Rejuvenation Glitch: A Science Fiction Story

In the middle of the twenty-first century when Tom Waters first heard that he could undergo rejuvenation treatments that would make him look and feel 30 years younger, the 50-year-old man thought it was too good to be true.

“Okay, Doc, what's the catch?” asked Tom.

“There is no catch,” said Dr. Danton. “Millions of people are doing this all over the world now, with fantastic results. The treatment I propose will be relatively modest. We'll only make your body look and feel like it is 30 years younger. Some doctors are doing rejuvenation treatments which make men as old as 80 look and feel like they are only 20.”

“Tell me again – how is it going to work?” asked Tom.

“We'll be giving you four months of injections, once every week,” explained Dr. Danton. “I could tell you the technical details about how the telomerase will make the telomeres in your chromosomes like the telomeres of a young man. I could give you all the facts about how the restorative nanobots will fix the damage done by 30 years of aging. But why bother getting into the details of the science? The bottom line is: at the end of four months, you will look and feel like a man of 20.”

Tom knew the treatment was very expensive, but he decided to give it a try. He had recently divorced his wife, and he wanted his next mate to be a much younger woman. He knew that many men his age went chasing after women half their age, but he thought they looked ridiculous when they did that. Tom figured: if I want to get a 20-year-old girlfriend, the best strategy is to look like a 20-year-old.

So Tom began the four months of injections. As the weeks passed, he kept looking in the mirror. He was delighted to see his wrinkles gradually fade away as the weeks passed. Tom noticed that his vigor and sex drive seemed to increase a little with every passing week. His hair gradually grew back, his skin tone improved, and he noticed himself looking younger as every week passed.

Finally the four months were over, and Tom looked in the mirror. He looked just as he had looked thirty years ago. Best of all, he had all the energy and vigor that he had that long ago.

Tom went to Bob, a good friend of his, to show off his change in appearance. He knocked on Bob's door. After opening his door, Bob asked, “Can I help you?” Clearly he didn't even recognize Tom.

“It's Tom,” said Tom.

“Tom who?” asked Bob.

Tom laughed, and explained everything.

“It's just amazing,” said Tom. “When they roll back your age by thirty years, no can even recognize you any more.”

Tom was now ready to go look for a sexy young woman to date. Yet he wondered: when he met such a lady, should he tell her he was a rejuvenated 50-year-old? No, he thought; that wouldn't work. There's something ridiculous about a 50-year-old man chasing after a woman half his age, Tom thought. Tom decided it was better to change his name, and come up with a fake story of his life. That way when he met Miss Sexy Young Thing, the woman would be more likely to accept him.

Tom then joined an online dating service that he hoped would find him the type of female he was looking for. He specified that his name was Rick Rogers, age 20. He also made it clear that he was looking for a female no older than himself. Through the dating service, he got in touch with a woman who he found very attractive. So Tom arranged an in-person date with the woman. They met at a small restaurant.

“I'm Jane,” said the woman. “So nice to meet you in person.”

“I'm Rick Rogers; pleased to meet you,” said Tom. “You look even lovelier than you do online.”

“How old did you say you were?” asked Tom. The woman looked very young, and Tom didn't want to get involved with someone underage.

“I just turned 18,” said the woman.

The two of them talked for hours at the restaurant. Tom had a strange feeling that he had met the woman before, but he couldn't associate her with any specific person he had met. It was almost the same kind of mysterious deja vu feeling that the great songwriters Rodgers and Hart had described in their classic song Where or When.

After two more dates, Tom made his move. After kissing the woman deeply, Tom said with a naughty look in his eye: “How about I show you my apartment now?”

“I think I'd better not,” said the woman. “You may not believe this, but I was raised by an incredibly old-fashioned mother. She taught me that a good girl should never have sex with a man unless they are married.”

At first Tom was disappointed. His rejuvenated body wanted some sexual enjoyment now, not months later after some engagement and marriage. But as Tom thought about it the next day, he decided perhaps it was all for the best. Presumably Jane is a virgin, Tom thought to himself, and therefore even more of a catch.

For a few weeks Tom and the woman carried on a passionate but non-sexual relationship. Then one day while the two were walking down a romantic river bank, Tom asked the woman to marry him. She accepted the proposal immediately.

Tom was overjoyed. He began making plans for the wedding. Tom told his best friend Steve about what had happened.

“Tom, don't you think you're rushing into this?” asked Steve. “You've only known this woman for a few weeks.”

“Steve, I can tell if it's the Real Thing in a few weeks,” said Tom. “When it's the Real Thing, I only need a few days to recognize it.”

“Okay, but let me investigate this woman a little, just to make sure that you don't get any nasty surprises,” said Steve. At first Tom refused, but after some forceful arguing by Steve, Tom reluctantly agreed.

Tom made plans for an expensive wedding. He decided to invite only a few people, so that he would not reveal that his name and life story were fakes. Tom made reservations for a wedding dinner at a very fancy restaurant on the 124^th floor of a new skyscraper.

On the day the wedding was scheduled, Steve met Tom at his apartment.

“So today's the big day!” enthused Tom. “She's going to make me the happiest man in the world.”

“Tom, you'd better sit down,” said Steve. “I found some shocking information about your fiancee.”

Tom gulped. “What is it?” he asked.

“Jane lied about her age,” said Steve. “She's not 18, not by a long shot.”

“Oh no!” said Tom. “I should have known from her baby face – she's underage, right?”

“No, that's not it,” said Steve. “The fact is: she's many years older than 18. She had a rejuvenation treatment just like you did. The treatment took decades off her age. That's why she looks 18.”

Tom winced.

“Okay, so maybe she's been around the block a few times,” said Tom. “So she's probably not a virgin. I don't care. I love her, and I'm going to marry her.”

“I also found out that her name isn't Jane,” said Steve. “She apparently did the same thing you did when you got rejuvenated – she changed her name and came up with a fake story of her life, so people wouldn't find out how old she is.”

“What is her real name?” asked Tom.

“With the rejuvenation therapy changing both of your appearances so much, she couldn't recognize you, just like you couldn't recognize her,” said Steve. “And with both of you giving fake names and fake life histories, there was no way for either of you to know you had met before.”

“What is her real name?” asked Tom again.

“Dorothy Waters,” said Steve.

“Dorothy Waters?” shrieked Tom Waters, putting his hands on his forehead as his face contorted in a horrified expression. “DOROTHY WATERS?”

“Yes, Tom, it's true,” said Steve. “That sexy baby-faced young girl you were going to marry today is your rejuvenated grandmother.”

7 Strange Contrasts of the Future

The future will be a strange landscape of sharp contrasts, where trends sometime move in opposite directions, leaving results that are diametrically opposed. Let us look at seven of these strange contrasts.

Our virtual worlds will get more beautiful, but our real world will get more ugly.

Virtual worlds are the artificial landscapes created by game designers and art designers working for television and movies. A few decades ago the best virtual worlds looked like crude cartoons, but progress in computer-generated imagery has been breathtaking. Video games such as The Elder Scrolls V: Sykrim and Fable II offer stunningly beautiful vistas, and if you see the latest Pixar movie you may see even more gorgeous make-believe landscapes. As computer technology improves, these virtual worlds will get ever more ravishing.

But as our virtual worlds get more and more beautiful, our real world will probably get more and more ugly. Overpopulation, sprawl, deforestation, and pollution all will play a part in decreasing the beauty of the natural world. We see an example of this in the Alberta Tar Sands in Canada, where a huge lovely natural area is being turned into something almost as ugly as a moonscape. 

There will be more forms of synthetic life, but far fewer forms of natural life.

According to the Wikipedia.org article on synthetic life, "In May 2010, Craig Venter's group announced they had been able to assemble a complete genome of millions of base pairs, insert it into a cell, and cause that cell to start replicating." Scientists will no doubt make many additional forms of synthetic life in the future.

But in coming decades the total number of natural species will sharply decrease. It is estimated that every day 100 species are being lost to deforestation. The National Wildlife Federation has estimated that 27,000 species are becoming extinct every year. Global warming is expected to increase the rate of species loss as more and more species become extinct because their habitat has changed.

The human population will grow higher and higher, but our resources to support it will grow lower and lower.

The human population is expected to grow by billions in the coming decades. Unfortunately, the earthly natural resources to support that population seem to be growing ever smaller. We are using up our reserves of oil, and may be near the peak of oil production; we may have only several decades left of regular crude oil. Several experts think we will hit Peak Coal in a few decades. We are depleting our supplies of fresh water, and the fertility of our soil is gradually declining. In addition, within a few decades we may soon run short on numerous types of metals and minerals such as phosphorus.

We will have more droughts, but also more floods due to rainfall.

Global warming is not making every place hotter and drier. Instead global warming is tending to make hot places hotter, and wet places wetter. A recent scientific paper states, “Climate models project increased aridity in the 21^st century over most of Africa, southern Europe and the Middle East, most of the Americas, Australia, and Southeast Asia. Regions like the United States have avoided prolonged droughts during the last 50 years due to natural climate variations, but might see persistent droughts in the next 20–50 years.”

But other places that tend to get a lot of rain will get even more rain. For example, last month a headline on monsoon floods in India stated: “5000 Missing in India Floods: Scientists Say Global Warming is to Blame.”

People will have more and more information, but the world will be more and more confusing and hard to understand.

Information is supposed to make things easier to understand. If you don't understand the Civil War, read a book or two on it, and you'll understand it. But as we pile up more and more terabytes of information, the world doesn't seem any easier to understand. The world seems to get more and more complex and hard to understand. Even as our science progresses, we add more and more baffling mysteries: black holes, the Big Bang, quantum entanglement, and dark energy, to name a few.

We'll get more effective ways of extending life, and also more effective ways of destroying life.

Scientists are working on exciting life-extension technologies. They know that as we age the units called telomeres at the ends of our chromosomes grow shorter and shorter. Scientists think there may be some way to stop these telomeres from shortening, and that may be the key to extending the human lifespan. Scientists are also doing work on stem cell research and artificial organs, which will offer hope for increasing the human lifespan.

But as this work continues, scientists will also continue work on artificial germs which could wipe out billions of us, drone aircraft which can bring death instantaneously from the sky, and nuclear weapons of increasing deadliness.

Our communication devices are getting ever more sophisticated, but our messages are getting ever more vapid.

Back in the time of Thomas Jefferson, people would use inkwells and quill pens, but they would write long letters to each other with sentences such as “It suffices for us, if the moral and physical condition of our own citizens qualifies them to select the able and good for the direction of their government, with a recurrence of elections at such short periods as will enable them to displace an unfaithful servant before the mischief he meditates may be irremediable.” 

But today the typical smartphone user does not write long letters, but sends out a slew of vacant, vapid little text messages such as “OMG DID U C HER? LOL”

Mars Reborn: A Science Fiction Story

When the fleet of huge alien spaceships arrived in the solar system, the most surprising thing was that they ignored Earth for years, and focused on Mars.

For years scientists on Earth watched the spaceships with excitement, using high-powered telescopes. Some of the alien spaceships kept traveling back and forth between Mars and the moons of Jupiter. Some of the spaceships released smaller shuttle craft, and those craft then landed on Mars, later to return to the spaceships from which they had come. There was one network of traffic back and forth between Jupiter's moons and Mars, and another network of traffic back and forth between the surface of Mars and the spaceships orbiting Mars. Then scientists on Earth noticed that the spaceships were building giant mirrors in orbit around Mars.

A few years later the scientists noticed that the surface of Mars started to change dramatically. Much of Mars' frozen carbon dioxide started to melt. Scientists speculated that the giant mirrors were being used to beam solar energy at Mars, and that this was why the frozen carbon dioxide was melting. The melting of the frozen carbon dioxide produced a rise in the temperature of Mars, due to the same greenhouse effect that was happening on Earth to warm its temperatures.

When the latest United States space probe landed on Mars, it found that the surface was much warmer than it had been when previous space probes had landed. A few years later, scientists detected that liquid water had appeared on the surface of Mars.

The President of the United States called a meeting at the White House to discuss what was going on.

“What the hell are they up to?” asked the President.

“Apparently they are trying to terraform Mars,” said the President's chief science adviser. “They are trying to gradually make Mars more and more earth-like, to give it a higher temperature and surface water. They seem to be bringing various elements from the moons of Jupiter to Mars. The next step will probably be to introduce plant life. Once that gets going, the plants will release a lot of oxygen that will make the planet pretty much like ours.”

“Why do you think they want to do this?” asked the President. “Do you think they want to live on Mars?”

“I think we should assume the worst,” said General Jenkins, the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “During World War II, do you remember what happened before D-Day? The United States spent years building up its forces in England, in preparation for an invasion of France. These aliens are probably doing something similar. They're probably using Mars as a great big staging area, as a place where they will build up their forces, to prepare for an invasion of Earth.”

“So we'll build up our forces to get ready for a fight,” said the President.

The alien activity on Mars intensified, and eventually astronomers noticed the first green specks on their photographs of Mars. Gradually more and more of the surface of Mars become the green color of vegetation and the blue color of liquid water. Anxiety about the intentions of the aliens grew even greater.

Then finally one day a large fleet of spaceships began traveling from Mars towards Earth. The spaceships went into orbit around Earth. Landing craft emerged from these spaceships, and the craft landed on the surface of Earth. From those landing crafts emerged robots, which began working on some form of construction.

“We need to destroy those things,” urged General Jenkins.

“All in good time,” said the President. “But let's wait a while to see what they're working on.”

After a few weeks it became clear what the alien robots were working on. They were building space elevators, gigantic devices for rapidly moving cargo or people from the surface of the Earth to an orbit in space, or the inverse. Once a space elevator was built, people could go from Earth into space without using a rocket, and could also come back from space to Earth without using any spacecraft.

“This confirms my suspicions,” said General Jenkins darkly. “They're building these space elevators so they can rapidly move an army from space to the surface of our planet. Once they're done with that, their invasion should begin. We have to destroy those space elevators.”

The President authorized an attack, and the US Air Force got busy assembling aircraft to be used for the bombings. But then an alien spacecraft landed in New York, in front of the United Nations building.

After three extraterrestrials emerged from the alien spacecraft, they were approached by the US ambassador to the UN.

“We know all about your plans for conquering us,” said the ambassador. “We will fight you with all our might.”

Then the largest of the extraterrestrials spoke.

“You are wrong,” he said in a strange, deep voice. “We are not here to destroy you. We are here to save you.”

Inside the UN Building the three aliens told the full story of why they had come from a distant star. Their race had discreetly visited the Earth years ago, and had found scientific proof that Earth was doomed to an ecological catastrophe that would make it unlivable. There was a huge amount of frozen methane in the Arctic and the tundras of Siberia. Global warming on Earth would cause that methane to melt. Being a greenhouse gas twenty times more dangerous than carbon dioxide, the methane would cause a super-acceleration of global warming, which would raise the planet's temperature to a level that would make the planet uninhabitable.

“We have been terraforming Mars so there could be a planet that your race could escape to,” explained the extraterrestrials, “after the temperatures on your planet grow too high.”

“And what about the space elevators?” asked the ambassador.

“They are not for bringing our people down to your planet,” said the extraterrestrial. “The space elevators are for bringing your people into space, so that we can take them to the newly habitable planet Mars.” 

The news of the alien announcement spread around the globe. Commentators lamented that mankind had got itself into such a mess. Why had so many people continued to pursue high-consumption lifestyles with a high carbon footprint, long after the scientists had sounded the warning bells? If only people had lived more simply, with less waste and extravagance, the coming disaster could have been avoided.

For a while many did not believe the aliens. But soon the frozen methane in Siberia and the Arctic started to melt, causing temperatures around the world to skyrocket. It was just as the aliens had predicted. The governments of Earth embraced the alien plan for migrating humans to Mars.

Then the first people starting using the space elevators to go into orbit, where they would board the alien ships to go to Mars. But the space elevators did not have the capacity to take all those who needed to go. The US government estimated that only one tenth of Earth's population could be saved before the planet got too hot to support life.

A lottery system was set up to determine who would be allowed to go to safety on the new Mars, and who would have to stay and die on the quickly warming Earth.

After getting the bad news that they would have to stay on Earth, a group of very wealthy industrialists decided to form a lobbying group that might change this result. They hired Daniel Black, the most expensive and well-connected lobbyist in Washington D.C. With a suitcase of cash and a bag of gold, Black was able to gain a meeting with Peter Baker, an official at the White House.

Baker listened to Black's slick lobbying presentation on behalf of his wealthy clients.

“Well, I see the group of people you represent are very, very special,” said Baker. “I checked out twenty of them. Lots of big factory owners, and some incredibly successful people. Globe-trotting billionaires with huge, sprawling mansions, big fleets of cars, huge yachts, and private jets. Shades of Jay Gatsby and William Randolph Hearst.”

“They're just the type of super-successful people we'll need on Mars,” said Black. “So I'm sure you'll agree that we need to make a special exception to allow my clients to be part of the humans taken to Mars. What a waste to let them die when Earth gets too hot.”

“No way,” said Baker coldly. “The people you work for each put thousands of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, by wastefully pursuing extravagant high-consumption lifestyles. They've already helped to ruin one planet, and I'm not going to help them get their hands on another one. Tell your billionaire buddies: you've made your bed, now lie in it. Or should I say: fry in it.”

The Consumption Bomb

Most of us have heard about the Population Bomb – the thesis that a growing human population will wreak environmental havoc, such as mass starvation. But many think that the real ticking time bomb in our future is not so much a Population Bomb but instead what may be called the Consumption Bomb. The Consumption Bomb is sometimes defined as the threat to our planetary health caused by ever larger numbers of people adopting Western patterns of consumption, causing catastrophic levels of pollution, global warming, and resource depletion.

The following graph compares growth in population and growth in consumption during the period from 1995 to 2005. The blue bars represent increases in population. The orange bars represent growth in consumption.

This graph makes clear: growth in consumption is increasing much more dramatically than growth in population.

Our main environmental problem is not necessarily that the world's population is too high. Our main environmental problem is that the world is consuming too much. Overconsumption is causing the world's carbon dioxide levels to rise to dangerous levels. To support our extravagant consumption levels, we are depleting our limited supplies of fossil fuels, reducing the fertility of our soil, raising the acidity of the oceans, overusing our limited aquifers of water, and engaging in deforestation that reduces the trees we need to soak up the ever-increasing levels of carbon dioxide caused by our wasteful lifestyles.

Now some will look at the above graph and think: so it's all the fault of those Chinese and Indians that have done things such as ditching their bicycles for cars. But it's not just growth in consumption we should consider, but also which countries are consuming the most now.

Below is a graph showing carbon dioxide usage in tons per capita per year. This is more or less equivalent to a graph showing consumption levels per country. 

From this graph we can see that the lion's share of consumption is being done by people in the United States, Canada, Australia, and Saudi Arabia. Even though consumption has been rising in China and India, the per capita consumption in those countries is still less than a third of what it is in the United States.

So we should therefore discard the previous definition of the Consumption Bomb, which was phrased to put the focus on recent adopters of the Western lifestyle. We should instead define the Consumption Bomb simply as the threat to our planetary health caused by high-consumption lifestyles, wherever they may be followed. With this definition we realize that it is not some nouveau riche Chinese who are the main drivers of the Consumption Bomb – it is mainly the citizens of the United States, Canada, Australia, and Saudi Arabia (along with, to a lesser extent, the citizens of ten or fifteen smaller nations).

One of the main catalysts of overconsumption is consumerism. Consumerism is almost a kind of secular religion that is preached to us from birth in a thousand ways, by evangelists such as the pitchmen of Madison Avenue. We are conditioned by television to judge the worthiness of a man by the size or the shininess of his car, or the number of square meters in his house, or how far he traveled for his vacation, rather than what is in the man's heart or mind. Consumerism compels us, in the words of one writer, to borrow money we don't have, to buy things we don't need, to impress people we don't like.

How can you help reduce the devastating ecological blast effects of the Consumption Bomb? Simply consume less. Here are a few things you can do:

1. Eat less meat. According to one study, if a family of four gave up eating steak for just one day a week, it would be the equivalent of taking their car off the road for three months.
2. Drive less, and take public transportation. Stop driving to some place you don't need to go to just to get some photo for a Facebook status update.
3. Stop using Facebook to celebrate frivolous overconsumption. Don't buy some thing you don't need because it would make a nice picture for you to post on Facebook, and don't go to some fancy hotel so you can post a Facebook update to impress your friends. And stop pressing the Like button when you see other people posting photos that document their own frivolous overconsumption. You are only encouraging such people to engage in excessive consumption.
4. Live in the smallest apartment or house you can comfortably live in. When the housing bubble burst, many a family was ruined because it didn't follow this rule.
5. Drop the slogan Bigger is Better, and adopt the slogan Small is Beautiful. Small cars and small homes are beautiful, as are bicycles. Big cars and big homes are (with some exceptions) relics of the past that we should not be building any more.