Ship's Holog: June 2078, fragment #3

In the days before The Great Change, when fossil fuels were still available for use by ordinary citizens and the private companies that served them, people (many people) traveled freely throughout the country and the world in petroleum-powered vehicles. You’re probably familiar with many of these archaic means of transport from viewing classic 20th century 2-D videos and virtual museums on your holopods; the most common of these were called cars, buses, trucks, trains, and airplanes.

As difficult as it may be to imagine, in the first decades of this century, when I worked as a global sustainability planner, I regularly traveled by airplane from my offices in New York City:

• in six hours to Brussels (then, as now, capital of the European Union)
• in eleven hours to the international city of Jerusalem (which served for a brief time as home to the United Nations after the USNA withdrawal from the UN that eventually caused that noble experiment in world cooperation to collapse)
• in just sixteen hours half-way around the world to Calcutta (at the time, having the highest population density of any city on Earth, but now eclipsed in that statistic by dozens of city-states around the globe).

We invite any and all readers from any place and anytime to share with other readers their own accounts of what life was like where they lived in the early 21st century before The Great Change.

Today, in this last quarter of the 21st century, it would take me about sixteen hours just to get to Burlington by horse and buggy, a trip of somewhat over 150 km from where I now live.

And, as far as we know, ordinary citizens in every country in the world are now limited by law to traveling by foot, bicycle, or “beasts of burden” (horses, mules, camels, elephants, and so forth), while civil authorities may also ride ATVs or fly Ultra-lights, powered by MPV (micro-photovoltaic) cells. As a result, to this day the only place most of my family has ever been is New Vermont. In fact, other than traveling to Burlington once or twice in their lives, most of them haven’t been outside the small lumbering and livestock-raising valley in central New Vermont where my clan has lived for the past 100 years.