Never heard of it before. My first impression: I wish there were more science, but I liked this quote.
If you ask my eight-year-old about the Future, he pretty much thinks the world is going to end, and that’s it. Most likely global warming, he says—floods, storms, desertification—but the possibility of viral pandemic, meteor impact, or some kind of nuclear exchange is not alien to his view of the days to come. Maybe not tomorrow, or a year from now. The kid is more than capable of generating a full head of optimistic steam about next week, next vacation, his tenth birthday. It’s only the world a hundred years on that leaves his hopes a blank. My son seems to take the end of everything, of all human endeavor and creation, for granted. He sees himself as living on the last page, if not in the last paragraph, of a long, strange and bewildering book. If you had told me, when I was eight, that a little kid of the future would feel that way—and that what’s more, he would see a certain justice in our eventual extinction, would think the world was better off without human beings in it—that would have been even worse than hearing that in 2006 there are no hydroponic megafarms, no human colonies on Mars, no personal jetpacks for everyone. That would truly have broken my heart. When I told my son about the Clock of the Long Now, he listened very carefully, and we looked at the pictures on the Long Now Foundation’s website. “Will there really be people then, Dad?” he said. “Yes,” I told him without hesitation, “there will.”
I find it hard “believing” in a technological future too. I have that “last paragraph of a long book” feeling. But they’re right, it’s probably not healthy.
I used to have that the-world-is-ending feeling, too. I picked it up by osmosis. Environmentalists were talking like we were going to run out of natural resources any day now (and often predicting disaster just a few years ahead). A lot of people casually mentioned that they expected the world to end any day now from nuclear war, although that might have been exacerbated by the fact that I read books which were written before the Soviet Union broke up. But nuclear tensions have been steadily ebbing, and environmental doomsday predictions have consistently failed to come true, and now I’m feeling optimistic enough to think about actually dealing with a technological future.
I don’t have links handy, but I’ve seen quite a bit of discussion to the effect that science fiction, especially American science fiction, has become very pessimistic.
I don’t expect humanity to end in the near future, but I can definitely relate. I’ve internalized the idea of a technological singularity, not in the sense that everything will become incredibly awesome due to rapid technological advancement, but in the sense that attempting to make predictions beyond a horizon in the not so distant future is absolutely futile. I don’t think mind uploading or interstellar colonization, I just get… blank.
Never heard of it before. My first impression: I wish there were more science, but I liked this quote.
I find it hard “believing” in a technological future too. I have that “last paragraph of a long book” feeling. But they’re right, it’s probably not healthy.
I used to have that the-world-is-ending feeling, too. I picked it up by osmosis. Environmentalists were talking like we were going to run out of natural resources any day now (and often predicting disaster just a few years ahead). A lot of people casually mentioned that they expected the world to end any day now from nuclear war, although that might have been exacerbated by the fact that I read books which were written before the Soviet Union broke up. But nuclear tensions have been steadily ebbing, and environmental doomsday predictions have consistently failed to come true, and now I’m feeling optimistic enough to think about actually dealing with a technological future.
By the way, this reminds me of one of the fake job application cover letters from Joey Comeau’s book Overqualified, which probably qualifies as a rationality quote in its own right, if only for the brilliant last paragraph. It hails from an alternate universe where Greenpeace isn’t stupid and counterproductive.
I don’t have links handy, but I’ve seen quite a bit of discussion to the effect that science fiction, especially American science fiction, has become very pessimistic.
I don’t expect humanity to end in the near future, but I can definitely relate. I’ve internalized the idea of a technological singularity, not in the sense that everything will become incredibly awesome due to rapid technological advancement, but in the sense that attempting to make predictions beyond a horizon in the not so distant future is absolutely futile. I don’t think mind uploading or interstellar colonization, I just get… blank.