What happened to the future?  It used to be all about hover skateboards, flying cars, living on the moon... the future was bright and exciting, we didn't know what to expect but we were excited and had positive creativity.

Today the future is zombie apacalypses, nuclear winters, global warming, 2012, y2k... what happened?  Why do I have to constantly think I won't be around in the future... that the world is going to end before I'm ever a girl?

Not that I'm some hypocondriac (sp?) but for real do you notice this too? I'm 25 and have my whole life to live still... can we make the future positive again? Pleeeaaaasse?!?!?

The Future's Not What It Used To Be.

graffiti on the wall, Haight-Ashbury, Summer of '69.

Quote from: rylielove on August 16, 2010, 04:15:05 PM
What happened to the future?  It used to be all about hover skateboards, flying cars, living on the moon... the future was bright and exciting, we didn't know what to expect but we were excited and had positive creativity.

Today the future is zombie apacalypses, nuclear winters, global warming, 2012, y2k... what happened?  Why do I have to constantly think I won't be around in the future... that the world is going to end before I'm ever a girl?

Not that I'm some hypocondriac (sp?) but for real do you notice this too? I'm 25 and have my whole life to live still... can we make the future positive again? Pleeeaaaasse?!?!?

Actually nuclear winter is what it used to be. Would you rather have lived during the cold war? It was decidedly less optimistic then when compared to what we worry about now. 

I'll make a prediction.

In a few hundred years, white people will become very rare.

This very question has me in an imaginary wonderland of jetpacks, space helmets and rayguns. If cyberpunks and steampunks can have their fun, then so shall I have raypunk. ^_^

Perhaps all it takes is an individual outlook. One day, maybe, it'll actually happen. There are enough people about for there to be a raygun gothic rocket ship in San Francisco these days, just to commemorate the future that never was. Until then, I just do what I can to have fun. 'Cos the future should be that, just as much as the present. Goodness knows the past wasn't much fun...

Quote"Tomorrow offers new frontiers in science, adventure and ideals: the Atomic Age, the challenge of outer space, and the hope for a peaceful and unified world."

~ Walt Disney

In grade school I learned to "duck and cover" if I saw a bright flash of light (nuclear explosion).  The future was tomorrow or next week - anything longer was just a dream.  You could perhaps prolong it with a home-built bomb shelter, but it was uncertain whether you could survive long enough or would want to live even if you did. 

In college the future was an almost certainty of being drafted and then probably sent to Viet Nam.  Thoughts of a career were for after that if there was an after that.

Live for today.  The past formed you and perhaps you learned a few things.  No one knows the future.  Today is all you have to work with.  I don't mean "eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow we die."  Rather, do the best you can now to create as pleasant a future as you can for yourself.

- Kate

"If you want to make enemies, try to change something" (Deus Ex: Human Revolution trailer)

The more things change, the more society tries to remain the same. Be it spirituality/belief systems, government policy, the nature of government itself and the nation-state model, any attempts to alter current models of social structure (that is required for wide scale prosperity) is met with the same paranoid fear all too common with those who are unwilling to adapt to the future as it could be.

Instead of unified governance with one set of laws, divide and conquer is humanities game.
Instead of a few common languages, there are hundreds of dialects with the only reason for existence being so called tradition.

There could be a future Star Trek style, only if "we" cast the chains and let it happen.

Quote from: spacial on August 16, 2010, 05:00:15 PM
I'll make a prediction.

In a few hundred years, white people will become very rare.

Already happening, the recessive gene for blue eyes is dieing off, just a matter of time before caucasian origin persons become added to the endangered species list.

not as long as they can take everyone out with them.

Hmmm, well I grew up in the 80s and 90s... maybe that and the combination of being a kid gave me the idea thay the future was bright and anything was possible.  I see all of your points about how we're always faced with a dim future but I don't want to anymore... I look in the mirror and fear ill never see femininity, why can't I think positively about transition.  I was just referencing that in todays world (and yes the past too) we're constantly told to live in perpetual fear about the future and I hate it.

So I guess this idea just boils down to wanting to think like a kid again with innocent eyes.... how do we do that?

maybe that and the combination of being a kid gave me the idea thay the future was bright and anything was possible

Oh, don't kid yourself, it was all gone by then.  All you were getting was some warmed-over left-overs from the early 1950s.

I think when you're a kid everything seemed brighter and more possible.  Growing up, I knew life was hard and that my future had the distinct possibility of sucking royally...I didn't buy into that whole "you can do anything!" thing either as I was growing up, but I was a jaded individual and I'm still a jaded individual.

Someone mentioned languages, there are also a lot of language mixing going on--such as Spanglish (which my Spanish teacher disapproves of).  Then you have Phillipino (spelling?).  Listening to my aunt speak in her native tongue is like listening to someone switch between three or four different languages every other word--I've heard English, Spanish, and a few other things come out of her mouth (which made my day, actually--I love languages).  But if all of the older languages died out, I'd be pretty devastated because then I might never learn to read various things in what they were originally written.

I don't think you could ever go back to that innocent mindset of being a kid and I don't think it would be a very good thing to try to go back to that way because it would mean forgetting various things that changed the innocent mindset and possibly leading to an unproductive member of society.

--All above was purely opinion. ^^ --

I don't know that we should look at the world with totally innocent eyes, but we can see the good parts while being aware of the bad parts.  Tomorrow will probably be something like today, with more good people than bad, with opportunities to make bad decisions or good ones, with gradual social progress (with a few bad hiccups), with your personal relationships being more important to your day-to-day well-being than what's going on somewhere else.

Yes, there are bad things happening and the future can look mighty grim.  But many small good things happen all the time, too.  Since we can't know the future, we can only work toward how we want to be in the future.  And the probabilities are that rylielove will get to be the girl she really is inside.

- Kate

Considering that 250 years ago we had no electricity, no nothing othre han wind power and fire, we sure have come fast considering that as modern humans we have been around for at leat 100,000 years!!!

Considering that we only have less than 50 years left of the stuff that powered all that, you're amazingly short-sighed.

I predict that this threads future looks doomed. 

well one thing is for sure - nostalgia just isn't what it used to be! 

More seriously though these things go in cycles. We face many challenges as a species, some of which, like the finite nature of our oil resources, we have ignored for far too long and may well bring our current technological civilisation crashing down.

I would say that the chances of our civilisation falling in the next 50 years are worryingly high. I'm honestly not sure if I were starting out today, whether I would choose to transition given the high likelihood of it becoming impossible to get supplies of hormones and the like in the future. (and those who know me should understand that for me to say that means that I am very worried indeed, because I would never willingly have gone without transition unless as a last resort.)

The thing which may yet change this is if some serious effort is applied to solving the twin problems of developing new and sustainable sources of energy generation, and controlling the population growth. If that can be done, then things will look brighter again. Until they are BOTH tackled then I fear that within half a century our current way of life will be brought crashing to the ground.

Why is this in transsexual talk? I didn't bother reading this thinking it would just be a TS moaning about seeing no possible future &c... but it's much more fun than that.

We had a programme called 'Tomorrow's World' and I remembering them doing all sorts of exciting things like testing out cds and stuff. I remembered when I heard of my first video conference and thinking it was like the Jetsons. I grew up near Gatwick airport and I remember the joy of the monorail - even recently I had a run on the DLR and that was like a ride and a perfectly sci-fi way to get into the docklands area (to the wonderful museum of the docklands). I also like some of the new architecture such as the Gherkin and London's City Hall. I can't wait till they finish the Shard of Glass. There are lots of people around here driving electric cars that move quicker than milk floats. I pay for the bus and tubes with a card that beeps. I have access to all sorts of libraries, shops and stuff through the internet. In many ways this does feel like the future I was promised - I never really envisioned my role in it though, and I guess I still don't - which is fine. I'll just pervert all this high tech stuff to my own ends and take the monorail to the museum and use the internet to buy out of print novels.

THE FUTURE IS NOW NOW NOW now

how do we get here? the future is how

I could be flippant or practical.

In Pakistan at the moment the future is: can my family and I live under a tarp in polluted water while the world ignores me.

It is: I really need a telephone/computer that can allow me to access  mind blowing technology so that I can tell my  friends I need them, when they are sitting next to me.

Is it: I can do a liver transplant on an alcoholic that costs $500,00, but I will not supply clean water to children and let them die of diarrhea.

It is: putting a 10 year old on a heart risk diet and pretending that her parents are not child abusers for ruining her life with a  Mcdiet.

It is: being raped in exchange for a hand full of rice to feed my starving child.

It is: building the most technology advanced machines and enhancing them, and that they are purely designed to kill.

It is: being in ER on a Christmas Eve and explaining to  a 26yr old Mum, that the bruises she has on her legs from bouncing her 9 month old baby is from her just diagnosed leukemia. She died within weeks. Obviously I still remember.


There is no future. And I mean that in a positive way.
There is only the past  and now.

The future is in your hands.

Sorry for being a little melodramatic.

Cindy



It is:

Quote from: Flan on August 16, 2010, 05:42:32 PM

Already happening, the recessive gene for blue eyes is dieing off, just a matter of time before caucasian origin persons become added to the endangered species list.

Possibly, but I was more thinking about the increasing failure of people with what we refer to as white skin, simply not producing enough children.

The skin tone is, perhaps a bit of a generalisation since there are people with very fair skin from other parts of the world.

But people who produce offspring with light skin tone, (tendency) non-brown eyes and (invariably) non-black hair, tend to originate from a very small corner of the world. Northern Europe.

These people have gone on to live in almost every part of the world, yet are even now, dying out, simply because they are no-longer producing enough children to sustain their genetic background.

To an extent, this is just an observation. But a more important aspect is that much of the drive to advance, technologically, has originated in Europe and from European cultures.  There is ample evidence that non-European cultures have achieved significantly in various areas of theoritical technology. Yet none took that leap to electrical energry storage.

Even today, the latest innovations in technology, using electrical energy, still come, predomently from European cultures. The far eastern cultures have exploited electrical energy of course. Though the innovations themselves, principally in electronics, still originated from predominaently European cultures.

I was speculating on how the future might look if these innovations become less important.

Cindy makes a good point though.

There would appear to be different social forces pushing us here. Those that seek to look backward, to see the past as some sort of utopia, principally politicians and religious types, those that seek to look forward, principally the psuedo science types, dreamers and charlitans. There there are those that want to look at the now. Some of the issue Cindy cited, for example.

The problem with the now group is they tend to cost money. The past group can always find reasons why today is so bad. The future group tells us that just a little more suffering and all the problems will be solved.

"Sometimes I worry 'bout the future
Are we ever going to find our way
I don't even realise
That we're living in the good old days

Stop taking life so serious
You don't even know what you have"

"Serious", Ash Grunwald. 

The 60's ?  Not that great really, I'm happy we got through them!