The Year 3000

From the very first episode of Futurama that I watched 2 decades ago I was hooked.  The premise was one that appealed to me even then when I was 11 or 12 years old, the whole premise being that the main character Philip J. Fry, a pizza delivery boy, delivers a pizza on New Year's Eve 1999 only to fall into cryogenic suspension and awaken on New Year's Eve in the year 2999 just in time to witness the turn of the millennium, albeit not the one he was expecting.

At the time there was still some innocence in my mind, some hope and imagination that left me with visions of the future that would be something I would want to live to see.  That hope has faded over the years, with the turn of the millennium almost everything with only a handful of exceptions for me personally has led to a world where not only do I not want to imagine the future, but it is something I don't think I want to live to see.  If I had the opportunity to travel through time, I'd be more likely to choose to go back than to go forward, as for how far back I would go, that's hard to say.  The not too distant past wasn't that great either, the 19th and 20th centuries whilst they did produce some good things were also filled with horrors and atrocities - let's face it, as human beings we're not very good at being human.

The only marginal appeal that can still be clung onto with some degree of hope when it comes to the future is the possibility that we might one day reach beyond this planet.  If that could lead to worlds where different ideologies existed independently then that might lead to some harmony, but my greatest fear with humanity spreading out amongst the stars is that we will repeat the mistakes we have made here on Earth and simply produce Earth 2.0 and Earth 3.0 and so on, all sharing the same problems, they are all ultimately the result of human endeavour so it's not unreasonable to conclude that so long as humanity is present then the problems we associate with it will also be present.  It's a sad admission that whilst we fight over imaginary lines between countries that we call borders and erect walls to mark them in territorial dispute that visions of a future where space travel is possible might simply end up with arguments over what planet belongs to who and that wars will still be fought over such claims.

When you look back at the world as it was a thousand years ago however, the difference is immense between the technological capabilities and the extent of human industry that now exist compared to then.  We look back and consider that time to be so primitive and underdeveloped in contrast, how might our world as it is today look in comparison to that of the future?  There was always the thought that we would continue to advance and that the world today would look just as primitive but that all hinges on the belief that we will prevail when you pit humanity against the problems that exist in the world today.  The assumption that we will survive climate change either by succeeding in reversing it or mitigating its effects or by some as yet unknown alternative means.  The assumption that we will survive the tensions that have been ramped up between nations and that the progression will not give way to regression.  Those all rely on the "what if" scenarios that we can play out when we imagine the future. 

There is now however a very real possibility that we might actually regress.  There is certainly a nostalgia that has proven insidious and difficult to defeat that leads others to reminisce about a bygone era, what could we say of human endeavour if the world a thousand years from today looks more like the world from a thousand years ago than the one we live in?  Some people would be very happy with that I am sure but most people alive today would not be happy but the trouble with that assertion is that you have to experience something in order to miss it, if you never experience it to begin with then you can't miss it.  If the world did regress it would take nothing more than a few generations for living memory to be lost and the status quo to be normalised.  We have already seen this by western government increasingly shifting to the right and to authoritarian governments which less than a century ago were the cause of two major wars that tore society apart.

It's not only possible to imagine a world that would regress, in many ways it is already happening and the complacency of those who believe that it could never happen will be our undoing.  The moment you believe that nothing can be lost is the moment you begin to gamble it all.