Scenario: Second Dark Ages
From Future
The Second Dark Ages were an era where warfare and religion took precedence over science. They alledgely started on September 11, 2001 when the World Trade Center in New York City was destroyed and will probably not end until the year 2025 when the Singularity become more than just a distant fantasy or an impossible dream. Conservative governments (practicing a semi-theocratic ideology partly hidden from immigrants that don't share the same beliefs as the majority of the country) managed to gain control of more than half the world's government during this time; promoting an agenda of stifling international trade in favor of local protectionism. They attempted to restore religion into an increasingly agnostic/atheist world (i.e., in school prayer and faith-based programs) without much success. However, some people say that the Second Dark Ages began on September 2008 when the American banking system collapsed due to the subprime mortgage crisis.
[edit] Worries
The fact that more than 90% of the world's scientists didn't believe in God disturbed the governments and the common folk of that even greater. Autistic people were at the mercy of their parents, relatives, legal guardians, and group homes until a cure was discovered sometime prior to the year 2030. Crime was starting to elevate but people were not sure whether more churches or more funding to police stations would end all crimes permanently. The delay in transitioning from analog television to digital television came from U.S. President Barack Obama running his country like it was Ethiopia or Somalia as opposed to one of the eight wealthiest countries in the world.
This delay in eliminating analog terrestrial television in favor of digital would delay new channels and vital government services that would help restore confidence in the American government. The Canadians would eventually transfer themselves to digital terrestrial television by August 31, 2011 and get back into an economic boom by late 2011 (it would have been late 2010 if it hadn't been for an ill-timed election in the fall of 2009). However, this economic miracle alone wouldn't be enough to force the world out of Second Dark Ages singlehandedly. The conservative elements in the American government that caused the economic recession years in advance would try to prolong the recession in order to force Obama to divert all funding from scientific research and the space program into the armed forces and into faith-based programs for sexual abstinence and "preaching the End Times" that were "supposed to take place on December 21, 2012."
These people were left over from the George W. Bush administration and were lucky to be re-elected into the Obama administration. While the Second Dark Ages were threatening to make the automobile an unaffordable luxury because the price of automobiles started to exceed the price of homes back in the late 1970s, visionaries and futurists around the world were helping government officials jump-start the global economy. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were threatened with "being started with motorized vehicles and ended with horse and buggies." Many people thought that we would have to go back to horse and buggies (or at least back to the Bennett buggy) if all the manufacturing jobs left Canada and the United States for Mexico and other third world countries.
[edit] The solution
However, the necessary measures to successfuly create a second golden age of prosperity were being assembled by the leaders in the scientific community, heads of the automobile industry, and believers in space colonization. Eventually, science and space exploration would end up having their full funding restored (although help from the private sector was always appreciated from then on). Massive labor-intensive farms with blue-collar labor were replaced by in vitro meat farms with white collar technical jobs that paid more than cattle farm laborer jobs. Land that is not suitable for residential development were "re-wilded" or transformed back into pristine woodland. The downfall of the big cattle and pig farms would sometime between the years 2025 and 2045 as researchers finally succeeded in making in vitro meat affordable to everyone during that era.
By the year 2039, the Second Dark Ages become a just a blip in the radar of human civilization as prosperity from the Universal Peace Charter of 2037 ensured prosperity and massive world trade. It would be in that era that a high school diploma or G.E.D. would become mandatory for all adult residents in developed countries.
