In The Future …, page 1

The first time machine for home use to hit the market is a dud — it allows travel only into the past, and only at a snail’s pace. Each minute you regress takes about a month of real time, and people spend years trying to reach last week. To the first time travelers, it seems like yesterday will never arrive.

Transcripts of Google search results circa 2005 for “the meaning of life” and other weighty topics are regarded as prophetic religious texts and compiled into Holy Bible 2.0. Extant Google servers from that era are revered as divinely inspired prophets.

Universities phase out traditional learning models, supplanting lectures and reading assignments with packets of granulized data that are injected directly into the brain. Fatal information overdoses among overly ambitious students become a top public health concern.

Travel agencies begin offering all-inclusive vacation packages to hedonistic alien pleasure planets. A global health emergency is declared when Earth doctors realize they can do nothing for the legions of returning tourists who’ve picked up strange new venereal diseases or gotten hooked on extraterrestrial narcotics.

When robots finally seize control of civilization, humans are repurposed as furniture. The most one can hope for is to be assigned coffee-table duty for a kindly robot family.

Untold millennia after all life on Earth has vanished, alien archaeologists uncover the ruins of what they believe is an ancient religious site, but is in fact a 20th-century pinball arcade. Vast scholarly treatises are written on the spiritual significance of the phrase “insert quarters.”