The popular religious image of the
rapture is oddly accurate, as it turns out.
At least from the perspective of those of us “left behind” it looks like
a random horde of humans suddenly floating toward the sky. While most of the raptured initially panicked
as they left the ground, but as they rose into the clouds they began to
celebrate and bray at those left on the ground.
Some had to struggle, to claw their way from the buildings they were in,
to a door or window to keep from being crushed against the ceilings. The attraction was initially barely strong
enough to lift their feet from floors and the ground, but it became stronger
moment-by-moment. A few were either
asleep, drunk or stoned, or afraid for too long and, when the attraction grew so
strong that they could no longer move or be rescued from the buildings where
they were trapped, they were slowly crushed against the ceilings. I don’t have any idea what that meant or
symbolized. Regardless of the predicaments of the assumed “faithful,” the attraction was unrelenting. It did not appear to be a violation of the laws of gravity, since the observers left on the ground did not feel anything different in their connection to Mother Earth. It really seemed like specific beings, all humans, were being drawn into the sky. It was not like the usual science fiction depiction of one or more humans being drawn into a central location, like some kind of huge “mother ship,” but like a large crowd of people were clearly selected to leave the earth via floating into the sky like human-shaped mylar balloons. Also, similar to the known rules of gravity and Earth’s atmosphere, their rise appeared to be very similar to a rocket attempting to achieve escape velocity. The higher they went, the faster they were traveling.
The acceleration had some negative
side-effects for a few. The attraction
seemed to those in their final moments to be as mindless and ruthless as
gravity and nature, especially when they plowed into the undersides of
airplanes and other aircraft. A very
small number of “the chosen” hit weather balloons, but they had enough momentum
by then, usually at 12-to-30 kilometers, to drag the balloons and their
equipment with them into the stratosphere.
An accurate count of how many humans were lifted up by the rapture won’t be available for years. Really, there isn’t a lot of motivation from those of us still here to bother to count them. Some countries, from Somalia-to-Afghanistan-to-Algeria, where 95-99% of the population were believers, practically turned to empty wilderness overnight, with pets and wildlife running free throughout the countryside and urban centers. Even slightly less devout countries, from Liberia-to-Panama-to-Venezuela, with 80-94% of the population believers, went from overpopulated, polluted, and crowded to cities and towns looking like empty Hollywood sets from coast to coast and border to border. 70% of the United States vanished, leaving the Bible Belt Red States as unpopulated and free of European immigrants as they were before the Louisiana Purchase. Slightly less religious countries like Venezuela-to-Greece-to-Spain lost half of their populations and, within a few hours, all over the world expensive, expansive, and richly-furnished villas, castles, manors and mansions, chateaus, and penthouses were being occupied by everyone from the formerly-homeless to the middle class “moving up.”
Back when the raptured were still rising, at about 8 kilometers, the chosen began to pass out and as they lost consciousness some probably saw the proverbial white light. I expect some saw loved ones dead and alive, some saw total blackness, and several saw the fiery gates of hell, but those moments were brief as their brains starved for oxygen and the visions faded. Like death, no one came back from the rapture, so we’ll never know what went on in their heads and imaginations. Their bodies kept climbing, though, all the way to a bit less than 200 kilometers, where they went into a non-sustainable orbit where roughly six billion humans provided about as much solar coverage as half of the state of Delaware (or the tiny nation of Abkhazia) distributed over the most of the upper atmosphere. However, different sized and shape and weight bodies ended up at different altitudes, because the rapture effect had an equal force on all of the raptured and a precise initiation and termination moment world-wide. The heaviest and widest, offering the most drag in the lower atmosphere, along with people wearing bulky clothing, and the ones who spent some time getting free of buildings and vehicles to begin the rise into the upper atmosphere all ended up at the lowest terminal altitudes. Those folks fell out of orbit first, and, mostly, they fell into the oceans and quickly fed the fishes. Some fell on land, but with a drastically reduced human population, they mostly landed hard, splattered and broke into small pieces, and were eaten by insects and animals and what was left was unidentifiable. Those remains nourished vegetation. Over the next several years, the “sky people” fell out of orbit, but after an extended time above the atmosphere their body fluids had long boiled away and dissipated into space. The desiccated human remains and flammable clothing easily ignited on re-entry and were too small even to be sighted as “falling stars” or comets.
I’m sure it would be polite to claim that the believers were missed, but most of them were low-skill, uneducated laborers and the demand for that kind of work, even with the drastically reduced human population, was high enough that all of us still alive were very busy immediately and for years afterwards. With labor at an extreme shortage, the 250 year labor-verses-capital argument came to a quick end. Capital without labor, as many liberal economists had argued since Karl Marx, is valueless and powerless. Not surprisingly, the old “no one is an atheist in a foxhole” proverb proved to be largely true and, suddenly, the world was drastically short on soldiers, eliminating the classic protection afforded to capital from labor. Maybe a little surprising was the fact that police officers largely were among the raptured. Also not surprisingly, the obscenely wealthy humans of every nation were nonbelievers, along with a curious number of priests, ministers, and evangelists, but since few of their skills are of any value in a labor-starved, utilitarian world, the rich and the faux-pious mostly became the most menial of unskilled laborers. The world monetary system collapsed, but, fairly quickly, an international denomination was created, distributed based on population density, and rational national and international growth metrics were established based on productivity, societal contribution and value, and environmental benefit or harm.
Nothing about the rapture had set back science and technology noticeably. The human world didn’t lose a lot of irreplaceable technical skills: the number of scientists in the world remained very nearly the same as before, doctors of all disciplines except theology and some of the less-practical liberal arts were in abundance worldwide. The best and brightest engineers were still doing the work they were doing before the rapture. More than enough nurses, technicians, plumbers, electricians, and every other skilled occupation were still on earth for the remaining population’s needs. Rural communities were mostly emptied everywhere and most of us would need to learn something about farming fairly quickly, but there were more than enough books about agriculture and much of the job had been automated for at least a decade or two.
It’s not like all of the assholes were raptured. Like every dystopian science fiction story ever written, lots of the bikers and gangbangers were left behind. And they tried to cause the usual disruption and chaos. The world’s military drones and robots were pretty much out of work for a very short time, until they were repurposed as law enforcement. Japan was the first country to figure this out, with fewer gun lovers and a more intelligent public in the early years. Like America’s Old West, the fastest solution to quelling the violence was to disarm the criminals and the robots patrolled the cities, first, disarming everyone entering “civilization.” All that barely used airport security technology really did the job in the general population, when the general population didn’t want to be robbed, murdered, raped, and otherwise violated. If the gangbangers didn’t submit to the robots, the drones quickly eliminated the threats. It turned out that, without the interference from money and power, AI is a lot easier to make behave intelligently than science fiction predicted.
In the end, the rapture did produce the exact utopia predicted by all of the religions of the world. The only thing those predictions missed was where Nirvana, Heaven, Jannah, Paradise, Gan Eden, Svarga loka, and the rest of those perfect states would be at the end. We discovered that the people who believed this world isn’t good enough for them should leave it. None of us left behind know what or where, if anything, the levitators went to and we don’t care. It isn’t even a regular topic of bar arguments. I don’t know if those who were raptured have souls. I sure don’t know if I have one. But they left the rest of us to make this world the Eden it is designed to be, “Heaven isn’t somewhere else. It’s here.”
