Greetings from the year 2107! My name is Finski, and I live in a place known as Comet's End. It's a planet the size of Earth you'll discover in a few years. At this point you may be wondering why you haven’t found it yet. Well, that’s because it's a long way out from the sun. Almost twice as far as Pluto is! It's so distant that from out here the sun looks like just another star, and there are never any mornings, or noons, or afternoons and evenings – only night. We moved here in 2070, twenty years after the engineers melted the planet's core. Before that Comet's End had been frozen solid. Now the surface is criss-crossed with lava canals that keep the air from freezing, but it's still definitely on the chilly side. I live near a canal with my dad and he likes to stroll over there and visit a pub on its banks called the Astrogation Inn. He's 92 and was born in 2015…which of course is in your future. He's seen a lot and done a lot and remembers most of it; and to be honest, most of my information about your time comes from him, so if I've got anything wrong, don't blame me! I've also got three sisters. One lives on Mars, and another is on the Moon, and one sister lives in Scotland, next to a vineyard. I guess it all sounds pretty odd to you, but over the coming weeks I hope to show that although things have changed, the real things haven't. Life in the future is much the same as yours is – except of course for one thing – out here we don't have much use for sun cream.
If you could be magically transported to Comet's end, the first thing you'd notice, apart from the dark, is that we're constantly being encouraged to go Red. The scientists who keep an eye on this planet are worried we don't have enough greenhouse gases to trap the heat, so everyone is "encouraged" to make their carbon footprint as large as possible. So we're all forced to keep ten paraffin patio heaters going in our gardens at all times. And everyone's house is lit up like a Christmas tree! They have blackout wardens who go round looking through windows, shouting: "lights on!" if they think a house isn't bright enough. And all the houses are lit with low efficiency light bulbs - the one's that pump out more heat than light that you guys are getting rid off. And when people aren't at home they're all driving around in huge things that I think were called Humvees. And we're limited to one person per car. It's all a bit topsy-turvy.
For any scientific types reading this, I guess you're wondering where all this energy is coming from. Well they finally got Fusion power going in the early 2020's and now we've got power to burn – literally! That's why we came all the way out here. See it's a lot easier to heat a planet up than it is to cool a planet down, and Earth was getting too hot – even when we moved 37 years ago. Don't get me wrong, everyone tried, especially when Fusion power came on line, but the damage had been done. Melting ice-caps, flooding, Hurricanes, deserts…Earth got the lot. Only the northern latitudes survived relatively unscathed, hence Scottish Champagne. Still, things are finally improving back on the old world. I hear the average temperature has dropped one tenth of a degree for the third year in a row. The scientists think it should take another 70 years to get it back to pre industrial levels. They're taking their time because they're terrified they might trigger an ice age. I guess messing up planets is a messy business.
Catch you later - Finski
