7.0 - The Future - Baseline

"Good luck in the future." My middle school yearbooks have that phrase scrawled in them dozens of times (ok, well, actually quite a few said "Good luck in the fucher," but I'm pretty sure I know what they meant).

Why not good luck now? Now is when I need it. What good is good luck later?

Looking at now from now, I don't see my good luck. When I look at now from then, I can see that indeed my future was lucky. I'm glad now that back then I was wished good luck in the future. I didn't really need it in sixth grade.

Anyway, the future has always been a topic of interest. Looking at now as the past's future provides an interesting perspective on the future that still is.

We as humans have a tendency to set artificial limits on the possible.

Alexander Graham Bell predicted that one day every manufacturing firm in the United States would have a telephone. Bold prediction? I suppose that depends where you stand in time.

The chief engineer of the British Post Office said in 1876 that the telephone might be all well and good for the United States but that it would never catch on in Great Britain because the country has an adequate supply of messenger boys. Then in 1886 he said that if the growth of telephone subscribership continued, by the year 2000 every woman in Great Britain would have to be a telephone operator.

He was right. Actually all of us are telephone operators by his standards. We connect our own calls.

To see into the future we must remove the artifical limits from seemingly bold predictions, and embrace the mocking predictions of the naysayers.

Science fiction has a long and glorious history of becoming science fact. John Brunner first envisioned a computer worm in his 1975 novel The Shockwave Rider. William Gibson's Neuromancer defined cyberspace in 1984, about six years before the WWW came to be, and long before 'net use became common. I have read about personal computers, cell phones, and even email in books written many years before these things became a reality.

To see into the future we must indulge our fantasies. If we can envision the future, we can make it happen. We probably should plan for it, too.

This is my baseline. The future is coming. Predictions to follow...