Our Fermented Future, Episode 12: The World of 2100

This is the last in a series about possible futures, published in Booch News each week, starting with a Preview on October 3rd. Episode 11 appeared last week.

Overview

By 2100, the Earth hums with quiet vitality. Cities are green, breathable, and alive—literally. After the Climate Reckoning of the 2050s and the Fermentation Reformation that followed, humanity abandoned synthetic consumerism and rediscovered the wisdom of the microbial world. Artificial beverages—cola, beer, wine—became relics of the Carbon Age. People sought drinks that delivered tangible benefits: nourishing the microbiome, stabilizing mood, and sharpening cognition. Enter kombucha—the “living beverage,” a cornerstone of living systems.

The Reformation’s legacy isn’t merely biological transformation—it’s cultural maturation: learning to work cooperatively with living systems, valuing local knowledge, building community infrastructure, maintaining honest assessment of capabilities, and recognizing that sustainable human thriving requires biological partnership rather than attempted domination.

Humanity still faces continuing challenges: climate adaptation, resource management, social equity, political conflict, and planetary boundaries. Fermentation provides useful tools but not complete solutions.

Humanity’s Partnership with Living Systems

By 2100, humanity had learned crucial lessons about partnership with living systems.

Fermentation taught that:

1. Working with biology is often more effective than fighting it: Bacterial bioremediation, probiotic therapies, and closed-loop life support—all leverage natural processes rather than opposing them.
2. Local diversity produces resilience: Decentralized fermentation cooperatives proved more adaptable than consolidated industrial food systems.
3. Traditional knowledge contains valuable insights: Indigenous and traditional fermentation practices offered solutions that industrial approaches missed.
4. Community infrastructure matters: Spaces for gathering and productive cooperation strengthen communities beyond what the consumption culture provides.
5. Multiple approaches are necessary: Fermentation didn’t solve everything because no single practice can. Success required combining fermentation with policy reform, technological innovation, social justice work, and environmental restoration.

Fermentation delivered measurable benefits:

• Improved public health through better nutrition
• Stronger communities through cooperative infrastructure
• Environmental benefits through local food production
• Cultural preservation through traditional knowledge
• Economic alternatives through cooperative ownership
• Educational frameworks through hands-on biology

There are remaining challenges:

• Scaling benefits without losing local character
• Maintaining safety while enabling accessibility
• Supporting displaced industrial workers
• Balancing innovation with tradition
• Limiting commercial exploitation of the grassroots movement
• Addressing inequities in access and outcomes

As the century closed, kombucha stood as both metaphor and method: proof that small, symbiotic systems could heal a planet pushed to the brink. Humanity had moved from extraction to participation, from ego-systems to ecosystems. The last generation of leaders—those raised during the chaos of the early 2000s—reflected on a hard-won truth: sustainability was not a policy but a practice of humility.

The Great Rebalancing (2090–2100)

The final decade before 2100 brought a reckoning—a rebalancing between people, planet, and profit. The kombucha industry, now deeply intertwined with global food, health, and climate systems, found itself both humbled and empowered. What began as a niche craft drink half a century earlier had become a symbol of regenerative commerce, microbial stewardship, and planetary renewal.

The Century’s End

By the 2090s, humanity had learned to live within limits. The population stabilized below nine billion. Carbon neutrality—once an abstract goal—was enforced globally through trade-linked carbon credits. Artificial intelligence governed not only production and logistics but also ecological thresholds: AI-run “planetary dashboards” warned when resources neared the threshold of overshooting.

Kombucha—once merely a beverage—was now part of a symbiotic food network. Its microbial base served as a living substrate for nutritional pastes, medicinal tonics, and even biodegradable materials. SCOBY farms, floating on the world’s rewilded seas, generated both food and oxygen while sequestering carbon.

The Kombucha Konfederation

The seeds that were planted in 2025 with KBI’s Verified Seal Program had by 2095, evolved into the Global Kombucha Konfederation. What was once a struggling network of small brewers had grown into a transnational cooperative representing over a billion daily consumers. Its “Code of Fermentation Ethics” guided microbial stewardship and regenerative practices across all continents.

Economics of Regeneration

By 2100, the measure of “growth” had changed. GDP had been replaced by the Regenerative Index—a metric that tracked ecosystem recovery, microbial diversity, and human well-being. Kombucha companies were central players: their microbial exports replenished soils, stabilized local economies, and improved nutrition without depleting resources.

A kombucha SCOBY grown in Kenya could now be shipped digitally—its DNA code transmitted to a local bio-printer and activated with local nutrients. Trade was no longer about moving goods but sharing life itself.

The Cosmic Ferment: Space, the Final Frontier

Fermentation played a pivotal role in the colonization of extraterrestrial bodies, helping shape new planetary ecosystems and extending the themes of life, consciousness, and microbial cooperation out beyond Earth.

By 2100, humanity’s reach extended into the solar system. Permanent research colonies existed on the Moon, thriving settlements dotted the Martian canyons, and orbiting bio-stations circled the gas giants. Yet amid all this technological triumph, one humble process—fermentation—had become indispensable to survival and meaning alike.

Microbes had preceded humans into space. Now they accompanied them as partners, teachers, and planetary architects.

The cosmonauts who stood at the threshold of the 22nd century included a terraformer, a kombucha-savvy starship captain, and an interplanetary ecologist.

Terraforming

Dr. Rafael Kimura, born in São Paulo in 2056, was a microbiologist with a poet’s soul. Half-Japanese, half-Brazilian, he grew up watching his parents brew miso and cachaça—two ancient ferments from opposite sides of the world. To him, fermentation was “the original terraforming technology.”

In 2080, Rafael was appointed Director of the GaiaMars Project, a multinational effort to create self-sustaining microbial ecologies on Mars. Earlier missions had failed because they treated microbes as tools—simple agents of decomposition or nutrient cycling. Rafael saw them differently: as co-creators.

Under his leadership, the project seeded Martian soil with adaptive, AI-guided microbial colonies derived from Earth’s most resilient ferments—kombucha SCOBYs, kimchi lactobacilli, kefir grains, and desert cyanobacteria.

He cultivated resilient cyanobacterial genera such as Chroococcidiopsis (globally abundant in hot and cold deserts) and Phormidium (dominant in polar deserts), along with others including Scytonema, Nostoc, Gloeocapsa, and Oscillatoria. These microorganisms thrive in extreme heat, cold, and dryness, often living hypolithically (under quartz rocks) for UV protection or forming soil crusts that create the base of desert food webs. In other words, they were ideal for hostile environments like the Martian surface.

He called them “symbiotic pioneers.”

Rafael managed the project with pioneering intensity:

“People imagine our bacterial systems are autonomous and intelligent. They’re not. We have post-doc microbiologists monitoring fermentation processes around the clock. When bacterial communities drift from optimal composition, we intervene. When contamination occurs, we troubleshoot. Biology is powerful but needs constant human management.”

Within 20 years, these microecosystems transformed vast regions of Valles Marineris into breathable biomes. Thin, rust-colored soils turned to green moss beds; subterranean water ice became microbial broths teeming with oxygenic life.

His motivation was both scientific and philosophical:

“To make another planet live,” he said, “we must teach it to ferment.”

By his death in 2109, Mars was no longer a sterile rock. It was alive—humming with microbial symphonies.

Starship Systems

Leila Zhang, born in Chengdu in 2064, was commander of Odyssey Station, an orbital habitat circling Titan, Saturn’s largest moon. Originally trained as an aerospace engineer, she had also studied culinary biology, convinced that morale and meaning in deep space depended as much on taste as on technology.

Under her leadership, Odyssey became the first off-Earth facility to maintain a closed-loop fermentation system—a living cycle where every human exhalation, waste product, and organic residue was metabolized by microbial partners into food, oxygen, and energy.

At the heart of the system was Luna, a centuries-old kombucha mother descended from cultures brought aboard the International Space Station in the 2030s. Luna had been genetically and spiritually tended by generations of brewers. Leila called her “the ship’s soul.”

Investigation into the value of fermentation in long-term space missions began in 2024 with the successful cultivation of miso on the International Space Station. They noted:

Observations suggest unique features of the space environment—what we might call ‘space terroir’—which could be harnessed to create more flavorful, nourishing foods for long-term space missions and to address fundamental questions about the biology of novel environments.

— Food Fermentation in Space Is Possible, Distinctive, and Beneficial

Crew members drank Luna Brew daily—a tangy, faintly glowing beverage that recycled carbon dioxide into nourishment and mood-balancing compounds.

Leila’s motivation was personal: her grandmother had been a kombucha maker in Sichuan, teaching her that “fermentation is patience made visible.” She saw Luna not as machinery but as kin. Her greatest fear was contamination—that a rogue mutation might destabilize the closed loop. But Luna thrived, evolving gracefully with each solar cycle.

In her logbook, Leila wrote:

“We are not alone in space. Our microbes are our ancestors, our companions, and our future.”

Interplanetary Ecology

Omar Nasr was born in Cairo in 2049, the child of desert farmers who practiced ancient fermentation to preserve milk and grain. As a young man, he witnessed the collapse of the Nile Delta under climate stress and vowed to study ecological restoration.

By the 2080s, he had become chief ecological architect for the Interplanetary Colonization Council, designing microbial biomes for lunar domes, asteroid habitats, and Martian gardens.

Omar’s breakthrough came when he realized that each colony’s microbial culture—its ferments, soils, and human microbiomes—formed a “planetary signature.” Colonies with balanced microbial diversity exhibited lower stress, higher cognitive function, and greater social cohesion. He coined the term “BioHarmony Index”—the measure of symbiotic health across worlds.

Omar’s motivation was deeply spiritual. “Every planet,” he said, “has its own yeast.” His work united science and mysticism: microbial networks as threads of the cosmic fabric.

His greatest challenge was political. Competing nations wanted to patent microbial designs for terraforming. Omar fought to preserve them as commons. His Universal Microbial Charter of 2087 declared that all interplanetary life forms are the shared heritage of the solar system. By 2100, thanks to Omar’s advocacy, microbial life flowed freely between colonies—in the form of ferments, seeds, and living culture exchanges that kept humanity connected across light-minutes of distance.

The Ferment Beyond Earth

As humans spread outward, so did the cultures they carried—kombucha, kefir, tempeh, natto, sourdough, and new creations born in zero gravity. Each space colony developed its own microbial symphony, tuned to its atmosphere and inhabitants.

Fermentation became the foundation of extraterrestrial ecology—producing oxygen, nutrients, and emotional well-being. In the silent vacuum of the cosmos, the gentle bubbling of fermentation tanks became the heartbeat of life.

Yet beyond the practical lay the profound: on every world humans touched, microbes whispered their ancient message—that life is not a conquest of matter but a communion of being.

By 2100, kombucha brewers on Earth toasted with their Martian and lunar kin through holographic “Ferment Feasts,” sharing flavors brewed across light-years and for parsecs into the future. The galaxy, once cold and empty, now shimmered with living effervescence.

The universe, it seemed, was fermenting itself into consciousness.

Summary: 2100 — The Age of Living Beverages

By the year 2100, kombucha had transformed human civilization. From fermentation to foundation, from drink to doctrine—kombucha’s long journey had come full circle.

The year 2100 witnessed a world transformed. Humanity had at last reconciled itself with the biosphere. Coastal cities once drowned by rising seas were now floating biocultures—living reefs made of cellulose and kelp, home to millions who harvested sunlight, saltwater, and SCOBY membranes for sustenance. Inland, forests had returned. Mycelial networks thrived beneath the soil, and atmospheric carbon was on track to drop below pre-industrial levels. Life—microbial, human, and machine—was symbiotic by design.

Every person alive knew the taste of kombucha—not as a brand or product but as a living ritual. The brew had become as universal as bread once was, yet infinitely more personal. Each batch told the story of a local climate, a community’s microbes, and the care of its brewers.

A Universal Daily Prayer was offered:

Our SCOBY, which art fermenting,
Hallowed be thy name.
Thy kingdom come,
Thy will be done, on Earth as it is on Mars.
Give us this day, our daily ‘booch
And balance our pH, as we balance others.
Lead us into fermentation, and deliver us from contamination,
For thine is the bacteria, the microbes, and the yeast, symbiotically,
For ever and ever.
Amen.

By 2100, the word kombucha no longer described a drink at all—it meant symbiosis. Children learned it in their first biology lessons: “Kombucha is a partnership of beings for mutual thriving.” Its philosophy shaped every aspect of life: governance (through symbiotic councils), technology (bio-coded rather than silicon-based), and even art (living installations that pulsed, breathed, and regenerated). Fermentation had become the metaphor for civilization—slow, transformative, and alive.

The old kombucha pioneers—those small craft brewers of the early 2000s who had struggled to explain their cloudy bottles to skeptical consumers—were now honored as ancestors. In Vallejo, Berlin, Seoul, and Nairobi, fermentation schools bore their names. Holographic exhibits replayed their humble workshops, their mason jars and stainless-steel vats, their laughter and frustration. What they began as a grassroots act of care had evolved into a planetary operating system.

In their honor, the Fermenters’ Equinox was celebrated each year—a global day of silence, brewing, and renewal. For twenty-four hours, production ceased. Humanity listened, quite literally, to the hum of the microbes—the sound of life in process.

This will be our fermented future.

Epilogue: A Message to Today’s Brewers

To the readers of Booch News:

When this journey began, kombucha was still a niche drink—something found in farmers’ markets, yoga studios, and coolers in the back of natural food stores. Most people couldn’t pronounce it, let alone explain the SCOBY. Breweries were small, margins were thin, and public understanding was limited to “a fizzy, vinegary tea that’s good for you.”

And yet, beneath that modest surface, something profound was already fermenting.

Each of you—today’s brewers, innovators, distributors, educators, and enthusiasts—is not merely selling a beverage. You are part of a quiet revolution in how humanity relates to life itself. The microbial world you nurture is ancient, generous, and wise. It reminds us that creation is cooperative, not competitive; that resilience comes from diversity; that change, though sometimes messy, leads to transformation.

When we imagine kombucha in 2100, we’re really asking: what kind of relationship will we have with the living world?

Will we continue to extract, process, and discard—or will we learn, as brewers do, to feed and be fed by the same cycles that sustain all existence?

The future described in these episodes—of floating SCOBY farms, living cities, microbial charters, and global fermentation commons—is not prophecy. It’s possibility. And every small act you take today brings it closer. Every local brew you craft, every story you tell a customer, every connection you make between ancient fermentation and modern wellness—these are the seeds of a living civilization.

When historians look back from 2100, they may see you—the brewers of the mid twenty-first century—as the ones who kept the flame alive during a time of industrial excess. You modeled a different path: one of patience, transparency, and care. You demonstrated that business could be regenerative, that flavor could carry ethics, and that microbes could heal both body and planet.

So, to every reader of Booch News: keep fermenting. Keep innovating. Keep sharing.

The world of 2100 begins with the jars, vats, and hearts of those brewing here in 2025.

Let it be alive.

Disclaimer

This is a work of speculative fiction. Names, characters, businesses, events, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination, assisted by generative A.I. References to real brands and organizations are used in a wholly imaginative context and are not intended to reflect any actual facts or opinions related to them. No assertions or statements in this post should be interpreted as true or factual.

Audio

Listen to an audio version of this Episode and all future ones via the Booch News channel on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you just want to listen to the music, tune in as follows:

The 28th Amendment Choir, The Universal Daily Prayer, 17:50

Here is a complete playlist of all ‘Fermented Future’ songs.

Lyrics ©2025 Booch News, music generated with the assistance of Suno.

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