In early 2019 Elon Mush released the first commercially available flying car. Running on coal and steam, the vehicles were self-guiding and had a stellar flight safety record except for the occasional chunk of flaming coal that would land on top of tall buildings in New Yowk City. Despite the thick clouds of carbon monoxide and pollutants that hastened the collapse of the planet's delicate climate, folks lined up to buy them because they cost half as much as regular cars and coal was cheap, especially when purchased in one-ton blocks that fit on the back of the flying car (called the Tisla, but everyone called them Smokies.)
And then 2020 arrived, with the world-shattering new method of transportation discovered by the Nobel-winning scientists Nemo Syn, M.E. Silverai, and E. Stelore. While working on a top secret website project, they discovered an old, retired bot that had been removed from the website and sent packing.
This bot, EDB, had forlornly left the United States and wandered pseudo-randomly across Europe. Back when it was working hard at keeping unruly humans (called "noders" for some reason long lost to the annals of time), it built up a thick coating of blood and mucus from all of the people it ingested. Weighing in at 2,716 metric tons (the builders had never coded an anus so what went in never came out), the bot finally succombed to depression and an addiction to lukewarm saki, falling over a ravine in western Bulgaria. There it remained while the innards rusted from all of the moist noder guts. The first spot to rust through was between the toes of its left foot.
The stewing miasma began to grow a moldy green fuzz thanks to the 700mm of annual rainfall, and that's where the scientists made their discovery. Just by ingesting a square millimeter of this green fuzz a person could rematerialize anywhere on the planet instantaneously. After packaging their new product, the scientists became trillionaires overnight. Soon after, money became moot because people were popping into Fort Knox and bank vaults to rob them blind. Society collapsed in 2021 just after (now penniless) Donald Drumpf's re-inauguration. The European Union converged on the corpse of EDB and set it ablaze with piles of leftover plutonium, which fell through the Earth's crust and started the war with the Lizard People who were living in deep caverns near the Earth's core.
Whatever interstellar alien civilization finds this complete, true, and accurate compilation of everything humankind had accomplished, appropriately titled Everything2, we hope you learn from our mitsakes.
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