#AtoZChallenge – Fiction Can Be Fun

Z – Zealots, Zeitgeist, and Zoomancy

Travelling around the 50:50 Earth represents a dichotomy, one that could spiral into existential crisis if allowed to fester. One of the great advantages of being a travel writer is that one doesn’t just have to travel for work, because one can simply work wherever one is, and migrate as necessary, sometimes on a whim, sometimes by direction, all the time living where one is working, really getting to know the place you are at the moment.

As at any time of history, there are zealots of various affiliations, although such people seem to be more mellow than in the past – is a mellow zealot an oxymoron? Certainly they seem more inclined to talk and argue their point. There is much more in the way of chequebook diplomacy as people attempt to protect the thing they are interested in, whether it is heritage from before, cultural and civic evolution, or the interests of the part of life unable to talk for itself.

Perhaps this stems from the zeitgeist. The population, on average, seems content with the world that we live in today. Of course there are malcontents, but they seem to be tolerated rather than accepted. Those that would see humanity exert its will over the whole world are vocal, but on the whole ignored. There’s plenty to do off-Earth, for those who really seek adventure, and there are amazing opportunities for those who prefer to keep their feet on the ground and atmosphere over their heads, even if there are places their parents went and things their parents did that they will be denied. Within these constraints, there is a certain dynamism and drive that had been missing in the general population for some time.

Bit perhaps the most important sign that things are going in the right direction is that the Earth is recovering, and endangered species are coming back from the brink. There is still a long way to go, and there are still a terrible number of species at risk: extinction is still a possibility. But if one were to predict the future from the animals of the 50:50 Earth, it would have to be one that looks a lot more positive than at any other time that human beings have been sharing the Earth.

Y – Yomp

In reply to some of the reactionary, libertarian articles about the loss of freedom to explore, it can only be said ‘what a load of old nonsense’. The new hedonism seems to involve an awful lot of effort to try and circumvent the rules – perhaps much as it has always been. We can only be thankful that some of the extremes such as big game hunting have finally gone extinct, but there are still those who would fork over frankly ridiculous sums to get close to a creature they’re not supposed to be near, or climb somewhere verboten, or any number of other activities which require access to land that has been set aside.

Some people, who should really know better, spend a great many column-inches expansively extolling the virtues of getting away from it all, getting back to nature, being at one with the world. Such trips as they suggest seem to involve environmentally and financially expensive trips to secluded parts of the world (‘Is this the world’s loneliest beach?’, ‘Is this the perfect place to forest bathe in solitude?) .

There are two answers to this.

The venerable Microadventures movement, founded by Al Humphreys in the early 21st Century, teaches us that adventure is all around us. An adventure can be as simple as doing a regular activity at a different time of day. Who, walking their dog, for example, has not experienced complete aloneness, or a new group of friends, simply by walking the same route at a different time of day. Or take, the cult of Cloud Appreciation. Again founded in the early 21st Century, this extreme form of hyperawareness shows how taking time to really look at things around us can change our understanding of it immensely.

Or, then again, one can take the time to go further afield. The 50:50 Earth where humans live is not limited to Judge Dredd style megacities, we do not live in a dystopia, just because we cannot go everywhere we want to, when we want to, instantly, and without thought. The parts where humans live is not limited to high-rise accommodation, vertical farms, and mineral reclamation. There is plenty of countryside to enjoy, being mindful of the other residents and habitats that we are moving through.

In any case, the art of the yomp is in no way dead, and whilst, perhaps, it does not quite have the cachet of exclusivity that some may aspire too, it’s an activity that can be done alone or with friends, as you wish.

*Shout out to Al Humphreys, who is in no way venerable, but has packed more into his life than can be captured in a few lines, and is also a really nice chap. I can’t be certain that he coined the term Microadventures, but he certainly wrote the book, which I highly recommend.

*I should probably also note that the Cloud Appreciation Society is not a cult. But who knows what could happen in the future, right?

X – Xeric habitats

One of the most difficult things for people to adapt to in the 50:50 world was the concept of places that were not possible to access whenever someone wanted to. Not all at once, but place by place, region by region, people removed themselves or were removed, and the planet shared on a more equitable basis.

Some of the first places to become free of humanity were, naturally, the most extreme of places, those with little to no available moisture. Strangely, some of these places became more populous, in a sense, after the locking down of the world.

Places like the antarctic have long had bases for scientific study, and even with more extensive use of satellite imagery, there is still a need for bodies on the ground. This sort of model has been brought to bear on other locations of interest. Modern materials and designs are able to make even the driest parts of the world habitable, whether they be hot or cold. The hardest part of the long stints in these bases, stints designed to minimise travel to and from, is the necessity of recycling all the available water.

W – W350: Tokyo Plyscraper

Completed in 2041, W350 in Tokyo is a must visit site on any pilgrimage around the 50:5o Earth. At 350 m in height, this flagship of the Sumitomo Forestry Co. was built to celebrate the 350th Anniversary of the company.

The 21st Century saw the construction industry fall back in love with one of its most important and sustainable materials. Major projects were initiated all over the world, with increasing ambition, particularly with respect to height, although subsets looked at scale in other directions, or at complexity, or simply at excluding all other materials from the design – transparent wood was even used for windows in some cases.

But W350 was something very different – a step change in design which took the title of tallest plyscraper from the previous holder of a piddly 120 m in one fell swoop. Whilst other plyscrapers have subsequently equalled its height, or gone taller, none can quite match the reputation of W350, not even the twins built elsewhere in Tokyo or around the World.

U-UN

A slightly different approach today, still in the 50:50 world, sort of, but a short story setting things up. Returning to the travelogue tomorrow.

No one would have believed in the first years of the twenty-first century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s – which is just as well, because they weren’t. Earth was a mess. The oceans were littered with the waste of humanity’s profligacy. The politicians argued over meaningless trivialities. Alien invaders taking control might have even been preferable to those mired down in poverty and despair. Or a nice friendly apocalypse to wipe the Earth clean. No such luck.

But if there was no single catastrophe that brought the world to its knees and humanity to its senses, there were points of light and hope. There was the Dutch kid who didn’t just stick his thumb in the hole in the dyke, but set out to capture all the plastics in the seas. There were the make-do-and-menders who furnished their homes out of upcycled pallets and drinks bottles. There were the architects and engineers who stopped competing over the biggest pile of concrete and started building ‘plyscrapers’ instead: wooden towers, taller than trees that changed the urban environment forever. There were the city planners who grew up reading sci-fi stories about ‘Caves of Steel’ and arcologies and pneumatic trains. There was the migration off the land and into the cities, leaving vast swathes naturally depopulated.

It never happened all at once, but change happened. People started stepping up, accepting the responsibilities that came with their rights. Meanness and ill-will still exist today, and the world still has its problems, but the environment is getting better.

So what happened? Like I said, it wasn’t any one thing that caused all this. But one big thing that happened was the UN white paper. And my grandmother was a part of that…

Andriana perched on the edge of Will’s desk and tried to resist the temptation to roll the document in her hands. It would have been tricky, because it was 150 pages, but she’d only thermally bound it thirty minutes ago, and the anxiety was building up inside her. Anne was trying to keep her head down at her desk, and failing. Anandini and Kwesi were trying to be casual by the water cooler, arguing the merits of various independent coffee shops. Odette, as ever, was running late.

Andriana tried to decide if she should knock on the Director’s door, or wait to be called in. When she’d woken that morning, she had been fired up: she would stride into the office thump the document down on her boss’s desk and demand that it be taken to the Secretary General. Since then she’d flip-flopped approximately every five minutes between this (uncharacteristically) decisive stance and something which she’d tried to convince herself was more moderate, but which might be construed by others to be wishy-washy.

Every now and again the cycle was broken by a desperate need to be sick. This had not occurred, so far.

This was the big one though. If this report was accepted, with her as first author, then she could do anything. Perhaps she’d get the field assignment that she’d been angling for. Maybe promotion. Maybe…but what if it bombed? The nausea started welling up again…

She ruthlessly supressed it and with a surge of confidence came back to the starting point of decisiveness. She stood up and felt the eyes of everyone in the team turn to look at her. At this point two doors opened simultaneously. Odette threw open the door from the stairwell and flurried in, shrugging off her light coat and apologising for being late, juggling coat, briefcase, and reusable coffee-cup; at the same moment, the boss threw open her door:

“I cannot hear myself think with you all breathing so heavily outside of my door! You’d all better come in and tell me what this is all about.”

They trooped in and the Director shuffled papers around so that she could sit at the head of the six-seater table that was to one side of the room. Everyone coveted this office, with the big picture window with the amazing view. Everyone knew exactly what they would do when they moved in, what furniture they’d have. Some favoured the floor to ceiling bookcase that filled one wall. Some cubes bursting with books and documents, others tastefully bare, with just one or two tastefully arranged knick-knacks and souvenirs. Several held
autographed copies of books such as Tim Jackson’s ‘Prosperity Without Growth’ and EO Wilson’s ‘Half Earth’.

Andriana took the seat next to the Director and handed her the document. The others took their seats round the table, and Will, who’s desk was closest, brought in an extra chair. He and Kwesu shared the other end of the table.
Madura Pau, Director of the UN Agency for Global Sustainable Development looked down and took in the cover page:

White Paper on the principles required for promoting the 50:50 Earth

Prepared by:
Andriana Crowner
Anandini Choudhry
Will Ledgerwood
Odette Marcon
Kwesi Nwosu
Anne Rossnitz
Madura Pau

“I’m not sure I see how I can be an author of this document, when I’ve never seen it before, and I can’t recall commissioning it. I trust this has not been distracting you from your duties.” The complete absence of threat in her voice, combined with the merest flick of a raised eyebrow was, paradoxically, one of the most threatening things any of these people had had to face.

Andriana flushed, but managed to stop herself from choking as she said “The title is pretty self-explanatory, I think. We’ve all chipped in to write a definitive case for a world where humans only live in half of it. We’ve covered some of the most pressing issues, and we’ve tried to consider what would need to be done from a technological view point to allow this. Of course this is very much a first draft, but we were hoping that you would give us some feedback. And take it to the Secretary General. When it’s been revised, of course.”

Pau’s eyes flickered to the book on the shelf and back to the document. She owed them the courtesy of taking a look, at least.

“No promises. But I will look at it. Now get back to work!”

They all trooped out again, barely having been sat down long enough to warm the chairs. Will wondered if it had even been worth bringing his chair in.

In the comfort of her office, Madura Pau picked up the document, a red pen, a block of sticky notes, and settled into an armchair.

T – Trees

Environmentalists love trees – and with good reason. Whilst there has been some argument over the overall effectiveness of trees as a means for removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and adding oxygen, the bigger picture is to consider the complex ecosystems that trees create a home for, not to mention the spiritual and physical benefits from walking amongst them.

One of the great surprises was how readily some species travelled. For example, it didn’t take long for sequoias to establish themselves further afield than California. These trees still haven’t reached their full heights, and that may take another century or more. But today there are more giant redwoods outside their home territory than in them. Britain has been particularly welcoming to these trees, and in turn has sent the London Plane on to conquer new ranges, a popular choice where there is an air pollution problem to address.

Whilst there is some way to go until the lost rainforests are replanted to cover their full ranges of old, there is already debate over the areas that should be replanted and the areas where new biomes have become established and should be protected in their own right. It seems a strange thing to bring to the International courts, but there are those who fight the Treeherders to stop them planting trees – at least in some parts of the world. One of the big pushes has also been to prevent invasive species from being planted even in the urban centres. There is a lesson that people still need to learn in terms of the plant and animal life that escapes control and ends up where it shouldn’t be…

S – SETI and the Songs of the Cetaceans

With increasing urbanisation, or perhaps that should be the increasing height of urban centres, opportunities to be in and around open spaces have increased in popularity and demand. It has become the custom for theatres, whether open air or more traditional, to be located in or adjacent to the new great parks such as New Broadway in New York, or Soho Park in London.

One of the more unusual of these theatre-parks is owned and operated by SETI – the Search for Extra-Terrestial Intelligence. Some critics have been less than kind about the original plays staged here, but even the hardest cynic would find it difficult to say anything bad about Sta Trek the musical. It is of course based on Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, and includes an advert for whalesong opera as a bonus.

Humanity has had a complex relationship with whales, with the particular nadir being the 18th and 19th centuries and the whaling industry that brought many species to the brink of extinction. The 20th and 21st Centuries were a strange mix with the environmentalists attempting to protect the whales and building international support even as some countries attempted to get around bans by citing scientific imperatives. And yet, even as people have been hunting whales, including the needful of imperatives of those for whom the sea used to provide essential subsistence, they have been fascinated and haunted by the songs of the whales, awed and amazed by their majesty, entertained and amused by their antics.

The whalesong opera was written by Sybil Chang-Singh in her spare time during her PhD studies on behalf of SETI. David Brin’s Uplift novels posited dolphins being raised not so much in sentience as application of native intelligence so that they could join humanity as a space-faring race, and the later books in the series present a species that is naturally poetic and musical, with every utterance carrying meaning not just in the words but how they are presented. An opera is therefore not such a big step and it is only strange that it took so long.

SETI’s interest in the whales is perhaps the harder part of the story to understand and accept. They have long been involved with studying cetaceans, and attempting to communicate with them, exactly because of the otherness in their manner of communication. SETI realised that the attempt to communicate with the whales and dolphins would provide an interesting proxy for learning to talk with an alien species.

R -Reservation

In our minds, the periods between two events can become telescoped: time may appeared to have dragged over weeks when in fact things happened a day or so apart, or may have felt like they came one on the heels of another when in fact there was a lot of just living between one shoe dropping and then the next.

There is a tendency to think of the implementation of the 50:50 Earth as something that happened very quickly, and certainly some aspects of it did, but equally some happened in slow motion, the start point in the distant past, before anyone even began to think of sharing the planet.

Throughout human history, settlements have risen and been abandoned for various reasons, sometimes returning in a new form at a later date, sometimes only remembered in legend, sometimes forgotten completely.

In truth, much of the world’s population was already moving to major urban centres away from rural locations hundreds of years ago; the decision to remove ourselves from half the Earth was one that in some senses fed into a trend that had been building for some time. Factories and farms moved to the larger cities, which became larger, smaller settlements became smaller and in due course villages and small towns were dismantled and nature allowed to reclaim the ground from which it been banished for so long.

There have always been those who are naturally contrary though. Not everyone was prepared to move off land that they’d been involved with for generations. Some were able to scratch the itch by taking up roles that came into being with the process, helping to shepherd in the new world order, acting as modern day Johnny Appleseeds by taking plants and animals to new homes.

And then there were the others. Those that refused to give up their land, that refused to listen to Governments and the UN, those that saw the people in the cities as sheeple. They weren’t going to give up their rights, no sir.

Some just wanted their day, and the opportunity to blow off some steam. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it was in the US that the most extreme reactions were seen, with armed defence common even as the police came to evict, and a surprising number slipping away to live off-grid. Some were even successful, and it would be decades before someone, a scientist perhaps, monitoring the regrowth, or a ranger doing some ecological maintenance, would stumble on a base that would do a defiant soldier holding their ground proud.

Q – Quodlibit

Living in a world which is shared out between humanity and everything else has been normal for a generation, but there are still many alive who lived through the traumatic birth of this new world, and everyday there are challenges to be overcome when people come into contact with the world around them.

There are still many who feel that the whole world should be available for exploitation and unfettered exploration – normal does not mean unquestioned. But questioning doesn’t automatically mean sceptical, or desiring a return to the world of the 21st Century.

Late in the 20th century, activists established Earth Day to advocate for the health of the Earth, to educate, and to promote environmental protection. With time, inevitably, controversy was attracted due to large corporations using Earth Day as part of green washing activities. By the end of the 21st Century, celebrating Earth Day had all but died out.

However, with the establishment of the 50:50 Earth, the practice returned. In part this was associated with an annual collection of debates and lectures themed around a single quodlibit, chosen by those who presented the previous year. It’s hard to believe that there are so many philosophical questions that can be associated with the 50:50 Earth, and yet Earth Day has not only become a world wide holiday and celebration, but people make the pilgrimage to see the speakers and debators getting to grips with these challenging questions.

P -Power from space

In the early 21^st Century, it was posited that all of human power requirements could be achieved from around 500,000 square kilometres of solar PV, i.e. by covering less than 1/1000^th of the total surface area of the Earth. Europe and North Africa, for example, would be powered by an array covering approximately 1/18^th of the Sahara Desert.

But even in the inhospitable Sahara, there are still mysteries to be understood, and life to be protected. Scientists are still making discoveries about the majestic star dunes, populations of unlikely creatures such as crocodiles are found deep within the Sahara, and lost cities still come to light.

In practice, whilst a significant portion of the required 500,000 square kilometres can be distributed across the rooftops of the world, the limiting factor is more around the materials available and the rate of manufacture than the availability of land.

With so much technology, yesterday’s science fiction is today’s science fact: it’s a yardstick that Arthur C Clark invented the geostationary satellite, and did much to cement the modern understanding of a space elevator, and Robert Heinlein came up the concept of a waterbed, presenting it in such a way that a subsequent patent application was denied on the grounds of prior art. Space based solar power was a science fiction staple right up to the point that it became a reality, with satellites kilometres long beaming energy down to receiver stations on Earth, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, all year round. The problem has been to ensure that this plentiful energy is a benefit to the whole population of the world, energy that is approaching free of cost and therefore is all too easy to take for granted, all to easy to waste.