Alternate title: Will the future be all that bad?
17776 is a multimedia story told by Jon Bois about a future in which there is no more death. Nor birth. Nor sickness. Nor old age. Only good ol’ American Football.
The narrative makes the geography part of my brain hum with how central space and time are to it. More specifically, the intersection between the two, right here in the land of opportunity. As an American myself, I can see the role they play every day I choose to walk instead of drive-- Suddenly, my small town is a big city, formidably large. And the humble wheat fields are vast expanses of barren waste. This is what I mean by the intersection of space and time.
Even when driving, America has space which still feel huge and scary-- All of the driving I’ve ever done in California only supports the theory that it’s an endless longitudinal expanse of yellow and gray. Don’t get me wrong, America (The physical, geological region) is equally as beautiful as it is imposing. But all of this space can sometimes feel excessive. Like, does Idaho really need all those fields? And how can there be so much in Utah when at the same time there’s so little?
It’s no surprise that such a big, expansive country affects the minds of its residents. Consider how a fish in the Mariana Trench might view the world differently than one in the Florida Keys. It's so easy here in the West to just zip around and tell yourself “I’m da king of da road” without bumping into a single other soul. It's hard for me to even imagine the super cities of the East coast.
So, infinite life without death. What’s the catch? Is the future a wasteland? No, 17776’s premise isn’t a gloomy one, like you might expect from your standard sci-fi story. Bois’s depiction of life 15,000 years from now is monumentally hopeful. There still exists love and friendship and happiness. The absence of death doesn’t lead to a widespread apathy, but a more adventurous perspective towards life-- And this is where space and time come in.
Similarly to how a car “shrinks” the perceptual size of a space, so too does an expanded lifespan. To a 10th century individual who lived till 25, the world was composed entirely of his lord’s fiefdom. To a 178th century individual who lives forever, America is the size of a playground. It leads to a lot of fun scenarios, the most noteworthy being the state-wide games of football spanning tens of thousands of miles. In the context of thousands of years per game, it might as well be a regular field. Hell, it might even be smaller.
In this compressed future, Bois goes on to predict something I’ve never considered: With infinite time and smaller space, 17776’s Americans can make more friends than ever before. Thousands and thousands of people, all interconnected. (Side note: Many people call America’s vastness “unthinkable” to Europeans, but smaller regions being more communal was literally unthought of to me before this epiphany. Europe: 1 / America: 0). What a beautifully hopeful idea!
I really dig optimistic sci fi like this. Star Trek is another shining example, although that series’ breadth and lifespan has led to a handful of bleak entries... What I want to get at though, is how both the futures of Star Trek and of 17776 have a period of “bad times” just before all of the good. In Star Trek, it's WWIII. In 17776, it’s climate change.
Both those “bad times” don’t seem all that far away, but the concept of a better future waiting on the other side is the most comforting thing I’ve been told by a story. One day we can all have infinite friends and synthesized Klingon coffee. We can explore the world as leisurely as we’d like. We can live together forever. We can make it.