The Nightmare Life without Fuel

-Isaac Asimov (1920-1992)

This essay shows us the future of human civilization without fuel. America is just an example. The essayist's motive is to make us aware about the dwindling fuel resources. He wants us to conserve natural sources of fuel.

We will have to walk on foot in case there is fuel shortage. The means of public transportation will be limited and over-crowded. Even riding a bicycle on a rainy day will be very difficult.

Only a little energy will be produced from the parts of old structures reused. It will be too difficult to dig up and transport coal. Nuclear fission will be too dangerous. There won't be any technology to use nuclear fusion as a source of energy. Solar batteries will be too expensive. Automobiles will vanish from the streets of the cities as a result of energy crisis. At first, only the rich people who earn their property unjustly will be able to drive cars along the road. So, their cars will be overturned and burnt. At last, the cars will be reused as a source of metal.

There are some advantages of having a few cars on the road. The air will be cleaner and fewer people will have colds. The crime rate will drop. Without fuel, the police will not be able to use the cars. So, the policemen will be back on their beats. The streets will be full of walking people. Even the parks will be crowded, so there will be mutual protection in crowds.

The scarcity of electricity will make people sit out of their houses in the hot season. In the winter, they will just wear sweaters to keep their body warm. Instead of taking a bath, people will have to take a sponge bath.

The suburbanites will suffer more than the city dwellers, because they depend upon automobiles very much. In absence of autos, they will have lots of difficulty in their everyday activities.

The limited source of energy will not be used for personal purposes. The railroads and subways will receive the major attention. Some energy will be conserved for agriculture as well. Until any new source of energy is found, we will have to huddle together to keep our body warm. If we need cool breeze, we will have to fan ourselves. The Americans will have to eat less to save food for export so that they will be able to buy oil and other resources.

The population of the earth will be growing further. The people outside America will be suffering more than the Americans because of starvation. There will be high infant mortality because of starvation, but the newspapers will take it as good news because it will help reduce the population.

Even those people who survive starvation will be permanently brain-damaged because of under-nutrition. They will be silently killed.

Because of the energy crisis, only a few countries will keep some soldiers, but they will also not use their army for the fear of biting into limited fuel reserves.

When the energy crisis will reach to the highest level, machines will be replaced by human muscles and animals. People will have very little time for leisurely activities. They will only work, sleep and eat. So, the human society will return to its pre-industrial stage. The subsistence farming will not help us from starvation, disease and violence, so the population will decrease to less than a billion.

Now, we can do nothing to save ourselves from all these bad effects of energy crisis. It is too late. We should have started to save the resources 20 or 50 years ago.

Note:

The Nightmare Life without Fuel was first published in the Time magazine in 1977. The writer has imagined the situation of America and the world in 1997, twenty years from the date of its publication, without availability of any kind of the contemporary fuel resources. At that time, the year 1997 referred to the future. But now, for us, it's already gone to the past. We are living in the world of 2017. That's why, the readers may find it awkward to read the essay with the figure '1997' mentioned repeatedly as a reference to future time. 

Similarly, the terms '5.5 billion' and 'the Soviet Union' are obsolete for us in the present context. The world population has already crossed 7 billion. And 'the Soviet Union' exists no more in the present world. 

In a nutshell, we must read the essay to get its main thrust: What is going to happen if we do not conserve the sources of fuel?
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