”Nine thousand years, our well-wishing opponents say. Ample time to make ready. Meanwhile, why should we lock ourselves into a program that will transform our civilization?
”People of Earth, through me and my colleagues Terra Central tells you that defense against the nebula calls for resources we dare not spend on anything less.”
Monstrous constructions, thousands of them, in orbits that only machine intelligence can maintain-powered by thermonuclear reactions or often by the mutual destruction of matter and antimatter-and first the antimatter must be manufactured by megatonnes-generating forces to ionize alien atoms and whirl the plasmas away-a citadel around the entire globe, waging a war that lasts a tenth of a million years.
”Sun-mirrors to hold back the glaciers in the near future won’t be compatible with this. Their advocates admit it, but say that come the time, we can make adjustments. Perhaps they are right. What they do not say is whether or not the mirrors will tie up too much material and effort. We’ll have to conduct a very thorough survey of the Solar System before we know. Meanwhile, every year we delay starting to take action, the Ice advances farther and becomes harder to fight.
”But we, people of Earth, we now alive, who must make the decision that all our descendants must live with or die by-we should think beyond the engineering requirements. Let’s ask ourselves a simple and terrible question. In the course of nine thousand years, what can happen?”
And she gave them history to show it was unforeseeable.
The Neolithic Revolution tamed wildernesses, fed suddenly large populations, founded the earliest towns, built the earliest smithies- and turned free hunters into peasant masses with god-kings above them.
Scarcely were the Pharaohs of Egypt laid to their eternal rest than thieves plundered the tombs. When railroads later ran through what had been their domains, for a while the steam engines were stoked with mummies.
The Persian Empire fell into internecine war, then fell to Alexander, whose own empire did not outlast his untimely death. What followed was a prolonged bloodbath.
Within four centuries of Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem, Christians were killing heretic Christians.
The peace and refinement of Heian Japan gave way to incessant struggle between clans and war lords. In China, dynasty after dynasty claimed the Mandate of Heaven and eventually, bloodily, lost it.
The Mongols galloped from end to end of Asia, deep into Europe, until their Khan reigned over half a continent. In a few generations that sovereignty crumbled. Nonetheless a remnant of it turned the nascent democracy of Russia into the Tsardom, and another remnant bore Islam to India.
The mighty Aztec and Inca realms broke before a handful of Spanish invaders. The wealth that flowed thence into Europe energized the trading nations of the North but rotted Spain itself, whose long-term legacy became one of tyranny and corruption.
From the “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity” of the French Revolution sprang Napoleon. From the idealism of Sun Yat-sen sprang Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong.
No one in power understood what such modern weapons as the machine gun portended, nor was able to end the stalemate they brought before it had destroyed four empires, lives in the tens of millions, and the spiritual foundations of Western civilization. A greater war ensued, and then a twilight struggle for half a century more, while on its fringes countries newly established went at each other’s throats.
In an age when science was reaching from the innermost atom to the outermost cosmos and scientific technology was transfiguring I he human condition, ancient superstitions ran rampant, everything from astrology to witchcraft. What slowly overcame them was neither reason nor the major faiths but those lesser, often despised sects that had never compromised their creeds. Then slowly their own dominance eroded.
Instead of making governments almighty, global communications speeded the effective breakup of societies into self-determining coalitions of all kinds, ethnic, economic, religious, professional, cultural, even sexual.
Environmentalist crusaders preached, official agencies strove, but what rehabilitated an Earth devastated by overpopulation and overexploitation was a new set of technologies and the economic incentives and disincentives they brought about.
”There are no final answers, not while humans remain human. Nine thousand years is further ahead than our most ancient written records go back. What changes, what violences, what revolutions will they see? Above all, what revolutions of the spirit? We do not know.