An Uncertain Future
John Ink2Quill
www.ink2quill.com

One of the most common topics in blogs, articles, videos and talk around town is the uncertainty of the future in the West and how that is related to an anticipated drop in the standard of living and the health of people. This unpleasant thought might be worth a ponder.

But ponder this thought. Many people believe that what makes our projections of the future so frightening is not only that we know they will never have a high degree of accuracy but that we have reached an “event horizon”. That means that our world has caught up with our imaginations. We have built machines that can fly and go underwater. We have made leaps and bounds in the domains of medicine, technology, entertainment and the list goes on. As a result we are in a kind of darkness that is usually illuminated by people we call visionaries.

Before the smart phone and internet, roughly pre-year 2011, we looked to SciFi for an idea where the future might be headed. Building bigger and faster ships for land and to fly the ether goes back over a hundred years to some of the parents of the SciFi genre like Jules Verne, H.G. Wells. Inspiration to explore the world of medicine and tinkering with life goes back to the greats like Mary Shelley. But what would those great minds write about if they were here today?

We have faster and faster ships and we have every intention of spreading out into space. Entertainment is so oversaturated with stories about this. Stories today about space are oversaturated with military themes, large clunky ships that have mastered the gravity question but somehow still look like they were designed by someone from the 1960s. The descriptions of space and space problems are still like a college lecture from the Industrial Revolution. Academia has not changed it’s views and curricula in a long time so they are partly to blame. The problem is that everyone’s vision of our future is too much the same, too conformist. We all know that Academia is very conformist but does that rot have to spread to storytelling and hold our imaginations hostage? Our ideas and views of the future have to be more open minded and we have to start accepting, or at least listening to, those people we call “crazy” and their ideas labelled as “ludicrous”. I guarantee that with a little time those people we call “crazy” today are the visionaries of tomorrow.

Here are some ideas that are not beyond the ‘event horizon’ I just spoke of but are still labelled as “crazy”. How about the idea of a very long life span. I won’t use the word “immortality” either. How about just replacing body parts the way we do car parts and live longer that way? How about inoculating people against some viruses and bacteria and extend our lives that way? How about rebuilding parts of the body like our nervous systems for those people afflicted by diseases, a condition they were born with or some accident were a person might have been paralyzed, for example? The possibilities are truly endless but we have to stop using words like “crazy” or “impossible” to describe the good ideas of visionaries.

Maybe our future seems so uncertain because we dare not dream past event horizons. Maybe the event horizon is just our fear of the unknown. Visionaries are out there.

Things to think about.

John Ink2Quill

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