The Invitation(38)

“Your climate will become unstable. Warm and acidic oceans will no longer nurture abundant life. Deserts will again come to dominate all land masses. Most of the animals that have inhabited your world through eons of change will become extinct. Deadly radiation from abandoned nuclear reactors will poison your water. War and famine will dominate. A microbial onslaught of infectious diseases will follow, killing off most of humanity, and human civilizations march through history will stop. Your cities and urban landscapes will be emptied of all human inhabitants, and centuries of decay will reclaim the Earth. A long period of struggle, and hardship will ensue. Yet, even this, humans will survive. In high mountains, and remote places, the scattered populations of the genus Homo will live on. Their descendants will live to see an age of ice, and a world much colder. Your oceans will shrink, and mountains of ice will dominate the land. Six thousand years will pass before deep sea currents once again restore the stability of a temperate world. At that time, a second dawn of man will begin. Human population will have dwindled to less than one percent of its former peak. The cataclysm will be over. This is the future you’re apparently willing to bequeath to your grandchildren’s grandchildren. And so we will show you what you are by default preparing for future human generations. Behold the future of man.”

With these words the alien face of a creature that calls himself a Linesian” fades from view, and in its place, all can see a wide-angled, panoramic view of the eastern United States as seen from space. The projected image still dominating a quarter of the night sky now showing our own world is remarkable in its detail, and clarity. It zooms in to the New England coast and the city of New York, but as the view brings us closer, and closer something very disturbing presents itself. Immediately noticeable is the absence of any familiar landmarks. An eerie curiosity pervades, as image after image is displayed, and it becomes hard to believe that what we are seeing, really is a picture of what use to be America’s financial capitol. We slowly approach what remains of the island of Manhattan, but it’s barely recognizable. Great heaps of rubble covered in huge mats of moss and algae, part swamp, part archeological ruin, with no bridge, building, or standing structure of any kind in any direction, and then the alien voice is heard again.

“The year is 2280. A runaway greenhouse effect is causing dramatically rising temperatures in your world. The release of methane gas from substrates beneath the sea floor has increased forty fold in the last half century, accelerating the warming trend. By this time, the Greenland ice sheet no longer exists, disappearing more than sixty years ago. Ice all over your planet is melting fast. Your oceans have risen over forty feet. Coastal cities have been abandoned for decades. Twenty six years before, on a warm, dark night in 2254, anyone looking eastward on the Atlantic coast of North America saw something very odd. A flash of brilliant white light was seen, and quickly disappeared. Lasting only a few seconds, those who saw it were at first puzzled, but when a slow rumbling was heard, and felt minutes later, it became unmistakably apparent that an impact event had occurred. It was a meteor. Only one hundred feet wide, it was not very large, but that was large enough. This meteor, made mostly of iron, was hard and heavy when it streaked through your atmosphere at seventeen miles a second almost a thousand miles east of New York City. The brief, silent flash was over in an instant, but would have effects lasting for decades. The meteor’s weight, speed, and angle of impact sent a massive energy wave across the dark expanse of the Atlantic Ocean. A cloudless, moonless night shrouds its terrifying approach. The tsunami is almost eighty feet high, and traveling at two hundred and seventy miles an hour. When the juggernaut strikes land it crests at one hundred and thirty feet, its incredible impact magnified many times over by increased sea level. Coastal cities, already crumbling are pulverized by the tsunami’s massive punch. Another great wave follows. Billions of tons of water strike your coastal cities at over two hundred and fifty miles an hour, and physically erases them. Parts of your Statue of Liberty are carried seventy miles inland. Warming temperatures did not cause this event, but made it much worse. What you are seeing is the aftermath of the most powerful indigenous impact event in recorded history. Nothing could have resisted it. All standing structures were undermined first by rising sea water, and then completely annihilated by the tsunami’s irresistible crush. Your New York City, capitol of the world, epicenter of global wealth and prestige, , the proud icon of your modern age, your Rome, is obliterated, and becomes the flooded wasteland of tangled industrial wreckage you see before you. What was a teeming center of human activity and commerce teems now with mosquitoes and turtles. The city that never sleeps, now sleeps forever. The ‘Big Apple,’ you might say, has been swallowed. If you could find a human in this wasteland to ask him where all the people are, he wouldn’t have any idea what you’re talking about. Over a century ago unusually virulent plagues ravaged already declining human populations killing hundreds of millions. The steep decline in human numbers will continue for thousands of years.”