Ship's Holog: June 2078, fragment #4

As you can imagine, it took a while for those of us who had lived in times of unlimited and unregulated use of fossil fuels to adjust to being limited to non-fossil fuel modes of transport. For many of us, the hardest of all the adjustments turned out to be our loss of freedom of movement. Although, I have to admit that in many ways the new life is a better one than the way we’d been living in the first several decades of the 21st century, when our dependence on fossil fuels, the prices of which had risen so dramatically, caused widespread economic and social dislocation and suffering for so many.

Nowadays, unable to travel large distances, families and communities have become more coherent and responsible, and self-centered materialism has given way to a focus on the necessities for communal survival. In many ways our lives, at least in New Vermont, now resemble those of citizens of many 18th century pre-industrial villages such as those shown on the Sturbridge Village virtual museum. Actually, the lives of the vast majority of people on the planet are far better than the lives led by their forbearers in the 18th century, especially in the developed countries where, by 2030, most disease was finally eradicated, so that very few people there now suffer from starvation or malnutrition.