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A quote: “History never looks like history when you are living through it.” ~~ John W. Gardner
I’ll start with a story …
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They look like some prehistoric forest. Stark white columns reaching to the sky as they march across the rolling hills, grasses golden in late summer. Some still have propellers. Some even turn if the wind is just right.
But they do nothing now but mock the passage of time and age of arrogance.
Many of us stop, to look with passing awe. Others with bitterness. But each year when we pass here going from our northern growing territories to our southern wintering lands, there are less of us to remember.
The youngsters? They rarely look. The past doesn’t interest them.
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Now, it’s your turn.
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.Featured image, cropped, Adobe Stock standard license.
Adjusting to the longer horizon of old Earth isn’t easy, but the abandoned windmills help provide perspective to eyes more accustomed to Mars or the Moon or one of the many free-flying habitats that orbit one or another celestial body. Although I’d seen plenty of flatvids and holos, the actuality still unsettled me.
Those towers represent the last gasp of the effort to create a “sustainable” technological civilization by those who wished to keep humanity confined forever to its cradle. We already knew that without space-based resources a technological civilization would inevitably fall back into a dark age that would never end, but they either ignored the figures or never intended to play honestly with our ancestors.
In the end, we won and they lost. By the time they discovered that we’d played an end-run around them, building our launching platforms in countries they couldn’t control, it was too late. We’d gotten enough up there that we could provide our own air, water, food and even habitats suitable for raising new generations. And we had the ultimate high ground, while they were at the bottom of the gravity well looking up.
Their descendants, such as they are, scratch out a hard-scrabble existence with hand tools beaten from what they can salvage of the ruins of the civilization that fell. We pretend that we are here on a trading mission, buying handicrafts in exchange for medical aid. In fact we are seeking the bright ones, those whose intelligence and dreams cannot endure the confines of such a straitened existence.
It is not entirely a mission of mercy or a charity. Even after the horrific death tolls of the Fall, Earth’s gene pool remains far deeper than our own, and many of us are in desperate need of spouses of sufficiently different genome to bring healthy children into this strange new world we live in.
Cameron says: They forced the windmills on us. It didn’t matter that the nuclear plants we built provided our energy; the powers that be in our county were going to make us use wind and solar.
The usual platitudes about “saving the Earth” and “renewable energy” were used in pretty speeches. And when proof was given that they were using the nuke plants, it was dismissed as a conspiracy theory. “What are you going to do about it?” they asked with a sneer.
Well, allow me to respond. We are the Order of La Mancha. And we’re going to attack the windmills.
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