While “23rd century” still sounds a long way off to most of us, a group of people on the Chinese internet have built a news website for this future time, writing about the world as it will look 200 hundreds years from now in incredible detail.
On the frontpage of MetNews (大都会新闻; link in Chinese), you can find daily updates on what’s happening in different corners of the world. If you want to see the latest global events for Nov 22, 2217, you can just click on the date and read about specific leaders’ meetings and battlefield developments. The site also includes deeper documents regarding actions on other planets, love stories along the Space Peninsula, and advertisements for the Russel Hudson Line, which owns 15 spaceships and can take you to anywhere you want to go:
According to a post on 23 Pedia (MetNews’ 23rd-century Wiki) entitled “A glimpse into the world after two hundred years”, the mainstream culture of the universe still revolves around peace and commerce, but the commerce we’re talking about here is between humans, the Anlike Empire (安立柯帝国), and the Jadeite Civilization (翡翠文明). The Anlike Empire is a thearchy — a society ruled by gods — located on a planet 2,000 light years from Earth. They import wine, chocolate and robots from us. The Jadeite Civilization, a much more highly developed empire, acts as a mediator between the other two, for reasons that have yet to be discovered at the time of this (future) writing.
Metropolitan Beijing, Washington, Brussels, London, Slavsgrad, New Tel Aviv and Human Colonies, Nov. 17 【Political News】 At 9:43am today Tokyo time, the Japanese parliament was attacked by unidentified speeding vehicles. The Senate building ignited into flames. As of press time, it has been confirmed that 21 people were killed and 13 were injured. #23rdCentury
Earth in 2217 is ruled by a Six-Nation Group consisting of China, the North American Federation, United Europa, Britain, the Slavic Republic, and Israel. Electronic currency based on distributed databases is used all over the world, and super-corporations like Xining United Defence Co. and Anglo-Sino Reinsurance LLC create 60% of all human wealth. Some of these super-corps already look familiar to those of us living in 2017.
All of the economic, political and social systems described on MetNews come with detailed explanations of how they’ve come to be, described by a timeline of 21st– and 22nd-century history. You can even download yearbooks for 2215, 2214 and 2213, which include tremendous pictures and texts that are so detailed, I had trouble believing they were fictional.
The creators of MetNews and 23 Pedia have systematically built their fantasy future universe, and want to involve readers in it with an overwhelming flow of information. I can’t stop exploring it now, especially after I took part in a poll on the front page: “Which property are you most interested in purchasing: Asteroid, land, stock, bond, or estate?”
Difficult decision…
