Earth 2100 Page #8

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to mutate and spread.

So some long incubating

virus that kills very fast,

that's the kind of thing

that's going to get us.

It only took an few people on a few

planes to spread it around the world.

Cases of the fever have

been confirmed in over 100 countries...

Now estimated that

Temporary morgues

have been set up in the streets of Shanghai.

The Vatican conducted a

national funeral mass today.

From Singapore to Sydney,

the globe shut down.

Farmers wouldn't bring food into cities.

Cargo ships wouldn't dock,

let alone unload.

Billions were on the verge of starvation.

I saw hundreds of people die every day.

I was immune.

One of the lucky ones.

It was hard to feel anything.

There was too much to feel.

You think about the effect that

this kind of disaster would have.

Everybody's depressed.

What do you do with all the bodies?

People just gonna, you know, take their loved

ones to the local park and leave them there?

At that point, cities will be unbearable.

You could see it on

people's faces on the street.

They had given up.

As more and more people died,

all services broke down.

There were frequent blackouts.

And now connections to the

internet were intermittent at best.

Around the world, deaths from

the Caspian Fever show no signs...

And then one day,

the power just went out.

The phones, the internet, the

whole data network went down.

Some said it was a terrorist.

Others thought it was the flooding.

Suddenly no one knew anything for sure.

If communication breaks down, rumor

becomes the communication system

and a mob psychology takes over.

Collapse is not something

that actually happens overnight.

It's the result of an accumulation of stresses,

an erosion of the internal strength of society,

so that it just becomes like an eggshell.

And one last shock breaks it.

Looting was rampant.

Most of the police force deserted.

The mayor was nowhere to be found.

We waited for the President or

the National Guard to appear.

But no one came.

That's when it dawned on

us that the government,

like so much else, had failed.

If the world breaks down,

if globalization breaks down,

then even the capacity of the United States to

kind of manage a degraded global environment

I think will come into question.

What we'll see is the federal

government being viewed as

something not to be taken seriously anymore.

Reports were sketchy, but

here's what I know for sure.

The virus continued to spread.

India and China had gone to war

over water and who knew what else.

Millions were dying from famine.

The human race was

collapsing under its own weight.

By that time, I will guess that we

will be seeing a substantial die off

of the human population.

Most of civil society

will have degenerated.

I was 75 when I walked across

that George Washington Bridge.

There were no check points anymore.

I left with a couple of friends

and a dog who had adopted me.

Rosy, I called her.

She never left my side.

But where was I going?

I didn't know If Molly was still alive.

Let alone still on the farm up north.

I didn't know

If I had a grandson anymore.

But that was my hope, that I

could somehow find them or they me.

A few hundred years down the line,

they'll look back and say

the Dark Ages began in the 21st century.

Our city, beautiful city, was abandoned.

And nature took over quickly.

As it always has.

The breakdown would be rather rapid.

The flooding of Manhattan would

have a real destabilizing effect.

The subway tunnels would flood

and they would stay flooded.

The columns that hold up the streets, they're

steel, they will rust, they will corrode.

The streets above them start

caving in, and low and behold,

we have surface rivers once again in Manhattan.

Nature has that momentum, you see.

Take the thing back.

Practically become like a jungle.

From the asphalt jungle to the real jungle.

Your big skyscrapers here are well

anchored into Manhattan schist.

On the other hand,

they weren't designed to be water logged.

It just takes one hurricane to hit New York.

Buildings are going to start to get taken out.

And it wasn't just the city.

Our whole way of life had crumbled.

But I found my daughter Molly,

and Daniel, my grandson.

He was a young man now.

Moly's husband George had been killed.

Both of us were widows now.

It is a hard life.

The United States is

fragmented into a million chards.

We're all cut off from each other.

Each protecting what little we have.

It would be a wrenching transition,

it would be a catastrophic transition.

It's something we

don't want to experience.

The Dark Ages were called

the Dark Ages for a reason.

I fear that we'll see a world

like medieval Europe

where you have feudal states

fighting for what remains of a

source of water, a source of energy.

We managed to produce our own power

and communicate over radio waves.

The cities that have endured

are now walled fortresses.

Jealously guarding whatever

remains of the computer age.

I'm picturing enclaves of affluence and wealth,

but surrounded by vast masses of

people who will be barely surviving.

In effect, humanity could very well be in hell.

Where hell is defined as

truth realized too late.

We have had to re-learn what we

had unlearned centuries before.

How to live off the land.

How to make do.

I think we'll see a world in which

literature, the arts, democracy,

those will disappear, largely disappear.

How much of the wonderful scientific

breakthroughs of the 20th and 21st century

will still be retained?

If it's some electronic-based thing,

it could all be lost.

My grandson Daniel might never

hear a symphony, go to college,

or read the books I read.

He will never marvel at a right whale,

the beauty of a coral reef or a spotted owl.

You ever actually get outside and just

kind of look at the wonder of the world,

- it takes your breath away.

And I think to think of a world where

somehow that is taken away, is really sad.

We're going to leave a planet

that is so desperately beaten up

that it will probably take hundreds of thousands

of years to get it back, to restore it.

We will have lost so much

of our natural heritage.

I can teach him poems and songs.

I can tell him what I saw and

what I learned along the way.

I can try to tell him what is precious.

What is precious?

I ought to know that.

They say I am the

oldest woman on Earth.

With age is supposed to come wisdom.

What is precious?

This Earth of ours.

This garden we must tend.

These people we love.

Lucy's story is a worst case scenario

of what could happen

if we continue on our current path.

It's a wakeup call, a challenge

for us to plan a different course.

But our experts say we

must act immediately.

Where did Lucy's world go wrong?

What can we learn from their mistakes?

We turn back the clock now to show you a

vision of a future we can still create.

There's a future out there

that's a much present future

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