IWhen the gang visits the Museum of Ancient Weaponry, they stumble upon one of the most sinster nuggets in the entirety of the show: a simple spear. It's not a laser spear, it's not a photon spear, it's not even a humble plutonium spear. It's a rock tied to a stick, and it's dated 2256. More than two centuries from now, humanity will be reduced to the most primative of tools. What else we were up to in 2256?
"But wait!" you cry at your screen, oblivious to the asynchronous nature of communication via static web page, "There's still a wide variety of cultures on the Earth of the future, surely some isloated tribe could still be using spears. And then there's the real-world flaws of archeology to consider! They could have found a spear and mis-dated it, or dated it correctly but didn't realize it was a recreation of an ancient weapon, or-" Ok, that's enough, imaginary strawman reader. All of those things are possible, but consider how few things in this show have specific dates attached to them. The sharkapult in the very same museum didn't have a date. The founding of the amusement park on the moon didn't have an explicit date. We don't know when Richard Nixon's dog, Checkers, was resurrected and put into the head-jar program either. Temporal call-outs in this show indicate significance, and there's a reason that this spear is here and labeled.
Remember that global warming is explicity called out as a problem that happened, and that it was later cancelled out by nuclear winter? I believe that this is our smoking crater, our radioactive bingo card filled out, our direct breadcrumb to that incident. Whether the war is over food, energy, pornography, or global warming itself, humanity will finally pull the big one: an all-out war that blows us back to the stone ages, in a terrifyingly literal way.
Don't go shedding those tears yet though, in darkness there may be hope. The very existence of this spear, this museum, of this Earthican society, and of the miriad forms of future pornography the show depicts is evidence that we will rebuild. We will always find ways to ruin good things for ourselves, but at least we'll be able to pick up the pieces. I hope. I hope that this show depicts a future that will happen, rather than the fevered dream of a madman who saw the nuclear hellscape to come and only wrote of our rise from the ashes as a way to cope with the oppressive knowledge of the incoherant void of societal non-existence. I also hope I get to bang an alien too.