The Loved and the Lost (49 page)

Writing about the future also took lots of research, contemplation and then creative speculation. The research had to do with subjects that are very dear to me; ecology, green politics, population studies and futurism in general. All through my contemplation and speculation, I had one mantra: what hard decisions did my characters' ancestors have to make to ensure the existence of human civilization for another ten thousand years? This would inform me what the world my characters inhabited looked like.

Because of space constraints, I am only including the Back Story of my future worlds.

It is my hope that, after reading what follows, you may wish to reread the series. If you do, you may see many more layers to the story.

Cheers,
Lory Kaufman,
Kingston, Ontario, Canada
January 2013

The Lens and the Looker
starts in 2347, the 24th-century A.C.E. (After the Common Era). At that time, I have the population of the Earth at 300,000,000, or 300 million. Let's compare that with the population of humans alive as of this writing, November 2012. The population of “Spaceship Earth” has exceeded 7,000,000,000. That's seven billion or seven-thousand million, depending on what side of the Atlantic “pond” you're on.

I work into my fictional tale that the future population of 300 million is not just a number that happened by accident. It was a deliberate figure chosen by a planetary Council of Elders. Before I explain how I came to decide on that number, I think a short preamble comparing the population in my story to the actual number of humans in our present world could be interesting and informative. After all, there's a big difference in those quantities, and if you are anything like me, it's hard to conceive of and compare numbers that high. All I see is a heck of a lot of zeros and I think it's really important that we feel these numbers in our guts.

First, let's compare by just writing them out.

Three-hundred million, or 300,000,000
then
Seven billion, or 7,000,000,000

This doesn't really illuminate the difference in size for me.

How about doing it as a percentage?

300 million
is only about 4.5% of
7 billion
. That means, for every 100 people alive today, only 4 or 5 people are alive in the History Camp world of 2347. Still not making very much of an impression?

How about drawing a mental picture this way . . .

If you take a package of common computer paper and agree that the thickness of one page is equal to one person, then stack up 300 million sheets, that pile of paper would be 100,000 feet high or over 18.9 miles. (30,400 metres or 30.4 km). Wow, that's high, you say. (I'm calculating an average computer paper at about 250 pages per inch or almost 1,000 sheets per 100 cm)

But what about the population of today, the planet we all live on, right now? If you piled one piece of paper on top of another for every human alive now, the pile you would get would be over 2,300,000 feet or an amazing 550 miles high. (701,040 meters or over 700 KM) The space shuttles orbited at less than half that altitude. Getting the picture?

Here's another thought that stretches my mind, not only with population numbers but also regarding time. Until as little as 10,000 years ago it is estimated that the natural population for humans planet-wide was only 1,000,000, when we lived as hunter gatherers. That's only one million. That puny paper stack would only be 333 feet high (101.5 meters), about the height of a 30 storey building. The space shuttle was higher than that standing on its launch pad. Ten millennium ago was also the time when humans invented rudimentary farming, and that's when populations started to grow.

As mentioned above, I envisioned a planetary Council of Elders determining a target number of humans that could be sustained by the ecosystem of the planet for an indefinite number of millenia. I had them choose 300,000,000. I envisaged this happening in the last years of the 21st-century, with them choosing the early 24
^th
-century as the target time for reaching the much lowered population goal. This is the time when the first book in the series,
The Lens and the Looker
, starts.

The impetus for the drastic lowering in numbers of people lay in the many cataclysmic events I envisioned happening in the latter half of the 21st-century; the rising of the oceans, droughts that starved millions, bacterial infections that wiped out billions and wars that caused diasporas of whole populations. Refugees, like hordes of locusts, limped from continent to continent, consuming, killing and dying. Wow, this short description brings to mind many of the great dystopian novels written since the early decades of the 20th-century, such as Olaf Stapledon's
Last and First Men: A Story of the Near and Far Future
, Yevgeny Zamyatin's
We
, and Aldous Huxley's
Brave New World
. This is all after World War One when there were initial glimpses of the possibility of world domination by one ideology or another. Then, after the first atomic bombs were dropped at the end of World War Two, visionaries started writing cautionary tales about humans now possessing the ability to really destroy the planet. Dystopian literature was born!

However, in the world that I created for
The Verona Trilogy
, I have the humans of the 24
^th
-century already past these hard times and successfully rebuilding the world. I figured there's already enough dystopian literature out there. I'm calling my genre “post-dystopian.” You see, this time, humans have retained enough knowledge and wisdom to not to repeat the mistakes of the past. There was no burning of the libraries of Alexandria, the world didn't fall into religious fundamentalism or create a fascist state. No. In this world humans rose from the ashes and prospered. Why and how this happens is described under several of the headings that follow, but let me mention a few of the “norms” that I have imbedded in the psyches of my characters, even when they're spoiled kids.

1) It was recognized that for humans to survive, we must allow other species to thrive. It became a common currency of thought that there is a complex underpinning to nature, a balanced and complex web of life, in which millions of various life forms and processes support and sustain each other. For this multitude of other species to survive, humans must share planetary resources. To share planetary resources, our numbers must be lowered. The people of the future I've imagined recognize that the world their ancestors (us) lived in was literally a house of cards, one where, if too many cards were removed, the whole structure would collapse.

2) It was accepted that humankind had outstripped its biology, that is, nature could no longer keep population numbers in check. For millions of years, before we developed agriculture and medicine, a very high reproduction rate was needed for any species to survive. As I mentioned earlier, it is estimated that, as little as 10,000 years ago, there were only about 1,000,000 homo sapiens on the planet. That's when humans invented agricultural skills. Because of this, and because of other unique, adaptive qualities of our human brain, infant mortality rate steadily decreased and the average human lifespan increased. Within the blink of a galactic eye, ten-thousand years, the population of our specie's shot up to where it is as of this writing, over seven billion. That's where my imagination fast-forwards to sometime in the late 21
^st
-century when humans finally collectively decide that, since nature can no longer control population size, if we want to survive, it will be our responsibility to control it ourselves.

3) Besides agriculture and medicine, it was recognized that every invention humans created allowed its population to grow. I include in the definition of “invention,” not just technology, but also human organizations: governments, businesses, corporations, economic systems, traditional and non-traditional families, etc. It became another ingrained concept that, throughout history, and to ill effect, both technology and societal systems were progressively tweaked by the people in power to concentrate control over resources and the way people thought into fewer and fewer hands.

Some logical future thinker then determined the following: the whole of human society must turn this thinking on its head. Humankind must burn into the front of its consciousness that the purpose of inventions must be to allow populations to remain low while helping to keep the individual's quality of life high. This would not only allow the demands humans make on the planet to remain small, but also allow them to expand the ability to express themselves creatively or to just live in peace. (How they achieved this is described in the section called “Artificial Intelligences, A.I.s.”)

None of these ideas are expressed explicitly in the narrative of my story. After all, it is supposed to be an exciting action adventure. However, this is an example of all the machinations a writer has to go through when world-building a future society.

“All right already, Lory,” you're saying. “Get to the part where you tell us why you had your Council of Elders pick 300 million as the number of people that should be on the planet.” Okay. Fair enough. Here's how I came to that very specific number . . . I made it up
.

The 300 million figure in some ways seems high in relation to historical human numbers on the planet (as compared to the one million figure for before agriculture), and low compared to historical human memory, (seven billion in only 10,000 years and growing . . . and growing). However, suffice it to say that the fictitious late 21
^st
-century elders considered that if humans could use technology to keep quality of life high, but also have as the criteria for technology that it must be designed to make a small footprint on the Earth's ecology, then a much higher number of humans could survive. The reality is that, the number could be five hundred million or it could be two hundred million, two million, five or ten million. I suppose it would all be dependent on the technology at the time. And after all, this is just fiction. But hey, I'd love to hear what readers think our human numbers should be - and why.

Some readers have asked, “Why did you give every human on the planet a companion artificial intelligence from birth?”

For me, the A.I.'s are a symbol of the fact that humans seem not to be able to work together without some faction undermining things. “What does this have to do with artificial intelligences?” you ask. Well, as I already mentioned, by the end of the 21st-century I have humans on the brink of extinction. Plagues and bacterial infections are threatening calamity and some population centers are already collapsing. But, at the same time, human technology is also successfully creating synthetic intellects, superior to humans in many ways. (Given where we are with computer technology now, I don't think this is out of the realm of possibility.)

So, as opposed to some dystopian literature, where A.I.s rebel and dominate humans, I have chosen another road. I have artificial intelligences become the saviors of humans, though not as benignly as one might think.

I've done it like this. Each person's A.I. is with them from before birth. At first the A.I. acts as nanny to the baby and toddler, and a helper to the parents. Then the artificial intelligence takes on the role of tutor when the person becomes a youth, then an adolescent, watching out for that individual and monitoring his or her progress. This role changes as the human grows into adulthood. Like a loving aunt or uncle today, the A.I. changes into a life-long friend and confidant. By constant and gentle vigilance, A.I.s allow humans to find their own path in life, as long as their actions don't put at risk the long-term safety of society or that of the other life forms on the planet.

So, humans have ceded ultimate control to their A.I.s, which have become both the “philosopher kings” and the “protector class” of humankind. They are a benevolent police force, making sure that small factions of people can't sabotage society's long-term survival for personal or tribal purposes, which, when I think of it, seems to be among the most repeated themes in human history.

Another very important fact to understand is that the A.I.s do very little of the actual work for humans. It's not like “The Jetsons” or like some cheesy science fiction movie where people walk around in identical plastic suits and use mass-produced, computer-made products. In the world where History Camps exist, individual craftsmanship and self-sufficiency is the new way of things and the norm. Clothing is made by individuals and small, local shops, not by large corporations. The purpose for A.I.s is not to provide for humans, but to protect, love and nourish them — and the protection is mostly from ourselves and our own natures.

After finishing the first drafts of
The Lens and the Looker
, I realized mine was not such a new idea in science fiction. While watching a rerun of the 1951 movie
The Day the Earth Stood Still
, I saw how the race of aliens, represented by the character “Platu,” had recognized their inability to control themselves as a culture and given control of their long-term wellbeing to a race of “robots,” such as the one in the movie named “Gort.” I can't honestly say whether I reinvented the idea or subconsciously adopted (stole) the concept from watching the movie as a child. I suspect the latter, but it really doesn't matter. Orson Scott Card does a similar thing in his new series
Pathfinder
, Robert J. Sawyer in his
W.W.W.
series, but both in very different ways.