Are you living in the future?
Humanoido
Posts: 5,770
If one lives long enough, it begins to seem as if we have made it to the future. If we can undergo serious life extension, is this form of time the best way to travel into the future? Obviously this is a short range future, or is it?
Depending on perspective, a decade can be a spectacular journey into future development of science and technology. If you can live and hold on to precious life for just ten years, and as science continues to make discoveries and advance more rapidly and considering that knowledge in some fields doubles every two years, and that great advances are made every two months, even short range time can be empowering future travel.
Can we get to the future now? Perhaps you move to a larger more futuristic city with 28 million people and vast megastructures and new technology you've never experienced amidst the tall rising buildings that vanish in the clouds. Now you have instantly gained future!
What other perspectives can you share about future?
Depending on perspective, a decade can be a spectacular journey into future development of science and technology. If you can live and hold on to precious life for just ten years, and as science continues to make discoveries and advance more rapidly and considering that knowledge in some fields doubles every two years, and that great advances are made every two months, even short range time can be empowering future travel.
Can we get to the future now? Perhaps you move to a larger more futuristic city with 28 million people and vast megastructures and new technology you've never experienced amidst the tall rising buildings that vanish in the clouds. Now you have instantly gained future!
What other perspectives can you share about future?
Comments
"We went to the New York World's Fair, saw what the past had been like, according to the Ford Motor Car Company and Walt Disney, saw what the future would be like, according to General Motors. And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep."
- Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five, Chapter 1
Sometimes I wish "General Discussion" wasn't so general. I like to talk about electronics, Propellers, SX's and Basic Stamps.
Oh, that's right...there' s a "chatter" flag. Maybe that needs to be added to this thread.
The future is very different in vision for everyone. While for some, it might be a mega-metropolis with robotic cars that which us in complete automated safety and efficiency to our destinations where we bask in controlled environments of near perfect comfort year round, for others it's a vision of humans living in harmony with nature and VERY close to it, yet just out of sight is a vast technological infrastructure that supports us - and all life on the planet - with astounding medical capabilities, completely clean and virtually limitless power, and the ability to materialize nearly any "thing" we could need, eliminating hunger, poverty. And yet we humans will still be able to choose to live as we wish, some spending life engrossed in technology, others still, to use a phrase, chopping wood and carrying water. Not as a matter of necessity, but out of a choice to do what makes one feel most alive, most at peace with their inner predilections and interests.
Relatively young, (I was born in the early 1960s), my introduction to the future was the Star Trek series. Now, I use - and create - technology every day that was inspired by that initial vision (and now far exceeds much of it), and as I have matured, so has my vision of what that kind of future would mean. It is an inspiring vision of hope for a planet that no longer is ruled and unbalanced by our most ignorant fears and prejudices.
The only thing that saddens me about it is how tantalizingly close it could be - it's just a choice away for so many, but ignorance, fear, and simple habit of inertia over generations keeps that choice hidden to so many.
We are indeed on the threshold of some amazing breakthroughs. Extraordinarily extended lifespans? Research Telomeres, Telomerase, Telomerase Activators and a small molecule isolated from the root of the astragalus plant called Cycloastraganol. We could be living well past 100, and in very robust, vigorous health and vitality that whole time.
If I've learned one thing on this planet, it's that if humans can imagine something, it's possible. It has been said before, by much smarter folks than I, that the stuff of the universe is much more like thought, than it is stuff. Perhaps we are all participating in dreaming our collective future.
Pleasant Dreams,
Dave
As I told Cameron Reilly when he interviewed me, from a certain distance in the past if you look at our current situation, the Singularity has already happened. We just don't appreciate it because we don't remember that world without ubiquitous electricity or where you couldn't travel from New Orleans LA to Jackson MS in a couple of hours, making a service call there a day trip. Whatever amazing stuff happens in the future, when we try to see it from here we will be bound by the same limitations as that person from 1900 trying to see 1980 or 2011 through the lens of their 1900 knowledge. At that point there was a suspicion of the power of the atom, and they might not be too surprised by atomic bombs, but who from that era would have written the story of an atomic power facility overtaken by an earthquake and tsunami and creating a contamination nightmare? Worse, who would have thought that after the achievements of the Apollo program political pragmatism would put the brakes on space exploration so that no capability to return to the Moon would exist for 40+ years? And who would guess that remotely controlled robots could get so capable that you could send unmanned probes to places like Mars and Saturn to get better results cheaper than you could with a manned visit?
We are living in the future, just not our own future. When those who follow us (possibly ourselves if they get this life extension thing sorted out in time) look back they will see us with the same quaint insufferable nostalgia that we feel when we look at antique spark-gap radio plans and internal combustion engines which used an open flame instead of a spark plug. How ignorant they will think we are, how much we were missing that is undoubtably right in front of our faces.
But their descendants will think the same of them :-)
I see lots of futuristic things, from my born in the late 60's perspective. Don't see as many of them as I would like, but they are there. To me, the real bummer is not living long enough to see the real structural changes that will occur. Sometimes those happen quickly. To those near death now, or who recently died, they saw some really big deal advances in the basics, along with gadget type advances. It's more static now, IMHO. We get gadgets, but the core infrastructure doesn't seem as remarkable, in terms of change, as it has been in the past.
Still, I think we live in very interesting times, and I'm happy for it.
We've got portable communicators, ion drives (often cited in SF books early on), incredible displays, computers, great radios (well, in some respects great, in others, more crappy today, compared to older designs, but I digress), and materials science is just huge right now too.
Electro-mechanical is just killer. We are dang good at it now. Bio-tech is just starting to take off, with who knows what results. Very interesting, like computers were interesting many years ago. Hope I get to see and potentially benefit from a little of that.
Re: Near term, speculative SF. Yeah. Difficult and risky. I really enjoy those when well done, almost as much as I do longer term SF.
The best future isn't technical, it's spiritual - developing faith in Jesus Christ to perform miracles. Why build a spaceship or other transportation when you can have spiritual transmission? Why build a hospital when you can be healed by miracle? Why build an agricultural infrastructure when you can turn a kid's lunch into a feast for thousands or water into wine? Until then my most worthy Bible discovery is written at www.wantdesk.com
Also until then, I'm preparing technically for robots to do all manual labor enabling everyone to live as retired so they can work on spiritual growth. I'm developing ideas for surviving earthquakes, floods, tornadoes, and other disasters with robot help and survival shelters with self-sustaining food supplies. I'm also working on software that will I hope, enable reprograming the culture by creating new and better Christian scripts for movies and TV.
Part of my preparation for the future was writing www.congressionalbiblestudy.org which among other things advises Congress to start preparing for the asteroid disaster which will wipe out 1/3 of the ships at sea and damage 1/3 of the earth according to Revelation 8. Unfortunately I have yet to learn of anyone in Washington DC reading it, as one might expect with politicians no one can trust.
Someday some or all of these ideas will get accomplished but only God knows if I'll see it.
My insurance doesn't cover miracles. It will, however, pay for a CAT scan or an MRI.
Kirk, please, give me a break. While I agree there is a lot of moral wisdom in the bible the only religious pronouncement that I have seen to have any validity is that " god helps those who help themselves". This is a technical forum, not a forum for religious proselytizing. Stick to the technical aspects.
Some of us live in the future. Others want to make us live here now. Thank God we're in a free country which was the future a few hundred years ago.
Living in Asia for 17 or so years is somewhat as if I am living in the future. But paradoxically it may seem to some of you that it is living in the past.
Asians are still tied to their roots. Things like rice paddies and village life are revered. So even in a big Asian city, people can find a niche of humble village-like living. Outsiders may not recognize it, but once you have been accepted as being part of the local life, it all seems very village-like.
On the flip side is the aggressive idealization of the future by Western culture. I am rereading some of the great 'anti-utopian' novels. "1984" by George Orwell and "Brave New World" by Aldous Huxley. They seem to promote some of the futuristic trends in tyranny that we really could do without. In some ways, I fear that Western culture is too invested in making the future better rather than holding on to some of the best, more friendly aspects of the past.
Whatever people do, it seems some form of mutual respect has to be in play for anything to succeed well. Do we really need to hang on to the future or the past? How about just making the best possible now and seeing unfolds?
I don't know how soon it will be before we cap off what we create, but I don't think its that far off.
Somewhere way back in the dim dusty corners of my (genetic?) memory, I seem to recall someone else saying exactly the same thing.
This presents a similar challenge as the "what happens when an unstoppable force hits an immovable object" conundrum. The question isn't a valid question because the two cannot exist in the same universe. To state that something has a force so great that it is unstoppable, must mean that no immovable objects exist in that universe and the same is true for the opposite.
edit: relative to my original post, this edit was done in the future however......
Remember reading the sentence above? That was in the past. This is past too.
The present is just a future memory.
Duane
by B: http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20070511092802AAFrc6A Live for the future because the future has a way of multiplying what you have done. For instance, when you plant a seed in the ground, it brings about a huge tree or plant. That tiny little seed can now feed your family for months. It only took you one day to plant it. Now in the same sense what you do today in one day will multiply in the future to feed you for months. Whether it be emotional things, relationships, money.
If you live for now, then everything is already ok for you because you are alive and you need do nothing at all. Therefore nearly all thoughts should be future thoughts but wisely, learning from history to help only pursue the best.
"Live long and prosper!"