Ancient mid-afternoons (2)

            Fun to think about but, as my last post discussed, we are the latest of a long line of people, the ever-rolling tide of humanity, encroaching and retreating, swirling in eddies, cresting and cresting and cresting. . .  Certain books, guess they are usually sci-fi, take on the ideas of what it was like.  And some look to the future, A Scientific Romance being a terrific example.  Riddley Walker, Fiskadoro are other (really good) forward-looking books.  It is a trip to think of the world 10 years from now and such a thought experiment is relatively easy compared to thinking about the world (with us still in it) a hundred years down the road.  Raise the stakes and think about 1,000 years in the future. 

            Looking forward and back – behind us: do we live with links to the past?  Older generations have their mores and particular zeitgeist and these are slowly changed by the up-and-coming generation’s own way of doing things.  Then the oldest generation dies off and the next younger one becomes the wise old folk.  It is hard to imagine life in the 1950s and soon it will only be guesswork cuz the people that actually did live then won’t be around.  And that is just fifty year ago.  What about 100 years ago?  These are historical times that we have records of so we dreamers at least have a blueprint to work with.  The future is different.

            A hundred years hence.  We can extrapolate from what we have today.  We can look at trends that we are part of today and try and project these into the future.  But we do not have a blueprint such as history provides us for reflections past.  In the future lays uncharted waters.  A hundred years could see us living as we do today.  Or the world – how people relate, how people live, where we live – could be radically different.  I was going to say unimaginably different but I think whatever the future holds it will be an iteration similar to something in the past.  (I guess this is a judgment against transhumanism.)

            Think of the future as an entity or a presence, something looming.  It is real.  Should I say it will be real?  For some reason it feels right to say simply that it is real.  It’s gonna happen.  Inexorable.  The far out thought is thinking of a million years in the future.  Tough to make that a concern today but what will things be like then?