How do you imagine the Future?

I believe motivation an positive direction needs optimism in order to move forward.

As much as there is overpopulation, global warming, human rights violations, and our addiction and dependency to oil.
All at an exponential rate, greater then we can compensate for.
As much as WE are doomed. (the earth will do just fine)

We still are driven to go forward, always a possibility to fix what is broken. And using the very last breath to try. Optimism.

I don’t think your premise is necessarily true. People haven’t always thought of the future as being rosy – look at the Ancient Norse, for example, who believed that Ragnarok was waiting for everyone. The Romans certainly believed that the future would be different from the past – in the future, more of the world would belong to the Romans ;-)

There’s always cause for optimism! I would like to believe, for instance, that we figure out a way to balance our technological advancement with the need to care for the planet we find ourselves on. Also, there should be moon-bases. Cloned dinosaurs too.

I imagine the singularity will come within our lifetimes.

@Hobbes , I was not aware of the Norse legend, so I googled it. It talks about some vague time in the distant future, not the immediate future, and the outcome is eventually hopeful. I believe there have been other times when a lot of people believed that the Apocalypse was imminent. Certainly now is one of those times, judging from the popularity of the Left Behind books. The vision of the Apocalypse is also optimistic, at least for true believers, even though it abandons the idea of improving things on Earth.

The Romans got to a point where they gave up on further conquest. It was all that they could do to try to hold onto what they had. Even when they did think of expansion, I doubt that they imagined daily life as being much different from what it was.

Quick note. Time Machine is far from being the first dystopian novel. Wikipedia has a nice article on the subject. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dystopian_literature Of particular interest is Jules Verne’s novel, which was not published until 1994. I am surprised I do not recall hearing about it. I would think that it would have created a bit of a commotion.

Flying cars, a moon base, a computer in every kitchen, and video telephones—all by the year 2000.

I am pessimistic about the future…... I think Cormac McCarthy, in his book “The Road”, expresses my feelings the best. The future is apocalyptic, muted, and horrible…, there is artistic beauty in his expression of this ‘horror’.... no question about that… forget the movie….. read the book.

”...Keeping memory alive is difficult, since the past grows increasingly remote. It is as if these lonely characters are experiencing “the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world.” The past has become like a place inhabited by the newly blind, all of it slowly slipping away. As for looking toward the future, “there is no later,” the book says starkly. “This is later.”” ... NYTimes book review Sept 25, 2006

I do not know who said it….. but….. all we can do, as individuals , is act that this be an unjust fate!

There’s cause for optimism. There’s cause for pessimism. It all depends which trends you think will be the strongest. It also depends on your understanding of basic human nature. You pays yo’ money and you takes yo’ chances.

Surprisingly enough, given my personal pessimism, I am optimistic about the future of humanity. Technological advances are happening at a rapidly increasing rate. Prosperity (in terms of things) is spreading around the world. Spiritual prosperity is also there in the mix.

Dystopian novels are warnings about specific trends. They are not predictions. They deliberately exaggerate so that people can steer away from that trend.

And of course utopian novels lay out ideas about a future we want. They propose ways of organizing society and interpersonal relations so that things will work better, with peace and harmony and all that good stuff.

The Fluther system has just deleted all of my long three-paragraph input explaining my positive outlook of the future. Forcing me to login again.

let’s use the quantum theory. The human civilization is a system and we don’t know it’s full state we know just a part of it and this means according to incertitude principle that it can evolve in very many ways.And in this many ways only one is your model of future and another one is another’s one model and so on.And of course that it can evolve in a way that isn’t in anybody’s mind.

“In the year 3000 YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook will merge into one super time wasting website called YouTwitFace.”

@mattbrowne ..... the FlutherGods/Godesses are sending you a message <g>

I see a world in which individuality is lost to group-think, vegetarianism is normalcy, and hunting and eating meat will become felonies. I see a future where the only interaction with nature will occur in zoos and parks, and the only upside is that religious zealotry will probably die out altogether.

Of course, that is only one possible future of many, but I already don’t fit into this world; people see me as an outdated archetype from the last century. By the time the world has changed to the point where it will too uncomfortable for people like me, I will be dead. That is sort of a relief.

Of course, humanity just might fuck everything up, wipe themselves out, and give some other creature the chance to be top of the food chain. I hope those new dominant creatures do a better job than we did, as we really fucked things up, didn’t we?

me on a shuttle to the moon. hell yes.

Captialism will squeeze us out…unless we change our course..

@virtualist – Well, I didn’t use a text editor first to copy paste into the text box. What’s the purpose of renewing the login?

@mattbrowne .. interesting….. your <keystrokes> into the buffer should have been sufficient for you not to have been ‘timed out’ ...... I’m sure they can fix that…..

Well, my three examples justifying my positive outlook of the future were SARS, 2004 Tsunami and Swine Flu.