Our Children's Children

14

By Molly Kimball

WASHINGTON (Global News) — The people who are coming from the tunnels are refugees from time.

This was confirmed late today by Maynard Gale, one of the refugees. He refused to say, however, why they were fleeing from a future which he says lies 500 years ahead of us. The circumstances of their flight, he insisted, could only be revealed to a constituted government. He said he was making efforts to get in contact with an appropriate authority. He explained that he held the position of ombudsman for the Washington community in his future time and had been delegated to communicate with the federal government upon his arrival here.

He did, however, give a startling picture of the kind of society in which he lives, or rather, did live — a world in which there are no longer any nations and from which the concept of war has disappeared.

It is a simple society, he said, forced to become simple by the ecological problems that we face today. It is no longer an industrial society. Its manufacturing amounts to no more, perhaps less, than one percent of today's figure. What it does manufacture is made to last. The philosophy of obsolescence was abandoned only a short distance into our future, he said, in the face of dwindling natural resources, a dwindling about which economists and ecologists have been warning us for years.

Because its coal and fossil fuels are almost gone, the future world, said Gale, relies entirely for its energy on fusion power. The development of that type of power, he said, is the only thing that holds the delicate economic fabric of his world together.

The world of 500 years from now is highly computerized, with the greater part of the population living in "high rise" cities. Half a dozen towers, some of them reaching as high as a mile, will constitute a city. Urban sprawl is gone, leaving vast surface areas free for agricultural purposes. The cities are built, in large part, from converted scrap metal which in our day would have been buried in landfills, and are computer-operated, almost entirely automatic.

There is, Gale said, none of the great spread of wealth that is found in our world. No one is rich and there is none of the abject poverty that today oppresses millions. Apparently there has been not only a change in life style, but a change as well in life values. Life is simpler and kinder and less competitive; there are few eager beavers in that world of 500 years ahead…