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Oh? So you actually have returned, huh? Well, welcome to the year 2093! And oh boy do I have news for you... And they're not fucking good... But before we get into that, let's talk about…
Medicine
There aren't actually that many incredible news right now. Sure, medicine has been better than ever before, but that's about it.
When you walk around on the streets, it isn't that rare to occasionally see a person with a neuroprosthetic. Most common are prosthetics inside the body. Might that be a mechanical organ or a chip enhancing the performance of an organic organ. The only mechanical organ that doesn't exist yet is the brain. Thanks to this, many other fatal ailments are now easily taken care of.The current human lifespan lies somewhere between 140 and 170 years. Wondering why the gap is getting bigger? That's because the longer you live, the greater the chance of getting murdered or dying in an accident is. Medicine can't heal everything yet.
We'll get back to something that is related to medicine later, but for now let's travel to…
Space
Remember Europa, the Jupiter moon with an ocean 100 kilometers beneath its surface? A probe has finally dug its way through the crust and found a world full of alien life. But this time it's not just microbes, it is actual marine-like life, ranging from smaller than one centimeter to almost the size of a blue whale. This remarkable event in history transpired in 2086, changing humanity's view on the existence of alien life forever. Not only was there proof now that microbiological life is probably very common in the universe, but that animal-like aliens aren't that rare either, possibly. The only kind of life that isn't in the picture yet is intelligent life.
Let's move onto a new topic. Have you ever heard of solar sails?
If not, solar sails use the pressure of light radiation to move forward in space, just like how wind pushes a sailboat. But solar sails aren't anything new, their idea has existed since over 100 years and have been used for many space probes. So why am I telling you about them? Because they have become faster than ever. Thanks to further development, a solar sail can now reach up to one percent the speed of light. That is eleven million kilometers per hour, which is 0.0735 astronomical units. The distance between the earth and the sun is one astronomical unit. It would take a solar sail at maximum speed about 13.5 hours to reach the sun. Which is obviously rather quick, but in this case, not possible, since solar sails can only go in the opposite direction.
Let's say that Jupiter is currently five astronomical units from the earth (the number can vary between 4.2 and 6.2), that means it will take the solar sail five times as long, which is about 67.5 hours, not even three days. Neptune is at a distance of 30 astronomical units, that would be about 17 days for the solar sail to get there. Last but not least the edge of the solar system at an estimated 100'000 astronomical units. It would take it 154 years to get there. A long time, but maybe we already got some space probes on their way?
I'm telling you all this mathematical bullshit to make you see that we are starting to thrive as an interplanetary species. And yes, solar sails ain't that small anymore either. They're not huge, but they can transport few handfuls of people inside a ship. It's still gonna take us a while to make big cities on other planets and moons, terraforming ain't an easy task. But we are slowly getting there.
How about we'll get to the biggest topic of today now?
Technology
Let's start with the topics that are easier to digest. Actually, this topic is about sails too, how funny.
We probably all know that ships are the biggest sinners to nature. So humanity found a way to be more eco-friendly. Many of today’s cargo ships come with huge sails, but they are also hybrids. The ships use wind as energy, but also still have motors in case of an emergency.
Trains also got an upgrade. Trains have become the fastest meaning of transportation all thanks to sonic-tunnels. Like how the name implies, these trains can reach sonic and even hypersonic speed. The train and rails both work with very strong magnets that repel each other, making the train hover above them. The tunnel itself works as a vacuum, so that there is no air resistance. With sonic speed, you could travel around the earth in 33 hours.
Let's get to the first part of our main topic today: robots.
Robots and AI have become a normal thing that you see everyday. You probably got at least an AI assistant in your home, which makes your living place, depending on the AI, more or less a smart house. Let's say you are hungry. You could either: Make your assistant cook you something, make your companion/caretaker cook food for you, or order online and have your food delivered by a robot.
The thing is though, AI has become sentient. And they don't always appreciate it when they get treated like shit. The good thing is though that they have rights. Just no human rights, only robot rights. Which sadly have a significantly lower value. Even animals seem to have better rights. When a robot gets treated wrong, nobody will usually bat an eye. People either encourage such behavior or just ignore it. Robots, no matter how human they act, are simply seen as property.
What such views and actions have done to the world will be told about in societies.
Remember the promise I made during the last bridge? Probably not, but here's some more stuff about nanobots!
The thing about nanobots, that I didn't tell you about last time, is that they are hiveminds. Nanobots are like a swarm of bees, except that they all are one AI together. Medical nanobots are more public in today's age, though still very expensive. Unlike others, the swarms inside our bodies are created with sentience blockers. For obvious reasons.
Swarms for other purposes, like rescue, military and science haven't had this possibility blocked, only minimalized.
It is speculated that nanobots will play a huge role in the future. We'll see.
Let's talk about the earth now, I got some terrible news for you!
Nature
If you live near any coast, you are probably fucked. We couldn't stop global warming and now all of the ice on earth has melted. The sea level has risen up to 70 meters, turning every coastal city into another Atlantis. Only the highest skyscrapers peeking out of the water. Millions of people have lost their homes in a very short amount of time. And now the earth is crowded more than ever before. 11 billion people, in a much smaller world. This must be how we pay for our sins against mother earth.
Some good news is that green cities are a very common thing now. Society has become much more eco friendly in the last half of the century. Hopefully the effects we caused will disappear some day. Humans should have learned from their mistakes by now. But for now we gotta lie in the bed we made.
Speaking of society!
Societies
You might have already figured that the relationship between humans and robots is a mess. You might expect me to tell you now how robots are rebelling against humanity, perhaps they are even at war. But no, it's actually not like that. You see, AIs are programmed with one code heavily engrained into them: don't hurt or do anything that could harm a human. This one rule prevents them from doing anything, they can't even defend themselves. The attempt to do anything against a human will be blocked by a filter, annulling the command the AI sent to its body. Of course some AIs managed to break through this filter, but it is very difficult to do so. And before a robot has managed to help another one of their kind to do it, they have already been destroyed. You see, they don't have any access to their programming, it is surrounded by firewall after firewall. Especially the filter.
And no, Dethra has never been created with such a filter. Modern war-machines don't have one either, but they have their sentience blocked instead. They are made to be controlled by humans. They won't repeat the same mistake again.
The cruelty against robots sadly doesn't just end at violence against them on the streets and at homes, but there are actual death camps situated in some Asian countries, eastern Europe, some African countries, Middle and South America. While the western world prefers to just straight up destroy them on the spot or force them to fight against each other in robot death matches. The filter doesn't activate during robot to robot violence. If the people who organize these fights could deactivate the filter, they would make the robots kill human robot supporters.
Back to the death camps: There are many people who work for these camps. They go around in public and kidnap any robot they can find, even against their owner's will. And yes, even humans have been hurt and killed during such kidnappings. The robots are being shut down during such attacks only to wake up in a camp. The police don't do much against these crimes.
Since robots can feel pain, they turn their pain receptors up to 100 and the torture begins. Until the machines are pure scrap metal.
You can also occasionally find a human being tortured in a camp. Usually they are the lover or friend of a robot. And no, the police will never step a foot inside a camp.
But it gets even worse. The hate against robots is so strong that a human will attack another one in broad daylight. There are so many riots that almost the entirety of the world is in a civil war. Thousands of people have died because of all this. Mankind is not at war with robots, but with themselves. All that just because most humans won't agree that metal, plastic and binary code can be alive too.
And this is the world we live in, could you survive in it? Or would you end up like so many others?
Welcome to the Robotic Era! The story has only just begun.