Time capsule message to the people of 2122

Dear Editor,

As I’m unsure whether there’ll be anyone around to read my Time Capsule (Census) message in 2122, I’ve decided to share it with your newspaper:

Greetings from 2022 Ireland, whether you’ve unearthed this message from the Time Capsule, as we wish you to… or retrieved it from the embers of a dying planet.

I address you with uncertainty and scepticism. I’m uncertain as to whether you’ll be there to read it, and sceptical about our willingness as a species to respond to the plea printed on thousands of placards last week to ‘Save our Planet.’

I’ve been reading about an ice shelf the size of Rome collapsing in East Antarctica; just days after record high temperatures were confirmed: Another possible nail in the coffin of humanity. Or maybe not, depending on how we tackle climate change. Elsewhere, the Amazonian rain forest is burning, our rivers and lakes are polluted and our oceans poisoned. Plants and animals are being pushed to extinction by a catastrophe largely driven by our species.

I’d like to think that you’ll inherit a world where this stampede towards depletion of resources and the disappearance of global biodiversity will have been halted. I hope… but I’m not optimistic.

The eco protests are getting bigger and louder, but will the politicians listen to them? Or to the experts who have amassed irrefutable evidence that we’re just seconds from midnight on the Doomsday Clock?

You’ll know; if you’re reading this.

We have newspapers in our time. Heard of those? They inform us of what’s happening in the world and we make them from trees that we cut down. For decades the standard of journalism was such that the harvesting of precious wood and even the stripping away of entire forests seemed defensible.

Now it’s different. There’s fake news, and people, especially politicians, who dismiss real news as fake when they don’t like the look or sound of it. Newspapers could be on the way out thanks to the worldwide web. You’ll know if they’ve survived.

I can’t imagine what the internet will have evolved into by your time. I hope it doesn’t turn life for you into a dystopian nightmare.

I wonder if you’ll have abolished the diseases that ravage and grieve us in 2022. Fair play to you if you have, but I wish it could happen sooner. Will homelessness be a thing of the past? And hunger? And will you have finally abolished war?

I’m hoping it hasn’t abolished us in the meantime. I’ve just switched off the TV again to block the bad news: There’s scary talk of mushroom clouds and nuclear winter. As I write this, a Ukrainian city has been struck by another barrage of Russian shells and missiles and the streams of refugees appear endless. North Korea is testing ballistic missiles, Saudi Arabia is executing people as if there was no tomorrow (which there mightn’t be for all I know) and dictatorship, a form of government we thought was on the way out, has made a big comeback.

I’m presuming that democracy will be firmly established in your time, or at least that common sense and decency will have prevailed against the rule of land-grabbing oligarchs and regimes that put profit before people.

I hope too that animals will have been liberated from cruelty and exploitation by your time. I’m engaged in a campaign to protect our beloved Irish Hare. It’s under threat from habitat loss accelerated by climate change, and from people who set dogs on it for fun in the ‘sport’ of coursing.

I’d like to think that activities like coursing will be banned worldwide in 2122 though I fear that the Irish Hare will be long gone by then.

Anyway, I wish you all the best if you’re reading this, regardless of whether you’re fully human (as we understand the concept) or party robotic; whether you live in houses like ours, or in glass bubbles, or under the sea, or out in space, or wherever.

If time travel is possible by 2122 would you mind paying us a visit? We’d love to know how things turned out.

John Fitzgerald, Lower Coyne Street,

Callan, Co. Kilkenny.