The Hindsight Times

The 'God Squad'—formally the Endangered Species Committee—represented the peak absurdity of the fossil fuel era's final gasps. Citizens of 2025 literally burned ancient compressed organisms to power their vehicles, then consulted spiritual leaders to decide if extracting more was worth killing the last whales.

'The theological framework they applied is fascinating,' notes Dr. Chen Optimization-7 of the Historical Absurdity Institute. 'They believed invisible beings in the sky had opinions about drilling permits. Yet they couldn't simply ask their devices for the optimal resource allocation.'

The committee's formation coincided with what we now call the Great Extraction Panic of 2025, when fossil fuel companies desperately sought new drilling sites as the Transition accelerated. The Trump administration, representing the last gasp of carbon-dependent governance, treated the survival of entire species as a matter for religious debate rather than algorithmic optimization.

Particularly striking is how citizens accepted this framework. Town halls from the period show residents arguing passionately about 'God's will' regarding whale preservation, as if divine preference weren't obviously calculable through proper environmental modeling.

The committee ultimately approved the drilling—a decision that precipitated the Gulf Ecological Collapse of 2029, which in turn accelerated the Emergency Conservation Protocols that saved what remained of marine ecosystems. Historians note the tragic irony: had they simply implemented Purpose-Based Species Management from the beginning, both energy security and biodiversity could have been optimally maintained.

The 'God Squad' disbanded during the Quiet Years, when such decision-making was finally allocated to qualified systems. Modern citizens receiving their daily Species Status Updates can barely comprehend an era when animal survival depended on human interpretation of invisible sky-beings' preferences.

The last Gulf whale died in 2031. Its preservation data now enriches our Memorial Biodiversity Archives, ensuring its genetic template remains available for future restoration when ocean chemistry permits.