Futurism 4 – Transcending Combustion

It’s almost 9 in the morning. I’m still in bed, reading an article, a good/bad habit I developed in my early twenties. I'm reading up on a company called SilentScape and its explosive success in the valley. It's one of the most disruptive brands to emerge in the landscaping industry since we started paying people to blow air at gravel patches, and recently it’s become the industry’s first official unicorn.

It took decades of educating the public and wasted efforts lobbying against oil companies, but we finally managed to transcend the internal combustion engine (ICE). Much like an unwanted relative, that loud and wasteful relic of the Industrial Age stuck around much too long.

And we didn’t get rid of it by forcing legislation through a Congress blocked up more impressively than a banana-eating champion after nationals. No, we did it the all-American way: free-enterprise capitalism.

Tesla Motors first popularized a brighter future in the late 2000s. We were pleasantly shocked to discover that ICEs were no longer a necessary evil, and that we could use clean energy sources as more than just buzz words.

For a (rather long) while, there were still those nay-sayers who claimed gas was more powerful, but then the Tesla Model S started winning drag races and their arguments turned a little more primal.

In any case, these past fifteen years have hosted a much-needed shift in our energy sourcing, without which we’d probably have been looking at a smoggy armageddon in every major city before my kids even made it to college.

It took decades of political turmoil, but we finally did it. We grew out of our grungy, DGAF teenage years and became responsible members of Earth. And, in the process, we even managed to quiet down our lives.

I remember when I couldn’t fall asleep without hearing cars rumble past my window.

I remember when I couldn’t possibly hope to sleep through my HOA landscaping crew’s untimely arrival on Thursday mornings.

Now, SilentScape is making the next generation of silent landscaping equipment high-quality and affordable, every major car company is manufacturing proprietary LI-battery powered vehicles, and we can all sleep in a little better.