Michael nodded. Screw humans. I want to know what the aliens know… I want to live how they live.
“Man had discovered zero-point-energy as far back as the early 1900s, only the technology was purposely stymied. From the 1950s on, a cabal composed of oil oligarchs, bankers, and defense contractors secretly black-shelved all ZPE breakthroughs, as well as all clean energy and anti-gravitic technologies. Greed not only caused billions of people to suffer needlessly, but the forced extension of the fossil fuel age was poisoning our planet.”
The view of Earth disappeared, becoming a river reflecting a clear blue sky. Brown-skinned children were playing along a grass-covered shoreline, elder men fishing from a modern pier.
“Do you recognize this city, Mr. Sutterfield?”
“I don’t know… somewhere in India maybe?”
“Correct. This is the Yamuna River in New Delhi… the way it looks today thanks to a robust economy ushered in by zero-point-energy. Over a hundred state-of-the-art sewage and water treatment plants were opened in the last fifteen years. New clean energy industries have taken root, employing what was once a destitute and dying lower class. Now observe the same scene twenty years ago.”
The image changed, the river darkening into brown sludge, its putrid surface specked by islands of garbage. Piles of refuse lined the shore. The pier was gone, replaced by a wrought-iron bridge, its belly bleeding rust into the waterway. Naked children bathed and drank in the shallows while adults unabashedly squatted into the cesspool, emptying their bowels.
“That’s disgusting. Don’t they have toilets?”
“The toilets are backed up with raw sewage, and there are no sources of clean water. And it wasn’t just the Yamuna. Eighty percent of India’s human waste ended up in its rivers, which could no longer support life. Dysentery and disease swept through the country, the death toll in the millions. But water pollution was not their only problem. Air pollution, caused by vehicles and coal-fired plants had created dark cloud banks of smog which covered much of India and China, blotting out the sunlight needed to grow crops while altering weather patterns in North America.”
The scene changed again, this time to an African village where half-naked dark skinned natives were running in fear from dark-skinned soldiers firing assault rifles. Several women carrying young children were chased into a white stucco church.
The teen found the violence enticing. “Where is this place?”
“At the time, the nation was known as South Sudan. The country remained divided by a civil war between multiple tribes that raged for decades. The men assaulting those women were members of the White Army, a heavily armed Nuer civilian youth brigade. Invading a Dinka village, they would steal their livestock and then rape and mutilate the women, butchering the men and enslaving their children. Unable to farm, the people were systematically starving to death. Things got so bad that two million Africans actually abandoned their homes to live in refugee camps. One of the poorest countries in the world, South Sudan and its people had no future… until a new energy technology was introduced in Africa.
“This is New South Sudan today.”
As Michael watched, the image of the burning straw thatched huts faded into a modern rural community of brick and mortar. An agriculture center sat adjacent to miles of corn fields, the crops supplied with water from feeder pipes linked to high-tech industrial wells powered by small hockey-puck-sized devices — the zero-point-energy unit humming with power.
The view changed. Rising silently in the sky, Michael looked down upon a new network of tarmac roads connecting African village to African village. Soaring higher, he passed over a gleaming metropolis before heading west over the Sahara.
What was once tens of thousands of square miles of empty desert had been transformed into farmland communities, the crops, orchards, and grasslands drawing water from man-made reservoirs. Above-ground pipes connected these enormous caches to city-size filtration plants situated along the Atlantic Ocean.
Michael knew about these giant desalination factories; each was powered by a zero-point-energy device no larger than the pod he was now sitting in. The Sahara Project was not only feeding the African and Asian continents with pesticide-free food, but the artificial lakes and reservoirs — each built with retractable roofs — had been strategically placed to disrupt the intense dry summer heat rising over North Africa’s desert — the cause of Atlantic Ocean-bound hurricanes. As a result, man could now diffuse one of the deadliest and most costly weather systems on the planet.
With free, clean and abundant energy, anything was possible.
His instructor continued the tour, contrasting the problems of the past with the solutions of the present. They traversed the Persian Gulf where oil refineries and rigs had been replaced by modern neighborhoods; then flew over the California coast where desalination plants similar to the ones used in the Sahara. They ensured the harsh droughts, which had threatened to extend the desert all the way to the Pacific coastline, would never return.
After a few more stops, Michael found himself back in space, staring once more at the Earth.
“We are now observing our planet as it appeared twenty years ago.”
“It looks about the same to me.”
“The extinction threat cannot be seen by the naked eye.”
As Michael watched, a lime-green haze appeared to bloom over North America. “What is that?”
“Methane. It is a greenhouse gas thirty-five times stronger than carbon dioxide. For decades methane had been escaping from underground coal seams and at natural gas rigs. The oceans absorbed much of this methane, along with CO2 from coal plants and carbon monoxide from cars. Then a new technique known as fracking was introduced.
“Fracking released intolerable levels of methane gas, but because the gas was invisible and the fracking generated vast amounts of wealth, humanity was slow to act. Then, in 2017, the Trump Administration removed virtually every environmental safeguard, and within two years, our planet experienced a runaway greenhouse effect.
“Over three hundred million people died of cancer and respiratory illnesses related to methane poisoning from 2019 through 2021; their deaths kept hidden from the public. Another two billion starved when the planet’s ecosystem shut down because of banks of smog clouds which blanketed parts of Earth’s atmosphere, cutting off the amount of sunlight needed to grow food.
Only the planet-wide shut down of fossil fuels, coupled with the advent of zero-point-energy and new technologies which eventually reversed greenhouse gases, prevented Earth from ending up like Mars—
— a dead world.”
12
The late night TV host sat behind his studio desk, allowing his wife, Claire, to powder the shine on his forehead.
Richard Gatenby was born and raised in Portsmouth, a city in the south of England. He had dropped out of school at sixteen, was married by nineteen, and spent most of his free time playing football (rugby) where his “win or die” persona could be properly directed. When a brutal tackle by two rivals sidelined him with a broken leg and a ruptured thigh muscle, the weekend brawler channeled his gregarious personality into a satirical talk show called “Let’s Get Randy with Dickie.” Uploaded onto YouTube, the videos quickly went viral where he was discovered by a program director for a local FOX affiliate in Dallas, Texas… and another talk show phenomenon was born.