Hit the gas. It’s a phrase we sometimes use to mean make something go faster.

But almost no one in CE22 knows where that term came from, and that's the reason we're thriving together on Earth today.

Hitting the gas was accelerating us to oblivion.

A century ago, the Ice Station Quellette team set up their historic polar outpost. From studying their surviving artifacts, the ISQ team’s planets of origin had been strikingly similar to our own – mindless conflict, violent consumerism, and a collective disregard of consequence. 

From the decks of their tall ships, the early Extractionists saw the pristine, “undiscovered” wild places as devoid of all value –– apart from whatever they could capture, kill, skin, rend, mine, pump, and sell. And soon it was nonstop clearing, cutting, burning, tilling, trapping, dividing, paving, and packaging, in assault-rifle rhythm.

By the end of the 20th Century, the young Gods of Industry had remade the world in their image, always figuring out new ways to sell something that didn’t really belong to them.

Nature abhors a vacuum –– that’s another old saying we’ve discarded.

To some, nature itself was a vacuum.

Had the Extractionists ponied up for the actual cost of running their businesses – paid people what their worth or the actual cost of the raw materials or to clean up the mess they left behind or even factor in the deleterious effects of their actions on the future – those extraction industries would have never got off the ground.

But they figured out how to get around that: Make everyone else pay. And when they reckoned they’d got everything that was gettable from a place, they packed up and split to find fresh pastures to exploit.

This became a very useful new business model, across multiple industries:

socialize the costs and privatize the gains.

The Flammables Industry tried with all their mighty consultants to crush new technologies (and some very old ones) that channeled the free, clean and infinite gifts from the sky and earth. Coal was handy 4000 years ago when they discovered it, but not after we found out it turns the rains to acid (and also, no picnic to mine for it).

And who would ever cook with a toxic gas called methane in their kitchen today? But when they renamed it “Natural Gas,” soon everyone was wired to blow. PS, they pumped poison into pristine aquifers to get it.

It’s puzzling, because people had been utilizing free solar energy for thousands of years. The first solar collector was built in the 18th Century. Many scientists experimented with it in the 19th Century, and even more in 20th. Albert Einstein won a Nobel Prize for his study of photoelectrics in 1921.

Good ideas generally cost less than bad ones.

The Agriculture conglomerates had forgotten lessons of the “Dust Bowl” when a drought in Texas and Oklahoma accelerated the effects of thoughtless stewardship of the land. Vast expanses of topsoil desiccated into an airborne powder, and fierce winds turn them into massive haboobs (look it up). That lifeless dirt quit absorbing carbon and required many pesticides and fertilizers (so many!) to produce increasingly nutrition-free crops (and as an added minus, poisoned everyone downwind and downstream).

With all that waste and excess was freely bleeding into rivers and streams, eventually a toxic soup of fertilizer and forever chemicals, oil, solvents, pharmaceuticals, plastic bags, and other idiotic effluvia converged into the oceans. Cooking in the overheating bilge, millions of dead regularly washed up on the beach.

Although possibly enjoying the effects of the anti-depressants (risky behavior, documented) sea creatures were entangled and strangled in massive gyres of plastic garbage and discarded fishing gear. Industrial armadas were vacuuming up the last schools of fish and dredging the ocean with nets that stretched for miles, ensnaring millions of “worthless” bycatch ––dolphins, whales, sea turtles, and birds, all tossed overboard to die.

Eventually, the fishing fleets were fighting over the last unwitting lives they could slice up for cash.

their “REGULATIONS” are our protections.

The smart money had already jumped to headier endeavors. As they got better and better at selling things no one needed or wanted, there was always some new startup selling solutions to made-up problems, and sometimes problems the startups themselves created.

They found ways to monetize our worst impulses, and sometimes our best. A few figured out how to harvest loneliness and fear and anger, then sell it to the highest bidder. When the profit margins stopped impressing their investors, they just figured out how to manufacture it themselves, replacing confidence and exuberance with jealousy and self-doubt.

Each new technology promised greater autonomy, but increasingly tethered us to the grid; their secret algorithms were deliberately designed to create addiction.

An addict is the perfect consumer.

They called it “engagement.”

Accordingly, the Extractionists systematically eroded Wonder, Curiosity, Satisfaction, Contentment, Peace, and Humility. As a substitute, they provided steady supply lines of Nicotine, Prozac, Cocaine, Oxycontin, Tribalism, Paranoia, and Outrage.

Obviously, if drug dealers were this cynical, they would have been put out of business and run out of town.

But the offshore bank accounts of the Extractionists swelled as the public bought and paid for their own ruin, in regular installments, and sometimes with their lives.

Our disposable culture always called for regular deliveries of fresh new inanities, soon trashed in favor of fresher, shinier, and more topical inanities. We laughed at the idea of an “Idiocracy” as it steadily took over.

A writer of the time, George Monbiot, issued a prophetic warning:  

“Our consumption is trashing a natural world infinitely more fascinating and intricate than the stuff we produce.”

Or as Rachel Carson asked, half a century earlier:

Who has made the decision that sets in motion these chains of poisonings, this ever-widening wave of death that spreads out like ripples when a pebble is dropped into a still pond? ... The decision is that of the authoritarian temporarily entrusted with power; he has made it during a moment of inattention by millions to whom beauty and the ordered world of nature still have a meaning that is deep and imperative.

By the time the ISQ team arrived in our world, the unprecedented scale of industrial fire-machines and misery farms had actually raised the temperature of the entire planet to a level not seen in three million years.

Anyone sounding the alarm was shouted down, bullied, beaten, and sometimes, when they thought no one was looking, murdered. And sometimes when they knew everyone was.

As the spring-less and fall-less and years gave way to endless summer, with brown Christmases and the odd white Memorial Day weekend (from hail the size of softballs), everything the scientists had warned us about came true, and more.

Blankets of trapped gas began to quietly asphyxiate the planet. A few degrees later, it became impossible to predict the increasingly capricious weather.

No one was shocked as cat-5 fire-nados and ice hurricanes wiped whole towns off the map, which was already littered with the crashed remnants of planes ripped out of the sky by rogue tsunami winds.

The last of the drinking water tasted like mayonnaise, from theose cheap, knock-off desalination machines. 

When the oceans finally became vast, tepid, acidic septic ponds, fears began to rise that soon, anyone tall enough to ride a rollercoaster wouldn’t get enough breath to stand up.

The ISQ team knew better than anyone they were exposing themselves to retaliation from an army of dark interests. Every schoolchild knows that these foreigners – these aliens, these refugees robbed of their futures – had witnessed the destruction of their own worlds, and how their terrible losses infused them with an unflinching determination to save ours. 

The ISQ team showed us the terrible future lying in wait if we failed.

We so wish they could see our wonderful world today, and that their sacrifice was not wasted. Then again, it’s worth reminding readers we never found any trace of them.

we hope they escaped the agents of the extractionists to another planet, another galaxy, another dimension. 

We only know the words “infinite worlds” kept coming up in their messages, again and again. So much so that we incorporated them into our Universal Charter in 2112. Words we live by, but don't quite understand – not yet.

                                  – Ariel Xi-Cisneros, Exhibit Curator

14 Ten 2151