Welcome back to another blog hop, with #OpenBook. Here’s this week’s prompt.
Don’t forget to click the link to see what everyone else has to say on this week’s subject. It’s at the end of my post.
You have been chosen to participate in a time travel adventure (You’ll end up in the same area as you are now). You get to choose between travelling 150 years in the past or 150 years in the future. Which do you pick?
It has to be the future. As well as creating a version of the future in my head, I’m very aware of all the problems of the present and the amount of discussion about what will become of us as a species.
Even the possibility that we might not be here in 150 years.
My personal opinion is that we will get our act together in the end, but it would be nice to see it confirmed.
My initial desire would be to see what has happened to the place compared to the predictions of the rest of society.
Have we sorted the warming and pollution issues out yet? Have we reconciled our differences and started working together? Is AI being used in the right way, to solve problems, instead of just to rip creatives off and make money for the wrong people?
Don’t get me started.
As well as getting the answers to those questions, and the most important question of all, are they still playing the music of the 1960s and 70s? it would also be pretty cool to see if anything that I predicted in my writing has actually happened. Because the things I’ve devised seem so logical.
My future worlds (and I do include Earth in that) have things like mini hydro-electric generators in every bit of running or tidal water, and induction motor vehicles, powered by a specially constructed field built into the road’s surface.
Or Glasswall, where cameras and computers work together to project the outside view onto the inside structure of an air/spacecraft, making it seem like you’re flying without one. These are things that are possible now, given the will.
Then again, there may be things that are considered impossible but have been achieved by a leap in science. I postulated faster-than-light travel by a device I called the Padgett Inverter, which was a serendipitous discovery that obeyed Einstein but took a different approach to solve the problem. Will our future have something like that, enabling travel anywhere in the Galaxy? What else might be found the same way?
We might all have light sabres.
The thing to remember, when you’re thinking about the future, is that just about all scientific advance is based on what came before. Occasionally, a left-field idea might appear, like Penicillin, or Teflon or X-Rays, but the majority of advancement is a steady progression on what we already have.
So, in my world of the future, even without any leap of discovery, I would expect to see a more advanced now, with Quantum computers, colonies on Mars or the Moon, maybe a lot of spaceships. In all likelihood (I hope), the climate and pollution problems will be seen as an aberration, a memory of a bad period in history.
There could well be a frontier spirit about the place.
Our race may well be entering a new era of exploration, comparable to that of the last few hundred years, only this time, instead of Terra Incognita, we will be looking at the stars.
I’d love to be a part of it.
What do you think about this week’s subject?
Let me know by leaving me a comment.
While you’re here, please click the InLinkz link to check out what my fellow writers have to say about this week’s topic.
I’ll be back with another post on Thursday, see you then. Meanwhile, have a great week.
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Stevie Turner
Good theories there, Richard, but I think future generations might well be burnt to a crisp because nobody is taking global warming seriously enough.
Richard Dee
Maybe, but I can hope that people see sense, even if they leave it until the last minute. Imagine waking up to find that the problem has been over-solved and we’re now facing an ice-age!
P.J. MacLayne
I’m worried about the future of the human race. If we keep expending out energy on fighting each other, how can we make any advances in other fields?
Richard Dee
A cultural reset is definitely required. Perhaps we need the aliens to turn up and concentrate our minds.
Laurel A Sliney
I think humans are incredibly adaptable and global warming isn’t a threat we can’t adapt to. I also think humans have a lot of hubris, believing we can control the global climate. Solar radiation is a much more powerful force than anything we can manage…thus far.
The geophysicists at the University of Alaska are perhaps less alarmist than some. And some of them postulate solar radiation is what has caused global (and solar system) warming and that appears to have climaxed. We’re lagging behind because that’s what planets do, but eventually, the Earth will cool (say, over the next 20-50 years) and there’s every reason to believe we’ll have another ice age — in about 10,000 years. It won’t be noticeable in 150 years, but eventually humans will need to move underground or to other planets because all but the Equator will be under 100 mile sheets of ice.
That makes me wish I was a sci fi writer. I love to read the genre, but I get bored by the scientific consistency necessary to write the genre.
Richard Dee
Thanks for commenting. I’ve been called someone who writes Sci-fi for people who don’t like Sci-fi. I’d hate to put people off a story by over-sciencing things. As long as it all sounds true, I’m happy. And I can see that there’s a lot more to the whole Earth climate debate than the single minded blame game that can only be solved by taxing people.
Kelly Williams
I hope we do get it together. There’s so much cool stuff to come, if so! I’d love a lightsaber bread slicer… toasts the bread as you cut. Is that too hitchhikers guide?
Richard Dee
That’s a cool idea, I wish I’d thought of it.