[whitecrow]

Great thread, wonderful posts. Lots of food for thought...I think my world isn't that different from the one we live in now, except everybody's motivation is different. People are much more concerned with one another, with the group, than they are now. Money is not too much of an issue, as things are freely bartered. Banks exist along with money (mostly old silver coins), but they are more like a gulching system where the credits accrued represent labor and goods, not actual cash. Communities are much more self-contained.

Technology has been made more elegant. New energy sources have made most causes of pollution obsolete. Ways have been found to clean up radioactivity and many toxic chemicals in the soil and water.

Dwellings are still largely twentieth-century structures, retrofitted for sustainability. Many people share properties, living more or less communally. As for marriages and relationships, I don't see that changing much, except that people are a lot more honest now. Some will always prefer serial partners, but more will strive for lasting partnerships. Without the superficial values of today's culture, those lifelong relationships will become much more common.

Everyone is wanted, valued, encouraged, and free. Screening programs and mentors help everyone steer his or her path toward their greatest potential and fulfillment. This is understood to be in the nature of service to the whole. Service is not compulsory, it's simply that no one would think of trying to escape it. Individual merit and talent is celebrated, but total individuality is thought of as a strange, lonely extistence. The ego lives in balance with the mass-consciousness of the entire planet.

We eat far less than in former times, and are mostly vegetarian. We keep animals for milk, eggs, and companionship more than for meat and hides. When we do take the life of a living creature, we do it in humility and gratitude, for the animal has made the greatest sacrifice. We do not slaughter livestock. When it is necessary to kill we do so as painlessly and quickly as possible. We do not enjoy it. We would not feel right about making this a mainstay of our diet.

We're rugged people, used to cold winters and hot summers. We are healthy and tough, having been exposed to most of the natural environmental hazards since childhood. There are hospitals and surgeons, but most of our medicine and health care is achieved naturally. Because we never veer from the healthy path since birth, we live a long time, and disease is minimal. Most of us are what today folks call biracial or multiracial - except it never occurs to anyone to think about it in the first place.

Our spiritual awareness is beyond belief, by twentieth-century paradigms. We are fully aware of multidimensional beings and in fact have become such, ourselves. We commune with plants and animals, with each other and with the earth herself in ways that old-paradigm thinkers would find frightening and even insane. Time is understood to be fluid and nonlinear. Time travel is exotic, but people do it, a bit like some of today's extreme sports.

There are councils and there are halls of justice. There are no government spies, no paranoid tyrants, no sycophants. There are no real wars in the modern sense. Conflicts are nipped in the bud because people everywhere earnestly desire the wellbeing of all.

It is not utopia, it is not heaven. For every problem of today that has been solved in this future time of mine, another has arisen, unforeseen. There are armies and police, though they have little to do. Resources will be cherished and everything will be somehow recycled. There will still be Superfund sites to deal with, as well as particles of depleted uranium that have blown to every corner of the globe.

One more thing I highly suspect...uranium and plutonium...assuming as regretfully I do that we'll see at least one nuclear exchange before this is all over...there may be all kinds of mutations in the near-future. So the greys? I kinda thing they may be...us.