Something different to kick off 2025. Doug Muder of The Weekly Sift recently commented that one of the things that's gone wrong in recent decades is that the Left no longer has a utopian vision. "The communist vision collapsed with the Soviet Union," he said, "and I don’t know anybody who wants to revive it." Dreaming up a progressive utopia sounded like a challenge, and it might be nice to spend an hour or two imagining a positive future for once, so here is one. It's not actual prognostication so much as wishlisting (with added snark), but that's what I've got right now. You may or may not enjoy reading it, but I certainly enjoyed writing it.
Welcome to the future. It is the year... well, never mind exactly which year it is. Far enough into the future that you have adult descendants who've never met you, I'll say that much.
Today we celebrate the start-up of our first cold fusion power plant. The technology was a bitch to get working, but it was worth the decades it took and the trillions invested. It's not quite Free Energy Forever™, but it's infinitely better than what we've had – almost literally. You see, only most of us are celebrating the fusion plant starting up: The rest (a small minority) are popping corks because this means we can finally take the last fission plant offline.
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Yes, nuclear power did come to Australia, but it took a few goes before the legislation passed. To their credit, the voters back then bargained with their leaders pretty hard. It wasn't enough just to have a new, zero-carbon source of household electricity – the solar boom was already well on the way to taking care of that – we needed a major infrastructure overhaul, one conducted with an eye on the future. We needed that power to bring us things like carbon-neutral steel foundries, desalination plants, intensive recycling and high-speed rail (both freight and passenger. Oil is now waaay too expensive for air travel to be anything but a novelty for the super-rich now, a bit like commercial space travel in your day. How the hell were budget airlines ever a thing?!).
Then there was the question of where to put them. The big problem with nuclear power plants isn't the risk that they go Chernobyl (even in the 20th Century, we could engineer for that), it's what to do with the fuel after it's finished powering the reactor. Spent reactor fuel is radiotoxic on a timeline that just about maximises the inconvenience to future generations, about 10,000 years or so. That's too long to trust most materials on a shifting, geologically active Earth, but short enough that dosages can shred your double helix. So what we needed was a national sacrifice zone, a vast slice of land that was already poisoned, and one that already had plenty of access to water. And of course, once we framed it that way, the solution was obvious: Cotton farms! Years later and billions over budget (of course), the first Australian nuclear plant opened and was connected to the grid. And today, that first historic batch of enriched uranium pellets are still out there, encased in glass, about 0.01 percent of the way through their first half-life...
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It cost us a lot, but the plants did valuable service. As I said, one of the earliest perks was high-speed rail. Australia is one of the most train-able countries in the world (pun intended), with just a handful of major cities to link up. A double-track high-speed rail corridor between them was really the absolute minimum a civilised country could expect, so after expansions to The Ghan and the Indian-Pacific, it was just a matter of re-routing and upgrading the 19th Century shitshow that existed between the cities of the south-east. Once that was done (with similar levels of work done on the Inland Rail freight lines), we were in business. Everything else was easily moved with hydrogen fuel-cell trucks and cars.
Oh yeah, everything not running off an overhead wire is hydrogen now. You might think it would've been batteries, but no, batteries were never going to be viable on the kind of scales we're working on. A battery is a heavy lump of rare-earths that cost a fortune, they were never going to compete with a simple hollow tank once the solar got cheap enough. Once two-thirds of our power was renewable, it was suddenly viable to apply the electrodes to seawater by the tonne – especially with a nuclear power plant ready to step in if the sky clouded over and the price of electricity rose too high.
Cheap electricity also made massive desalination plants viable, and desalination made farming viable in a lot of places it hadn't been before. That said, plenty of farming is done within the cities as well, grown hyper-efficiently under magenta LEDs that only give the plants the wavelengths they need. Their water is cycled through fish farms to ensure they get the nutrients they need (so weird that plants grow better with fish and poultry manure, almost as if they're still adapting to mammals). Often synthetic fish, too. Synthetic meat is a major source of protein today and it's... fine, honestly. Real meat is still better, but it's expensive – think Kobe beef vs chuck steak in your time – and a lot of meat product in the old days involved feeding the inedible parts of the animal into a mincer anyway. For those applications synthetic meat long ago proved adequate, but the industry's real killer app came when they branched out and became an ethical source of lion and Galapagos tortoise. What, you've never tasted either of those? Ha!
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It didn't really matter that every litre of desalinated water created another litre of double-salted water, because we had a place we could drain it all – Lake Eyre. If you're thinking, "Wait, wouldn't that have an enormous environmental impact?" you're not wrong, it's just that that train left the station decades ago. Thanks to sea level rise, Lake Eyre is backfilling from the Southern Ocean anyway. Environmental impact? You don't know the half of it.
We missed the cotton farms only briefly, but before long we were all looking stylish and sexy in a new natural fibre: Hemp. Hemp used less water than cotton, and it was available because all drugs are legal now. I mean, of course they are. Ages ago we struck a new bargain with the pharmaceutical giants: They sold us the life-saving medications we needed at a fixed percentage over cost, and in return they were allowed to make bank from recreational drugs instead. It made sense, right? Most of the so-called "horrors of drugs" were actually the horrors of prohibition, of not knowing how much of what exactly was in tonight's uppers, downers, poppers and zingers. Once they were made in a clean, regulated factory with a known dose printed on the package, the OD rate dropped like a stone. To zero? No, of course not, no more than that other legal, legacy drug – alcohol. But it was a hell of a lot lower than before, and we got a better medical system out of it on the side. And of course, a few edgelords maintained the black market stuff was better, but hey what do you do?
The other half of reforming the medical system was to give nurses and pharmacists a lot more of the burden of clinic duty, of diagnosing sniffles and prescribing (from a strictly limited set of) medications. Doctors – real, honest-to-God medical doctors – are really just for emergencies now. And of course, if you're truly desperate there are diagnosis machines as well, but nobody uses them if they don't have to. Nobody trusts them.
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In fact, increasing mechanisation made some things weirdly cheap by your standards (and other things weirdly expensive. It's hard to explain). Nearly all jobs are service jobs now, but basic necessities are so cheap you don't need to work too much anyway, and with a little training it's just about possible to live Marx's dream, "...where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow..." Just about.
Indeed, with machines making the basic necessities cheap, it led to what people in your time might call an "Etsy-fication" of the economy. After your two or three days at the service job, most people were free to work on their passions, and for many this meant cranking a potter's wheel, or blowing glass, or sewing clothes or just... making stuff, purely because they could. Sometimes other people buy what they produce, because it's nice to own something made by human hands, but that's not really the point anymore. And needless to say, the explosion in the arts of the last few decades has been staggering. Everyone is media-literate on a university level nowadays, so sampling all the capital-A Art out there in just a single lifetime is like filling a syringe at the seaside.
And if you think that sounds impossible, that surely work would expand to fill the time available to do it... well, the factory workers of the industrial revolution thought so too, until they wrangled the eight-hour workday out of their masters. Hell, the very concept of the weekend had to be passed down as the Word of God itself before subsistence farmers of the bronze age would accept it. The social contract is always up for renewal, oldtimer. The economy is our creation, our servant, not our master: If it's not doing what we need it to do, we can change it.
At least there's no shortage of people to work, thanks to our latest wave of immigration from the slowly-submerging Pacific island nations. Brown Australians huff and complain that we need to do something about our open borders, but the children and grandchildren of immigrants always do.
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I say "brown Australians" but... You're going to find this really hard to swallow, but it's more or less impossible to say what colour anyone is anymore. I mean, obviously you can just look, but you can't rely on that when it's liable to change whenever the mood strikes them. Body mods and gene-hacking made racism, sexism and transphobia academic (albeit over decades), outside a few hardcore religious holdouts. When skin colour and gender are more or less optional, what does it matter anyway? There was even a trend for Blaschko stripes a few years ago, but the younger generation is always looking to scandalise.
Far more importantly, we put that gene-hacking tech to work creating new species to replace the ones lost to the Sixth Extinction. (Again, if you're concerned about new invasive species, I remind you that ship sailed before either of us was born.) It started with relatively simple things, like new bees for plants that had lost their pollinators, but gradually the scientists allowed themselves more leeway to experiment. (Not every experiment worked, of course, but it's a lot easier to build fail-safes into an invented species than a wild one.) Some of the jewellish serpents and glittering butterflies they've come up with are so beautiful it breaks your heart, and Great Barrier Reef 2.0 has to be seen to be believed.
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At which point, I suppose, we have to address the elephant in the room. Yes, we live in the age of Climate Change. The atmosphere has warmed by 3 degrees Celcius, which is more than you guys were hoping, but less than you feared. Sea levels have risen by about a metre, but that's not the real problem. What the dopier among you never seemed to grasp was that 3 degrees of warming doesn't mean what used to be a 40-degree summer's day is now a 43-degree day. It means the ocean of air over our heads, 500 million square kilometres wide and 400 kilometres deep, contains an extra 3 degrees of energy. That's an enormous amount of energy, and it comes out in weird and violent ways. Never mind the waves that might be lapping at the walls of your beach house, all buildings and infrastructure today has to be built tough – bunkerised, you might say – to withstand the tropical cyclones or surprise pop-up hailstorms that regularly blow through Sydney and Wollongong...
That was colossally expensive, of course, but the hard work's mostly been done now, so I won't get hung up on the natural disasters – mostly because they don't really bother us. The olds are always surprised how sanguine we are about this stuff, but why wouldn't we be? We don't remember a time when droughts only lasted a few years and box jellyfish didn't lurk off Bondi. The harder part is actually keeping the voting public focused on doing the hard work of returning to a world none of us remember. Carbon capture remains tough, after all: It's a fundamental violation of the Laws of Thermodynamics, as our engineers never fail to remind us. (See? This is why nobody likes engineers. You give them something important to do, and they tell you it can't be done and then feel smug because they knew that and you didn't. I understand they weren't any better in your time.) That makes it difficult, but not impossible. The job of reefing the Earth back on the straight 'n' narrow continues, year upon year. It took us two centuries to knock it out of alignment, so it'll probably take at least that long to fix it again.
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But we can do it. And in the end, all of it – the genetic engineering, the hydro farming, the shiny new fusion power plant – is in service of our ultimate goal, that of making humanity a spacefaring species. What, you think we can't? The technology mightn't exist to reach Alpha Centauri yet, sure, but colonies closer to home are... well, I won't give too much away. It's dangerous to know too many specifics about the future. Let's just say it's always impossible until it's done, and life on Earth is rapidly approximating life on board a space station anyway, so we might as well. But every day the planet is a little bit more cleansed, a little bit closer to equilibrium, and every day the stars are a little bit less far away. The path before us still isn't easy, but every day I get up and do my part – my teensy, tiny, barely consequential part – and I live in hope. Plenty of humans have had less.
