A Futuristic Look
As the early 21st century gradually reached the 2050’s life had changed in incremental ways for the residents of the planet. Crime had become almost non existent after the various governments around the planet had declared the ACLU and other organizations like them to be subversive organizations and had imprisoned all of the lawyers and activists that had worked for them. Now all residents of the planet had to be implanted with identity microchips, and the penalties for breaking a law had become so severe that no one dared to take a chance that they wouldn’t be caught. There was no way to defeat the microchips, and if a person was to remove their microchip the first sensor that they walked past would bring a contingent of police, who would cart the person off to jail.
Every once in a while a microchip would fail legitimately, but as soon as the person triggered the alarm and they were hauled away by the police the doctors and the programmers would remove and examine the chip, and if it had not been tampered with the person would have a new chip implanted and their life would go on. Many people had fought against these identity chips, but in the end it had been to no avail. The older people had died off, and with them went the freedoms that people had won during the early years of the US. The US constitution had been changed so that freedom of the press was controlled by the government and although there were very few printed newspapers around, the papers and the daily newscasters had to have all their daily news fact checked by a special government body to ensure that the news was fit to be printed. The second amendment had been abolished, and now guns and bullets were completely outlawed, however that didn’t matter much because all the police now had electronic stunners that could put you down 100 meters away. Manufacturing had begun to return to the countries where the goods were sold by the year 2014 when robots had become sophisticated enough to perform the tasks that low cost workers in developing countries had done. But very few people were employed in the manufacturing industries and they only required computer programmers and robot repair people. Most people retired at the age of 50, and their government pensions were designed to allow them to live well past the normal age of 100.
By the year 2030 the doctors had finally determined that they could not win the war on myopia. In the late 1990’s laser surgery had become popular, and while that worked for some of the people far too many people had vision problems after their surgery, so finally in 2020 this form of surgery was outlawed. Then the people who had ICL implants were loosing their eyesight due to complications. Apparently the procedure of implanting a permanent contact lens for vision correction had caused people to develop cataracts at a much earlier age, and now the only form of surgery allowed was cataract surgery, and then only if the cataract seriously affected your vision. The doctors then went to work on a way to prevent, or stop myopia in its tracks. But they had not found any success. It would appear that one thing would seem to slow down the progression of myopia for a while, but then after the treatment was stopped the persons myopia progression would increase to a much higher degree that they thought it would have gone to if they had done nothing.
Eventually the experts decided that there was nothing that could be done to help most of the myopes. We had become a myopic society, and it was no wonder. Our daily visual field was generally a few inches away from our eyes, looking at computer screens and typing on virtual keyboards. There were no wild animals because the population of the planet had overrun almost every area that could be considered habitable so even if there had been any guns or bullets there was no hunting anyway. Where people had once required at least a minimum of 20/40 vision to be able to drive this was no longer required. All the private automobiles were driven by computer anyway, so as long as you could see well enough to program your destination into a computer you didn’t have to see anything else. Even a blind person could “drive” a private automobile with the voice command software.
The people who had a bit of trouble were the people who were so highly myopic that they couldn’t even get close enough to the screen to see it without their glasses. Or, the other people who had trouble were the few remaining people who were farsighted. Of course, all these people wore glasses which solved their problems. The population of the world had gradually reached a point where 10% of the population was farsighted, and the other 90% was nearsighted. Of the 90% of the adults who were myopic about 30% had prescriptions in the range of -10D to -15D. Another 30% had prescriptions that were between -15D and -30D, and the balance were the high myopes. But even the high myopes had sufficiently good eyesight to function normally. And it seemed that most children were born myopic now because by the age of 2 almost every child wore glasses for the correction of myopia.
Contact lenses had been very popular at the beginning of the century. However, as more and more people became myopic the will to go through the bother and muss to wear contacts had gradually diminished. There were still a few people who did wear contacts, but they were limited to those who required the best possible vision correction. Their contacts were custom made, and were extremely expensive.
Some of the very high myopes did end up with uncorrectable vision problems, but these were a very low percentage of the high myopes. In some cases these people did go completely blind, but in the world of 2050 a blind person was easily able to adapt to life without sight. Eyesight no longer meant the difference between life and death, and almost everything was available in audio.
Over the years the citizenry adapted to the fact that glasses were the norm. Now it was extremely rare to see a pretty young lady over the age of 16 who was bare eyed. A large number of highly myopic men were fascinated by these bare eyed girls and a bit of a cult had developed. These sightings were so rare that pictures of girls without glasses and sightings of girls who were not wearing glasses were often posted on a website that was devoted to GWG’s – which stood for girls without glasses.
Specs4ever Jan 2013