The chronicle of 2200

Found in an old manuscript in the ruins of an old university:

Well this year has been pretty much the same as those that went before. We planted crops, most of which failed because we only had the poverty of seeds we could find by the side of the now-decayed roads. Out children died of diseases that were once thought to be gone. It is time at the end of this century to reflect on the past two centuries - the second dark ages...

It is astounding to think that we have come to this pass after rising so high in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. We once went to the moon, but now we can barely make a 100km trek to trade with the sparse settlements left after the great collapse. We once knew the weather a week in advance, and now we rely on "shepherd's delight". And the reason is that people retained their faith in what went before the rise of science, and opposed science itself whenever they could.

It all began in the middle of the twentieth century. In hindsight we can see that scientists had predicted the problems that eventually brought us to our knees, but industry, and special interests represented by bought and paid for politicians, bent on exploiting the present by mortgaging the future, built up a distrust of science and a weakness of will to deal with the coming problems.

These special pleaders denied that prevention was better than expensive technological cures in medicine, the environment, the peak of oil production and the increasing lack of clean water. They used petroleum for plastics that they buried when used, or threw into the sea. They overfished and overfertilised and tore down the forests from which all living resources came. They destroyed the climate by pushing carbon and other chemicals into the atmosphere.

Worse, they decreasingly funded research that might have helped ameliorate the disaster. Instead they stole public funds to advance their own agendas, fight useless wars, and wasted incredible amounts of metals, which will never be available again, along with all the other nonrenewable resources, for present gain.

They even started to attack the safest, cheapest and best form of medicine - vaccines - that had saved so many from early death or disfigurement. They made their populace eat food that was less nutritious than that which their own ancestors had eaten, although fresh food was freely available.

In several countries, such as America and Europe and their former colonies, which used the bulk of the wealth of the earth, they even tried to prevent the prophetic voices that cried doom from even speaking. For a while, there was a worldwide communication system open to all, but increasingly they closed those doors and pulled down those pulpits, all in the name of national security. And so the old tribalisms revived, and we slowly fell into the medievalism of the past while the seas rose and the storms brewed, literally and metaphorically. The water wars lasted for fifty years, and millions - billions - died, until only a few small revenant populations survived.

It was nothing like their apocalyptic films portrayed, but one day we looked about and saw that we were worse off than those who had survived the black death in Europe. Without oil to transport goods and food, without accessible minerals in the absence of mining technologies that relied on the oil, and in the absence of manufacturing that spanned the earth and made available to any society with the money the high technologies that their society was based upon, things simply... failed.

In retrospect it is glaringly obvious that their technology and social and economic structure was fragile, and vulnerable to many critical failures. Eventually, no technology that could not be learned from a book and made locally was possible, although we still trade in the remnants that we now, too late!, recycle from the excesses of the high period.

Even as I write, the religious fanatics control our small isolated villages and few remaining cities, none of which even approach a mid-West American township in complexity. If they ever find this chronicle, oh reader, I am done for, for heresy and doubt. But the truth is, they missed their chance, our ancestors, and we are paying off their debt with the lives of our underfed and disease-ridden children.

We will never go to the moon again. We will never search the skies for other life. We will never even make vaccines that allow all our children to live past five. But if we ever do, I hope that the generations that achieve it learn from the stupidity and denialism of the past. It was an expensive lesson - I hope we have properly learned it. Oh reader of the future, mark well the mistakes of the past.