Pyongyang itself was subjected to an intense bombardment action lasting 38 days. Kim Jung Il is presumed to have died during the campaign.
- The Bombing of Tehran: The United States with Israel, Saudi Arabia, and a coalition of other nations detonated another nuclear device on a foreign power, but the detonation occurred miles above Tehran. The provocations of the American despot and his subsequent coup to hold onto power had lead the Iranian leadership to prematurely believe in the decline of American military power. As the world continued to recover from the first global pandemic, Iran found itself in conflict. Backed by Syria and Russia, an emboldened Iran sealed off the Persian Gulf and began open hostilities on first U.S. military ships, and then the ships of U.S. allies. The situation escalated until the detonation of the nuclear warhead above Tehran, at which point the Chinese stepped in. The Russians quickly withdrew support and the situation deescalated. However, radiation poisoning affected the region for a decade and the United States was ordered by the Revised United Nations Security Council to clean up and pay restitution (four to two with the U.K. abstaining).
- Various Acts of Terrorism: Arguably worse than missile strikes by nation states, the proliferation of use of radiological "dirty bombs" by non-state affiliated terrorist organizations caused more spread of radiation than all of the state-sponsored nuclear attacks combined (even factoring in the Pan-Asian War). Chemical gas and biological attacks also spread terror and chaos throughout the world. Hacker groups of all kinds—state sponsored, organized crime, and individual "hacktivist" groups—made cyberspace a battlefield to the point where cyber-attacks, illeagal crypto-laundering, and infrastructure destruction accounted for more than half of all global traffic.
- The Pan-Asian War: although it did involve other nations, the Pan-Asian War was fought primarily between India and its allies, and China, who had limited support from Pakistan and a few other allies. During this conflict, four nuclear detonations occurred: two by India, one by Pakistan, and one by China. Touched off by Chinese assertive claims in the east in Arunachal-Dupresh and Chinese damming of major fresh water river sources into India, the conflict quickly escalated to include Pakistan, India, and China in Jammu and Kashmir in the north. The first nuclear strike by Pakistan was retaliated by India in the Azad-Kashmir region. A second Indian strike in Tibet was met in kind by a Chinese strike. The mobilization of the Commonwealth and the remnant United States on the side of India along with pressure from both the European Union and Russia to cease hostilities eventually ended the conflict. But it was the largest war of the century which proved that the Chinese navy was now only stoppable by a combined force of the remaining Anglo-sphere.
The Democracy Crisis
The American Coup of 2020 is seen as the first crack in the shell of liberal democratic government. But it was hardly alone. Many autocrats acted under the facade of legitimacy, including Russia's Putin, China's Xi Jinping, America's Trump, the Philippine's Duterte, Brazil's Bolsonaro, North Korea's Kim, and Venezuela's Maduro. After the Coup and America's withdrawl from the United Nations and N.A.T.O., the world no longer considered the moral and political power of the United States seriously. With the fall of the world's old remaining superpower, the new rising superpowers began to openly vie for power—predominantly Russia, China, India, and Brazil.- The European Disintegration: Wrought with internal conflict, bickering due to lack of coordination on disease pandemics, economic imbalance and environmental degradation, and the break of the United Kingdom from the European Union in the early part of the century, most of the fighting in Europe was of a relatively minor nature. And most of this conflict was localized to the immigrant and refugee influx from Asian and Middle Eastern countries. Mostly borders were closed, refugee and immigrant camps and settlements were raided, and various crimes were committed. Terrorist acts of retaliation ensured that these sporadic outbreaks of violence would render many parts of Europe useless against the rising superpowers of Russia, China and India.
- The American Disintegration: The United States remained intact, but sorely wounded and ineffectual as the century wore on. No longer trusted and taken seriously, trade and diplomacy waned. This didn't result in the loss of American corporate power (which arguably grew stronger to fill the void in former state function) nor did it lead to a dissolution of the Union. However, it did leave America as anemic as Europe and only proved to be an irritation and/or impediment to the growing ambitions of Russia, China, India, and Brazil.
- The New Russian Empire: The legacy of Vladimir Putin's Russia in the early-to-mid century continued as new, young leaders built upon his expansionist foundation. No longer satisfied with the self-preservation of Russia or the re-acquisition of the former states of the old Soviet Union, Russia began to openly and blatantly interfere with world political order. Its tactics for planting chaos into longstanding democratic countries was an effective and inexpensive means of establishing itself as a stable alternative to the chaos of the crumbling democracies. Although never declaring itself an empire, the word was used among the world's leaders much as it had once used the term for the American or British Empires. Eventually, it engaged in various skirmishes, proxy wars, and "police actions" on behalf of the Reformed United Nations (particularly in the Middle East) but were really land grabs.
- The Chinese Empire: The investments in the early part of the century and the military island-building in the South China Sea paved the way for the Chinese government to become the world's top economic superpower. China used its economic might and its infiltration into governments in the Pacific Rim, Africa, South America, the Indian Ocean and other maritime interests to gain great influence. Many countries and companies had substantial loans to the Chinese government—particularly those in the southern hemisphere. Even democratic nations, eager to do business with the giant, capitulated to increasing Chinese boldness in even their internal affairs, particularly when free speech or human rights activists painted the Chinese in a critical light. And so long as these democratic governments valued capitalist ventures over political rights, the bulwark of democracy further crumbled and was seen more as obstructionist to economics than supportive. Although China showed no interest in expanding its borders formally, its government arguably controlled or significantly influenced a plurality.
- The Commonwealth Steps Up: As American and European power waned, the influence and power of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom-Scotland Coalition filled in the democracy gap. Often referred to as "The Commonwealth" their growing power was often joined by the remnants of the European Union, the Scandinavian Union, Japan, and even India to oppose the interests of Russia and China.
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