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Lucy Goes Back To The Future: mOOn platOOn says ABC Docudrama Sucks
On June 2, 2009 ABC-TV in America presented a two-hour science fiction docudrama showing Lucy living until 2100 A.D., with the world crumbling about her steadily.
It was all doom and gloom about the environment and global warming. According to the consulted experts, 2015 is the turning point. If we don’t do “something” by then, humanity’s debris will destroy our civilization and take a lot of species along with us into oblivion.
I guess they didn’t hear that the world is ending in 2012 (see Mayans).
Essentially, New York City will be flooded by 2071 or so, and America’s Southwest will be one big, ghost-region, waterless dessert. Vegas will be abandoned.
Traveling through America’s Southwest, according to the dramatization, will be a crude return to the lawless days of the wild west. And the Northeast, while somehow holding out as American Paradise the longest, finally succumbs to barbarism, or as ABC promotes it, a return to “The Dark Ages.”
Ever notice how, when the dilettante futurologist ponders more than a couple of decades into tomorrow, the future becomes the past? Wild wests and Dark Ages and, as Arthur C. Clarke would have put it, “a failure of imagination.”
Network wonks will argue that the purpose of the amateurish sci-fi presentation was to raise awareness of global warming and prompt international cooperation in curbing industrial causes. Okay, then why make it boring and monotoned? With minor adjustments, their entire future looks and feels exactly like our present. As if, in 1909, ABC Theatre Productions staged a play about the year 2000 where the climate had changed radically but everyone still rode around primarily in horse-drawn carriages.
I submit that we must expect both the unexpected (?) and the obvious (unmentioned), the obvious being War.
Would a 1909 speculator have assumed development of interplanetary rockets? Or equal rights for all citizens? Or the widespread use of X-rays? Or television? Radio? Punk music? Open candor about the love that cannot be spoken? Nuclear power? Female liberation?
Between now and 2100 many wild cards will be dealt. Some will help solve the very problems we see as insurmountable. Others will destroy many of us despite our best efforts. A few will do both.
Although, ABC contends that jets very similar to today’s will still be operating in 2080-something as Plan B to fog over the Earth and cause global cooling…
Meanwhile, in their little drama, the men-folk dropped like flies generation by generation, the prediction of widows heavy in the air. Why? Heroics. Women still like to stay close to safety zones during the life-threatening crisis, it seems.
I almost got mad at Lucy when she decided to have a kid herself. How dare she? Hadn’t she noticed that the planet was deteriorating rapidly? Didn’t she listen to her parents’ stories about how cool it was when they were kids compared to when even SHE was a kid? Was she crazy? It was like delivering a sane person into a madhouse.
My prediction: There is going to be a major war. It will wipe out about 3 billion people over a decade somewhere in the next 50 years. It will likely be centered in Western Asia and the Middle East but will violently touch every continent on Earth.
Deaths around the globe will be attributed to this war, and opportunities to rebuild and ecologize the infrastructure will abound.
Just wanted to mention it, because ABC forgot to. Along with the fusion battery. And the matter reconfigurer. And the enhancement-viruses. And personal inertia. And icon-love droids. And so on….
You know, collectively we’re going through a bit of a guilt phase. Let’s clean up our act, but knock off the fear factor. Dumb ass drama poorly executed comes off like mere propaganda. Honestly, who are we kidding? With modern knowledge we can see some of the inadvertent blockhead moves we made in the past – such as putting major cities in the paths of annual hurricane zones and potential flood sites – but instead of moving, we’re going to build a wall? Yeah, I want my baby and my wife behind a wall that holds Death back. Home sweet home.
Knowing how dangerous some of the places are where we choose to live, and seeing the still-available acreage that is yet unused, maybe a long-term moving plan is also a practical idea.
I understand some land is opening up on Greenland and there may soon be some exposure in Antarctica.
Well, in case you feel like catching my own version of an even farther future, you can go to mOOn platOOn in space: YEAR 2140
PS ---à wish it had been Lucille Ball.
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