Fifty years from now, as fed up elephants stage last ditch assaults on human habitations, lab defector, gene modded rats sign peace treaties in shadowy, underground kingdoms built amongst aging pipes carrying water, natural gas and data to our complexes and Americans hail the crowning of the third cyborg iteration of George Bush, descendants of the people who once worried themselves into troubled sleep over the failure of news organizations to accurately report on the world's affairs will have no memory of “news” as we currently (and fleetingly) understand it.

The debate – still raging in some industrialized nations – over information vs. entertainment (or what's sometimes hybridized, at least in the United States, as 'infotainment') will be as dead as the pyramid builders, as dead as the once fish plentiful oceans. But unlike the work of the ancients, the passing of the news age will leave no impressive monuments behind for tourists to marvel at and carefully climb (unless one counts the New York Times building).

What will send “news” to its grave? In the end, it won't be government pressure to ignore problems and report on achievements (even if non existent) – though that's always a factor. And it won't be the reluctance of corporations (which is what these “news organizations” are, after all) to criticize the fragile status quo.

No, it will be simple need. The need of former citizens, now consumers, teetering at the edge of the consumerist age's end, to be lulled into a comforting, waking dream of efficiency, cleanliness and progress, even as threatening clouds gather.

The sort of head scratching going on right now in the US (and, no doubt, many other places) over why, despite bloody failure, mayhem, destruction and chaos approximately 30 percent of the American population persists in believing half and un-truths will be a thing of the past.

Fifty years from now, nearly everyone will prefer sunsets displayed on flat screens to the real, and troubled, sky.

Browse here for a better conception of non-possible futures...

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Categories: Science, Future, Humour, Progress, Civilisation, Time, Human, Conceptual Time-Capsule...