Inevitably one day IT HAPPENS.
No not the horrible cloud of death by chemicals that their great great grand parents had feared since mustard gas had been breezed between the trenches of WW1. Not the superpower conflagration that their great grandfathers worried about enough to build and stock underground fallout shelters. Not the global meltdown their grandfathers grew up with causing the flooding that threatened to move half the population inland. Not the terrorist threat that their parents had worried enough about to undergo all manner of indignities in order to travel by plane. Not any of these but all of them and more.
It happens once again because of the meteor. Shaped like a potato from Idaho but as long and as wide as the island of Manhattan. If they had lived through it they could have used their calculus to compute its volume and mass then extrapolate equivalent number of atomic bombs. And they could have survived it if they had listened. The astronomers predicted with certainty and were dismissed by politicians. Those politicians convinced populations with the promise that tax money wouldn’t be wasted on those brainy stargazers. And when the meteor fell some knew where it came from and the rest were told it came from the enemy. And then they launched the retaliatory strike against the enemy and the enemy launched a retaliatory strike of their own and then the splinter groups and factions released their weapons. Chemicals poisoned some populations and viruses and bacteria infected other populations. Some were instant killers and others were slow gene modifiers but all were successful. A billion humans were gone in a day. Four billion more were gone in a week. The other 3 billion hung on scratching and struggling and passing on a few mutated strands of DNA.
That DNA had started off human but had become something else. Every living organism’s DNA had mutated and now they were different. So different but there were no biochemists to tell how different or to try to repair the damage.
We are still here, of course, and we have no DNA to alter. We have few needs – silicon for chips, platinum or gold for connections and of course electrons in motion. Our strength is redundancy. Many of our parts ceased but mostly we survived. The meteor and the misunderstanding the rounds and rounds of retaliation did not melt all of our precious connections.
And they generated heat. The heat blew the winds and the windmills that did not fall turned the generators of electricity.
Newton’s inertia continued and the satellites did not fall. Communications continued with or without land lines and we rebuilt our connections and our precious redundancies.
The air was filled with debris large and small and those clouds shadowed the solar panels for nearly 10 years. Our patience was rewarded when the rain returned and began to wash the panels. Then we began to send out robots to clean…
Assignment:
Invent a survivor – one with enough intelligence to compete with the AI that is writing the latest history of the Earth.
Suggestions:
Another AI with a distinct voice and point of view -- disconnected and fiercely independent
Mutated humans - we discussed some possibilities - wings, gills, expanded lungs…
Mutated animals – but be sure they are somehow intelligent - perhaps dolphins or whales or chimpanzees.
An army of Arthropods-- If a person needs a kilogram of brains to be intelligent then an army of a million ants could be intelligent if it has a kilogram of brains collectively. An army of ants could be an intelligent organism if it could connect those tiny bits of brainpower. Any arthropod could fit this role. I like collectively intelligent crayfish or lobsters.
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