What Happens in the 4000s?

This is again, one of my more random posts but I was thinking the other day about how all my life I've heard about the year 2050. One of the first images I remember from French class in my childhood was this dome with garbage everywhere outside of it and people walking around in space suits. This was supposed to be 2050, and the picture was about a world deeply polluted an hideous.

It's actually one of the most terrifying things I ever encountered as a kid, because my French teacher, a lady with short, brown hair who recommended me into French immersion later in conversations with my mom, said that she would die before 2050 and so it was up to us students to keep the world clean and make sure it didn't end up like that.



Telling seven year olds they're in charge of the future? So traumatic. I do think that was one of the formative experiences of my childhood, because I was terrified of that reality. For the first time I walked out of school and noticed the pollution all around. There used to be cigarettes butts on the pavement everywhere. After some new anti-smoking and littering legislation, the Ontario of today has way less garbage than what I remember from primary grades. Still, that message of environmental responsibility of the world has been ingrained in the heads of kids of my generation.

YA experienced a strange jump in dystopia a few years ago and I feel like I've read many of them. What I've noticed most is that the dystopia takes place in the 2000s. I vaguely remember a book about what happens in the very early 3000s. So what about the 4000s?


Any kind of guess on what life will be like two thousand years in the future will be completely wrong. It's scary thinking about it. Will there be a civilization left? Will there be another world war? Hydrogen and nuclear bombs? What will the pollution be like? How many people will populate the Earth? What kind of technology will they be using? Will any people even be left? Imagining so far into the future is a daunting task, but I think I would like to read a story that takes place in the 4000s.

It may as well be a fantasy because everything will have changed immensely from our primal times, but I guess I'm a little creeped out that authors keep imagining horrible things happening in the near future. That's my lifetime folks! I'm hoping the world remains pleasant and my generation can stop the pollution and work towards sustainability and a high quality of life for all people.

I'll still continue to read about dystopias taking place in the next fifty years, but I'll just throw it out there that maybe we're okay for a few more generations and the 4000s might be a better time to end the world.

-P.E.