The other day, I started thinking about the future. Not the “where will I be in 5 years” future but the future that comes in 50, 100, 350 years. It’s kind of a fun thought experiment, especially when the entire world is currently crumbling around all of us.
Originally, I started thinking in terms of my written journal – will they be in an archive? Or maybe they’ll be found strung across the continent on dusty tabletops because Russia got a little too frisky and I had to go on an epic cross-country adventure post-apocalypse. Will they be rotting on Earth while I immigrate to a moon colony? Could my niece have them on her shelf and her children read about Great Aunt Sarah’s career woes? Will I digitize them at some point? Ooo, will I print out this blog one day and bind it alongside my journal?
Then I started thinking about other future things. Again, not the practicalities of who’s going to go through my stuff when I die since I have no kids, but what things will be like then. Daily life has been changed so wildly since I graduated college, and that wasn’t a terribly long time ago, so how crazy could it be by the time I get around to kicking the bucket? Beyond?
I doubt I could even come close to guessing right – I bet my great-great-great grandparents could have conceived of any idea that comes close to the fact that I have the world’s most expensive light switch/weather forecast (I’m talking about Alexa), or that have the sum of the world’s knowledge in my hand but use it to watch cat videos. They wouldn’t have even known about cat videos!
I hope they take cats when they colonize other worlds. And dogs. If someone is a lone worker on a far away planet, I think a dog or a cat would be key to mental health.
I just have so many questions about the far, and far-ish, future. Do we ever colonize beyond the moon? Do we ever figure out that Earth would really rather we not poison it? Or do we all die in a horrific nuclear firefight? According to my Googling, Africa & Australia don’t have nuclear weapons, so I hope they survive and that the nuclear clouds avoid them enough that they thrive.
On a happier note, I bet we eventually figure out how to beat cancer at some point. Of all types. I don’t think it’ll be soon, but eventually knowledge will build on itself to the point someone finally puts it all together and wipes cancer off the map. The same goes for most other diseases – there’s no reason to think that we can’t eventually figure out how to correct aberrant biological processes. As long as we keep plagues from completely wiping humans off the map, anyway.
So that’s what I think about when I have time on my hands – the absolute inability to predict the far future, or even the middle future. I’m excited to find out what the world will be like in 20-30 years.
This blog post is a mess – I swear it made so much more sense in my head. Let’s all just accept that my brain has been fried from too many horror movies, okay?
-S
Coffee & Crows 