Who Creates The Future? By Steve Parris
Thursday, July 3rd, 2008
Am I the only one old enough to remember the oft-time black and white promise of a glorious future? A future filled with technological wonders such as flying cars and cities in the sky. While it may not be necessary to remember, it’s certainly fun to discover which predictions from the past have become today’s reality. Transporting Your Future Today will be reviewing predictions made by futurists that are anywhere from 50 to 80 years old for their accuracy. The blog will explore through dialogue with its readers how predictions affect the future. Readers will be asked to comment on the accuracy of old pictures like the one above or audio or video files from the 30s, 40s, 50s and 60s. I hope you will find the content compelling enough that you will share your thoughts in an attempt to understand how futurists and their predictions from the last 80 years or so affect life today and tomorrow.
Each new post will add a new category with a link to a media clip or picture. Links will be of varying types, some will be film shorts such as those shown in schools across America for years. Others will be audio files or pictures like the one above, a 1953 depiction of a
home from the future. Homes and people are not known to exist in orbit today unless you consider the International Space Station a home. This depiction, I think, is compelling enough that it may have indirectly contributed to the building of the space station in some way if enough people involved in its creation viewed it or simular pictures from that time. Considering that man had not achieved or floated in orbit in the early 50’s, the depiction bares an uncanny resembance to the second picture above of astronaunts working at the space station. I rate it a 8 because much progress have been made by man in only 50 years that it can’t be that long before people are permenantly living in dome houses in the sky with lawns and trees.
I am asking readers to review the media and if you believe that the prediction being made is motivating enough to be remotely responsibile for something happening today then share your comments and rate the accuracy of the predictions on the usual scale of 1 to 10 with 10 being the best. Collectively, through readers comments we will have an idea of how well futurists’ predictions are perceived to affect the future. Perhaps an open web dialogue may help to transport the future today by speeding up development of the missing technologies. So in some small way, you can help to create the remaining technologies needed to make the space home prediction 100% accurate. Maybe you, your family or your friends hold the keys to domes homes and trees in orbit.
For those unfamiliar, futurists are a group of individuals who dare to share their visions of tomorrow with all of us today. They come in various forms. Some predict the hot new futuristic products for corporations like Control4, a futuristic automation company. Others are sci-fi writers like Arthur C. Clark and Stanley Kubrick, co-writers of 2001: A Space Odessey . And others still, although not quite as famous, write articles for popular magazines like The Futurist. A few schools are offering degrees in the future. How about a master’s degree in futures studies or alternative futures, if you too are so inclined and desire to shape today’s future.
As a final thought, Transporting Your Future Today’s believes that technology is a measure of progress and, therefore is a marker of the future. It also acknowledges that it is entirely possible that what is collectively known as “the future” may be determined by some higher markers, like eliminating war and hunger, taming the forces of nature or achieving “world peace”. Yes, these are a real possibility of what technology can achieve. And if so, then Transporting Your Future Today would argue that technology can and will solve these and other problems like global warming that affects our future happiness and prosperity. One example of this is Doctors Without Borders‘ Plumpynut, a decidedly low tech solution to feed starving children in the developing world. Would it be fair to say that a world without straving children is a marker of the future?
With these thoughts in mind, Transporting Your Future Today’s initial post “Who Creates The Future? ” asks readers to help answer this question by considering the following related questions:
- Is the future of its own creation, that is, is it its own reality forged by creation and maybe only slightly nudged by educators who motivate us to make a contribution?, or
- Is the future created by those holding and wheeling power over the masses, that is, by elected officials, religious leaders, dictators or, perhaps, even terrorists?, or
- Did great inventors or inventions forge our present world, that is, is it created by technological advances?, or finally
- Is the future inspired by sci-fi writers and futurists?
of all aspects of existence. But all of existence has yet to solve the intriguing chicken and the egg quandry. Which comes first? Is it our ideas, or, is our future mandated by other forces that may or may not be changeable by man. Consider this, was it a book like Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon that inspired US President John F. Kennedy to challenge NASA to go to the moon or was it solely a political move to out pace the Soviets? The parallels are endless!Would humanity be better served knowing who creates the future? Please share your thoughts.