Alternate Title: A Nightmare Vision of the Future
I’m telling you, folks, this futurist’s substack has been great for my blog.
The question this futurist asked yesterday is “What science fiction technologies do you wish were real?”
Lots of predictable stuff. I even chimed in to suggest a space elevator or gravity manipulation, mostly because those are macguffins I use in my science fiction.
One comment presented a case for time travel that was alarming. I reproduce the comment in full:
Time travel so I could bring a bunch of climate scientists, activists and storytellers back for a redo on resisting fossil fuel companies. We’d send some to the 1870’s and some to each decade thereafter in a coordinated effort to short circuit the birth of the modern PR movement and paint fossils [sic] as the filthy planet-destroyers they are. That’s just for a start.
There’s a lot to unpack here.
First and foremost, the idea of using time travel for political activism is deeply disturbing. It never occurred to me, and I have thought about and written time travel based fiction. Politicizing time itself. Just wow.
The three privileged groups to earn their ticket to the past to save the future are Scientists, Activists, and Storytellers. Scientists willing to go back in time to push an agenda just are activists. Activists just are story tellers because they are trying to tell a convincing story, a persuasive story, about some thing being more bad than we think it is. So what our commenter is saying here is that three kinds of story tellers will be telling three different kinds of politically aligned stories. The scientists will tell stories that are based on numbers for academic audiences; the activists will tell stories based on people for political audiences; the storytellers will tell scary stories to the wider public. Psychological warfare across time and space, my friends, that is what we are talking about here!
Of course, there’s no alternatives. We built modernity on cheap, efficient, power. That’s why they claim the world is wrecked. They love modernity but the original sin was building modernity on dinosaur squeezings. We don’t get an empire state building, iPhone, etc without good cheap black gold.
I don’t know why the commenter chose the 1870’s. Why not the 1800’s? Why not 1700’s? Coal has been available for all time, only in the industrial revolution did it start getting used for good cheap easy power.
So problems we are dealing with: 1- Time Terrorism. I just can’t even believe that climate change somehow justifies that. Staggering. 2- No alternative for fossil fuels, so get used to wooden ships and whalebone skirts. 3- Law of unintended consequences. If the whole world discovered the wonderful power density of Oil and chose not to exploit it, then one group gets competitive advantage by exploiting it, and they conquer the world in tanks because everyone else’s green-energy trebuchet’s are useless against them.
Time terrorism. Just amazing. I can’t believe it.
AMDG
Times-Dispatch of Vichy Earth 