War of Attrition

I don't know why, but I always remember the archival footage of the announcement in old-style black and white: Smeary, blurry, grainy. This is not at all how the digital news clip actually looks. The fact is, the video record remains crystal clear, its colors as vibrant and its hi-def resolution as pristine as the day it was made.

It was my however-many-greats-grandfather who made the announcement, a watershed moment in history. The conflagration, and the courage, that followed was in no way his doing, but he was nonetheless lionized -- gilded with greatness in the penumbra of those world-changing events.

If the scope of the consequences seems fitting, if the world seems as though it ought justifiably to have been different in the wake of my great-to-the-nth-degree grandfather having made his announcement, that's because everything really did change as soon as he uttered the words. I mean, everything -- and in ways that no one could have foreseen.

I'll summarize the media statement he gave that day, April 7, 2051. Twenty-four days previously, at precisely 1800 hours, a message arrived at a secure server in Redmond, Oregon. The server belonged to a top-secret military facility. It was shielded and isolated from the Worldnet, and yet the message seemed to be an ordinary email. Another peculiarity was that there was no IPO address associated with the email. My great-grandfather did not disclose what message the email contained; all he would say was that it appeared to be a possible prank, and maybe a terrorist threat, and its veracity was being investigated.

But then a blogger revealed the most astonishing thing of all: At the exact same moment the email arrived, astronomers in Socorro, New Mexico, and at the very large dish at Arecibo, and at several other large radio-telescope facilities around the world, noted a strong electromagnetic signal of extraterrestrial origin.

My great-grandfather's superiors confirmed this, but added that they still thought the message might be some sort of elaborate joke, an ill-advised if ingeniously executed security breach by a lone teen hacker or maybe an anarchist group.

When another email arrived at the same server at 0401 hours, fourteen days after the first message, that theory was discarded. Radio astronomers in Hawaii and Australia had noted another EM pulse, again coinciding with the message. Civilian astronomers noted it too, and went online. The message boards lit up. Rumors flew.

The two events, observed from different spots around the globe, allowed for triangulation of the origin point, and here the mystery deepened. The signal came not from any star, but from less than one light year away, in what seemed to be the reaches of empty space.

Let me fast-forward seven months to the day of the next significant announcement, when President Thea Nguyen revealed the contents of the emails. The messages hailed the people of Earth, she said, but despite their deep-space origins they were not of any alien provenance. Rather, they originated from our own planet... nearly a century in the future. The origin point was from the area in space at which the earth, sun, and solar system, flying through space and orbiting the center of the galaxy, would arrive in the year 2141.

President Nguyen let that sink in for a moment and then stated what people across the planet were just starting to grasp: This was not a greeting from across the gulf of space, but rather through the veil of time.

Or, if you like, across a generation gap. The future people didn't have any pearls of wisdom to share. Instead, they had demands. Their orders to us included a host of what the planet's ruling corporations condemned as "anti-business" and "socialist" directives: Cut atmospheric emissions to zero. Stop all logging, and instead focus massive reforestation efforts. Suspend all fishing activities, and especially protect sharks, which had become nearly extinct. Outlaw all chemicals and industrial endeavors that led to groundwater contamination.

The list went on, but it boiled down to this: Abandon every tenet of industry, and by extension banking and economics, that our system relied upon.

The future people made these demands because Earth of 2141, they claimed, was a hellish place, inhabited by twelve billion starving, gasping souls. Atmospheric oxygen had been depleted; the water table had been poisoned; there was little arable land remaining; the climate had entered a runaway greenhouse effect that was roasting alive Earth's too-numerous inhabitants.

The demands were underscored with threats. If the people of 2051 did not comply, their future counterparts in 2141 were prepared to use a variant of their time-piercing communications technology to devastating effect as a punishment. They were able to transmit small amounts of matter, no more than a kilogram or two, from one place to another in the past. Hardly any mass at all, really -- but enough, if targeted carefully, to bring down bridges, or planes, or cause dams to fail. The people of the future promised to wreak havoc on the infrastructure of the 21st century, and thus on the commerce of the era; indeed, the people of the mid-twenty-second century were prepared to crash their forebears' civilization, if they had to, to stop the reckless ways of the earlier generation.

None of those demands were met. The very idea of being dictated to by people who didn't even exist yet enraged an overwhelming percentage of the population. Anger at such presumption -- such lack of respect for their wise elders! -- cut across all demographics; one pundit called it "powdered bottom syndrome run amuck." Behavioral scientists took up that meme, theorizing that the human mind was hard-wired to dismiss the demands of its progeny and revert to moral indignation if pressed.

Another narrative grew up when a pop psychologist took to the Worldnet and spun the hypothesis that a cultural obsession with youth (and increasing numbers of youths) put such mental and economic stress on every person who was no longer young that a hot, wild resentment had been building for decades. This high-handed list of directives from the future was the final straw. Here began the culture war that would end all culture wars, and it might even end the world as we knew it. "Apr�s nous le d�luge!" became the slogan of the day.

When their demands were flatly, angrily rejected, the people of the future showed that they meant business. They used their technology to remove small, but crucial, pieces and parts. Cargo ships sank; power grids came down, and so did skyscrapers. Delivery schedules and supply chains were disrupted; stock markets destabilized. In a short span of time, civilization really did seem to be on the verge of collapse.

The rhetoric, already overheated, grew white-hot. Humanity's descendants -- terrorists! -- had declared war on their own ancestors. Well, the people of 2051 were not going to stand for it. They declared war right back on the people from 2141 -- the "Forty-oners," as the desperate people of a century hence came to be known. If the 41ers sought to compel us to do their bidding by showing that they could kill us (the self-dubbed, freedom-fighting "Forerunners" declared) why, they had a lesson coming to them. The Forerunners could prevent the 41ers from ever being born!

Thus was the stage set for the biggest and most brutal smack-down of all human history. Calls for immediate and drastic birth control went up from every quarter. Overnight, the most vehement opponents to birth control changed their tunes: The Catholic Church even began handing out condoms at Sunday services and offering free vasectomies and hysterectomies at their hospitals and clinics. Entire national programs of sterilization went into effect. This was a war the Forerunners were determined to win.

And win it they did. Almost immediately, the temporal attacks became less frequent; by 2087 they had stopped. 2141 came and went, and the Earth suffered no great apocalypse, a development that reignited fresh... if confused... rounds of recrimination. Instead of twelve billion souls, the Earth now harbored just over two billion, and the birth rate was still falling. The word "genocide" started to float around. So did words like "hoax" and "conspiracy." The liberals blamed the conservatives, and vice-versa, for the sins of a now-vanished future enemy -- an enemy that was (if anybody) none other than the people of this new 2141 themselves.

Eventually the entire confusing conflict settled into history, and there it remains. Now, as I walk across lush and fertile landscapes and breathe in fresh, cool air in the year 2226, I wonder whether the people of that alternate Earth, that scorched and poisoned planet, had not played their forebears into responding just as they intended. Faced with the wrath of their own descendants, the Forerunners opted for radical grassroots change that turned out to be the ideal prescription for averting total ecological calamity. The Earth was never able to sustain more than one billion people; now, eight decades after the key year of 2141, the total planetary human populace holds steady at half a billion, and our once-badly damaged ecosystem has bounced back.

The world is just fine, as it turns out -- and the future looks brighter than ever.

For George