The World in 2050
By Leah Yananton
Throughout my life, I have written letters to my future self. As a child, I would write letters to my teenage self, and as my teenage self, I would write letters to my twenty-something self.
“Dear Leah age 23, this is Leah, age 14. I wonder where you are living, I wonder what you look like…”
When I was in my twenties, I would write to my forty-year-old future self. “Were you able to become the woman you dreamed of, making art, finding spirituality, telling stories, and making the world a better place? Did you find love? Did you truly live?”
When I was in my thirties, I wrote about what kind of eighty-year-old I hoped to become— an educator, teacher, and gardener. Now in 2050 at age 70, I am only ten years away, and am grateful for the longevity. There was a time in the 2020’s when we all thought we were going to die and become extinct, before humanity shifted to a Degrowth economy and clean energy, before the nuclear warheads were dismantled when the doomsday clock second-hand was terrorizing us all clicking ever closer to midnight.
When I was in my forties in the 2020’s, I indeed thought a lot about my mortality, and confronted the thought of death. I grieved the reality of our impermanence, and upon having a revelation of evil, I died several ego-deaths after learning the vastness of the problems humanity was facing, especially in 2024 when things were more horrific than words can describe, with barbaric military violence harming and killing innocent men, women and children in Gaza under genocidal, scorched-earth devastation, broadcast over our smartphones. The olive trees, the land, the love of families, the injustice of the occupation, the trauma, heartbreak, and injustice of war and the brutal veracity of hatred that man can inflict on his brothers, sisters, parents, children, and land, was for all of us feel in real-time.
2024 became the year of the Authoritarian Despots, funded by Techno-Corporate States (for example, Microsoft had more wealth than all the countries combined). The U.S. Government was completely controlled by war corporations, which sucked all the resources from the American people, and in 2022-2023 used nearly a trillion dollars for war, driven by asset management companies’ requirement to increase bottom line of profit for shareholders. War companies and the think tanks they funded were what controlled America’s foreign policy, which was characterized by World War II patterns of power and domination for capitalist pursuit of supremacy. But when the military turned on it’s various global entrapments for full-spectrum dominance in 2024, that’s when things really started to fray and the future looked as bleak and depressing as the military imagined it would be in 2050.
“I don’t really worry about our soldiers being outfought,” said Gen. David Perkins, commanding general of U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command. “By the time 2050 rolls around, game changing technologies on the U.S. side will include laser and radio frequency weapons, swarms of drones, rail guns and synthetic biology, TRADOC said.”
Civilians know that means life would be getting worse if the war corporations continue to be in the driver’s seat.
“When weapons are your product, war is your marketing,” peace activists say.
It was up to us to get on the higher track of probability, off the path of extinction carbon and on the path towards living carbon with a sustainable future where humanity could continue living on a regenerative planet full of healthy biodiversity and biodiverse systems in nature.
Lucky for us, half the world already understood how to get on the higher track of probability, as indigenous cultures and indigenous people have known how to have a healthy, sustainable way of living that already allowed them to thrive for 65,000 years, such as Aboriginal First Nation People of Australia. I learned from Tyson Yunkaporta in his book “Sand Talk,” that time is not a straight line like an arrow careening towards an end, as Aristotle professed, but a torus, regenerative and infinitely alive. Western intellect got stuck on Aristotle’s arrow of time, like Dr. Strangelove was stuck riding a rocket into catastrophic oblivion. Thank you to the Aboriginal First Nation People of the planet for brining us back to Earth, back to our hearts as One Earth Family.
And now here I am, age 70 in the year 2050, and I am writing this letter back to my forty-something-self, because indeed it was 2024 when I faced the war machine head-on toward one of its many crooked faces, and I need my younger self to know that it turned out alright, even though it was very, very terrifying for a while.
Dear Leah, age 44, I need to remind you, my past self in 2024, about the huge rogue waves that made headlines across the news when they “smashed into remote US military base in the Pacific.”
In my own personal mythology, these waves were what symbolically began to usher in the change of paths, shifting from our most likely, and worst case future path if we had continued to be guided by war corporations, and shifting to our best possible future with the greatest benefit to all, when the people united to demand the end of government funding of war corporations, with a ceasefire forever. We demanded that the war and military budgets instead be used to invest in meeting human need, and putting our resources towards cultivating healthy society, as a good neighbor as part of this Earth Family, no longer acting as the bully to the world which earned the U.S. the nickname of the United Devastates, bullying other countries with the threat of our nuclear bombs. We saw we had to change it all at once and very fast. Oppose the evil action, not the people caught up in the system, as Martin Luther King Jr. instructed for nonviolent protest. “Righteous anger toward systems, and reconciliation toward one another.”
“A video posted on X showed the terrifying surge of water rushing into a dining facility on Roi-Namur island, the second-largest island of Kwajalein Atoll, which hosts a US military ballistic missile defense test site in the Republic of the Marshall Islands.
The rushing water broke down doors and windows and pushed furniture around the facility as it reached near ceiling height in the video.”
Just two months earlier in 2023, I was at Vandenberg Space Force Base the night of Halloween, when at the strike of midnight to usher in November 1st, The Day of the Dead, the Space Force performed its test-launch of the Minuteman III Inter-Continental Ballistic Missile, which was headed toward Kwajalein Atoll, and would pass the missile tracking station in Kauai (which was the extinction capital of the world with bird and marine life species going extinct everyday), the route followed every test-launch. I was there to protest the launch with my peace friends and organizer MacGregor Eddy, and Diana Kubilos from the Kingian Nonviolence (KNV) and Conflict Reconciliation program, both whom I had met during a World Beyond War book club when we read “Understanding The War Industry” by Christian Sorensen.
We arrived to Vandenberg at night along with other protestors and with the support of organizations that we work with: CodePink, DefuseNuclearWar Coalition with RootsAction, to name a few. As we gathered, suddenly a bright fiery light lit up the dark sky, and down a corridor of tall pine trees I could see in the distance the Minuteman III launching.
The light came first, and then the sound followed. The fireball ascended. There was a low, steady rumble. Many of us gasped. Just like that, so simple, a weapon like that could deliver untold devastation, repeating the sins of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The light seemed to move slowly at first, and then as it arched out across the Pacific Ocean, it became distant very quickly.
There is a launch from Vandenberg Space Force Base about every three months, and the Air Force/Space Force no longer announces it in advance since the time the late Daniel Ellsberg attended and brought too much attention, too much press to the launch. So we watch for the indicators of when the launch will happen, at some point they have to announce it publicly so that other countries know it is just a test and not an actual nuclear warhead heading towards the Pacific, but just the missile. MacGregor was not shocked to learn that they had chosen October 31/November 1st, as it would be a perfect time for people to be distracted with the holiday. But there we were in the dark of night, Halloween night after the children had been dressed as ghouls and collected their candy, and went to bed to hopefully have sweet dreams. There were we adults, facing the real life ghouls, the real life nightmare.
The Pacific Islanders of course never deserved to have their islands and lives stolen from them for sake of these precision-engineered weapons of mass destruction, weapons of poison, weapons of extinction. Where are the people of Kwajalein Atoll now? How can we hear their voices?
Kwajalein Atoll is a tiny island, says the U.S. Geological Survey, “with a total area of a total area of about 2.5 square kilometers (about 1 square mile), and it is also remote, about 3,900 kilometers (2,100 miles) southwest of Hawaii and just 9 degrees latitude north of the equator.”
“That makes it an excellent location for missile testing and detection, according to the US Army’s Space and Missile Defense Command, which operates the Ronald Reagan Ballistic Missile Defense Test Site on Kwajalein.”
Indeed, the United States of America conducted 67 nuclear tests in the Marshall Islands between 1946 and 1958. The U.S. conducted 23 of these tests at Bikini Atoll, and 44 near Enewetak Atoll, but fallout spread throughout the Marshall Islands. March 1st, 2024 was the 70th Anniversary of the Castle Bravo test, which released 15 megatons of TNT, far surpassing the expected 6 megatons. This unexpected outcome was due to additional reactions involving lithium-7 in the fusion fuel. I haven’t seen Christopher Nolan’s film “Oppenheimer” yet, but I am aware from Daniel Ellsberg’s book “The Doomsday Machine,” that in real life, the atomic scientists had a scene where they considered the small chance that their bomb could catch the entire atmosphere of the globe on fire.
When I was in college, I lived next door to where the first atom was split. Years later when I got married, my father-in-law had served in the military and was sent to Nagasaki as a field artist the year after the U.S. dropped the bomb, which changed him to become a peace activist and he returned to the U.S. horrified by war. The military discharged him. Godzilla is another movie about the atomic bomb, and in the 2024 remake “Godzilla Minus One,” directed by Takashi Yamazaki, the main character is an ocean mine-sweeper on a boat. My former landlord had worked on a small boat as an ocean mine-sweeper in World War II, just like in the movie, but on the side of the U.S., sweeping Nazi mines. But what about the people who were in the “test” bomb’s wake, such as the Indigenous First Nations people of New Mexico and Nevada, as Western Shoshone Chief Raymond Yowell explains, “the radiation has caused Shoshone, Ute, Navajo, Hopi, Paiute, Havasupai, Hualapai and other downwind communities to suffer from cancer, thyroid diseases and birth defects. What about the “hibakusha,” the surviving victims of the atomic bombs which fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the Japanese fishermen on board their boat, Daigo Fukuryū Maru, also known as “Lucky Dragon No. 5,”who were unexpectedly caught in the fallout from the Castle Bravo test on March 1, 1954. “Godzilla Minus One” pays homage to them.
I do not enjoy writing about scary things, but after I heard Greg Mello of the Los Alamos Study group explain what would happen if even one ICBM were to detonate the nuclear warhead it carries, how all infrastructure would be blown away, there would be no healthcare, no ambulances, and how human survivors would experience excruciating sickness immediately as well as throughout future generations.… I drove from Los Angeles to Vandenberg, and I thought about what I had learned, confronting the evil of it all, the inversion of life, how smart engineers are and why are they using it for killing instead of for well-being. What about the current 6th mass extinction caused by this destructive human force? This anti-human, anti-earth, anti-life lord of terror must stop. I thought about our love, my love for my family, the love that nature is, and how much delight we enjoy by living. The miracles are endless. Yet there are hundreds of these ICBM’s stored in underground silos across America’s heartland, ready to launch at a moment’s notice.
Let us listen to Daniel Ellsberg. “The chance that this system could explode ‘by mistake’ or unauthorized action in a crisis—as well as by the deliberate execution of nuclear threats—taking much of the world with it, has always been an unconscionable risk imposed by the superpowers upon the population of the world.”
Nuclear disarmament is our only choice. Yet the U.S. continues to use its nuclear arsenal as the core propelling its dogma of “Might makes right,” and propping up its stance as the global bully. “Listen to us or we’ll nuke you,” is not a neighborly way to behave. “Love Thy Neighbor As Thyself” goes a lot farther.
The “Minutemen III” missiles were named after the Revolutionary War soldiers who were required to be ready within a minute’s notice. It makes me think about the Indigenous First Nations of this land, their Turtle Island, and how they lived here for tens of thousands of years, and could thrive here for hundreds of thousands or millions of years longer, if only our “revolutionary war” would now be for nuclear disarmament, for defunding war corporations, and redirecting those resources to meet human need.
So I got in my car on Halloween night, and I met MacGregor and Diana at Vandenberg Space Force Base, and we continued our work and deepened our prayers.
The U.S. sought to replace its Minutemen ICBM force with new Sentinel missiles, which had been estimated to cost nearly $300 billion, but the Air Force announced that costs would be 37% higher, around $100 billion dollars, to be completed by 2050.
Back in 2024 when I attended the midnight Minuteman ICBM test laugh on midnight of November 1st, Day of the Dead with my peace activist friends, during the time of the launch when we were silent, aghast at what we were witnessing, I prayed to my ancestors and to the indigenous First Nations People who’s land was stolen for this insanity, and I apologized to the Earth for the military’s actions, as I watched the orange fireball of the missile light up the night sky and travel up up and away out across the Pacific. I thought about our future, will I ever become that 80-year old woman I hope to become, and I thought about how angry and heartbroken I feel about the global ice sheets melting. I do not want the ice to melt. I do not want humanity to continue to work against nature. I do not want men to continue to silence women’s voices. I do not want men to continue to vilify and exploit our bodies and commodify our sexuality. I do not want us to all starve in famine or die in nuclear waste. I do not want to ride this arrow of time, I do not want to ride on this missile of the prideful Dr. Strangelove, careening towards extinction. I do not want this for Earth.
“I am sorry, Pachamama. Forgive us. I am sorry. Guide us, ancestors. Teach us how to change our ways,” I prayed.
The next day, I drove down the coast back towards Los Angeles. I stopped at a random beach to stretch my legs and walk around. I noticed there were several off-shore oil drills and a pier down the beach with oil facilities on it. I felt sad and almost hopeless, how could we do this to our planet, to our home, to our oceans. I don’t want to feel sick, and I don’t want anybody else to ever feel or get sick. I continued to pray, to keep the oil in the ground and to clean up any oil spills and contamination. I prayed for our health. I prayed that these off-shore oil rigs stop drilling.
I was feeling depressed, despite it being a beautiful day at the beach. There were several pods of dolphin swimming! If they were still happy, I thought, then I can feel a little happiness too, as in this moment, we are alive, we are together, and we are well. I walked back to my car, and I saw that I had unknowingly parked near some kind of oil pipe. I watched it for a while, thinking about the fossil fuels. Then a tour group arrived. I asked the woman leading the tour group if I could join them on to the pier to learn about the oil company here. She apologized that she could not have me along, as these were elected officials, and she was from California State Lands Commission. I learned that the random beach I had stopped at was called Little Rincon, Chumash land. The Spanish colonizers had been brutal to the Chumash in these parts.
“Do you know anything about the off-shore oil drills?” I asked her.
“Yes,” she said. “They were decommissioned in 2018.”
“So no oil is being drilled anymore!?” I said.
“No. The onshore stopped in 2018, and the offshore well plug and abandonment was completed in 2021.”
“This is amazing to learn! Thank you! This is hopeful!” I said, realizing that my little prayer had actually been answered.
“Now we just have a lot of cleaning up to do,” she said, and continued on with the tour group, as the elected officials wearing office clothes followed her down the beach path and onto the pier.
I got in my car, and drove home. I had the windows open and breathed in the delicious ocean air. I felt deep gratitude. That happened! There were dolphin! The oil rigs were decommissioned! Awesome.
The next day, I called MacGregor Eddy to check in and see how she was doing after the gathering at Vandenberg.
“The missile failed! The MinutemanIII had to be destroyed by Vandenberg mid-way because there was an error of some sort in its trajectory!” she said.
“We were lucky this one was just a test, and was not carrying a nuclear warhead. Once an ICBM is launched, it cannot be recalled, so there is no room for error or false alarms for the hundreds of Minutemen III ICBM’s across America that are ready to launch within a moment’s notice, with nuclear warheads already onboard.”
“So it failed? I think our ancestors came through for us on Day of the Dead!” I said. “Ha! ICBM’s are no match for the ancestors!”
“Yes!” MacGregor said. “We need the voice of the Chumash here. Do you know that Vandenberg Space Force actually prides itself on protecting the land, endangered species and upholding cultural heritage!? They have a website devoted to it. Can you believe the nerve…”
Meanwhile I am thinking about all the pollution they cause from their launches, and the latest article I read about space junk and the for-profit space race, and how scientists at NOAA are now seeing “the fingerprint of human space traffic on stratospheric aerosol,” said Troy Thornberry, a research physicist at NOAA’s Chemical Sciences Laboratory. “Adding a lot of material to the stratosphere that was never there before is something that we’re considering, as well as the sheer mass of material that we put into space.”
Let us not forget that war is a for-profit industry.
The budget for United States weapons “defense” programs could be better spent investing in human well-being and sustainability.
Thinking back to the 2020’s and the interview with U.S. General David Perkins, he had said “As we look to our enemies around the world, they might not outfight us on the battlefield, but I think they might be able to sometimes out imagine us … into what is the realm of the possible and maybe where the future can be.”
Perhaps this general didn’t realize what he was admitting to in his lack of imagination about how beautiful the future can be.
The U.S. empire wouldn’t cut its lifeline —that is, war— willingly, but the minds and hearts of the American people shifted and as we began to teach each other more and more about what kind of future we want 2050 to be, and even soldiers began to demand resources go to investing in human well-being.
The senseless atrocities in Gaza woke everyone up from the spell of complacency, we realized that we are all living under nuclear threat too, and we were called to hold the line.
Through our collective actions in 2024, we began to demand that Congress defund the Pentagon, rescind all World War II -era foreign policies, and dismantle all World War II era institutions and war corporations.
The Great Shift was the time when finally the people of the world united and created a global strike — not working, not purchasing, and not participating in the war profit-death-cycle, but demanding that resources instead be applied to meeting human needs, investing in humanity and providing well-being and real safety, real security, real brotherly love. It would be “blasphemous” to write that even soldiers put down their arms and joined the strike if it hadn’t happened, but it did happen after the soldiers realized that their missions were not for spreading democracy and upholding American values, but for enriching the profits for fossil fuel barons and weapons manufacturers. ¡No mas! Once the soldiers reclaimed their right to life and desire to create good for others, they weren’t able to be used as dispensable pawns anymore by the warlords. In fact, it was in the 2030’s that warlords were finally put in jail.
Am I writing a letter to my past-self, or am I stitching a yarn with you, with my teachers, friends, students and with my future self, revealing a fabric of life that breathes as a whole system, a living mycelium network of life, and a multi-dimensional experience of quantum physics that allows us to change the present and the future with each act of altruism and hope, defying the doom and pulling the plug on the doomsday machines once and for all. Let us pray to give back to the Earth, give back to Pachamama all the resources she has so abundantly given us. Let us pray to give back to the land, to clean our waters and make our rivers drinkable again, to clean up all vestiges of the past, and move forward into the future for millennia to come. Just think of all the stories we can weave together.
The Democrats were nervous they would lose the election to Donald Trump, and it was a perfect moment for the people to unite and demand the U.S. made these shifts. As CodePink was hitting the halls of Congress everyday in February 2024, the Congress interns begged the activists to keep it up— someone has to talk sense to the Congress members. I invited Presidential Candidate Marianne Williamson to also visit the offices of the Congress members to speak truth to power, and sure enough, she would be the one who could defeat Trump and defeat Biden, and help American heal its heartland, heal our hearts. We have no more time for nightmares and impotent inversions, perverting “live” into “evil.” Let it all go. ¡No mas!
People long for the world to be in balance again with clean air, clean water, healthy food for all.
Now it is our time, our planet, our prayers for the greatest highest good for all that will be answered from now on, together, we thrive.