Earth 2100 is an eighty-ish minute documentary released in 2009 and 2010 by ABC and the History Channel about the collapse of global civilization by the year 2100. You can watch the whole thing here. It traces the life of a woman born in 2009 and stops off in 2015, 2030, 2040, 2050, 2065, 2085, and 2100. Lucy, our point of view character, experiences the slow degradation of the environment and resource depletion. From 2015 to 2030 she witnesses gas prices climb and climate change stress water resources while world leaders fail to coordinate on emission reduction goals. In 2040 Lucy is working as an EMT when a flood of climate refugees burst through the USA Mexico border and itchy trigger fingers turn it into a blood bath. She buries her parents in 2050 and moves to NYC so her husband can work on sea walls. Lucy's daughter Molly goes to live on a farm in 2060. 2075 sees Lucy's husband die in an attempt to repair a broken sea wall gate during a super hurricane that floods New York. Ice caps melt, sea levels rise, and many coastal areas are lost. A stressed and breaking society is hit with a major pandemic in 2081 which leads to diminishing labor, trade, and travel. Finally the power goes out for good and Lucy leaves Manhattan for the last time in 2085. She is seventy five. She finds her daughter and grandson on a farm but her son in law has been killed. The tale ends in 2100 with Lucy as the oldest person in her community living the hardscrabble life of a postindustrial farmer. The docudrama ends on a rewind to the present and a call to action to prevent this future by investing in solar panels and the like.
At the time of writing we've passed the first check point in this narrative a decade ago and we will pass the second in five years. What stands out about the future presented is its concern with peak oil. There was a massive spike in petroleum prices in 2008 and gas prices were wild at the time. Running out of fossil fuel is less of a talking point now. Obviously, we have less than we did in the past but it seems like the flow has been mostly constant. In contrast concerns about global warming have only intensified. This is being addressed by a massive increase in the volume of electricity generated by renewables but we still have a long way to go on that front. I don't think that most people think we are on track for the solar punk future but photovoltaic technology has actually come quite a way since 2008. Did this show have anything to do with that? I don't know.
What I do know is that futurism is a crap shoot. That said you should still try. I understand that this is a polemical piece arguing for less fossil fuels but it seems like there is no technological advancement after 2010. We haven't even hit the second stop on the future train and we have social media so good it's destroying society, electric cars, and computers can finally understand spoken language while failing to know how many Rs are in strawberry. If Your future isn't so weird that it is borderline unrecognizable then you are doing it wrong. Every decade I've lived through has been its own alternate universe science fiction scenario and it looks to me like the ones that proceeded me had the same problem. While I don't want to claim that resource depletion isn't a threat folks on the ecological front have been beating that drum for sixty years and Soylent Green isn't even people yet. Actually, we over shot the population numbers for the movie and now we are arguing about whether demographic collapse is the next big threat. Reality is stranger than fiction.
Eschatology is a funny topic. On a long enough timeline everyone and everything ends. Most of the time nothing happens. As a discipline nobody ever gets points. If you're right the world ends you lose, wrong the world continues and you lose, and if you predict that it continues nobody is going to award points for that either. It would seem the only winning move is not to play and yet you loose a lot harder if the world ends. I feel like I'm kicking a puppy criticizing this and I also feel that it's necessary to grade society's homework from time to time. On a whole, I give this a C+ for all of the reasons laid out above.