L
Lyle Lewis
Guest
- Thread Author
- #1
For the past year, I have been posting occasional satire essays on Substack. The idea was simple: push an environmental argument slightly beyond its familiar form, and assumptions that normally remain invisible can suddenly become obvious.
A nighttime wetland beneath a star-filled sky, partially illuminated by an artificial beam of light reflected from an orbital structure overhead. The image contrasts natural darkness with technological intrusion into an ecological system.
But something strange has started happening.
It is becoming harder to tell where satire ends and science fiction begins. More unsettling, it is becoming harder to tell where either one ends and contemporary reality begins.
When I wrote The Field Trip to Nature, the premise depended on exaggeration: a future in which nature survived mostly in tiny fragments, often in distant places, encountered through highly managed experiences and increasingly available only by appointment. What remained was mediated, curated, engineered, preserved, and explained to us by many of the same systems that had helped replace it.
The problem is that this is becoming less exaggerated all the time. The joke only works if the premise feels absurd. Increasingly, it doesn’t.
Part of the joke was that access to nature had become something to schedule. Increasingly, that is not much of a joke. Many campsites in national and state parks must now be reserved months in advance; some backcountry permits and other forms of access are allocated by lottery. Nature has not completely disappeared, but access to some of its remaining fragments is already becoming rationed by reservation systems, permits, quotas, wealth, and chance. Nature remains available. Terms and conditions may apply.
At the same time, the technological half of the satire is rapidly losing its exaggeration. We already manipulate genomes, engineer organisms, contemplate resurrecting extinct species, design gene drives capable of altering wild populations, automate ecological monitoring, manufacture artificial foods, build machines that imitate cognition, and discuss technological interventions capable of modifying planetary climate.
Each is debated as though it were an isolated technological choice. That may be precisely why the aggregate is so difficult to see.
We tend to encounter new technologies one at a time. A new artificial-intelligence model appears. A new genetic technique becomes viable. Engineers suggest a new method of removing carbon from the atmosphere. Autonomous systems become capable of performing another task previously carried out by humans. A company proposes bringing back an extinct animal. Extinction, apparently, is becoming less a final outcome than a product-development opportunity.
Each arrives with its own vocabulary, specialists, benefits, risks, and arguments. What is harder to perceive is that none of them is arriving alone.
Artificial intelligence accelerates genetic research. Genetic engineering alters what biological intervention is possible. Automation increases the scale at which those interventions can be deployed. Cheap sensors generate more data. AI interprets the data. Robotics acts on the interpretation. Energy systems power the whole structure. Mining supplies its materials. Global communications distribute the technology nearly instantaneously.
Each technology changes the environment in which the others operate. The interactions multiply faster than our ability to think about them. Increasingly, technology is wagging the dog. Time itself is being compressed: invention, deployment, consequence, and adaptation are being pushed closer together.
For most of human history, transformative technologies spread slowly enough that generations could at least partially absorb their consequences. A tool emerged, diffused, altered behavior, produced unintended effects, and eventually became part of the cultural landscape. That process is increasingly compressed into years. Sometimes months.
A technology can move from laboratory curiosity to commercial deployment before institutions have even begun to understand its consequences, much less their full scope. By the time regulation catches up, the technology may already be embedded in infrastructure, markets, expectations, and everyday behavior.
Tools become conveniences. Conveniences become dependencies. Dependencies become necessities. And necessities become difficult to question. Our ability to create technologies has lapped our ability to understand their consequences.
Consider the proposal to place large mirrors in orbit and reflect sunlight onto selected areas of Earth at night. Apparently darkness has been underperforming. From an engineering perspective, the first question is predictable: Can it be done? But that is not the important question.
Darkness is not simply the absence of a service humans have not yet figured out how to provide. The cycle of light and darkness is one of the oldest environmental signals on Earth. Organisms have evolved around it for hundreds of millions of years. It governs migration, feeding, reproduction, predator-prey interactions, insect activity, bird navigation, plant physiology, and circadian rhythms across the biosphere. Changing darkness therefore does not change one variable. It enters thousands of relationships simultaneously.
Yet our technological institutions are extraordinarily good at evaluating whether something can be built and remarkably poor at determining what happens when the resulting intervention propagates through ecological systems. Technological interventions may be reversible in an engineering sense while remaining irreversible in an ecological one.
We can alter genomes before fully understanding them. We can release chemicals before understanding their ecological pathways. We can manipulate rivers before understanding how changing the timing, amount, and movement of water will affect the fish, wildlife, and people that depend on it. We can deploy artificial intelligence faster than societies can understand its political and psychological consequences. And now we can contemplate modifying the night itself before understanding what darkness does.
Satire traditionally depends upon distance. The writer takes something recognizable and pushes it into a future sufficiently exaggerated that the underlying absurdity becomes visible. But technological change is consuming that distance. A satirical premise written today can become a business proposal tomorrow. A science-fiction scenario can become a startup. An absurdity can become infrastructure.
The time between imagination and implementation is shrinking. That matters for reasons extending far beyond writing.
Human beings are not particularly good at thinking about multiple interacting threats simultaneously. We simplify. We isolate variables. We ask whether climate change is dangerous, whether artificial intelligence is dangerous, whether biotechnology is dangerous, whether biodiversity loss is dangerous.
Then we debate which threat matters most. But the world does not experience them separately.
Climate disruption affects water, agriculture, migration, disease, fire, infrastructure, political stability, and ecosystems. Biodiversity loss reduces ecological resilience. Resource scarcity increases political pressure. Political instability weakens institutions. Artificial intelligence increases the speed and reach of information, manipulation, research, optimization, and technological control. Biotechnology expands the range of biological interventions available to societies already struggling to understand the systems they are modifying.
Every major risk enters a landscape already altered by the others. They interact. They amplify.
We analyze energy development one project and one technology at a time. Solar is compared with fossil fuels. Wind is evaluated separately from mining. Transmission is treated as infrastructure rather than energy development. Data centers appear in another accounting system entirely. But ecosystems experience the cumulative footprint of all of them. The atmosphere responds to the total concentration of greenhouse gases, not to the categories we use to produce them. Landscapes respond the same way. They experience the cumulative effects of all disturbance.
There is no solar ecosystem, wind ecosystem, oil ecosystem, or natural-gas ecosystem. There is only the ecosystem onto which all of them are being added. One of the least appreciated consequences of technological acceleration is the growing impossibility of predicting what all these technologies will do collectively within an even more complex system—Earth itself.
Technology is usually evaluated according to what it can accomplish for people: increased efficiency, greater productivity, lower cost, better health, more convenience, higher profits, greater control. The ecological question frequently comes later, if it comes at all.
Where will the energy come from? What materials must be mined? How much water will be required? What landscapes will be converted? What waste products will persist? What organisms will be killed or lose habitat? How will this technology interact with dozens of other disturbances already acting on the same ecosystems?
Those questions are difficult because the answers rarely fit comfortably into the story of technological progress. Every technology exists physically somewhere. Even the technologies we describe as virtual depend upon mines, power plants, transmission lines, cooling systems, manufacturing facilities, transportation networks, data centers, and waste streams. The cloud, inconveniently, is still on the ground. Our accounting systems separate technologies. The physical world recombines them.
Nowhere is this accounting problem more consequential than in the way we talk about human carrying capacity. We routinely hear arguments about how many people Earth can “support.” Ten billion is often discussed as though the question can be answered primarily by calculating calories, cropland, water, energy, and improvements in technology.
But support is an extraordinarily slippery word. Humans have always been unusually generous in defining “support” when they are the species being supported. Support ten billion people for how long? A year? A century? A thousand years? Long enough for the population to peak and decline?
And support them alongside what? If more cropland is created by eliminating forests, more irrigation water obtained by drying rivers and wetlands, more seafood harvested by simplifying oceans, and more biological production redirected toward humans by eliminating competing species, the immediate human supply of food and water may increase.
But the systems being liquidated are not merely scenery. Forests influence rainfall, temperature, soils, water, carbon, and regional climate. Insects pollinate plants, decompose organic matter, recycle nutrients, regulate other organisms, and feed enormous portions of terrestrial and freshwater food webs. Wetlands store water, process nutrients, buffer floods, and support fisheries. Rivers are not simply pipes carrying water toward human users.
We cannot appropriate all of those systems for ourselves without eventually changing the conditions that make human life possible. At some point, greater appropriation of the biosphere stops increasing human carrying capacity and begins reducing it.
The problem is that we do not know where that crossing point lies—or even whether we have already crossed it. The crossing point itself depends on time.
A practice that allows another billion people to live for twenty years may reduce the number who can live a hundred years later. Pumping an aquifer can increase food production today while exhausting a water supply that may take centuries or millennia to replace. Clearing a forest can increase agricultural acreage while eventually altering the rainfall on which agriculture itself depends.
Technological success may simply kick ecological failure farther down the road.
We respond by adding another layer of technology. Synthetic fertilizer replaces lost fertility. Irrigation compensates for insufficient rainfall. Pesticides replace ecological controls. Air-conditioning compensates for increasing heat. Desalination substitutes for freshwater. Hatcheries replace reproduction. Artificial pollination can replace some work once performed by insects. At sufficient expense, we can now reproduce small pieces of what functioning ecosystems once did for free.
But technological substitution is usually much narrower than ecological function. A bee is not merely a pollination machine. A forest is not simply carbon storage. A river is not merely water delivery. Soil is not simply a medium for holding fertilizer.
When technology replaces one ecological function, we tend to count the function successfully replaced and overlook everything else the original system was doing.
Which Earth? An Earth containing functioning forests, rivers, insects, soils, wetlands, oceans, and wild species? Or an increasingly simplified Earth in which more of those functions must be technologically reproduced simply to maintain the human population already present?
The second world might support more humans for some period of time. It might also be far less capable of supporting them for very long.
Carrying capacity is therefore not a fixed ceiling waiting somewhere above us. Humans continually alter it. Agriculture, medicine, irrigation, fossil energy, fertilizer, sanitation, and technology can raise short-term human carrying capacity while biodiversity loss, climate disruption, depleted soils, exhausted aquifers, pollution, and ecological simplification reduce it over longer periods.
We are changing the ceiling while climbing toward it. Some of the things allowing us to climb higher are lowering the ceiling behind us. That is not easily captured by any calculation of how many people the planet can “support.”
Our language reinforces the abstraction. We speak of artificial intelligence as though intelligence itself had become detached from matter. We speak of the cloud as though computation occurs in the atmosphere. We speak of clean technology as though shifting environmental costs geographically or chemically makes them disappear.
When consequences are removed from immediate perception, deployment becomes easier.
Something similar may be happening with cognition itself. Artificial intelligence can increasingly infer not just what people know, but patterns in how they think—what attracts their attention, what arguments persuade them, where uncertainty exists, and which forms of language change behavior.
That capability can increase human agency. A system that understands how someone thinks can challenge assumptions, expose contradictions, retrieve forgotten connections, and help turn intuition into explicit reasoning.
But the same capability can be used in the opposite direction. The difference is not whether the technology understands us. The difference is what that understanding is used for.
A system designed to help people think more clearly can also make them easier to steer. Both emerge from the same technological capability.
That is another reason satire is becoming more difficult. Reality increasingly arrives pre-satirized.
We destroy ecosystems while advertising restoration. We simplify biological systems while describing the process as management. We create technologies to repair consequences produced by earlier technologies, then create additional technologies to manage the consequences of those. Eventually, the repair requires its own repair.
At some point, exaggeration becomes unnecessary. All the satirist has to do is rearrange the language slightly—or increasingly, not at all.
This does not mean technology is inherently destructive. Artificial intelligence can expand human understanding. Genetic analysis can help managers conserve genetic diversity in endangered populations. Sensors can reveal ecological changes that would otherwise go unnoticed.
Capability is expanding faster than restraint. Intervention is expanding faster than comprehension. Build the data center. Expand the transmission line. Engineer the crop. Automate the system. Remove the carbon. Revive the species. Modify the genome. Optimize the landscape.
Each step can be made to appear rational within its own frame. The cumulative trajectory is harder to justify because no single institution, discipline, corporation, government, or generation can see the whole thing.
No one can.
That may be the real boundary now disappearing—not merely the line between satire and science fiction, but the line between technological imagination and ecological reality. Increasingly, once an intervention becomes possible, possibility itself becomes an argument for deployment.
Human technology has progressively weakened constraints once imposed by biology, energy, geography, and time. Concentrated wealth and power increasingly determine who is positioned to exploit that freedom at scale. The achievement is extraordinary. So is the risk.
Writing satire has made that risk feel more visible to me because satire requires asking a simple question: What would happen if we continued this logic just a little farther? Increasingly, the answer is uncomfortable. We already have.
And by the time the next satire is written, reality may have moved farther still.
A nighttime wetland beneath a star-filled sky, partially illuminated by an artificial beam of light reflected from an orbital structure overhead. The image contrasts natural darkness with technological intrusion into an ecological system.
But something strange has started happening.
It is becoming harder to tell where satire ends and science fiction begins. More unsettling, it is becoming harder to tell where either one ends and contemporary reality begins.
When I wrote The Field Trip to Nature, the premise depended on exaggeration: a future in which nature survived mostly in tiny fragments, often in distant places, encountered through highly managed experiences and increasingly available only by appointment. What remained was mediated, curated, engineered, preserved, and explained to us by many of the same systems that had helped replace it.
The problem is that this is becoming less exaggerated all the time. The joke only works if the premise feels absurd. Increasingly, it doesn’t.
Part of the joke was that access to nature had become something to schedule. Increasingly, that is not much of a joke. Many campsites in national and state parks must now be reserved months in advance; some backcountry permits and other forms of access are allocated by lottery. Nature has not completely disappeared, but access to some of its remaining fragments is already becoming rationed by reservation systems, permits, quotas, wealth, and chance. Nature remains available. Terms and conditions may apply.
At the same time, the technological half of the satire is rapidly losing its exaggeration. We already manipulate genomes, engineer organisms, contemplate resurrecting extinct species, design gene drives capable of altering wild populations, automate ecological monitoring, manufacture artificial foods, build machines that imitate cognition, and discuss technological interventions capable of modifying planetary climate.
Each is debated as though it were an isolated technological choice. That may be precisely why the aggregate is so difficult to see.
We tend to encounter new technologies one at a time. A new artificial-intelligence model appears. A new genetic technique becomes viable. Engineers suggest a new method of removing carbon from the atmosphere. Autonomous systems become capable of performing another task previously carried out by humans. A company proposes bringing back an extinct animal. Extinction, apparently, is becoming less a final outcome than a product-development opportunity.
Each arrives with its own vocabulary, specialists, benefits, risks, and arguments. What is harder to perceive is that none of them is arriving alone.
Artificial intelligence accelerates genetic research. Genetic engineering alters what biological intervention is possible. Automation increases the scale at which those interventions can be deployed. Cheap sensors generate more data. AI interprets the data. Robotics acts on the interpretation. Energy systems power the whole structure. Mining supplies its materials. Global communications distribute the technology nearly instantaneously.
Each technology changes the environment in which the others operate. The interactions multiply faster than our ability to think about them. Increasingly, technology is wagging the dog. Time itself is being compressed: invention, deployment, consequence, and adaptation are being pushed closer together.
For most of human history, transformative technologies spread slowly enough that generations could at least partially absorb their consequences. A tool emerged, diffused, altered behavior, produced unintended effects, and eventually became part of the cultural landscape. That process is increasingly compressed into years. Sometimes months.
A technology can move from laboratory curiosity to commercial deployment before institutions have even begun to understand its consequences, much less their full scope. By the time regulation catches up, the technology may already be embedded in infrastructure, markets, expectations, and everyday behavior.
Tools become conveniences. Conveniences become dependencies. Dependencies become necessities. And necessities become difficult to question. Our ability to create technologies has lapped our ability to understand their consequences.
Consider the proposal to place large mirrors in orbit and reflect sunlight onto selected areas of Earth at night. Apparently darkness has been underperforming. From an engineering perspective, the first question is predictable: Can it be done? But that is not the important question.
Darkness is not simply the absence of a service humans have not yet figured out how to provide. The cycle of light and darkness is one of the oldest environmental signals on Earth. Organisms have evolved around it for hundreds of millions of years. It governs migration, feeding, reproduction, predator-prey interactions, insect activity, bird navigation, plant physiology, and circadian rhythms across the biosphere. Changing darkness therefore does not change one variable. It enters thousands of relationships simultaneously.
Yet our technological institutions are extraordinarily good at evaluating whether something can be built and remarkably poor at determining what happens when the resulting intervention propagates through ecological systems. Technological interventions may be reversible in an engineering sense while remaining irreversible in an ecological one.
We can alter genomes before fully understanding them. We can release chemicals before understanding their ecological pathways. We can manipulate rivers before understanding how changing the timing, amount, and movement of water will affect the fish, wildlife, and people that depend on it. We can deploy artificial intelligence faster than societies can understand its political and psychological consequences. And now we can contemplate modifying the night itself before understanding what darkness does.
Satire traditionally depends upon distance. The writer takes something recognizable and pushes it into a future sufficiently exaggerated that the underlying absurdity becomes visible. But technological change is consuming that distance. A satirical premise written today can become a business proposal tomorrow. A science-fiction scenario can become a startup. An absurdity can become infrastructure.
The time between imagination and implementation is shrinking. That matters for reasons extending far beyond writing.
Human beings are not particularly good at thinking about multiple interacting threats simultaneously. We simplify. We isolate variables. We ask whether climate change is dangerous, whether artificial intelligence is dangerous, whether biotechnology is dangerous, whether biodiversity loss is dangerous.
Then we debate which threat matters most. But the world does not experience them separately.
Climate disruption affects water, agriculture, migration, disease, fire, infrastructure, political stability, and ecosystems. Biodiversity loss reduces ecological resilience. Resource scarcity increases political pressure. Political instability weakens institutions. Artificial intelligence increases the speed and reach of information, manipulation, research, optimization, and technological control. Biotechnology expands the range of biological interventions available to societies already struggling to understand the systems they are modifying.
Every major risk enters a landscape already altered by the others. They interact. They amplify.
We analyze energy development one project and one technology at a time. Solar is compared with fossil fuels. Wind is evaluated separately from mining. Transmission is treated as infrastructure rather than energy development. Data centers appear in another accounting system entirely. But ecosystems experience the cumulative footprint of all of them. The atmosphere responds to the total concentration of greenhouse gases, not to the categories we use to produce them. Landscapes respond the same way. They experience the cumulative effects of all disturbance.
There is no solar ecosystem, wind ecosystem, oil ecosystem, or natural-gas ecosystem. There is only the ecosystem onto which all of them are being added. One of the least appreciated consequences of technological acceleration is the growing impossibility of predicting what all these technologies will do collectively within an even more complex system—Earth itself.
Technology is usually evaluated according to what it can accomplish for people: increased efficiency, greater productivity, lower cost, better health, more convenience, higher profits, greater control. The ecological question frequently comes later, if it comes at all.
Where will the energy come from? What materials must be mined? How much water will be required? What landscapes will be converted? What waste products will persist? What organisms will be killed or lose habitat? How will this technology interact with dozens of other disturbances already acting on the same ecosystems?
Those questions are difficult because the answers rarely fit comfortably into the story of technological progress. Every technology exists physically somewhere. Even the technologies we describe as virtual depend upon mines, power plants, transmission lines, cooling systems, manufacturing facilities, transportation networks, data centers, and waste streams. The cloud, inconveniently, is still on the ground. Our accounting systems separate technologies. The physical world recombines them.
Nowhere is this accounting problem more consequential than in the way we talk about human carrying capacity. We routinely hear arguments about how many people Earth can “support.” Ten billion is often discussed as though the question can be answered primarily by calculating calories, cropland, water, energy, and improvements in technology.
But support is an extraordinarily slippery word. Humans have always been unusually generous in defining “support” when they are the species being supported. Support ten billion people for how long? A year? A century? A thousand years? Long enough for the population to peak and decline?
And support them alongside what? If more cropland is created by eliminating forests, more irrigation water obtained by drying rivers and wetlands, more seafood harvested by simplifying oceans, and more biological production redirected toward humans by eliminating competing species, the immediate human supply of food and water may increase.
But the systems being liquidated are not merely scenery. Forests influence rainfall, temperature, soils, water, carbon, and regional climate. Insects pollinate plants, decompose organic matter, recycle nutrients, regulate other organisms, and feed enormous portions of terrestrial and freshwater food webs. Wetlands store water, process nutrients, buffer floods, and support fisheries. Rivers are not simply pipes carrying water toward human users.
We cannot appropriate all of those systems for ourselves without eventually changing the conditions that make human life possible. At some point, greater appropriation of the biosphere stops increasing human carrying capacity and begins reducing it.
The problem is that we do not know where that crossing point lies—or even whether we have already crossed it. The crossing point itself depends on time.
A practice that allows another billion people to live for twenty years may reduce the number who can live a hundred years later. Pumping an aquifer can increase food production today while exhausting a water supply that may take centuries or millennia to replace. Clearing a forest can increase agricultural acreage while eventually altering the rainfall on which agriculture itself depends.
Technological success may simply kick ecological failure farther down the road.
We respond by adding another layer of technology. Synthetic fertilizer replaces lost fertility. Irrigation compensates for insufficient rainfall. Pesticides replace ecological controls. Air-conditioning compensates for increasing heat. Desalination substitutes for freshwater. Hatcheries replace reproduction. Artificial pollination can replace some work once performed by insects. At sufficient expense, we can now reproduce small pieces of what functioning ecosystems once did for free.
But technological substitution is usually much narrower than ecological function. A bee is not merely a pollination machine. A forest is not simply carbon storage. A river is not merely water delivery. Soil is not simply a medium for holding fertilizer.
When technology replaces one ecological function, we tend to count the function successfully replaced and overlook everything else the original system was doing.
Which Earth? An Earth containing functioning forests, rivers, insects, soils, wetlands, oceans, and wild species? Or an increasingly simplified Earth in which more of those functions must be technologically reproduced simply to maintain the human population already present?
The second world might support more humans for some period of time. It might also be far less capable of supporting them for very long.
Carrying capacity is therefore not a fixed ceiling waiting somewhere above us. Humans continually alter it. Agriculture, medicine, irrigation, fossil energy, fertilizer, sanitation, and technology can raise short-term human carrying capacity while biodiversity loss, climate disruption, depleted soils, exhausted aquifers, pollution, and ecological simplification reduce it over longer periods.
We are changing the ceiling while climbing toward it. Some of the things allowing us to climb higher are lowering the ceiling behind us. That is not easily captured by any calculation of how many people the planet can “support.”
Our language reinforces the abstraction. We speak of artificial intelligence as though intelligence itself had become detached from matter. We speak of the cloud as though computation occurs in the atmosphere. We speak of clean technology as though shifting environmental costs geographically or chemically makes them disappear.
When consequences are removed from immediate perception, deployment becomes easier.
Something similar may be happening with cognition itself. Artificial intelligence can increasingly infer not just what people know, but patterns in how they think—what attracts their attention, what arguments persuade them, where uncertainty exists, and which forms of language change behavior.
That capability can increase human agency. A system that understands how someone thinks can challenge assumptions, expose contradictions, retrieve forgotten connections, and help turn intuition into explicit reasoning.
But the same capability can be used in the opposite direction. The difference is not whether the technology understands us. The difference is what that understanding is used for.
A system designed to help people think more clearly can also make them easier to steer. Both emerge from the same technological capability.
That is another reason satire is becoming more difficult. Reality increasingly arrives pre-satirized.
We destroy ecosystems while advertising restoration. We simplify biological systems while describing the process as management. We create technologies to repair consequences produced by earlier technologies, then create additional technologies to manage the consequences of those. Eventually, the repair requires its own repair.
At some point, exaggeration becomes unnecessary. All the satirist has to do is rearrange the language slightly—or increasingly, not at all.
This does not mean technology is inherently destructive. Artificial intelligence can expand human understanding. Genetic analysis can help managers conserve genetic diversity in endangered populations. Sensors can reveal ecological changes that would otherwise go unnoticed.
Capability is expanding faster than restraint. Intervention is expanding faster than comprehension. Build the data center. Expand the transmission line. Engineer the crop. Automate the system. Remove the carbon. Revive the species. Modify the genome. Optimize the landscape.
Each step can be made to appear rational within its own frame. The cumulative trajectory is harder to justify because no single institution, discipline, corporation, government, or generation can see the whole thing.
No one can.
That may be the real boundary now disappearing—not merely the line between satire and science fiction, but the line between technological imagination and ecological reality. Increasingly, once an intervention becomes possible, possibility itself becomes an argument for deployment.
Human technology has progressively weakened constraints once imposed by biology, energy, geography, and time. Concentrated wealth and power increasingly determine who is positioned to exploit that freedom at scale. The achievement is extraordinary. So is the risk.
Writing satire has made that risk feel more visible to me because satire requires asking a simple question: What would happen if we continued this logic just a little farther? Increasingly, the answer is uncomfortable. We already have.
And by the time the next satire is written, reality may have moved farther still.