A day in the year 2100
Today is a special day as it marks the end of a century and the beginning of a new one! I don't know if it's just me but after waking up this morning, the air smelled finer, my room’s atmosphere looked brighter and my anxiousness felt lighter.
Every first of January and for as long as I can remember, I kept this habit of stating out loud, to everyone who deems to listen, that “THIS NEW YEAR IS MY YEAR” even though history proved me otherwise more than once… but hey, I am born a wishful thinker, and I will die a wishful thinker!
This Friday morning I stayed in bed for at least 2 hours gazing at the impact craters of the moon; the way they look coupled with their massive circumference has always humbled me, and — believe it or not — bought me peace of mind. WallX is a company I have admired since 2087, which corresponds to the year when they launched the first version of the WallroomX: a kind of software that allows an array of moving visuals to be fully integrated into the walls of a chosen space.
WallroomX was maybe the best gift I have ever received from my brother. As a photon engineer, he used to evangelize the technology as the best innovation of the decade, in his words: “How cool is that! all you need to do is task WallX to cover the walls of your room with a special magnetic and conductive coating and BAM!! you are able to visually teleport yourself anywhere in the universe!”. While the sight of the moon was my happy place, my brother Mikael would often program his office walls to showcase the idyllic long white beaches of the Maldives, it apparently helped him concentrate and evade at the same time—Good thing our parents were lucky enough to visit this blissful island before it ended up under the water about 30 years ago, who would have thought that a 1.1m increase in sea/ocean levels would be so destructive — .
After I finally decided to leave my bed, the first thing I did was take a rejuvenation or “a shower” how my parents still like to call it. They would tell me every now and then that, back in the days, people would wash their bodies using water mixed with something called soap. Even though I checked the concept on the Quantumnet, I still find it weird! and wasteful. I remember reading an article, a few weeks ago, about how the world fell critically short of water in the mid-2060s. At first, I found the information counter-intuitive considering that scientists found — maybe 15 years prior — better alternatives to Reverse Osmosis membranes, which made the process of separating minerals and ions (i.e. salt) from seawater cheaper to scale and, as a result, available for mass consumer adoption. But after finishing reading the article, what I found “counter-intuitive” wasn't anymore! Apparently, the 1 trillion tonnes of plastics that were polluting the oceans at the time, multiplied the nanoplastics to a point where it was present in nearly 100 % of the global waters (the reverse osmosis process wasn't able to filter the salt waters anymore which marked the beginning of what history named it “the existential water crises of 62–74”).
Anyway, all this to say that I am happy we now have rejuvenation; not only is it water-free, but entering the rejuvenation tank— a design a bit similar to the now-banned solarium standing capsules — will expose you to jets spraying your body with a hyaluronan solution mixed with Neuropeptides, Phyto-peptides, and Copper peptides… what a nourishing attainment for the skin!
After drying myself up with a towel, I hopped in my clothes and headed towards my garage where my beautiful Tesla Sol-X was elegantly waiting for me. Once in the back seat, I verbalized the location of my sister’s place to MARS — Tesla’s voice assistant — and off we went!
My sister Kate and I live 20 min apart from each other, in the beautiful city of Madrid. Today she and her husband invited me over for lunch, and to be honest, I couldn't wait to taste her famous jelly Fettuccine pasta and, for dessert, the tasty strawberry gel spheres topped with pistachio crumbs… Molecular gastronomy has come a long way!
Once the car arrived at destination and parked itself, I suddenly stopped salivating at the thought of the dishes filling my mind for the past 18 min, told MARS to deploy the solar panel, and stepped out of the Tesla as fresh as ever. As I started walking toward my sister’s building, I looked back and gave a last furtive look at my Tesla making sure its solar panel opened properly. While it's true that the solar panel option is 6 years old, I am still in awe in front of such a mechanism! which consists of a 1-meter rod that pops out from the car’s exterior ceiling before unrolling, and then spreading a cylinder-like photovoltaic textile panel — apparently, the car hasn't enough surface area on its own to gather sufficient solar energy, hence the need for a surface extension — .
About 2 minutes later, I finally reached my sister’s doorstep. First things first, I stand still for a bit giving time for the door’s embedded cameras to scan and recognize my face and my external morphology then, after the door automatically opens, I advance into a 2 by 1-meter open-ended cabin that sends invisible pulse lasers cleansing me from any kind of germs. The process of entering someone’s home nowadays might seem time-consuming but it's not! The whole thing takes about 1 minute and is pretty convenient, efficient, and important… the world had enough pandemics in a century. I remember watching a documentary not so long ago about the COVID-19 pandemic that crippled the entire planet from 2019 till the end of 2023… Governments were clearly not prepared which explains all the bad calls they made at the time. But now, in retrospect, the COVID-19 pandemic was a good thing because it forced Humans to be more hygienic, and more careful of their surroundings — this might explain why the C-BBV pandemic (Brazilian blood-borne cow virus transported by mosquitoes) that happened in 2048 wasn't as harsh and lasted 6 to 9 months — .
My sister was waiting for me in the living room, and as I was approaching, she stood up and opened her arms ready to embrace her big brother. I always appreciated her character; genuine, caring, and crazy at the same time. As kids, we used to go sit by the beach and watch the monthly drones' colorful spectacles organized by the city’s municipality, dreaming and trying to imagine our respective futures. We didn't end up so bad after all, she became an elegant and beautiful 25-year-old VR French teacher, and I, a 27-year-old guy who launched his second start-up in Virtual real-estate — It didn't get me rich yet but I can’t complain of my more-than-prosper situation—.
After we finished having lunch, I said goodbye to my sister and my brother-in-law and headed to my friend’s place for a nice gaming session. I know Dimitry for about 6 years now, he became a friend because of his good-hearted intentions and his inspiring curiosity. Once at his place, we decided not to lose time and immerse ourselves into the “world of Gaia”. Generally, my ego doesn't let me degrade myself by saying that I have an addiction to anything in life, but after playing “World of Gaia” on the PlayStation VR6 … my ego can go to hell for all I care!
For the ones who didn't try the game yet; let me arouse your senses with its mechanics. Of course, at first, you need to dress in the skin-tight synthetic bodysuit, put on the helmet with the integrated VR headset, and position yourself in the omnidirectional treadmill, only then can the magic occur. After launching the game, you get a visual asking you to choose an era, before virtually sending you in it! At the moment there are 2 options that you can choose from; Ancient Greece and the high middle ages, but a 3rd era is being developed as we speak and is scheduled to launch in 2105.
Dimitry and I usually choose the Ancient Greece option since we already invested a lot of time in it and, well, we love Greek mythology. Long story short, the game consists of an open world available to all gamers who bought the game. Thanks to the 110 sensors embedded in the suit and the mobility conferred by the omnidirectional treadmill, you are able to explore and experience the virtual world as if it was real! The best part is that you can use your actual crypto coins to purchase virtual in-game lands, houses, and rare artifacts amongst other things. Sony really outdid themselves with their 6th generation VR console.
Three hours and lots of fun later, I left Dimitry’s place and decided to walk back home as I felt the need to gather a breath of fresh air and visually reconnect with the real world. After I told MARS to self-drive the Tesla back to my garage, I took a left and engaged myself into Gran Via, one of Madrid’s most famous streets.
Every time I find myself in a place surrounded by a lot of people and a lot of tall buildings, I strangely feel small-scale and free at the same time. Each clothing store I passed by had those huge screens positioned on the wall just above their entrance, the goal being to showcase their product and their brand storytelling — a concept a bit similar to what Time Square used to have before they upgraded their software about 7 years ago to integrate holographic image projection — . Nowadays, every major city looks more or less alike because of the aforementioned big screens inundating their buildings’ facade. The once expensive and hard-to-scale microLED technology became more affordable and widely used by small to medium-size brands. In parallel, the big and wealthy brands are experimenting with a fairly new technology — a next-gen microLED of some sort — that permits the individual control of submicron light source using quantum dots. The quality of the displayed visuals is such that you feel them alive!
While I was enjoying the looks of the surrounding buildings dressed with all those mesmerizing colorful images, I spotted my car taking a right turn towards home! or I think I did… lookalike electric cars are everywhere nowadays. I don't know how accurate this is but a friend of mine who works at WAYMO told me that roughly 86% of all vehicles in “first world” countries are electric compared to 39% in developing ones; a difference in adoption percentages that is mainly determined by the country’s infrastructure. Indeed, last summer when I traveled to Ivory Coast, I didn't see as many electric power stations as there are in Madrid, and I certainly didn't see the special lane for self-driving cars common to Western Europe’s streets and highways — creating a unique lane for autonomous driving cars, like we have for bicycles, ended up being a good idea by the ADTSA (autonomous driving traffic safety administration), it separated cars with human drivers from cars without, hence reducing bothersome bottlenecks — . I don't know how many more decades are needed for the world to reach 100% of cars being electric, but let's say that the fuel price being at its all-time low is probably another factor that is slowing the transition.
After I finally arrived at my place’s doorstep, I heard a voice behind my back wishing me a happy new century! It was George, my long-time neighbor. Incredible how at 117-year-old, someone can still be able to have good mobility, decent-looking skin, and sufficient awareness.
It is common sense to anticipate life expectancy to naturally increase given better healthcare and more advanced technologies, but if I had to pick one major breakthrough that greatly stretched George’s living years, It would be 2063’s biology noble prize winner’s successful experiment: Human stem cells modulation of Cnidarian regenerative bio-capacities.
I am no expert in Human biology which, at first, made it complicated for me to understand the mechanics of such an experiment, but then a friend of mine working in the field came to the rescue and explained it to me as the following: Cnidarians (e.g. Jellyfish, hydras, …) have the amazing ability to regenerate amputated body parts thanks to a stress signal instructing stem cells to go into “repair mode”. Therefore, the goal of the experiment was to find a way to program Human stem cells to go into repair mode as well! What the Nobel prize winner did, was to grow pluripotent stem cells in-vitro, undertake a minor manipulation in their genomic constitution and introduce them in animal tissue first and in Human tissue second.
The results were life-changing! Despite not reaching his main goal of wanting to regenerate from scratch human amputated body parts, the Nobel prize winner’s successful experiment greatly contributed to the increase of life expectancy that reached a global average of 101.4 years in 2100.
After I saluted George back and wished his new year to be filled with nothing but good health and happiness, I opened the door, made a few steps towards the living room, and threw myself on the couch. I don't know if it’s the bias talking but the comfort my couch offers is unparalleled! especially after a long day away from Home. Like most of my days, I have this routine of spending roughly one hour in front of my TV catching up on the world's actuality. Today, the bulk of the news covered next month’s trip towards the red planet!
Every two years, in August, SpaceX’s “Heart of gold M7” amongst other rockets would take around 100 semi-trained adults to Mars under the Earth colonizing Mars global alliance program established in 2040. I wasn't born yet, but I read somewhere that during the first 20 years, only scientists and engineers were picked for the martian journey. The goal was to build proper Bio, Geotech, and Medical infrastructures to sustain life, heat up the atmosphere to melt the available ice into water and make it possible to give healthy births regardless of gravity constraints. Fast forward 60 years, I can obviously say that Elon Musk’s dream materialized beautifully despite the two infamous catastrophic rocket explosions of 2048 and 2055, both of which nearly bankrupted the company.
Fun fact, Elon Musk’s burial place can be spotted just outside Cocoon 1 (Mars’ nomenclature for buildings).
About an hour and a half later, I turn off the TV and get billed 20 cents. Public channels are relatively cheap compared to the PPS (price per second) of commercial/private channels. Once, I paid 0.1 cents a second for a 2 hour long documentary on “Humans' interactions with bugs”… I must have been drunk at the time. Nowadays, everything became a pay-as-you-consume scheme. When I was a kid, you could still find services where you would pay a fixed price at the end of the consumption, or pay every month/year via a subscription model, but the transition to PAYC happened fast.
Every company has its own crypto tokens which play the role of shares and internal currency interchangeably. When individuals such as myself use a service; micro amounts are subtracted every second from our Bitcoin wallet— thanks to the linkage of the public key to the different services — and converted into the company’s specific coin/token for the sake of accounting and ITC (identify-the-customer). Apparently, in the past, people used to carry and pay with something called “FIAT currencies”, differing from country to country. I can't quite put my head around the FIAT idea… How in the world did the previous generations find value in worthless pieces of paper, backed by nothing but greed and the illusion of power? Human nature is full of surprises.
Having no plans for tonight, I transitioned from my couch directly to my bed for some reading time. I am not the “bragging type” but I can say with confidence that my bedroom is one of a kind. I have positioned my 227.43 x 227.43 cm bed in the middle of the room facing a 4 meter-ish 140-degree curved bay window. During the day I keep the windows uncovered so light can pass by and illuminate my room and — wishfully — my day, and during the night I usually switch on WallroomX after the automatic floor-to-ceiling walls cover the bay window completely.
Once in my bed, I grab my Papex (an A6-size foldable electrophoretic e-paper) and ask my home’s voice assistant to download “Back to the present” from the Quantumnet and send it to my device.
I know that some people still call it “the Internet” but I believe that “the Quantumnet” is more adequate since the commercialization of more affordable quantum computers to the masses in Q1 of 2093. Companies all around the world are still exploring the massive business possibilities of such an upgrade but at an individual level, life got easier and more convenient — Sure, smart homes with IoT devices connected to each other is not new technology, but the adoption of Quantum computing made everything faster by Tenfold, at least — .
“Back to the present” is a book by Eliane S. I greatly recommend! Let me read you an extract:
“… and then he wakes up from a hypnopompic state, his eyes wandering around the room in search of familiarity. Was it a dream? a precognition? or maybe the script of an imaginable future inspired by the past and determined by the present?”
Previously published here
