Will They Mourn?

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Will They Mourn?

In fifty years, will the humans of Earth think fondly of the days when the masterfully orchestrated violence of the infernal combustion engine and its many demands ruled the roads, aspirations, economies, politics, health and even environment of the planet and its people?

Will they remember when 1.3 million humans died in a single year, bodies rent and crushed by the kinetic energy of tons of steel, glass and plastic going awry, directed solely by the hands and minds of beings not well equipped to handle the millisecond demands on attention required to safely guide such machines?

Will they ever count the ill and dead who were not victims of motion gone wrong, but instead succumbed to the effects on their bodies from the acquisition, processing, shipment, combustion of the very ancient and finite source of fuel used, and the many other side-effects of the massive global efforts needed to create and maintain the vehicles themselves?

Will they still be using the different, but even older means to apply torque to a shaft and turn a wheel, that being a rotating magnetic field in opposition to a fixed field, rather than a series of precisely timed combustion events pushing a movable plug in a tube against a lever to turn a shaft?

Objects will no doubt still need to be moved about, perhaps to an unprecedented degree, though will this still be a “job” for a human to perform, to have a hand on a rudder, flight yoke or steering wheel, making endless small corrections to compensate for the variables that seek to divert the vehicle from its intended path? Or will this largely or entirely be the domain of “intelligent” machines that can perform this task to a degree of precision and speed orders of magnitude beyond what the most talented human driver/pilot who ever lived could have achieved, never bored, never distracted, never inebriated, and with nearly instantaneous and continuous communication with the guides of other vehicles in its vicinity, and a memory of a vast database of situations upon which to aid decisions?

Will the raucous sound, intense vibrations and pungent odor of an engine be the sensations of fond memory, of a dimly-remembered past, or will they still be celebrated in gatherings of the Faithful, still keeping such machines in perfect operating condition, racing them around tracks, showing them proudly in gatherings and in museums? Will they still be powered by the heavily processed remains of ancient zooplankton and algae, carefully prepared in boutique processing plants, or will such machines be powered by the chemical proceeds of finally-abundant electrical current passing through water, dividing it into its constituents, only to be recombined in an engine, bringing to life an old technology still worshipped by the young and restless?

Will the people still frequent the roadways, in order to daily attend the site of their employment, visit friends and family, acquire the various and sundries needed to remain alive in an advanced civilization or simply “see the sights”? This seems likely, but will there also be a large portion of humanity that prefers to visit other parts of the Earth, contribute their mental efforts to an employer, or simply commune with others through the medium of telepresence, AR or VR, or whatever supersedes these, their senses enhanced by the medium to a degree that we can't imagine?

Or will, instead, we set ourselves back centuries through conflict, given the at-present situation where it appears that we simply can’t get along with each other, when exposed to too much information about the “other”?

Time Will Tell…

dunno tbh

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No for supporting trump. Because doing so is deplorable.