Day 86

If there are people around a thousand years from now, I hope they think our lives were impossibly backwards. I hope they think of our Neosporin and our Chicken Nuggets and our Dread Viruses and our tendency to dehumanize each other as unsurvivably quaint—the way I think of a shirt made out of straw, with lice running through the holes in the weaving.

Here are my expectations for humanity 1,000 years in the future, leaving out peace and equality, which are the free spaces on the bingo board.

• Working shrink rays. Can shrink themselves small enough to drive tiny submarines through a regular-sized person’s blood stream, or lose their children in the front lawn.

• Only sneeze when they feel like it. Can sneeze on command.

• Have to dress up as the First Proxima Centaurians in boring school plays.

• Recognize coyotes as legal persons.

• Can repair and replace tooth enamel, but why? Who uses teeth?

• Have quantum computers with 11-state qubits. Still force students to buy TI-84s for graphing in math class..

• Finally reanimating everybody cryogenically frozen in previous 1,000 years. Thaw each person, wake them up, scold them for being egotistical jerks, freeze them again.

• Think camels were always tiny.

• 30 years away from grid scale break-even fusion reactors, but really this time.

• Groundhog’s den now encircled with LED lights. Growing season extended by six weeks.

• Crumbs at bottom of toaster go to a different dimension, just like ours do.

• Won’t time travel back to eras before universal adoption of warm water bidets with automatic air drying.