Hope for Tomorrow

Today is where we make hope practical for tomorrow.

Futurity has always been a superlative incentive for two reasons: Hope and Outcomes.

HOPE: We hope for a better deal every day before going to sleep, because life is difficult and the challenge of being a person does not diminish with wealth, power or happiness..
OUTCOMES: The future alone can tell how it will all turn out in the end, which is what we want to know most of all—the outcome of a lifetime's worth of struggle & investment, the result of history! This is no less than the central Armageddon Issue, or an eschatalogical expectation which makes futurism tantalising beyond any technological surprise in store—indeed, beyond the promise of a better life!

But Futuristic Hope & Progress have also been a nuisance, for two reasons the same in any era: Agony and Confrontation.

AGONY, because another day can mean more torture, anxiety, discomfort for millions who live in crude bondage or suffer illness.

CONFRONTATION: progress is confronting, because it is not an external event, we have to live with every bit of novelty, adjust time-tested agendas to another breakthrough, check the notions of a lifetime against a newer revelation—and on that basis, hope itself soon turns into a nuisance, and scientific discoveries simply spoil the fun!

FUTURE CONFRONTING
Social organisation in any era depends on the quality of scientific procedure.

Ancient People were intelligent enough to give us the basis of everything we do, however lack of technical method meant that there was a limit to what you could expect by way of living conditions—which would improve or grow worse, for a time, depending on who had won the last war, basically!... Up to the 20th century the most extreme threat posed by technology consisted in putting up with rail-tracks being laid across your backyard. Or training your soldiers to use guns in haste, now that your enemy had done away with archers & ladders... Then, the human adventure took a drastic turn —thanks to scientific method, which brought Modern Times out of a static history.

Method meant that we could reproduce genius at will. Modernism altogether builds on the ability to successfully repeat a very difficult operation every time and in no time. This evolution was much needed after a million years left to the initiative of brilliant individuals, who kept producing masterpieces without a match for everyday purposes—whereas methodical production brought utilitarianism into every home in a comparatively dismal period of time. But this technical upgrading also has us standing at a crux, progress can only grow more stupendous by the day. From here on, there is no backtracking. The civilisation we have put on foot is neither whole nor quite oriented, yet reducing speed at this juncture would make it squarely unsafe—and as futile as hiring a muleteer to keep The Titanic from leaving the docks...

We have covered so much ground since the War of the Trenches, but can we take the next level of social acceleration?

This crucial question is the key to our futuristic equation. There is one answer only: now we have this kind of technology we must go the distance—which always sounds good, but is so frightening an exercise, most of us would rather wait for the 11th Hour. Trouble is, lagging at supersonic speed only calls for increasingly complex social conditions—whereas back in the Dark Ages, lagging meant that you never had a society complex enough to enjoy life, even if you were a big man... It's that Complexity is the First Proof of Progress—it is an acquired taste, does not exist in nature, as such. Reducing complexity to Common Denominators is the Second Evolution of Progress. We are not too good at doing that as yet; we are lagging, in other words—yet must go the distance, or make it worse for ourselves. It gets better: As it stands we are unfit to go the distance, yet must go beyond—we are already so advanced, we can only go beyond!... And this is the big social question, then, "what becomes of us when we make it to Mars—and then TO THE STARS?"...