“The Last Act of Humanity”
By Dale Langlois
Foreword
The World’s population approached the ten billion mark. The destruction of low lying cities along the coasts of every continent pushed civilization inland, taking up valuable farmland. Global flooding destroyed another third of the planet’s fertile soil. Famine plagued all nations.
When the true effects of our carbon foot print became blatantly obvious to the taxpayers, the people who warned of the future problems of climate change were the first to be denied grant monies; funding for science seemed less important than money spent feeding the masses.
A planetary power grid, and county sized bio-reactors built to produce artificially grown meat were astronomically expensive, and took a big chunk out of every country’s budget.
Concerns shifted to solving immediate problems and away from studying possible problems of the future. Observatories lie idle all over the globe and in outer space, fuel supplies and coolants ran out in existing space observatories. Mars was unattainable. NASA no longer existed. Exploration was put on hold. Anything above the outer atmosphere was deemed unessential spending. Commercial spacecraft made regular flights to the ISS and several In-Orbit Hotels where the “Well off” go to vacation. Space had gone commercial. We wanted to play in it before we learned more about it.
No funding was given for asteroid or comet observations, most of the objects considered a threat wouldn’t hit till long into the future, ‘Plenty of time to develop ways to deflect a threat.’ Ninety five percent of all objects have been mapped and were being tracked.
“Some things come in hot” was the explanation given to the most powerful man on the planet. Nothing could be done. He and all the leaders of Earth unanimously agreed to keep the fate of their species a secret. It would be the last act of Humanity.