Blue Planet Day

TIME TO STRATEGY EXECUTION: 70 DAYS

Blue Planet Day was celebrated as a recommitment of the world to fighting death by imminent extinction. WICO personnel were enlisted to participate in briefings to the public and activities at their local facilities and field offices, with a focus on “the world of tomorrow”: what life will be like over the next fifty years as the global strategy is implemented.

Maura and I stayed in Colorado to assist at the Boulder field office, which coordinates research with universities and government agencies throughout the state, including collection of data at one of WICO’s test sites in the mountains southwest of Denver. We were joined by Maura’s parents and a distant cousin who live in Colorado Springs and, to my surprise, helped found the test site.

Sally was present at all of the events, using her enormous bandwidth to give lectures and answer questions for all of the visitors. She shared details of the global strategy, whose completed parts have already been disseminated to national governments for review. A multimedia presentation produced by the Education group was made available for download and played in theater spaces at each of the facilities.

Most people I talked to were interested in progress made toward limiting self-sustained ecological impacts, especially those in polar regions and the oceans that threaten to further destabilize the climate. A scale model of the WDP group’s pad technology for removing carbon dioxide from oceans was a big hit, along with a hall of dioramas showing how a suburban neighborhood might look after each decade of transformation into an end-state community dependent more on natural systems than artificial ones.

Mark Luke and Ronald Wingate hosted a panel discussion about how the expected changes to the world economy would affect private industry. Most questions centered on the progress of their Evolution over Devolution (ED) collaboration and its plans for the immediate future. Still committed to creating an artificial supply chain that can replace natural systems, Luke said that use of biotechnology is now ED’s top priority, aimed at adapting human life to a radically different resource base within five years to avoid the worst-case extinction scenario. Wingate argued that substantial economic reward is still possible with a mix of renewable energy and community-scale pollution cleanup technologies that can augment the WDP group’s efforts.

A three-hour meeting at WICO headquarters in London was beamed live to meeting rooms all over the world and recorded for later playback. It began with a keynote address by Secretary General Decatur, and included speeches introduced by Ambassador Lazlo, who herself presented an overview of STRIDE’s organization, operation, and progress, as well as a fifteen-minute description of our Quality Assurance team’s work. Maura wasn’t bothered by not being asked to represent us, telling me that she had been given explicit instructions to focus on the work, a new phase of which she and I will be starting tomorrow, right here in our home state.

Reality Check

“Blue Planet Day” is, of course, the simulated world’s version of our Earth Day.

People, technologies and organizations mentioned here have been mentioned in earlier posts, and some elements of the story are related to other fiction I have written.