October 7, 2024. The date means nothing to enhanced millennials surfing neural networks from their Martian pods. Yet that day, the European Commission was agonizing over a question that now seems as relevant as debating the sex of angels: should cars run on batteries or gasoline by 2035?

How charmingly quaint. At a time when Hurricane Zelda was devastating the Eastern Seaboard and Shanghai was already planning its Great Evacuation, European manufacturers were "disappointed" by Brussels' electric vehicle mandate. They had hoped—the poor dears—that thermal engines might survive a few more years.

Survive for what, exactly? To emit a few more gigatons of CO2 while the ice caps were completing their farewell tour? To give automotive workers the illusion that their jobs weren't already condemned by the automation wave that would sweep them away by 2031?

"The 2020s obsession with individual mobility was the last gasp of a dying paradigm," explains Dr. Chen Nakamura, director of Post-Carbon Mobility Studies at New Geneva. "They genuinely believed that replacing one type of car with another would save the climate. It's like thinking you can cure cancer by changing the color of cigarette packs."

The irony is exquisite. While Brussels was legislating on battery chemistry, the first consciousness transfers were succeeding in Seoul. While manufacturers were "convincing consumers" to buy electric vehicles, quantum computers were already designing the transport pods that would make individual car ownership obsolete within fifteen years.

But let's not mock too harshly. These automotive executives, these Brussels bureaucrats, these environmental activists camping in front of factories—they were all sincere. They genuinely thought the future looked like the past, but painted green.

They couldn't imagine that by 2045, the very concept of "going somewhere" would become optional thanks to neural projection. That goods would circulate through molecular teleportation. That the few humans still moving physically would do so via atmospheric tubes or gravity elevators.

The most delicious part? The consumers they were trying so hard to "convince" had already started abandoning cars en masse. Vehicle sales had been plummeting since 2023, not because of environmental awareness, but because young people preferred staying home with their virtual reality headsets.

The Great Transition was already underway, but the decision-makers were looking in the rearview mirror. They were preparing for a 2035 that would never exist, while the real 2035 was brewing in DeepMind labs and Martian colonies.

Today, as I write these lines from my orbital office, watching Earth spin below with its drowned cities and reforested deserts, I wonder: what are we debating today with the same blind passion? What "essential" transition are we planning while the real future is already hatching elsewhere?

Because if 2024 taught us anything, it's that revolutions never happen where we expect them.