At this, the dawning of a New Year, I come to you with an idea. It’s a simple idea with an almost impossible mandate – to predict the future, and then act as tour guide toward that future.
From the first moments that modern humans began to communicate and exchange ideas, we have pondered our past, present and future. Where have we come from? Why are we here? And where are we going?
Many would say that figuring out the past is easy; it is the past after all and we have been there. Turn around and gaze down the memory road; read about what happened when… it’s all there for us to learn from. Okay, I know what some of you are thinking; what about the fact that ‘history is written by the victors’ and all that rot. True, some of our collective past histories hinges on the reality that it is in fact bull shit (can I say bull shit on the internet?). For the most part however, we know what was going on and when.
The present is also pretty easy to deal with. It is what is happening now. Granted, what happens now takes place in a very short time line and one second it’s here and then it is the past. That said, today is today and we can see, hear, and even interact with the present (something we can’t really do with the past, no matter how hard we try to change what we have done, it cannot be undone).
Since we have (in the briefest of terms) considered the past and the present (we will get back to both in more detail by the way); let us now ponder the future. This is, in my opinion, the most elusive of time. It is a time that has not yet arrived, yet is passing us this very instant into oblivion. The future is always in our grasp yet just out of reach and at the same time drawing us toward it like a moth to a candle. Where are we going? Good question (I’m glad I asked it); for humanity has been asking that question for some time and we never really get an answer (good or bad). Think of the future like Bob Dylan’s song ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’.
We, us human’s, continue to question our existence; asking questions like where are we going? How many roads must a man (or woman) walk down? How many seas must a white dove sail? And on and on and on. Did you get the Bob Dylan references by-the-way? I now, I digress.
Where was I? Oh yes… the, sorry, our future. Humanity’s future and our place in the Universe.
Every year, around this time of year, I come across a plethora of predictions for the future. They all try to predict what direction we take in science, the economy, humanities, war, peace, crime, medicine, and the list continues.
Some of these predictions come from the media, some from professors’, some from futurists, writers, and even, I dear say, people that can (and never get it right) predict the future. You know the type, the ones that take your money and with the vaguest of questions and suggestions have predicted you are not only going to get pregnant, but fly off to Zanzibar and marry an African prince and get wealthy sending unsolicited emails to millions of people telling them you need to get money out of the country and you’ll cut them in for a percentage if only they wire into your bank a sum of money for you to pay the special ‘getting money out of the country tax’. Oh, sorry, but I digress again (I really have to stop doing that).
While some of the future predictions seem to be ‘spot on’, the vast majority are not. Take for example the predictions made during the 1950’s of where we would be by the 1980’s. Flying cars, jet packs (I’m really disappointed in that one. I wanted a jet pack), atomic cooking stoves, colonies on the moon and mars, a chicken in every pot, and so on.
Mind you, I am glad that we do not have flying cars just yet. Can you imagine the carnage; we can barely keep cars on the ground from piling up. Just think what would happen if we flew them around. Never mind watching out for bird droppings; now we have to look out for dumb ass drivers running out of fuel, taking the wrong turn and smashing into a sign post (floating sign post of course), and some fool throwing out their trash from five thousand meters above our heads. No thank you.
We were an idealistic people back in the 50’s though; still recovering from World War Two and about the head into another global conflict (Korean Conflict / War / Police Action, take your pick); and the Cold War beginning to heat up.
We wanted our future to be bright, prosperous, filled with wonder in a time that was crammed with technological marvels. Humanity was going to move forward with a utopian future where food, fuel, housing, money were all abundant. We even envisioned changing how men and women would look. Not only would be cure all illness, we would change ourselves genetically. Humanity would create enhanced humans that learned quickly; ate less (pooped less one would hope), had more hair, had less hair, etc. In short, we would be smarter, faster, more powerful than a locomotive; able to leap tall buildings in a single bound…. Sorry, wrong essay.
Didn’t quite turn out like that did it? Since those glory days of hope and dreams we have polluted out air, seas, land. We have created vast waste lands of toxic sludge, cut down sizeable acreage of forests, radiated whole cities, clogged our roads, and allowed our infrastructure to deteriorate. Since the 1950’s we have watched the health of whole nation’s decline, unable to or unwilling to assist. War(s), famine, drought, plagues, you name it, we got it. What happened to all that hope for man… (Sorry) human kind?
I have my own opinion of course (you knew I would). But what my opinion is doesn’t really matter, does it. What matters is where we go from here. Here being the ‘here and now’, the present. I told you we’d revisit that past and present of the future (or something like that).
Where, as in what direction we take toward our collective future depends greatly on what we do with today; and what we do with today has a lot to do with how we view our past. Profound? Maybe…. Okay, who am I kidding? That is profound as hell and you should remember where you read it first.
Think about it this way, what we do today is predicated on the value we place on our past. Notice I did not say ‘values’ as that has a…. spiritual quality I prefer not to discuss today. What I mean by value is the ‘worth’ we place on our knowledge of the past. Is our past worthy (or noteworthy) of our notice? Should we take what we have learned by trial and error and apply that knowledge to the decisions we make today?
I am waiting on your answer….. no, really; this is something you truly have to decide in order to make the decisions you must make to affect your future.
Let’s assume that you have decided what to take from your past, and want to apply that to your present. Now, does the rest of humanity do the same? Should the rent of humanity do the same? In my own humble opinion, we should at the very least come to some sort of consensus on the direction we travel; for we do travel together. Try as you might, you are not getting off the planet anytime soon.
The problem with this however is we can’t even agree on basic ideas. We squabble over language, religion, rights, guns, food, water, land, money, power, and quite frankly it’s all a load of crap. We may as well be arguing over who (whom?) has the biggest Hemorrhoid.
Humanity has not ‘gotten it together’ at any time in our collective history and that is a very sad state of affairs. Doubt my assessment of our past, think long and hard about our global history and prove me wrong. Thousands of battles, wars, and conflict. Billions of deaths; billions more casualties’ and displaced peoples all throughout the recorded history of humanity (I will refrain from saying “oh the humanity”. Okay, I said it.)
Moving forward toward our future utopia will require us to be equals on this big blue ball we call home. Yet after several million years of evolution, we continue to have the ‘Have’ and ‘Have-Not’ countries. We continue to look at each other with suspicion and fear and we continue to kill each other off despite our better knowledge in the name of religion and power.
My personal prediction for our future is not a bright one if we continue with this timeline, but how do we change it?
Here is how…. STOP! Stop trying to change history to suit your own view of reality. Individuals, countries and society in general must view our / their history as it is. History is not about who won or lost; it’s not about who died or how; it is not about inventions or who has a patent on them. History is about the life of our ONLY planet. History is asking the question, “What decisions did we make to get here”. Good or bad, we chose our path and we made it this far.
Now, what do we do with it? We LEARN from it. We take what we have done in the past and learn what worked and what did not. Can we take what we learned and move forward? Can we take what did not work and fix or change those decision and what can we take from that and move forward?
We need to look at ourselves as a whole, not as individuals. There is an old saying, “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few”. It means that we as individuals are nothing without the whole of society. Never mind the so-called ‘Rights’ of the individual because it is the collective, the whole, that keeps those Rights dear and near to them. If the collective felt otherwise, then you can forget those individual Rights.
Oh, and before you go and check, let me tell you that the above quotation was first said by Leonard Nimoy's character Spock in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. It is similar to philosopher Jeremy Bentham who said, "It is the greatest good to the greatest number of people which is the measure of right and wrong."
Where am I going with this rambling? I am trying to (in a very long winded way, I know it) point out that we need to change. We, the individual first, will have to decide if we want the future that is inevitable based on the path we are currently on. And I have no doubt you can figure out what connotation that would take.
Or do we want the future where individuals are respected as part of the community. Where there is no have or have not, where there is enough food to feed the hungry masses of the planet and a future where we work together to find treatments (dare I say cure) for cancer, heart and other diseases, addictions, mental illness and of course that scourge of human affliction, Stupidity; for that is the worst of human ills and affects far too many of the species.
Maybe I am dreaming and maybe I’ve watched too much Star Trek; where Gene Roddenberry’s (August 19, 1921 to October 24, 1991) vision of our future is one where we work together to explore the mind. Where the acquisition of wealth is seen as a waste and the acquisition of knowledge is what we strive for.
It is a cliché? You bet your bottom it is; but that’s okay. Is my vision of a world that is clean, with renewable energy resources, crime free (with the elimination of ‘want’ in society we can reduce if not eliminate the crime one perpetrates to acquire ‘stuff’) and free of hunger, abuse and hate a dream? Yes, yes it is and that’s okay.
You see, every step forward in our collective evolution and development requires someone to dream of that future. It requires that we first change how we, as individuals first, then as a society, look at our past and how we will guide our present.
So go ahead and dream. Take that first step toward the future we all truly hope we have. One day we will arrive in that future together and say, “Isn’t today a great day to be alive!”
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