ASSIGNMENT FOR MYSELF:Listen to this: http://81.92.213.233:1337
Write about this: 141 year-old man who’s only just now “old.”
Time Limit: 20 minutes
Other Limits: No rereading or editing while writing, nor within 4 hours of finishing
.
RESULT:
Untouched
At 141, I’ve only just now hit the realm of being truly old. A few generations behind me, there are people in their sixties who look like they’re in their early twenties, not that they’d know what “looking like you’re in your twenties” even means.
I’m in central China these days, enjoying the beautiful mountains and stunning rivers. I come across a number of villages where people still live, farming and living life they way their ancestors did. I wonder if they even know that the planet has less than five-hundred million people left on it.
As ages began to increase drastically, space travel and terraforming started getting as much funding as disease-control and post-natal genetic modifications.
At first, intergalactic travel was like any new technology, affordable only by the rich, but as the years went by, even the poorest of people could afford to get a small place on some backwater world. Charts of the Earth’s population started looking like a bell-curve within decades.
The planet seems empty now. After we got below two billion people, the looting began in earnest, but before long people realized that there was more than enough of everything to go around. The people who had been naysaying continued life on Earth were proved wrong by the self-tending fission power plants, auto-farming, hypersonic transport, and so much more.
The novelty of living in abandoned mansions began to wear off after a while, and even the most jaded Earthers began to wonder if they should go ahead and take a chance off-world. It seemed that abundant and decadent living was only worth it if there was somebody to lord it over.
Most of the people left are the aged and infirm and those who swear that a new and more natural society will spring forth on this planet. Maybe they’re right. Scientists are already reporting a marked decrease in pollution and a few weeks ago I walked past an abandoned coal mine where machinery was already rusting, bamboo and vines already reclaiming their property.
I’m not sure how I feel about it all, to be honest. I came to China to explore its ancient treasures, and while the government still maintains many of them, the ones out here in hard-to-reach-places are falling into disrepair. Instead of seeing the remains of archaic civilizations, I’m seeing temples hopelessly overgrown. Areas where terraced farming has been going on for centuries are already eroding back into flowing hillsides.
What’s the point in leaving a planet behind as “a perpetual legacy to our roots,” as the newsfeeds call it, when soon enough none of it will be recognizable at all?
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