The Next Ten Thousand Years
Our Ecotechnic Future?
What would our world look like in ten, a hundred, a thousand, or ten thousand years from now? Usually this territory belongs to science fiction, envisioning our species colonizing not only the solar system but the entire galaxy. Sci-fi novels and movies, however, have a really bad tendency to disregard biophysical reality—even physics itself—making them a very poor tool to understand what awaits our species and the more than human world. So, following the footsteps of Ugo Bardi and John Micheal Greer, who set out to predict the next 10 billion years, allow me to take you on a journey into a much more realistic version of the future. Unlike these two great authors before me, whose writing focused primarily on the effects of global heating and laying out vague ideas about the technology of the future, let me show you the real, practical, technical challenges facing future human civilizations to come. At least, the way I see it.
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Before we delve in, let me start by stating that what follows is not what I wish to see. Quite to the contrary: I really wish we could find a way around our problems, accepting reality as it is and devising ways together to adapt to our rapidly changing circumstances as gracefully and as humanely as possible. I believe there is a way to hospice modernity and to dismantle industrial civilization peacefully, getting rid of both wars and tyrants during the process. However, based on our current trajectory, that’s definitely not where we are headed.
Civilizations follow a predictable trajectory of rise, prosper and fall, obeying the universal laws of biology, physics, and geology; reinforced by institutional inertia and proven by historical records. At the same time, while being deterministic, our future remains totally unpredictable and shrouded in mystery: there are simply too many unknown unknowns and moving parts to make sound predictions. Thus what you will read here is nothing but a possible outcome—the one I see most probable out of the billions of potential versions of the future. So, do not take any of this as a prediction, but rather as a thought experiment; a work of fiction, intended to spark new ideas, questions, and perhaps some answers. And while some of what follows might seem overly pessimistic, I don’t want you to lose faith in our future either: things, as I said might as well turn out to be far better than we fear at the moment. I hope this little story will help you understand the world around you at least a bit better than those “science” fiction caricatures of a future, which is the most unlikely to come.
Ten Years from Now
July 4, 2036. The world has become a fragmented, untrusting place. Instead of the emergence of a much hoped for ‘multi-polar world’ we see a bitter struggle for control. Geopolitics is dominated by a set of “bunker states”, a category which now includes all former western democracies as well. Constantly at a low intensity, but all encompassing (economic, cyber, trade, and sometimes kinetic) war with each other, neither “side” can claim victory, though. Conflicting spheres of interest and wars waged through proxies is the name of the game now. The world has been caught up in a destructive competition for control over resources, energy and politics.
Years of ever harsher rivalry, unsustainable debt overhang and a general crisis of unaffordability has led to a series of major economic downturns. Unlike most financial crises in the past, however, this one has evolved into a never-ending story of bank and business failures, followed by mergers, then another round of bankruptcy. Asset and stock market bubbles burst violently, only to be re-inflated in a couple of months time by central bank interventions. These wild oscillations, however, could not hide the long term trend of decline and devaluation, let alone the real life effects of accelerating deindustrialization: rising unemployment and a relentless increase in poverty. The K-shaped economy of the 2020’s gradually gave way to an LV economy: a staircase-like series of drops (L’s) for the 99% of people and a V-shaped rebound for the top 1%.
“Louis Vuitton for me, potato sack for thee…”
The only way to quell the resulting social unrest and public discontent over stratospheric levels of inequality was to turn both America and Europe into a Trans-Atlantic military dictatorship in all but its name. For the sake of defending “national security” civil rights and voting are now severely constrained. People are under 24/7 AI-based surveillance, much like in China and Russia. Mass arrests, restricted movement, and the establishment of internment camps have become routine measures. Despite all this, however, the discontent felt over a failing economy is just keeps building up—a civil war is clearly on the horizon. China and Russia, too, are both experiencing a severe economic downturn and civil unrest, urging their leaders to tighten their grip on power even further. “Leaders” across the world are becoming ever more desperate.
Meanwhile world aggregate fossil fuel production peaked in 2029 as the depletion of rich, easy-to-get deposits accelerated over 7% per year, and as new discoveries proved to be wholly inadequate to compensate the fall in conventional oil and gas production. Coal, dependent on cheap electricity and liquid fuels to be mined is on the decline since the late 2020’s already. The resulting fall in dispatchable electricity generation and a chronic diesel fuel shortage is now making the ongoing worldwide economic decline even steeper. And since manufacturing “renewables” would require more (not less) mining, the depletion of rich copper, silver and other reserves, has effectively put a cap on wind turbine and solar panel production as well. Production plants of all kinds are forced to shut down for weeks, sometimes for months at a time, due to a lack of energy; driving most of them bankrupt in a matter of years.
The lack of fuel further incentivized nations to openly seize tankers and to sabotage each other’s infrastructure in the hope that this would “surely bring them to their knees!” [sic], while providing a lifeline to their own economies. In reality, the lack of energy and falls in consumer demand has led to a rapid deindustrialization worldwide, with most of the resources and energy now being diverted to drone and missile production. Universal basic income has been given a try in many places but it only created more inflation of basic necessities, as neither the necessary resources nor the production capacity were there for growth to return. Shortages, and price spikes for certain commodities in high demand have become everyday realities. Just like rebounds on the stock market, these trends were rather short lived, though, as sudden price increases and physical shortages quickly resulted in a further round of demand destruction.
The once thriving global industrial civilization—whose growth was predicated entirely on extracting cheap non-renewable resources—is now facing a jagged but collective and unstoppable decline; made all the worse by aggressive competition in a new era of never-ending, nebulous hybrid and proxy wars.
World population peaks at 8.7 billion, with nations everywhere around the globe facing a combined crisis of ageing and a lack of childbirths. Meanwhile, global temperatures on average are getting dangerously close to 2°C above pre-industrial level… And even though CO2 emissions have stopped rising due to a worldwide peak in fossil fuel output, the worst of climate change is still in the pipeline.
A Hundred Years From Now
April 14, 2126. After a long, tumultuous, often chaotic and cruel century, the world has finally found peace again. Not because there was a major peace conference ending all wars, but because former nation states slowly stopped being states, and run out of ammo. And when the Kessler-syndrome became a reality in 2038, following a stupid mistake in one of the satellite’s course correction data, all low orbit space craft have suddenly become space junk. This event has effectively blinded warring parties and made a coordinated strike on each other impossible. And if that major technical mishap were not enough, each former nuclear superpower has experienced a form of popular uprising not much later, resulting in a bunch of failed superstates. As part of this disintegration process, the maintenance of nukes themselves was also neglected. So when Missouri tried to launch its stockpile in the direction of Washington D.C. (following a particularly angry spat between two of the successor states of the former U.S.A.) their doomsday weapons turned out to be duds. It was a close call, though.
Needless to say, the political map of the world has become totally unrecognizable towards the end of the 21st century. Yes, there are still some states even today, but these are states in name only. Most nations have been effectively dissolved as there is nothing left to be governed: no economy, no finances, no wars. Maintaining complexity gradually became impossible due to a lack of adequate energy and mineral inputs. It took several decades, mind you—and not a few years—but eventually most surviving communities have become self-governed city states. Big cities have been all abandoned, as without supermarkets, let alone a working water and sewage system, they have all slowly became uninhabitable, forcing people to leave.
World fossil fuel production is getting close to zero as I write this. Apart from a few places with still producing wells, there is not much coal, oil and gas left to be recovered economically. Not that we have the economy, let alone the technology to do so: after a multi-decade-long industrial decline and the complete loss of mining during the 21st century, we could no longer drill more wells or build more equipment. All we have now are some meticulously maintained generators and engines running on seed oil, but not much more. Most of the work is performed by hand, makeshift mechanical wind and water mills, and other low-tech equipment made from what you would surely call “junk.” Abandoned mega-cities are visited frequently by horse drawn caravans looking for valuable stuff to be used in our rural communities. You see, ours have become an ecotechnic, ‘scavenger economy’ actively repurposing every building material, and using every piece of unused equipment as a source of spare parts.
As part of our efforts to improve the efficiency of recycling, we have rediscovered bronze as a strong, corrosion resistant, yet easy to cast metal in tool making. Instead of working our asses off cutting down an entire forest with hand tools and making tons of charcoal just to make some steel (then burn at least as much charcoal again to shape that metal into an axe), we use quarter to half as much fuel to melt aluminum and copper wires in a crucible and cast a tool, or spare machine part for that matter. You would be surprised how well rediscovering metallurgy worked for us.
Unfortunately, the same could not be told about the climate. Although there are no official measurements any more, we estimate that we have crossed the 4°C mark somewhere around the turn of the century. After the AMOC shut down completely in 2050, Europe began to experience severe winters again. Combined with scorching hot, bone dry summers, this has made agriculture mostly impossible across much of the old continent, forcing many people to migrate. Meanwhile, global heating, in combination with the loss of cooling technology, has rendered much of the tropics uninhabitable for at least 2-3 months a year.
World population is now estimated to be slightly above 2 billion. While many have lost their lives due to wars, heat waves and famines, the vast majority alive in the early 1990’s, have died due to old age. Of course, they did not live as long as their parents did, but most lived to see their sixties. So by the time Earth’s temperature rose above 3°C in the second half of the 21st century, natural population decline and a lack of births have halved world population, easing the pressure somewhat. And as economic conditions kept deteriorating, even less people wanted to have a family, which has eventually led to a veritable population collapse “by choice,” decimating world population in less than a century.
A Thousand Years From Now
September 12, 3026. Or shall I say, Tukkimakk 28, 763? Or Lunardi 16, 5248? You see, the world no longer has a unified time and date system, as re-emerging pockets of human “civilizations” in the third millennia have completely lost touch with each other, and their past. When talking about those “civilizations” don’t think of high tech cities, and space travel, though. Rather, neolithic villages scattered around a narrow habitable zone just south of the Arctic circle...
Meanwhile, the rest of the planet has totally “rewilded itself,” as a few invasive species found a new home around the globe and as a new “normal” has started to set in. Needless to say, this is no longer the same planet you used to know as a “modern” 21st century human. See, polar ice caps are a thing of the past since centuries now, with sea levels climbing 70 m (230 ft) higher as a result. Jungles have been replaced by a wild combination of heat tolerant Kudzu and savannas, with deserts reaching as North as Central Europe and with much of the Great Plains having been turned into a steamy salt marsh. (Don’t even try to match your climatic zones from a thousand years before our time to what we have here… As I said, this is now a completely different planet.)
Technology wise, you might be surprised that we live just like your ancestors did 10,000 BCE. After a brief revival of metallurgy around the 25th and 26th century, there is not much metal left to be recycled, let alone to be mined on this planet. So, while the retreat of ice caps (especially on Greenland) have exposed some pretty nice deposit of ores, people no longer had the help of fossil fuels to mine and smelt all of those. The easiest to get portions were scooped up by sailors and were shipped back to the Arctic Empire for processing. The rest, had to be left in place. So while the world experienced a 200-year long revival of literature, science, math, technology as new resources entered the economy, they could not make prosperity last for another millennia. The resources were simply too thin, not to mention the gradual decrease in habitable area compared to prior eras.
After the last major civilization fizzled out towards the end of the third millennium, at least humans stopped polluting Earth, even though the legacy of prior attempts is still here to haunt us. We have learned to live without technology and to avoid forsaken places where calves born with six legs and where brown water seeps from underneath the ground. We teach our children to respect the living world and tell them to think seven generations ahead. We no longer believe we’re the masters of this living planet—we’re but one of the few species left inhabiting it.
Ten Thousand Years From Now
“Date? What is a date? And what do you mean by sivilli-zai-shon? Techno-what? Metals? You mean this?” [Shows you a polished shell.] People ten thousand years from now have completely forgotten what civilization is—but not because they are crude, brutish and uneducated (as many liked to think of indigenous folks in your age). Language itself has undergone a gazillion transformations, with new words entering, but many more leaving your descendants vocabulary. Hundreds of generations grew up not having the faintest idea what a skyscraper or a cell phone is, how they could’ve looked like, or how they were used. All what they have now is made from wood, stone and animal products… Hence the lack of words for glass, steel or concrete—without which imagining the 20th and 21st century is quite hard, to say the least.
Now, that there is absolutely zero mined minerals and metals left, let alone arable land suitable for intensive grain agriculture, your descendants in the far future have returned to agro-forestry: a combination of planting trees producing edible nuts, while hunting the by then recovering wildlife for meat. Naturally, this kind of lifestyle, adapted to a set of changed circumstances, can no longer support hundreds of millions worldwide. World population is now estimated to be around a few hundred thousand, or a million at best. Meanwhile Earth continued it’s long journey towards a recovery from the human experience. New ecosystems started establish themselves. A new era of speciation has begun.
Over the following hundreds of thousands of years a much better adapted hominid species emerged as a result of evolutionary pressures, eventually crowding out Homo sapiens entirely. Our story (or to be more precise: our genetic lineup) ends here, but the story of life continues. Our planet finally returns to a climatic equilibrium, and begins to cool slowly as rock weathering slowly reduces the CO2 content of the atmosphere… Up to a point, where there is not enough of this vital plant nutrient to grow trees, and grasslands (having a more efficient photosynthetic process) take their place. As more and more CO2 gets sequestrated, though, ice ages return, only to fade away some ten million years later as the Sun gets gradually hotter. New species continue to emerge, hominids disappear altogether, and life goes on without “intelligent” beings for tens of millions of years.
Newly emerging intelligent creatures, perhaps, then find new coal and metallic ore deposits, as Earth’s crust will have gone through some serious remodeling by then due to plate tectonics. Will they start an industrial civilization then? Will they discover traces of our presence, a few millimeter thick, radioactive and carbon rich sediment layer in the rocks they mine? Or will they come to be at all? It is impossible to tell at this point. One thing seems to be sure: our long journey down the carbon pulse, together with the rest of our story, will be no less spectacular than our rise to where we are at the moment.
Until next time,
B
Thank you for reading The Honest Sorcerer. If you value this article or any others please share and consider a subscription, or perhaps buying a virtual coffee. At the same time allow me to express my eternal gratitude to those who already support my work — without you this site could not exist.
Much food for thought here and that’s what I hate about dying. I will never know what really happens.
Thoughtful and much needed predictions for our future as natural resources are further depleted, top soil gives way to desertification, our 3,000 times massive human overpopulation begins to crash from population density stress, the 6th extinction proceeds to the ends of the earth, estrangement from Nature makes us increasingly psychotic and "unhinged" from reality, the increasing (sic) burning of fossil fuels speeds heat energy accumulation in the biosphere, our hydrological AC is increasingly overwhelmed, formerly sequestered pathogens explode into areas occupied by humans and domestic animals, families become evermore fragmented from one diaspora after another, intellectual functioning is ever more neglected and relegated to the "technoworld", and Freud's "thanatos" predominates the psyche in the end times. Have a blessed day and think long and hard about bringing another innocent life to bear in a dying world.