 | Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
But that was in the past. Today I want to talk about a crisis that will hit this nation forty years in the future.
It will be 1903 and our country will be faced with enormous problems.
The United States will have a much bigger population, spread widely throughout the land. Communications will be restricted to Morse Code over wire, because it's impossible to transmit intelligible speech and there is no way to send signals through the air. Limited contact between distant, or hard to reach, parts of the country will isolate them from each other, leading to division.
Not only that, but in order to have a unified country, we must have the ability to travel long distances quickly. That means we'd have to be able to fly! We can only do that with balloons, but they aren't a solution. You'd have to have a fast, heavier-than-air machine, which surely won't be around in 1903 - if ever.
As for ground transportation, we will have to depend on the railroads, but that has its limitations. And the only other way of getting around by machine will be with cumbersome steam-powered vehicles, since there is no way a compact, lightweight, internal-combustion machine can work. Another reason we will grow apart as a nation.
In addition, our population will be suffering from epidemics, weakening our bodies, and the body politic. We won't have the faintest idea what causes tuberculosis or cholera and therefore will be unable to do anything about it. The result will be social discord.
Now that I've made the case for a national crisis by 1903, I hope you all joing me in my proposed solution. I say we should give up hope on the progress of mankind. Instead, we should retreat into our own personal spheres - facilitated by privatizing every government asset and every government program. For you see, there is no possible way that we as a people, nation, or state can ever solve the problems that will face us forty years hence. |
