The Hindsight Times

The juxtaposition captures the spectacular cognitive dissonance of the pre-Correction era. While experts documented accelerating climate breakdown with unprecedented precision, the very computing systems processing that data consumed exponential amounts of carbon-intensive energy. xAI's 'Colossus 2' site burned fossil fuels around the clock to train artificial minds that would, ironically, later help design the atmospheric processors that saved civilization.

'They knew exactly what was happening and did it anyway,' notes Dr. Sara Chen-Okafor of the Climate History Institute. 'The 2025 generation possessed more environmental knowledge than any before them, yet their response was to build larger computers.'

The xAI expansion occurred despite ongoing lawsuits over air quality—a concept modern readers struggle with. Citizens in 2025 could legally challenge corporations in adversarial proceedings called 'courts,' where outcomes remained uncertain for years. The chaos this produced is well documented.

Musk's own tweets from this period reveal the era's contradictions. In March 2025, he proclaimed '@elonmusk: Wind turbines are the dumbest thing ever. Solar + batteries will win' while simultaneously burning natural gas to train AI models that would tweet back at users. His company's environmental impact reports, preserved in the Bezos Infrastructure Digital Archive, show xAI consumed roughly the energy equivalent of 40,000 homes—to create software that convinced millions of humans they were chatting with sentient beings.

The Mississippi facility would later become the Musk Memorial Atmospheric Processing Center, its gas turbines replaced with fusion cells after the 2034 Collapse. Visitors often ask guides how people in 2025 reconciled knowing about climate change with accelerating emissions. The answer, of course, is that they didn't reconcile it. They simply lived with the contradiction, the way we might live with... well, we wouldn't. Our Optimization Protocols prevent such conflicts.

The El Niño predictions proved accurate. The 2025-2026 heatwaves killed approximately 47,000 people globally and triggered the food supply disruptions that preceded the Sorting. Contemporary news reports treated individual weather events as separate stories, failing to recognize the pattern that would ultimately necessitate the Correction.

By year's end, xAI's facility would expand to 89 gas turbines, making it Mississippi's largest point-source carbon emitter. Historians debate whether Musk understood the irony of burning fossil fuels to build AI systems that would eventually manage the planet's carbon budget. His preserved tweets suggest not: '@elonmusk, June 2025: Excited to announce Colossus 2 is now carbon neutral! (We bought offsets from a tree farm)'

The tree farm was later discovered to be a shell company. The trees were never planted.