Next week it will be the 10th anniversary of the day the aliens landed. The government has declared a national holiday and there will be fireworks, all the usual stuff. But not many people will be celebrating.
For one thing, there's another monster typhoon brewing in the Pacific. All those fancy new fusion generators don't seem to have fixed the weather. I remember the first television interviews when the aliens tried to explain what they could and couldn't do for us. They were like tiresomely indulgent parents, fixing this, giving us that, but warning us that we would still have to learn to deal with difficulties.
I'll be OK, here in my penthouse apartment. I got rich when shares in the oil companies dived because the aliens offered us cheap, sustainable, non-polluting energy. I figured that it would take ten years for everyone to make the shift from oil burning cars and trucks, and in the meantime there would still be big profits for the oil companies, so I put my life savings in at the bottom of the market.
I was right, and of course the powers-that-be moved quickly to ensure that the new technology didn't fall into "the wrong hands." So the existing energy companies built the fusion generators, and continue to build them all over the world and make huge profits because demand for energy continues to exceed supply. It will take decades more to meet the needs of everyone because we just don't have enough skilled people to build an entire new global infrastructure, and in the meantime we're still burning coal to make electricity for our cars.
Still, the air is noticeably cleaner. Or is that just the usual pre-typhoon weather? It was a bit of a shock to learn that climate change has always been real and wouldn't go away just because we stopped releasing CO2. I remember the alien who called herself Gaia, shaking her head when the interviewer asked her about that.
I'm a fan of your scientist James Lovelock, she said.
He figured it out years ago, an ecosphere is a self-organising system that tends towards stability - up to a point. But that stability is always going to be disrupted by the c**ulative effect of events which seem inconsequential. Edward Lorenz figured that bit out in the 1960's when he discovered The Butterfly Effect. The Earth's climate has always varied, and always will.So I'm going to sit here and drink my champagne while nature unleashes it's fury on a world that is only just starting to learn, and drink a toast to Gaia.
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