February 14. Last day of what we used to call civilization. The solar flare hit early the next morning and took out too much infrastructure for us to rebuild. Turns out we were nothing without our electrical grids; without our satellites; without our computers. But humans are resilient, and we spread out from our darkened cities and into rural towns and villages where we learned to work the land with machines until the fuel ran out, and by hand after that. We hadn’t abandoned our technology – we kept the most essential; the most important bits. We had tricks of agriculture and medicine and small-scale manufacturing, and we built solar collectors and windmills and biofuel plants.

But the truly amazing thing is that it took this fundamental shift to make us happy again. Thrust into close-knit caring communities, so near to the production of things essential to life, people started feeling like they had a purpose. They smiled more. Artistic expression flourished. Love bloomed. Our species had finally grown up.