Carl Sagan said, "if you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe." Of course, "from scratch" means from nothing. As I interpret his saying, nothing comes from nothing except the Big Bang. And even that belief has a few dissidents.
A simpler way of saying this is that everything since then was preceded by some causal event. If this is true, it must follow that events today will cause events tomorrow and all the tomorrows of our future.
So given our seeming inability to deal with our real issues and instead focus on simple-minded concerns like some movie star's sexual orientation, one hundred years from now things might look like this:
Half of the people on the planet refused to believe the climate scientists and now the Earth is a devastated, dying world. Population is 12 billion. The insatiable demand for natural resources has depleted the Earth's own supplies and off-world mining is not a reality yet. The population explosion created a rampant consumerism, spurred on by unregulated capitalism.
The climate has permanently changed. Warmer temperatures accelerated the spread of and consequently the mutation of diseases. Over-use of antibiotics rendered them ineffective and created devasting infections by resistant super-bugs that evolved to have immunity from them. Major plagues break out sporadically and take millions of lives. Governmental austerity programs in the early 21 century set medical and scientific research back decades and now there are no effective medical treatments on the horizon.
Those same austerity programs defunded education at the elementary levels producing poorly educated adults who today cannot cope with the myriad problems that plague humanity. Their lack of critical thinking skills, a scarcity of enormous proportions, has made the average voter incapable of a reasoned decision to protect his or her own interests.
A series of disastrous elections of purchased politicians who ignored their constituencies' needs in the early 21st century produced governments owned by corporations and the mega wealthy. Consequently, respect for formal authority eroded. With the loss of voluntary respect for authority, the use of force is now the only mechanism for maintaining order. The effect of force continues to erode as more and more people wake up to the fact that their elected government doesn't represent their interests and police departments are paid enforcers.
So-called sovereign citizen groups are now enjoying exponential growth in popularity as an informal defense mechanism. In response, normal systems of crime prevention long ago morphed into militarized police state tactics.
The "Black Lives Matter" movement in the early 21st century was the canary in the mineshaft. The white majority paid little attention to it because it seemed to only affect minorities. They thought they were saved by the biological crap-shoot of the color of their skin.
Success at the privatization of public services, including the prison system, exacerbated the problem with the governmentalization of the profit motive and any vestiges of a minimally-functioning judicial system died along with the ideal of equality for all under the law.
The corporate takeover of the country is now complete and Marx's prediction of a society whose primary value of all transactions is financial, came true. Today, the inherent worth and dignity of a human life has been replaced with its market value.
On a positive note, shareholder value has been optimized.
As the suicidal seed of capitalism started its self-destruction, corporations have begun their downward spiral into oblivion and a new social order is beginning to form on the horizon while the mega rich peer over locked gates from their private islands. The people's government crumbled long ago.
Hermes, Greek god of commerce or Mercury, Roman god of financial gain, have long ago replaced the God of love, mercy and compassion. Maybe they know what will come next.
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