Goodbye Grandpa. Have a safe journey back home to Earth. We’ll miss you buddy. That’s what we called each other when he was alive. He told me we would be best buddies forever and I never doubted it. It seems like it’s been forever, but Earthlings have only been living on Jupiter’s moon, Europa, for about 80 years. My grandfather was one of the first to come. He was 30 when he chose to leave Earth while he could or die a slow death from the atmosphere that had killed so many people already. There were a lot of people that chose to stay and all of them died a horrible death. Right up until he died yesterday morning my grandfather would tell me stories about when he was a young boy growing up on Earth. The way he talked, you’d think it was just last week he left there. Moving to Europa meant a new beginning for mankind; it was a fresh start for everyone and my Grandpa was one of them but now his ashes are going back to the place he loved most, Earth. He made me promise that when he died I’d send his ashes back to Earth. If the High Command knew I cremated him last night, they’d send me to the isolation moon of Jupiter for at least a month, maybe longer. On Europa it’s illegal to burn anything; we don’t want to repeat the things we did on Earth that contributed to the poisoning of the atmosphere. Luckily my friend is a research scientist going to Earth and he promised to keep my secret and spread grandpa’s ashes as he wished. Please don’t judge me. I try very hard to follow all the rules but for my grandfather, I had to make this one exception. It would be worth it if I had to sacrifice a month or more in isolation. We were buddies and I would have done anything for him. I’ll never forget the stories he told me since I was a little boy about life on Earth when he was a young boy of 10 years.. He made it sound so fabulous that sometimes I wished I’d grown up there. It’s difficult to think it was ever as nice as he portrayed it considering how it is now. It’s uninhabitable now, unless you live in one of the laboratories used only for research. The only people there now are the engineers and scientists that are researching what happened so we’ll avoid doing it again on Europa. Even if it was possible to improve living conditions none of us would be allowed to go back there. We know for a fact that the planet will reach the end of its life expectancy in another 125 to 150 years and then disintegrate like other planets have before when their time came. Mankind just expedited Earth’s timing a couple hundred years early. Man had plenty of warnings but people continued to build factories that burned fossil fuels and almost everyone continued to drive vehicles requiring fuels to operate and polluting the atmosphere. We use the power of the sun to operate most manufacturing equipment and to operate our vehicles. Vehicles here don’t use roads like on Earth, they all fly now. Roads were a waste of land and very expensive to maintain consistently. Flying vehicles are so much more practical. Most places you want to go to you can fly to in a straight line, no more going out of your way to get to your destination. Things might have been different if the wealthy had followed the same rules as everyone else but they paid off politicians to ignore and even participate in those criminal acts to steal more money and gain power with no concerns of what they were doing to man or to the planet. Europa’s Government is so different today. We don’t allow Government to increase itself in size or create useless departments as a means to conceal something that’s not good for the people. We don’t allow anyone to stay in politics longer than 8 years. When election times come, we have an independent group that changes every election, provide all citizens the complete history of potential candidates every 7 years, giving them one year to study who they want to vote for in the 8th year. The information is the accumulated data we do for every citizen from the time they’re born so we can be assured that it is accurate and nothing is hidden or exaggerated the way it was in elections on Earth. It may sound like the horror stories you hear about “Big Brother” but the results are an honest Government for the people. All political parties are outlawed since we confirmed they worked against the best interests of the people, promoting their own agendas. As all the candidates must do, the newly elected candidates, a of maximum 3, agreed prior to the election to undergo a process that programs their brains so they are only capable of doing good for all people and our home, Europa. My grandfather was one of the few that lived during the time when mankind had religions. It’s unimaginable that only 100 years ago people were still being fooled by the propaganda tool called religion. Religions were mind controlling systems created by a handful of wealthy individuals to make people to do their bidding and make them more wealthy and powerful than they already were. Science proved without a doubt that there was no god for any religion. Religions robbed people of their self-responsibility and self-confidence in their decision making; encouraging them to pay homage to an invisible entity for everything that happened; right or wrong. Europan’s realize that things happen because of our direct actions or inaction. We take full responsibility for the results, good or bad. After centuries of needless fighting and killing in the name of god and religion we now accept that we, alone, are responsible for our actions, not some invisible entity. The elimination of religion was one of the main contributors to the elimination of wars and hunger. People no longer are fooled into giving portions or sometimes, all of their savings to religions that were being run by con men that never cared that the donations caused families to go without food, clothing or shelter. No longer are we infested with those so called spiritual leaders that perpetrated the lies to gain wealth, recognition and power. Religions were a major source of prejudice and hate that resulted in segregation and killing throughout all of Earth. As a society, we still have room for improvements but we have completely eliminated hunger and the lack of clothing and housing for everyone. Everyone gets the best medical care and goes to schools with the best teachers available. All teachers are required to be tested every 5 years to assure they stay the best and have the interests of the students in mind. No more passing students just to get them out of your class and no more teachers slacking their duties because they think they can’t be replaced because of tenure. Our teachers are amongst the highest paid individuals now but they must earn it or lose it. It only makes sense that if we want our children to be the best, they must be taught by the best. It didn’t make sense on Earth that teachers were expected to teach our kids to be the best but they were not properly compensated to do so. Occasionally we have some minor crimes, usually caused by a young person experimenting with how far they can go without getting caught but as for any major crimes, such as murder and rape, those things are unheard of now. With the help of science, our brains have evolved to a point that we never have the urge to commit those types of crimes. Natural evolution and our knowledge of past experiences has provided us with a fair and healthy sense of competition that allows us to grow as humans and not envy what each other has which could result in hating or even killing. We refer to ourselves as Europans not Earthlings anymore. All Europans live together and work together as one. We don’t encourage any segregation and we speak one language which also helps in avoiding miscommunications that could result in wars. You will not find any prejudices against gender, color or any other differences we may have. Everyone carries their weight and receives equal pay for equal work. There are some things we don’t have that my grandfather told me about that maybe would make life on Europa better such as large forests and more lakes. My grandfather grew up in a region with a lot of trees and fresh water lakes. He lived in the state they called Ohio. It was in the northeastern part of the country called United States. Grandpa told me his friends and him would spend all day in the forest and spend a lot of time in a small house called a tree fort that they built in the branches of a large tree. I remember laughing when he told me that only boys were allowed in that tree fort. They even had a sign on the door that stated, “No Girls Allowed”. In our society today, this would be unheard of; we simply don’t segregate anyone, regardless of color and age or whether you’re a boy or girl. Our brains have evolved so that even if it were legal to do that, we simply don’t. History proved to us that any form of segregation leads to disputes and unnecessary killing. I knew from the stories grandfather told me and the photos in our school books that at one time Earth had amazing architecture and experienced different climates depending on where you lived. On Europa we control climates, allowing us to enjoy the differences by choice and not suffer due to any major catastrophes such as a forest fire, flood or what they called earthquakes which destroyed buildings and often killed large numbers of people. With the aid of high powered telescopes we can observe some of those remains of architecture and still see terrain that man didn’t destroy while living there. Some other things we don’t have that I wish we did are the massive oceans and the quantity of fresh water lakes that Earth had. I use to love hearing grandfather’s stories about when his friends and him would go out on the lake in a rowboat for hours and catch fish that later they’d cook and eat. I can’t imagine what it was like to eat something that was once alive and swimming in a lake. It sounds so barbaric but my grandfather always made it sound like so much fun by the way he’d explain it and the expressions on his face. In my mind I can still see those faces he’d make when explaining in detail putting a worm on a hook that was attached to a string at the end of a long stick called a fishing rod. Life is easier on Europa. We don’t have to go through all that trouble to get something to eat. No one eats anything that was not first processed in our factories. If you prefer not to chew and swallow food you can choose to have it injected into your system, saving on the wear and tear on your teeth and the muscles in your mouth. My grandfather insisted on using the old set of false teeth he brought from Earth. Every night he’d take them out and put them in a glass of water with some sort of cleaning agent. How gross that was. If anyone doesn’t follow our laws and guidelines they are either sent to the isolation moon or if their crime is irreversible they’re eliminated. For the last 60 years no one has been eliminated and only a handful has been exiled to the isolation moon for periods of one to six months. In general, we know if we abuse the rules like man did on Earth, we could end up with the same result as Earth did. We’ve learned from our mistakes. What’s really sad is the governments on Earth had the power to prevent the deterioration of the planet but a handful of secret societies such as the Freemasons, the Skull and Bones and Bilderberg members that preferred to remain anonymous, paid off the politicians to ignore and sometimes join in the criminal actions to gain power and hoard the money. By the time the key figures from each of those societies were revealed it was too late to save the Earth but those individuals knew they were going to be prosecuted and put to death so they all vanished to their secret headquarters at the northern pole of Earth, known as Antarctica and they chose to commit mass suicide by setting off nuclear bombs that destroyed their headquarters and all the other locations that they held meetings, such as Watford, England. When I was in school we learned about how corrupt the governments were then and how people were fooled by a few wealthy politicians that created false ideals of patriotism to fight wars and kill each other. We are not perfect; if we were, it would become too monotonous and end up having adverse effects. There are times when someone may violate the rules but for the most part, everyone follows them and we are happy. There is enough diversity amongst us to avoid any complacency but not enough to encourage any hate between us. We have learned to accept any differences.