The Comets

Scientists have always feared that one day Earth would never be the same. That the world we know it to be would be changed forever due to a catastrophic event. For the past few years, NASA had been monitoring the path of several comets that came near Earth’s orbit. At first there was no need to worry or think much about these comets since they were so far away. But as the years passed, the comets got closer and closer to Earth. The scientists started to worry since the trajectory of the comet’s paths were always changing. They were unable to calculate the given trajectory for the next few years, even decades, but they knew that the comets were getting closer and closer to Earth. These comets were no ordinary comets which worried the scientist even more since there was no record of the type of comet they were in their database. And as the years went by, more and more comets appeared. 

One day the scientists noticed that something was about to enter Earth’s atmosphere. It was one of the comets. But how could this happen? Even though the scientists were unable to calculate the given trajectory for the comets they at least came to the conclusion that the comets wouldn’t come to Earth for about a century. It was January 16th, 2065 and the first comet was able to crash on Earth. There was nothing that could be done to stop the comet from landing on Earth. Just as the first comet entered Earth’s atmosphere, in the distance you could see several other comets heading towards other places. At 12:45 in the afternoon, the first comet broke through the atmosphere and divided into three massive pieces, each of them landing in Africa. It was only a matter of time till the rest of the comets crashed on Earth, more specifically in the states since I lived in San Diego, California. 

January 20th, 2065 all the comets had crashed on every continent. For several days the news was filled with scenes of out of control fires everywhere, smoke consumed everything in its path, and ash fell from the dark sky. You could hear the screams of people in the streets and the constant blaring of fire sirens all day. And when we thought the worst was over it was just the beginning. As the sun rays pierced through the dark sky, the rays activated something in the comets that caused them to glow so bright they eventually exploded. January 26th, 2065 was the day the world was turned upside down. I remember that day so vividly, I saw the world up in flames, crumbling before my eyes. Then all of a sudden, an explosion of light consumed everything and the ground below me shifted.

 I woke to a violent, cold breeze that came through my broken window. As I laid on the floor so cold and confused as to why I was cold and that I couldn’t hear the ocean waves crashing. When I found the strength to get up all I could see were mountains so tall they could touch the sky, evergreen trees and snow. The sunny beach life I once lived was now a cold mountain life. Depending on where you lived, the opposite occurred. Africa was no longer a hot barren desert with grasslands. It had turned into an icy, frigid place. Places that were hot turned cold, desserts turned into rainforest and vice versa. And that wasn’t the only thing that changed, the animals that once lived there had been transformed where they would be able to live. Everywhere and everything that we once knew to be normal for thousands of years had changed except for the people. They were the ones who had to learn to adapt to their new living conditions.  

At the beginning people thought that this “new” change was only temporary and refused to adapt. But that only made things harder for them, they wanted to go back to their old ways but couldn’t. And when they finally saw that things weren’t changing anytime soon, they then began to adapt, but they did it on their own terms. They did want others from different terrains to teach them how to live, they would figure it out on their own. Even though they chose the hard way, we eventually found a way to live. The world was still in shambles and scientists, the ones that were left were still trying to understand the comets. But this was hard to do because each terrain had one or two scientists but wouldn’t share or let them leave to go to other terrains. People weren’t scared to travel to other terrains, there were a few obstacles in their way that many didn’t want to overcome. The first one was that each terrain was very different so it was hard to adapt to a new terrain even if it was only for a few hours. Second, outsiders from other terrains weren’t welcome by the other terrains. The border patrol and leaders of the terrains would meet in somewhat neutral ground where they could both survive to exchange goods or discuss matters like neutrality or other things. The last one was that everyone had become so divided that no one from the terrains got along with one another so no one ever left. No wars between the terrains had broken out which was good but there were murmurs that any day now we would be at war with any one of the terrains. It was day 126 since the comets came, the former life I once had as a surfer girl was over, I was a cerulean mountain girl. 

My vignette captures my ideas of how I view the future will be left in shambles and people will be more against each other. As a society, people already have their views on the world and their opinions, there’s no changing that. And yes you can say that in some way we are unified but for the most part we only care about ourselves. The images fire everywhere, darkness, the world left in shambles and peoples screams demonstrates how I think the future will look like. That a small fire has already occurred and if people keep feeding it, it’s only going to grow due to us not taking care of the environment. Also the descriptions of how people are divided shows how people already are very much divided. The more distance we put between one another, the further away we know each other and resort to war and chaos. Lastly, the example of people not adapting to the new changes that occur and refusing help is scary. Our best shot at living is to be able to adapt for the better and not go backwards and make yourself struggle just because we don’t want to ask for help. I see the world has already started to show its cracks due to man’s actions and no one anytime soon will take the blame or fix them.