A pellet shot of micro-futures
Trigger warning: rape, pedophilia, autism
Since 2018, I’ve been irregularly tweeting micro-futures. Short speculations meant to invite critical thought. They’re organized into a thread of threads, but that’s obviously not the best format. So I’m moving them here to make them both more readable and accessible to my non-Spanish-speaking students.
I’m sorting them in chronological order, but please don’t take this as a “timeline of the future” but rather as a disarrayed shot of small, autonomous pellets from more or less probable, plausible, or desirable futures.
How does each of these futures makes you feel? Excited? Disgusted? Why? Consider these tiny speculations not a trip to the future, but a trip to your own convictions, hopes, and fears.
2019: Manipulation Rate Optimization
For the UK elections, the Tories launch the first campaign strategy based on A/B tests.
They broadcast Boris Johnson deepfake videos promising opposite things, and then, after denying both, the real candidate declares in the line of the most successful deepfake.
2019: Open-carry voodoo
A millionaire Youtube star invents the most feared weapon of the new elite: the Voodoo Gun. At the pull of the trigger, it snaps a photo of the victim and sends it to a pre-hired team that will determine their identity, and release against them a $150,000 budget allocated between angry fanbois, doxxers, social media publicists… a wide variety of professionals proficient at socially destroying a person with every non-violent means imaginable.
—That you could do with an app, you don’t need a weird looking gun.
— You know nothing. Half the power of a gun lies in what you get when you point it at someone, not when you fire it.
For the Voodoo Gun to have maximum deterrent or persuasive power, the process of social obliteration is triggered by cyber-currencies and smart contracts designed so that no one, not even the owner of the weapon, can stop it. The effect is totally irreversible.
The day the creator accidentally triggers the device while cleaning it, he becomes the protagonist of the first act of accidental smart-contract-enabled social suicide.
(2020 update: should have called it “the cancel gun”)
2019: The period of hacking the period
The first Lilith Technique is successfully performed: reversible installation of a biocompatible plug in the cervix with a bypass that sends the menstrual contents to the ascending colon. The Pope condemns the practice for “violating the dignity of women”.
It takes ten years of social debate until having a Lilith is totally de-stigmatized. In 2029 the number of cervical-colon bypasses practiced in developed countries exceeds the already declining number of breast implants.
In the discussions it is argued that the slow adoption of Lilith is due to the fact that it is “an intervention on the female anatomy for a matter that is of no interest to men,” so male surgeons tend to exaggerate the risks and ignore the advantages.
Pragmatism prevails: not only is it the most effective barrier method of contraception, but it also makes menstruation noticeably more manageable. The feminine hygiene sector experiences a strong disruption.
Friends (women only) Would you have a Lilith? Laparoscopic surgery with general anesthesia, 24-hour recovery, to forget about contraceptives and expel your period, dehydrated and compacted just with the rest of your… your digestive contents.
(My pathologist sister tells me that communicating the cervix with the colon would be a terrible idea because the colon’s microbiota would wreak havoc on the uterus).
2019: It’s not VR, it’s rape
DARPA completes pilot tests of DEFLECT, the advanced virtual reality system with haptic devices that allows infantry deployed in hot areas to virtually commit various acts of sexual violence against local women.
“The benefits are clear in terms of a marked decrease in incidents involving civilians, and ease of reintegration upon return,” says Jane H. Skinner, the program’s chief researcher. In the face of strong protests from multiple groups, she responds: “This is war. Combat-related sexual violence is a real problem, and it is a serious one. We can do this, or we can go back to the old doctrine of turning a blind eye. It’s your choice”.
The different reactions to DEFLECT within feminism become one more axis of internal discord.
Two years after, longitudinal follow-up shows that after returning, several of the soldiers participating in the DEFLECT program are involved in incidents of sexual violence involving both their partners and other women.
Meanwhile, several companies in the Orlando area are investing in mimicking DEFLECT’s performance with civilian technology. The banning of these systems leads to the birth of a thriving black market in content and devices.
2019: Surrowoke
Woke ultraliberals invent fair trade surrogacy.
2019: Nitroglicerine in your smartphone
Gladys Castillo raises 2M euros in Indiegogo to make a discreet flat micro-pillbox attached to the smartphone of people at risk of cardiac arrest. By taking it to your mouth, it simultaneously releases its single dose of nitroglycerin and closes a circuit that excites your smartphone’s NFC sensor and triggers it to send a message to the emergency service with your location.
It enjoys an exploitation window of 30 days before convenience bazaars become saturated with 1 euro knockouts.
2020: The dawn of pharmaco-behavioral design
After a year of Phase III trials, one of the big generic drug manufacturers launches worldwide EaseOut, a treatment for depression three times more effective than the existing ones as measured in “real life outcomes”.
The formula: an app that combines self-administration of cognitive-behavioral therapy, weekly mood self-diagnosis through experience sampling, and a simple algorithm of successive trials with generic SSRIs that searches and finds your ideal out-of-patent antidepressant.
National health systems enthusiastically prescribe the app as the first line of treatment right in Primary Care, because of its unprecedented safety, effectiveness, and cost-efficiency.
The pharma’s stock skyrockets. Their ratios soar above those of those pharmaceutical companies that spend their R+D budget on the search for new molecules. “The ‘beyond the pill’ era is here, and it’s powered by old drugs,” headlines The Lancet.
As was the case years ago with Headspace, a cornerstone of the success of the new product/service is in the content quality. The pharmaceutical company vertically integrates a production company to lower costs for its second foray, this time into anxiety disorders.
2020: My eyes are here
Google adds “Eye Contact” to Duo, Hangouts and Meet: the feature that via Machine Learning corrects the apparent direction of the gaze so that when two people are looking into each other’s eyes on their screens, they really look like they are looking into each other’s eyes.
(Partially fulfilled when that feature got added to Apple’s FaceTime.)
2020: Pseudoneurodivergent posturing gets cancelled
Self-deprecating humor on Twitter at the expense of situations where your introversion or social awkwardness borders on autism spectrum disorders is no longer considered charming.
(Partially fulfilled as such posturing is now deemed ableist and in bad taste)
2020: Naegleria is the new Greta
The increase in deaths from Naegleria Fowleri (the brain-eating amoeba) in connection with the rise in temperature catapults the gruesome protozoan to the stardom of climate terror.
2020: Stranger things have been seen
Following the innovation that brought so many benefits to Levi’s, Apple releases the iPhone ZD, with a “D” for “distressed”. Smartphones that already leave the factory with a scratched screen, and indelible marks of wear and tear on the case. Much more expensive.
2020: Neither bots nor cyborgs: implants in the campaign
In the US presidential elections, bots and cyborg networks on Twitter are replaced by implant networks. An implant is a permission given by a real user to a platform to tweet on their behalf with some regularity in combination with their organic tweets.
The platform uses a Rephraser (a Machine Learning based algorithm) to rewrite the programmed message but using, individually for each implant, the lexicon and style turns typical of the implanted person (extracted from their organic tweets). In this way, communication strong-points can be disseminated in a way that is practically indistinguishable from people’s genuine organic opinion. Like astroturfing but undetectable by conventional means.
An article in WIRED baptizes the practice as “imozeling” by Imozel, the manufacturers of one of the artificial turfs closest to real grass.
2020: Get up to 200 euros in freebets for an in vitro fertilization
I win the lottery and fulfill my dream of buying a sports gambling parlor and transforming it into “ALEA”, a permanent non-profit exhibition dedicated to educating the public about the nature of chance, probability and uncertainty.
As you enter, you’re given 1,000 tokens and can spend them as you wish in different games that are statistically correct replicas of real life situations with a statistically definable uncertainty component: Infertility, Cancer, Investing… (you don’t win anything, just learn).
2020: Until next neurobullshit
The startup Uncanny NeuroTech raises 20 million dollars to market their OpenBook FaceReader technology, capable of interpreting the micro gestures of a person with the same predictive efficiency as that of a human expert (practically none).
2020: Better go cool than go light
Lenovo launches a portable computer inspired by the Motorola 9100. Weighing 12 pounds, with a tiny mechanical keyboard and a 5-day battery including a 120/220V inverter to connect your electric shaver or whatnot, the bulky, waterproof titanium case begins to be seen proudly carried by the new digital design and software development elites.
2021: Behavioral design stales
Growing public literacy in behavioral economics means that in product design, things like framing a user’s decision in terms of aversion to loss are judged to be as sappy and crass as the crude Freudian advertising resources of the Mad Men era.
2021: Must one draw the line?
An article in Wired captures the main points of the heated debate over whether “Neverland”, the Magic Leap eyewear deepfake app that allows pedophiles to view their sexual partners as if they were minors, should be legal.
2021: Compromise solution
The SLOW smartphone, an Android device with an electronic ink screen, is not suitable for games, blurs the transitions of modern apps, and its camera is only suitable for capturing QR codes. In return, it is indestructible, the battery lasts a week, and it gets an A+ in accessibility.
Many digerati consider it a good virtuous halfway point between immolating themselves on the altar of exponentiality and retreating to waldenponding.
2021: We’re not taking it anymore
Siri, Alexa, Cortana and Google Assistant simultaneously implement a pattern of interaction they call “Noraslamming”: in front of any inappropriate input (sexual insinuations, verbal abuse…) they answer “That’s no way to talk to anyone” and shut down for 15 minutes.
2021: With the spirit of Alfredo
On the occasion of the call for early General Elections in Spain, the race between the TV channels for developing having a neural network that does real-time factchecking on politicians. Minutes before the seven-way debate, the hacker team “KRYPTO KRAHE” manages to clandestinely retrain the TV channel robofactchecker using the Old Testament as its sole source. Each candidate’s statement gets disproved in prime time with data taken from Leviticus verses.
2021: To the iron with it
Given the trend towards browser-based applications, and inspired by the Lisp Machines of the 70s and 80s, Google and Qualcomm join forces to create a microprocessor whose machine code is Javascript.
2021: Slow bullet
It is suspected that the Russian Federal Security Service has a genetic weapon capable of inducing a variety of terminal diseases in a single target individual by diffusing a personalized protein into the environment, which is harmless to others. The death of newspaper director Dusan Mikhailov from pancreatic cancer, and of activist Alla Balashova from a glioblastoma, inaugurate the era of media paranoia about “slow-motion assassinations”.
2022: Spain arrives late to the burial of disruption
2022: The verb “to disrupt”, the noun “disruption” and the adjective “disruptive” cease to be used appreciatively for innovative business, and return to their original semantics.
In Spain it still takes about ten years to stop talking about something “disruptive” as something rad.
2022: Suck on your smartphone
Huawei buys 25% of the electronic cigarette company JUUL and integrates tiny vaporizer modules into its smartphones. The first phase of the new product roadmap is apps with controlled decreasing nicotine administration to help quit smoking. The second phase involves the substitution of nicotine by other synthetic psychoactives with different functional properties (stimulants, benzodiazepines…) allegedly to improve the accuracy of treatments with psychoactive drugs for mild disorders of high prevalence. The third phase (approved soon by the Chinese government and a few years later in the rest of the world) involves the administration of psychoactives that trigger the reward response by associating it with desired behaviors in an interoperable way with Sesame Credit.
Reactions against it start to recede with the first successes of Honeymoon, the app that “cures gender violence”. The 2030s are declared the decade of fusion between psychopharmacology and digital applications to create more stable societies, and happier and more productive people.
2022: Keep calm and carry on
In the business world, the expression “business as usual” loses the pejorative connotations of inertia and resistance to change assigned in innovation contexts, and recovers the positive connotations of calm and resilience with which it was used in the UK in 1942 against The Blitz.
2022: User-centered society
An apocalyptic op-ed from a conservative news outlet coincides with a morbid report by Vice on Freebie, the 23AndMe spinoff that for 20 dollars and 15 cc of your spit determines whether or not you have the “Johnny Rotten Cocktail” (the genetic combination that allows you to do any kind of drugs and yet get old).
2022: Korg Neurosynth
The first commercial synthesizer based on neural networks is launched. It faithfully imitates the expressiveness and complex articulations of great artists such as Hendrix on guitar, Parker on saxophone and Davis on trumpet.
2023: Sorry if I call you love stupid
Immunoremovable tattoo ink is perfected. Each tattoo is delivered with a vial of the specific antibody which, when intravenously injected, will cause its complete and selective disappearance within fifteen days.
After the padlocks on the Pont Neuf, the following silly practice of celebrating toxic love becomes all the rage: getting a tattoo with the other person’s name and then posting a video breaking the vial and flushing the contents into the toilet.
2023: Inclusion and knowledge
2023: Years after the dismissive addition of the A for Arts to the STEM acronym, the educational world finally admits that the H for Humanities is as necessary as the rest if not more so.
Five years after, under protest of social scientists, the acronym THEMAS is dropped and we start talking about just “knowledge” (the post-Brexit British did not have much luck proposing THAMES).
2023: Mattel gets in the crossfire
Pickets with banners “SEX WORK IS WORK YOU JERKS” demonstrate in front of Mattel’s headquarters in El Segundo (California) protesting the withdrawal of the “Barbie Escort” and “Barbie Adult Media Mogul” product lines.
2025: You shall thrive
The leftist press, after a six-month investigation, lambastes Thrive (code name for internal use only), the semi-secret initiative of one of Spain’s largest banks to establish long-term ties with high-potential individuals.
Thrive is a para-financial product with three components: high potential teen detection system, life coaching system for key life decision support, and a lifetime line of credit.
The detection system identifies high school adolescents who, because of their social network profile and academic results, have a high probability of becoming high-income adults. They are offered a psychometric test and if they pass it, parents are offered entry into the program.
The life coaching system is a holistic optimizer that helps make key decisions about training, employment, housing, hobbies, and relationships. You can ignore the advice of the algorithm in these areas, but only thrice: “three strikes and out”.
The line of credit finances your studies, private medical insurance, travel, housing… Normally by the age of 25 the bank has already spent about one million Euros on you. The interest rate is dynamic and individual.
Thirty years later the program has profoundly controversial results. On the positive side, Thrive’s algorithm has little to no class, gender or ethnicity bias, and results in the emergence of a new elite of unprecedented diversity. On the negative side, behavior control is so prescriptive that it borders on the illegal. Thrive is accused of being a digital, secular version of Opus Dei. The intellectuals do not know what to think and only react according to their ideological reflexes.
Nay-sayers leap like hyenas over the first cases of suicide, but statistical analysis reflects that the incidence of suicide is actually lower than that of the general population.
2024: Hertzian waves? Not in my yard!
Controversy erupts worldwide over the specification of the PoW (Power over Wireless) layer of the new 6G standard. It tries to release a low band of Medium Wave (around 300 kHz) to transmit a carrier without signal, to feed IoT devices.
The idea is to create a worldwide coverage of energy that is easy to harvest so that certain sensors placed on everyday objects do not need to include a power source. Old AM transmitters and repeaters are diversified as energy transmitters creating a new business in which device makers pay a small fee to cover the cost of energy emission.
A large part of the population revolts. Voices from various points on the grey border between science and pseudoscience argue about health risks.
In the eye of the storm are people with electromagnetic sensitivity. The public dilemma of whether this condition is organic or psychological reaches its maximum intensity. There hasn’t been such a polarizing topic on Twitter for years.
For two decades, RF field intensity meters get more popular than thermometers and become the liturgical device of a whole new way of blaming someone for our ups and downs.
(Nikola Tesla chuckles in his grave).
2025: The invasion of the everpuppies
A bitter debate opens on Twitter about whether those who buy dogs modified with CRISPR/Cas so that they never go beyond puppies are true animal lovers or not.
2025: The next avant-garde will not be an avant-garde
The “Manifesto for a Cultural Reset”, signed by people from the visual arts, literature, sociology and cultural studies, starts an era in which we give ourselves permission to rediscover everything. Their detractors label them “Adamists”, a term they enthusiastically appropriate.
Galleries and museums fill up with vibrant novelties that range from bone ornaments carved with bifaces to pop art, including an exhibition whose spectators “reset” their gaze through a ketamine-assisted immersion in Egyptian friezes and Romanesque frescoes, so that at the end of it, when we see “for the first time” the use of perspective in the Renaissance, their heads are blown off.
2026: Man, your smartphone smells
The “electronic nose” (a detector array that can analyze volatile compounds in the air) is added to the set of integrated sensors in smartphones and home automation devices. Its first application is culinary: it warns when the food you are toasting, frying… has reached the point. The second, the recognition of many events in the house (arrival and departure of people, emotional state of self and others …)
Finally we can have the situational awareness of a dog.
2027: Solve for Happiness
POCTech Corporation, the Chinese company manufacturing insulin pumps controlled by blood glucose sensors, gets authorization from the Chinese Government to start a pilot of Atarax, the first “emotional pacemaker” for patients with bipolar disorder. Combining a multidrug pump with a versatile biosensor and a network firewall with payload analysis on the patient’s devices, Atarax estimates mood from the presence of glucocorticoids in the blood combined with physical and digital activity analysis, and stabilizes mood through real-time administration of variable doses of ketamine, mirtazapine, carbamazepine, and selective filtering/injection of web and application content.
Eight years later, China declares the eradication of bipolar disorder. Atarax users are happier, more productive, and have more satisfactory social relationships. In view of the social clamor, the ban on use in healthy people is swiftly lifted.
In the West, meanwhile, the debate over whether emotional pacemakers should be legal is soon settled with a “it’s a neutral technology, it can be used for bad or good things, let’s proceed with caution but not be backward”. By 2044, the principle of emotional pacemakers has extended from the restricted concept of “health” to the more holistic “well-being” and then to the more ambitious “happiness”.
The purchase of American Medtronic by The Walt Disney Company is flanked by the creation of a non-medical division aimed at optimizing content consumption according to emotional state. The tagline “Solve for Happiness” starts to appear printed under the Walt Disney logo.
2028: Lunar lingo
In the heat of project Artemis to establish permanent presence in the Moon, astronautical expressions like “this guy is stickier than regolith” or “this project is taking escape velocity” are incorporated to the popular speech starting a new Space Age.
2029: Surveillance cocacolism
The Coca-Cola Company gets international regulation to authorize them to put a sensor and GPS receiver on every can/bottle that monitors location and pressure difference between the inside and outside, and send the data to Atlanta as often as necessary.
Two years later, thanks to the stream of location and pressure data, TCCC obtains valuable data on the distribution chain and consumption contexts that allow them to increase their EBITDA by a stellar 25%.
One year and a half later, Aamira Bashir, from the Engineering Department, discovers that due to the storage and energy harvesting capabilities of the chip in each can/bottle, there is no practical limit to the frequency with which pressure data can be sampled and sent. By raising the pressure sampling frequency to 44,000 samples per second, every can and bottle of Coca-Cola in the world becomes a high-fidelity microphone. Overnight, TCCC becomes the world’s largest intelligence agency.
2029: Adaptive nudge
Following the success of Phase III trials, the FDA approves the use of anaprezumab (trade name Bliss) for its efficacy in treating anxiety and depression associated with poor living conditions (temporary work, low pay, decline of social services).
Psychiatrist María José Ochoa declares: “Those who accuse us of pathologizing and medicalizing what is not a disorder but simply the failure to adapt to an abusive social order, one would say they were born yesterday. More than half of our work has always been exactly that”.
2029: Don’t be evil if you can be monstruous
A whole range of questionable practices has become so prevalent in digital products that “working ethically on a digital product” has become just as problematic as working ethically in a tobacco company or a gambling parlor chain.
2029: Boy Band Riots
First case (in the UAE) of what will later be called “boy band riots”: a tactic of tempering social tensions at the hands of economic/political power through controlled violent civil disobedience movements led by laboratory leaders.
Design phases of a “boy band riot”:
1. Design of final state: The authorities begin by determining the reforms or concessions that will be made at the end of the process.
2. Riot design: Casting and training of global and local leaders. Calendar of mobilizations.
3. Mobilization: The leaders, amplified by psyops in the media and social networks, provoke the expression of popular anger through outbreaks of civil disobedience with controlled violence. The first victories of the movement are staged before the feigned resistance of those in power.
4. Negotiation and victory: The leaders achieve the reforms or concessions designed in phase 1, in a climate of apparent humiliation and defeat of power.
5. Demobilization: Once the change is achieved, the disturbances cease amidst a general sense of victory for the people.
Although “boy band riots” are born in the Gulf monarchies, throughout the 2030s they are adopted globally, first in Russia and Latin America, and then in the United States and Europe.
2029: The climate doctrine of shock
The Chinese government claims to have already in place the most ambitious plan to reverse the climate catastrophe in the world, combining 97% emancipation from fossil fuels, 100% nuclear + renewable energy model, massive tree planting, and large-scale geoengineering.
Ten years later, compared to the “too little too late” solutions of Western democracies, the swift success of the Chinese-African model starts a debate unthinkable two decades ago: are one-party systems the only ones that can save a planet? Or, as critics prefer to put it: is climate terror going to be the new shock doctrine for us to surrender our remaining freedoms, after the war on terror?
2031: The Great Fork
Calico fires Srini Agarwal, their rockstar geneticist, after the publication of his disturbing “Neo-Eugenic Manifesto”. The temperamental genius known as “the Kurt Cobain of CRISPR/Cas9”, driven by spite, moves to North Korea and forks Homo Sapiens.
2031: You are a party pooper, Tian Yang Zhao
The physicist Tian Yang Zhao shows that matter cannot move more than 1/250 c, and that neither hyperspace nor wormholes nor anything like that are possible. Libraries move most of “space operas” from the Sci-Fi section to the Fantasy section. (go to 2071)
2034: Incal revival
An animation team composed mainly by GenZers discovers The Incal and adapts it to feature films in 2D animation entirely drawn by hand.
2038: She’s got Chen Ziyi eyes
Under Chinese cultural hegemony, Qingdao’s movie stars mark the normative beauty in the West. The “Asian eye” (upper orbitopalpebral fold removal, construction of an epicanthic fold) is the most requested aesthetic surgery after liposuction.
2049: The porcept era
Bitmaps (pixel arrays) lose relevance as a form of acquisition, storage, transmission and reproduction of digital images, replaced by porcepts (“portable percepts”), abstract digital models of the state of a visual neural network.
The new imaging pipeline: photosensors are replaced by retinas (biophotosensors arranged in a random, biologically grown matrix). At the moment of capture, a neural network transforms them into porcepts.
Porcepts can then either be sent to a display device (typically an organic culture of bioluminescent cells by seeding a surface in a random pattern), or be sent, through transducing electrodes, directly to the user’s optical nerve or visual cortex, where instead of being seen as a flat image trapped behind a glass and bounded by a rectangle, they are perceived as vivid hallucinations.
Graphic designers no longer work with pixels, but with high level semantic descriptors of porcept elements (textures, shapes…) These elementary particles of the image do not belong to the field of the geometrical, but of the perceptual.
There are two scenarios there.
Working with images at the level of percepts instead of geometric components:
a) It’s much easier, and results in a new wave of destruction of visual design work when clients carry out their own image creation and modification;
or b) It is much more difficult and counter-intuitive, making the porcept era in the history of imaging analogous to the FM synthesis era in the history of electronic music.
This shift in the forms of representation (from luma/chroma raster arrays for their mathematical manipulation, to perceptual complexes for their manipulation by neural networks) does not have to occur along the entire pipeline, it can be only in some phases.
Who knows, maybe the basic elements into which a porcept is divided will be that elusive thing that philosophers call “qualia”!
2049: Untick if you want to live
Ten years after implementing the Voluntary Active Euthanasia (VEA) program at the age of 110 in people without serious health problems and with no other reason than to consider they have already lived enough, a transcendent step is taken: to move the VEA form from “opt-in” to “opt-out”.
2051: Come back when you’re not surplus
The perfecting of low-cost cryogenics saves capitalism for the umpteenth time from “collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions”. Families at risk of exclusion during crises can choose to freeze themselves until next recovery.
“It’s a humane solution to the problem of… surplus population,” argues young post-neoliberal economist Milton Harberger. “And its nostalgic critics tend to overlook that this is a market-based solution and therefore strictly discretional”.
2054: If you still don’t pay your fee we will have to send you an autoimmune diarrhea
After the success of phase III trials, Vericel markets the first programmable human leukocyte: a new blood component capable of performing the tasks assigned to it via Over-The-Air download. The era of software vaccines is born.
2055: One humanity at a time, please
The Nairobi Agreement is signed, agreeing on the limits to genetic modification of human beings:
- Life expectancy: Median will not exceed 110 years. Mandatory active euthanasia starting 120 years if Karnofsky index < 50. End of active period lower limit = 85% of the life expectancy of each strain.
- Behavioral genetics: Modifications aimed at creating subordinate castes are forbidden (decrease in IQ, increase in preference for repetitive tasks, increase in aggressiveness or libido, or in general any type of programmed deficit).
- Species integrity: Modifications that result in sterility or total or partial reproductive isolation are prohibited. The direct or indirect collection of fees for reproduction is prohibited.
- Safeguard: Any new strain must be vulnerable to a single peptide capable of disrupting the cellular respiration process in individuals of that strain only. The peptide formula will be kept under the custody of the United Nations Security Council.
Analysts across the political spectrum agree on two assessments:
- it is an incoherent jumble of measures resulting from geopolitical tug-of-war and full of holes
- is better than nothing and at least addresses the most urgent issues
2071: In the hellhole of the galaxy
Astrophysicist Atiena Chibuzo delimits the Chibuzo Agora (96% of the Milky Way where contact between exocivilizations is possible) and proves that we were born outside it. Humanity enters a period of collective existential FOMO and depression.
