The Future by The Committee for Historical Adjustments

On the morning of October 16, 2012, physicist Saul Pentergras entered his office at The University of the Interior, sat down at his desk, and started replying to a flood of email from students who for very good reasons had failed to finish their homework assignments. As he was writing to one student that it would be perfectly acceptable for him to turn in his problem set after his pet kangaroo had recovered from typhoid fever, he says, he noticed something shimmering through the corner of his eye and turned just in time to see a heavy book materialize from the air and fall with a thud onto the hardwood floor of his office. The book bears the simple title of The Future and indicates that it was compiled by the Committee for Historical Adjustments in the year 3421 AD. Over the course of its roughly 1500 pages, the work purports to do no more and no less than provide a factual overview of the history of the human race from the present date until 3421. In a somewhat controversial move, it is being released to the public this month, via Veritable Press.

The contents of the book are wide-ranging, detailed, and frequently harrowing. It begins, no doubt to establish credibility, with five pages of winning lottery numbers for the year 2013 throughout the United States. The Committee then gets down to work, detailing the largely nightmarish course of the next 1300 years of human history. According to the book, over the next hundred years, climate change will intensify, claiming millions of lives through extreme weather phenomena and famine. In spite of this, the world’s population will continue to increase, reaching 12 billion by the year 2100. Oil reserves will dwindle, and no fully viable alternative energy plan will have been developed. Growing scarcity of resources will lead to an increase in armed conflicts (though, luckily, no nuclear weapons will be deployed). No immediate solutions to these problems will be forthcoming, and the continual progress our civilization has seen since the start of the Renaissance will come to a halt. By the year 3100, ravaged by war and natural disasters, the human population will have dwindled to 800 million.

But then, things will begin to change. A new age of unification will begin, as decimated nations will resolve at least some of their differences and come together to try to solve some of the immense problems facing the world. By 3250, much of Europe will officially be a single nation, China and Australia will have merged, and India and much of sub-Saharan Africa will fly the same gigantic flag as the world’s largest military and economic power. A period of peace will blossom, and progress will resume. We will learn to live in a warmer world. We will develop viable alternatives to oil.  Perhaps most importantly, we will resurrect our space program and begin to explore the universe again. In 3410, the unified African/Indian nation will land the first manned mission on Mars, establishing a permanent colony. Plans will begin to be made for larger, longer, more ambitious trips. In 3420, the mechanics of time travel will be discovered.

The appearance of The Future naturally prompted a great deal of both skepticism and excitement, especially in academic and literary circles, and has led to a flurry of speculation about the true origin and purpose of the book. Among the theories that have been put forward are the following:

• The book has actually been sent back from the future and depicts the true future as experienced by the Committee for Historical Adjustments. They wrote the book and sent it back to this pivotal moment in history so that we can take a different path and avoid the millenium of suffering experienced by the ancestors of the Committee. There is some debate among philosophers regarding the metaphysical possibility of this. Many claim that, even if time travel is possible, it is impossible to “change the past.” For example, if we take a different path from that described in The Future, The Future would never have been written and hence could not have been sent back in time to influence our decisions. This is paradoxical, they say. Others claim that we shouldn’t be so hasty in our analysis, arguing that the only constraint that has been placed on the future is that, at some point, a book identical to The Future, whether or not it portrays the true events of the past, must be sent back to Professor Pentergras’ office on October 16, 2012.
• The book has actually been sent back from the future and depicts the true future as experienced by the Committee, but it is impossible for us to take a different path from the one depicted. The book is not a warning, but a guide and a promise, without which humanity would be unable to stay perched on the knife’s edge of existence for the next millenium. If the book did not exist, the human race would, in its blind ignorance, inevitably fall prey to any one of the dangers facing it or, lacking the knowledge of the imminent dawning of a new Golden Age, would simply give up and fade away.
• The book has actually been sent back from the future but depicts a future much worse than reality. (This hypothesis is closely related to the first.) Somewhat perversely, the existence of this book, which will spur us to action, is the only way for humanity to avoid the misery depicted therein. A careful balancing act had to be achieved in the writing of the book, though – the somewhat hopeful ending is necessary to avoid sending humanity into total despair.
• The book has actually been sent back from the future but depicts a future much better than reality. It was sent by a group of radical nihilists intent on the destruction of humanity and was designed to lull the human race into a false state of complacency in which impending doom will not be recognized until it is too late to prevent. Again, a delicate balancing act was necessary. An overly optimistic picture would have inspired enthusiastic action and averted disaster; it was instead necessary for us to think that we just have to wait out the next thousand years for good things to start happening.
• The book has not been sent back from the future and is simply an elaborate hoax. This seems to be the most widely believed theory. If this is the case, then the book’s creators did some very impressive work. The materialization of the book in Dr. Pentergras’ office is documented on his security camera – if this is a fake, then it was very well done. Also, five of the dates about which The Future made lottery predictions have already passed, and it has been correct about every one.
• The book has not been sent back from the future. It is an assault on the lottery, carried out by a group that has infiltrated lottery organizations and has the ability to rig the games. Once the book is published and some of its predictions have been seen to be true, the numbers it predicts will be bought en masse. The lottery will then not make any money, either for the states or for those buying winning tickets, and will collapse. The rest of the book is just filler.
• The book has not been sent back from the future. It is propaganda by an environmental organization, designed to scare the world’s governments into finally taking meaningful action about climate change.
• The book has not been sent back from the future. It was written by an anti-environmental organization, calculating that the book will be interpreted as environmental propaganda and that this will erode the credibility of the movement.
• The book has not been sent back from the future. It is a sophisticated mathematical projection of current historical trends in the spirit of Hari Seldon’s psychohistory.
• The book has not been sent back from the future. It is a sort of boast by a clandestine cadre of individuals with the power singlehandedly to bring about the events depicted in the book, despite any resistance which may be organized by the book’s publication, and the ability to profit immensely from the upheaval of the coming years.
• The book has not been sent back from the future and is simply a work of science fiction. If this is the case, then this reviewer must admit that the work itself, aside from its technical achievements, is not terribly impressive. The prose lacks personality and the plot is derivative, covering ground that has been treated much more engagingly in countless other works.
• The book is the result of a random quantum fluctuation and lacks any intrinsic meaning.

For now, speculation about the nature of The Future is more engaging than The Future itself. It is worth reading, though, if only for the fact that this speculation is enormous fun. The book could turn out to be a flash in the pan, a hoax quickly uncovered and tossed aside. On the other hand, regardless of its veracity, the book could conceivably come to play a crucial role in the history of our race, and you, Dear Reader, can claim to have been one of the first to take it seriously and recognize its true importance.