An Apology to the Future

(To be included in the Time Capsule to be opened in 2265)

by

John Riminton.

Hi, whoever you are. If you can read this, I guess that you must have managed to survive on the messed-up world that we left you but it can't have been easy for we really did our best to make it unfit for humans. Or maybe you are people from some other world paying a brief visit to our hot little planet who have been able to find a means of reading this. How would I know?

Firstly, there were far too many of us, about nine billion, but, hey. you can't stop everyone doing what comes so naturally. It had, in fact been calculated that we really needed 2 ½ more worlds like ours to have enough space to feed us all as we wanted – but there was only this one so we burned a lot of fossil fuel like oil and coal to give us enough usable energy to try to grow more food and to make all the things that we were told we needed. That heated the place up but whether we made it too hot only you will know. Still, it was fun while it lasted.

Then we had a bunch of people called politicians to organise us but apart from the odd one now and then, they were a pretty hopeless lot, greatly influenced by so-called “lobby groups”, that is people who were making money and didn't want things to change, so the politicians didn't do the things that they should have done to try to stop the things I have mentioned.

There were plenty of clever people around but they didn't seem to be able to get themselves listened to and I feel sorry for them for they could see what was coming but couldn't stop it.

Did your fore-fathers, say, 150 years, ago find a way to get to one of the other planets in our solar system? (I hope that you can understand some of these terms). That would have helped.

Must stop now but, on behalf of us all, I did at least want to offer an apology to the future. That is the least that we can do and never let it be said that we didn't do the least that we could.