Everyone (and when I say that I mean myself, i don't know enough people to say that accurately, but I assume there are others) tend to look toward the future with a false sense of optimism. "All our problems will be fixed in the future" I say to myself. "Everyone will stop being stupid because education will get better", "that energy crisis will figure itself out because renewable energy will get more and more efficient", the list of problems that the simple passage of time seems to solve goes on and on and on and it isn't hard for me to imagine a future cyber paradise where everyone listens to
Far Side Virtual all day atop geodesic skyscrapers.
It is true that as the future goes on we will get more liberal. This is fact. The absolutism of the paleolithic era, the simple kill or be killed dogma will no doubt vanish as time goes on and technology improves simply because life itself will get less competitive. Our ability to satisfy ourselves biologically will no doubt improve dramatically to the point where it may never even be a question whether or not food is on the table. I have no doubt that simple progress will be able to completely satisfy the bottom layer of Maxwell's hierarchy of needs. In the future (assuming nothing extremely cataclysmic happens) we will no doubt be able to maintain homeostasis like never before.
But think about how many of us actually complain about maintaining homeostasis on any given day. Admittedly, the answer is quite a sizable majority of population, but certainly none of the people who can speak the language this blog is written have that much a problem with homeostasis (even that statement isn't entirely true.) But my point is, you, the person reading this blog (who certainly has enough free time to journey deep into the Google search engine to find it) probably has no trouble accounting for all your basics biological needs on a long time basis. Homeostasis is not what we are worried about when we look hopefully to the future. What we are hoping for, even praying for in the future is the total absence of conflict (and even just unwanted turmoil) in general. We are hoping for the elimination of all our current societal woes, be they nuclear war, poverty, energy crisis, etc. We look to the future with the hope that everything that is problem now will be not a problem later. Then we get all fuzzy inside.
Lets grant that though. Let's assume that every problem we have now will be solved in the future. Great, that fantastic. Your life still won't be a living seventh heaven. Do you want to know why? When you eliminate all the problems you know you have, the problems that you don't know you have will emerge. I mean, even if we treat the universe as a static object that won't collapse into a black hole in 90 billion years, and we exempt the earth from external apocalypses brought by asteroids and the like, we will still face the unforeseen consequences of our actions in the self contained environment of our planet. Do you think anyone for saw the problems we would face today a hundred years ago? Of course not. People a hundred years ago didn't know computers would be a thing. I mean, its quite possible people wrote about them in stories and the like, but they were never considered as a practical reality. And they shouldn't have been. It would've been illogical to prepare for something that we weren't sure existed or not.
But all examples aside, the point I'm making still stands. There are always unknown unknowns, and even if they wont be unknown in the future, they are unknown now. And that's the crux of my argument. The problems we have now are no doubt a small, select portion of all the problems we could be having. Even excluding the fact that humans are always gonna remain the fickle creatures that we are, the universe (heck even just the planet earth) is bigger then you can ever imagine, and that's not any fault of your own. You can at most only know
about 300 people, what makes you think you can predict the collective consequences of 7 billion people?
"But x^2," you think as read this blog, "surely our ability to predict the future will get better as well! We may not be able to process the universe, but surely we can build a computer that can. I mean it's all just math, right?" Fair enough, we may be able to build a computer that can comprehend all seven billion people on the planet and then run predictive analysis to determine the best course of action. My point still stands: When you've dealt with all the problems you can see, the only problems you have are the one's you aren't aware of, and to suggest that there is a finite amount of things you can't be aware of is almost certainly illogical (and that wouldn't be very futurist of you). On another note, what makes you think we will be able to understand the answer the computer gives us? Why should we follow the advice that doesn't make sense to us? And don't pull that "God works in mysterious ways bullshit" because that's not very futurist of you either.
Neil Degrasse Tyson said that if you define God as all the stuff we aren't able to explain then God will slowly shrink as scientific progress moves onward. Sure, there may come a point were we are able to explain everything that happens, but that doesn't mean that we will be able to stop it from happening (heck, maybe it will turn out that it needs to happen.) There is a reason why throughout all of human history people who think the present is Humanity's lowest point and exist alongside people who think this is the highest point. We can only compare things to the past, and if things look worse now than they did back then (or better), what else are you supposed to think? We know we can't predict the future, so we ignore it, but in doing so, we get all worked up about the present.
If believing in the future is your way of coping with an uncertain world, then that's fine. Believe all you want. Base your dreams on the knowledge of the future, but make base your reasoning on the knowledge of the present. And besides, how fair would it be if at some point humans just stopped having problems? That would be a boring ass place to live. Conflict is what makes life interesting. You can't have good without the bad. That's something that will always be true.
But who knows for sure? Only time will tell.
