ABC News built this special around a single question: what happens if humanity's warnings about population growth, resource depletion, and climate change go unheeded through the twenty-first century? The film uses a fictional device, a girl named Lucy born in 2009 whose life is narrated year by year against a timeline of real projections, to dramatize droughts, food shortages, mass migration, and the collapse of coastal cities as sea levels rise. Interspersed are on-camera interviews with scientists, historians, and policy experts including figures like James Howard Kunstler and Thomas Homer-Dixon, who lay out the data behind each scenario and debate how much of it is avoidable. Archival news footage of famines, storms, and resource conflicts anchors the speculative timeline in events that have already happened. The tone is deliberately alarming, framed as a warning rather than a prediction, and the film closes by asking what choices made now could change Lucy's ending. It plays as a time capsule of turn-of-the-decade anxieties about civilization's trajectory.