by Christopher Schlegel

Civilization is digressing lethargically on it’s way down hill. High-tech media sources are gone, as with any televised programming. The more advanced a technology was, the quicker it went down. For a brief time, newspapers came back into existence. The were published at random intervals, but even that was a short lived venture. When you can get a rare fresh newspaper or, more frequently, their government sponsored reports, you can read that there is a little dissention among experts in various fields about when the Final Collapse will occur. There is no disagreement in the prediction that it will occur.

Some have been bold (or stupid) enough to proclaim it to be a matter of days. One of these, a Pre-Embryonic Psychologist, even went as far as to specify thirty-eight days from the time of his announcement. When the Collapse did not occur as scheduled, he claimed that it did indeed occur but people (other than himself, of course) pre-consciously chose not to perceive the event. Most of the predictors were far more vague and generalized in their calculations. The estimated time resulting from their speculative equations ranged from months to decades.

The story I set down here is the result of extraordinary events. I think any story worth being put down in concrete form for posterity should be necessarily so. Perhaps, though, to contrast it with every day events surrounding and leading up to it might be in order. Since I have no idea who may find my manuscript, I must put everything in a proper context. For the reader may be completely unfamiliar with our civilization’s history.

From what I understand through a basic, novice anthropological knowledge, we took millions of years to progress from Perception-Level Beings to Conceptual-Level Sentients. Then, thousands of years to move on to Industrial-Level, then, hundreds of years to Digital-Level. >From there, only decades to Purecarbon-Level. Each phase taking, obviously, less than the last. Because we have had no contact from conscious beings originating from off of our own world, we have no idea how normal or abnormal this rate of progression actually is. Some intellectuals are saying that the advanced exponential growth we went through was an unavoidable Historical Necessity. And likewise, so is a Final Collapse. This, of course, fits in nicely with the doom-filled predictions and prophecies of religious leaders and factions the world over.

Last month a group of physicists published a paper that claimed this can all be understood through the application of Iandlepough’s Uncertainty Principle. This Principle states that we can’t obtain specific knowledge of the sub-atomic objects smaller than the smallest wavelength of light. Scientists use light to indirectly observe the workings of these extremely small building blocks of the universe, so, obviously, anything smaller than our smallest tool is unobservable. Using this Principle as a major premise of their paper, the physicists inferred that because we can’t observe the workings of the fundamental building blocks of reality we can’t have any certain knowledge of reality in general. Therefore, Cause and Effect are subjective illusions created by people foolish enough to think that they observing sense and order when they look at the world around them. Ultimately, they surmised, we are at the mercy of these sub-atomic particles that we can have no knowledge of. These particles whiz around doing or not doing or doing and not doing at the same time (this part was referenced by some extremely complex mathematical equations) what they do and/or do not do and we are simply dragged along helplessly and unwittingly for the ride. I am certainly no scientist or philosopher, but it wasn’t too hard to imagine how pleased most people were to learn they aren’t responsible for their thoughts and actions.

I wonder if it is the same on other worlds.