A journey into time with Einstein

I am not a fan of science fiction movies but given that it is the 50th anniversary of Albert Einstein's death, let's talk physics. I will not pretend to understand fully his special theory of relativity but scientists say Einstein's revolutionary theory laid the basis for modern thought on time travel.

Let's forget about going back in time to right that wrong, or to marry the person you thought was wrong at the time until you met your current mother-in-law. Special relativity dictates that travelling forward in time is possible, but travelling back in time is more complicated. So in the tradition of science fiction movies, let us zap ourselves forward and journey into the future say, another thousand years, and see what the state of our planet is then.

Now I'm not sure given our track record that our planet will be habitable a thousand years from now. I am going to pretend, however, that it is and there is some sort of human hybrid populating our futuristic world. Don't be surprised if half the population looks Chinese. They are all Chinese and they are running the world.

American culture has been subsumed by Asian culture and we are thankfully eating sweet-and-sour chicken nuggets, rather than greasy burgers. China's best ally is India and Britain has stopped pretending to be America's puppy or a former colonial power.

The euro is the world's most powerful currency, though there is no such thing as paper money, as all the trees have disappeared. A few years ago while living in Cairo, a French team of adventurers I will not call them archaeologists because they were not came to Giza and started drilling holes into the walls of the Great Pyramid of Cheops. They stuck probes with tiny cameras attached into the holes to see if they could look into the past and find the pharaoh's missing tomb. They came up with nothing. Some things should perhaps remain a mystery but there is no mystery all the world's trees have been cut down and the forests have disappeared.

Oh did I mention that it is so hellishly hot on this earth that we all have to wear insulation to stay alive? We are now living on a scorched earth, having denuded its forests and sucked out the last drops of gold, crude oil, gas and coal.

You open a history book and wonder just why your ancestors did not see it coming. They knew about greenhouse gases and they knew that burning coal and fossil fuels was harming the atmosphere and chipping away at the ozone layer. They knew that they were eating chicken fattened up with hormones and genetically modified wheat. They knew they were not doing enough to preserve the planet for future generations.

While the Americans and their Western allies were more environmentally conscious, there was less concern in Asia for the environment India was struggling to feed is growing population and China was trying to catch up with the Jones' in the United states. The warning signs were there but they appeared to have been written in a defunct language.

By 3005, we will have exhausted all our natural resources. China and India will have challenged the United States for control of the Middle East and won not by sheer force, but by cajoling and wooing their main sources of crude oil and gas supply.

The US military, starved of fuel, will have given up its expansionism and disbanded. By then, the United States is not really unified, as 49 states tried to occupy Texas and its oilfields during the Great Civil War of the 21st century. George W. Bush's great-great-great-great-great-grandchild or maybe even his clone will be president and the official language will be Chinese and maybe Spang-lish.

But do we really need time travel to look into the future? The meeting on Monday between George W. Bush and Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia was significant in more ways than one.

The two men, ending hours of talks at Bush's Crawford ranch, issued a joint statement recalling that the relationship between the two countries began 60 years ago when Franklin D Roosevelt and the founder of Saudi Arabia, King Abdul Aziz Al Saud, met. The relationship was about oil then and it is now. The Saudis have it in abundance and the Americans want it. So do the Chinese and the Indians.

The next conflict of present and future superpowers will be over diminishing energy resources and the Saudis are the big prize.

I doubt the environment was high on the agenda of the talks in Crawford. In fact, I would bet it did not even feature. Those beautiful Crawford trees must have been quaking in their roots at the prospect of a future where the colour green has disappeared from nature's palette.

What of Russia you ask, or Britain? What happened to them? Well, Russia closed its borders and ports and used up all its crude oil and gas for itself, having drawn the former Soviet republics back to mother Moscow with the promise of a better future. Then it went nuclear and seceded from the world.

So did Britain, which incidentally is showing some prescience in considering going nuclear now. So did Iran and North Korea, which, after a few setbacks, managed to get their power plants running smoothly.

But the future does not have to be this way. There is fuel cell technology, there is solar power, there is wind power and there is brain power that we have not yet begun to harness.

They say that necessity is the mother of invention. You don't have to understand the theory of relativity to see we need to develop a new way of life now in the present and not go hurtling into the future with our eyes wide shut.

The Writer is Middle East editor of Platts, energy information division of the McGraw-Hill Companies. The opinions expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Platts.