He never expected to live this long. In the middle of his first century of life, nobody could have guessed how simple it was to remove most of the artificial pollutants. All that business about “natural” nutrients pretty much revolutionized medicine, once the calcified establishment lost its grip on things. Replacing the technology which created various energy fields, shielding stuff which couldn’t be replaced, made a huge difference. Not just in medicine, but in everything. Technology research became so focused on energy fields, one of the first things they found was the holy grail of solid fields, which had previously been theorized as “force fields.” It made it possible to shield all sorts of things by creating a field which simply turned back in upon itself. It also made it possible to build huge facilities in places no one ever dreamed.
At one point, one lab was working deep in an ocean fissure when they stumbled across the technology which brought him out here halfway between two star systems. Someone realized it was possible to manipulate gravity. That is, they created a device which could greatly magnify the effects of gravity on objects, both in attracting and repelling them. So they launched a probe with a gravity drive, and all it did was enhance the pull from the moon and repel the gravity well of the earth’s core. They didn’t expect it to be so easy to move a quarter ton of equipment without any moving parts, precious little use of anything resembling “fuel” and no pretty fire or colors, even. The field produced a faint glow at the repelling end, but the pulling end was blacker than black. All the primitive Science Fiction movies and books had failed to guess that one.
They also couldn’t have guessed what the instruments told them: Just outside low earth orbit, the radiation was so intense, nothing from earth could have lived. Nobody had expected to find the old US-NASA had been lying about those famous Moon landings. While the technology of his own day could have easily done a better job of making the pictures more accurate, it didn’t really matter. The shield technology was enough to handle the radiation. Indeed, once they managed to tune it to permit essential minimal levels of radiation which the human body used for maintenance, all it took was an added calibration routine in the programming for space travel shields.
So the result was a very comfortable cruise, such as men took on huge ocean liners before the global political collapse. The space ship was just a big rectangular box, assembled on the moon by field-powered robots, and easily launched by the power of a tiny gravity manipulation field. Nobody expected the improbable result of the field, once running, would power everything the ship would ever need for human comfort.
So he sat on the couch in his spacious cabin, reviewing in his mind the expectations he had when he turned fifty. That had been almost a century before. He couldn’t have guessed he’d be in better physical shape than then. He couldn’t have guessed they would learn enough about human thinking to find ways to keep track of two centuries or more of memories.
And as they silently sliced through interstellar space, he could hardly have guessed politics would never change. It’s not as if mankind learned nothing. It’s that mankind never changed. Not really. Once they realized the extended family structure was the highest and most productive social model, men still came up with all sorts of crazy new and old ways to try yet one more time. It always failed. Because he had been one of the earliest voices demanding a return to clans, it gave him just a tiny bit of political clout. So it was his clan selected to make this trip, and he was the head of household. He never could have guessed that.
The one thing he did guess caused him yet one more time to smile, with just a hint of smirk. He guessed Western organized religion would panic when the Nation of Israel turned out to be a complete fraud. He had felt that little country would destroy itself, but could not have guessed how completely it would do so. Right now the biggest shield project on Earth was keeping the sea of radioactive glass, spreading out from the site of Jerusalem, from harming any of the rest of the planet. All those nuclear missiles fired from Dimona fell right back on the Ancient City. And the almost the whole of Christendom collapsed with it.
Not faith, of course. Just the organized religious structure, most of the teaching, and all that investment in facilities came apart in just a matter of weeks. When the false prophesies of Israel fell apart, the entire Dispensationalist heresy wasn’t far behind. Some Reformed groups held on the longest, having never accepted Dispensationalism, but eventually came apart from other issues. The tiny few, such as his own clan, whose faith excluded all that before, were ready to succor those who didn’t commit suicide. Thus, his own clan was partly a spiritual clan, having no shared DNA, nor even married into the clan. They joined by covenant.
That was a part of the new post-Western culture. Nobody was quite happy, couldn’t quite agree on all the details. Still, the revival of the ancient Eastern ways of the Bible was progressing. The new intellectual ferment was the basis behind almost all the advancements since that nasty war saw Israel commit suicide, trying to destroy the world with them. Wild theories about fault lines which would break apart the crust if enough nuclear weapons were detonated on top of it didn’t pan out. Instead, the heat from the first detonation simply detonated the rest, each with a much weaker yield, until the last one melted in the air high above, doing nothing at all.
While the humanity did not suddenly have peace, they did have a huge mess to clean up. It was called a miracle when the discovery of field technology permitted the first effort to limit radiation leakage from Palestine. But had the problem not been so severe, the initial fast progress away from environmental poisons as a whole might not have happened. All of that, no man could have guessed. But the end of the old Western Christian religion was not just a guess for him, but a matter of faith.
