A Visit to the Museum 2067

It was going to be special day. Dad was going to take Timmy, 10 years old, to the Museum of Technological History. Dad had been talking about this visit for weeks now. He was a mechanical engineer with a deep fascination for the evolution of technology – and its influence on human behaviour.

They entered the museum and quickly made their way to the main room of interest – the development of transportation through the ages. It was mainly about cars. Timmy loved learning about cars, both old ones and new ones. In the main room right in front of them there was a relic from the past – a fossil fueled, internal combustion engine car! It was cut in half with all of its inner parts exposed.

Timmy was a bundle of questions. That is why he and his dad were such good chums. Timmy loved to ask questions and dad enjoyed trying to answer all of them.

As they drew near to this almost prehistoric relic, it seemed so complicated and cumbersome to Timmy. 

“What is all this stuff in this big steel block?” he asked.

“This is a cylinder with a piston which goes up and down. Underneath there is a connecting rod and a big heavy crankshaft. Up above there are valves that go up and down, and there is a sparkplug to set all the gas/air mixture alight.”

"But where does the gas and air mixture come from?” asked Timmy.

“Well these cars had a big tank in the back of the car – and they had to keep filling it up with petrol (they called it gas way back then).”

“And after this gas and air mixture burned, what happened to it?”

“Well they had to develop an exhaust system to get rid if it. It was noisy so they had to add a ‘muffler’. It also made the outside air quite dirty and polluted, so they invented something called a ‘catalytic converter’ to take some of the poisonous stuff out of the exhaust gas”.

“One more question dad, what is this thing with all those levers and springs and stuff?"

“Oh, that is the transmission. Internal combustion engines needed to be adjusted for starting, speeding up and high-speed driving. Today we just do this with simple electrical converters, but in those days, they didn’t know about that.”

“Dad, did they have electricity, 160 years ago?”

“Oh, yes, of course they did.”

“Then why didn’t they just start off by making electric cars?”

“Well. there where some electric cars long ago, but they discovered so much of this dark liquid stuff in the ground that they chose to develop it. The fact that it burned so easily made it very attractive to them. Some people got very rich extracting and selling this stuff, so it was hard to stop using it.”

“Remember all of this happened before the Great Collapse of 2047. People then believed in something called ‘unregulated capitalism’(UR). They thought that if it was good for making profits, or money, then it must be the best possible solution. People actually believed that if you could make lots of money from something, then it must be very good for everyone. 

Some people complained that the air was getting hard to breathe, but the people in charge did not listen to them very much. Also, the whole world was warming up. Lots of scientists tried to sound the alarm, but the URs were in power and shut down the message. 

We now know the results. All around the world things got very unstable and chaotic. There were some terrible wars. Cities, especially those along the coasts were badly hit. Many innocent people lost their lives. Fortunately there was that brave small group that came up with a better model. We now call it ‘socially regulated capitalism’(SRC)” This system is not perfect, but it is working much better than the one we had before the Great Collapse.”

So, son, shall we go home and think about what we have seen? Do you want to use your smartphone and use that app to call up a car to drive us home?”