the year is 2124
Voices echo across continents, tying humanity into an intimate community. Iron horses, a true triumph of human ingenuity, race across the homestead connecting distant towns to the city's nascent heartbeat. Nightfall, once an impenetrable obsidian curtain, starts to fall with the gentle shimmer of artificial suns. Moments, once lost to time’s sway, are captured and immortalized in still snapshots. Meanwhile, advancements in medicine and economic theory have lengthened our lifespans considerably. The year is 1914.
Communication is instantaneous, linking distant minds with invisible strings of binary code. The known boundaries of travel and knowledge disintegrate, rendering once far flung corners of the earth newly accessible. Night, once a dominion that regulated productivity, is now outshone by brilliant dazzling light. Singular moments can transform into global narratives in the blink of an eye, etching themselves permanently in our collective memory. Genomic engineering ushers in a medical renaissance as conversations will soon shift from solving genetic predispositions to normalizing genetic enhancements. The year is 2024.
Memories are experienced and replayed not through words but through a language that transcends speech’s limitations. Our thoughts traverse a collective highway of consciousness in a harmonious symphony. Vivaldi would be proud; his artificial construct seems to think so. Our night sky is no longer littered with stars but bustles with the lively glow of orbiting lights, ships, and satellites. We are the headmasters of the solar system, no longer the frontier but rather our cosmic playground. Just as we mastered computer code to create artificially intelligent beings we now call equal, we’ve conquered our genetic code. We now stand on equal footing with death. Once inevitable, mortality is now more of a choice; a fundamental human right. The year is 2124.
The future is yesterday, today, and tomorrow. In every epoch, humanity has painted its future with the brush of imagination. turning the abstract into the concrete. The future, is always a distant horizon, but it’s also continuously reshaped by the dreams of yesterday, the actions of today, and the visions of tomorrow. We are not just participants in this journey but creators, sculpting the next chapter of our collective story.
My favorite creative works that helped me understand and think through this topic:
- The Beginning & End of Humanity (video) by Pursuit of Wonder
- Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant (video) by CPG Grey
- Gattica (film) by Andrew Niccol