Whether Forecast

WHETHER FORECAST

Though the next few decades will both deliver many surprises and fulfill expected gains, the distant future will evolve as an ominous, eerie, difficult-to-forecast shadowy blur of incomprehensibility. Certain new discoveries are likely to change everything.

Assuming that things proceed without a major cataclysm or global catastrophe--such that a recovery to our current level of technology is postponed indefinitely--the next few centuries will create an ever widening gap between our present notions of the real world, and a view of reality to come that is so different from contemporary perceptions, that the language to describe or explain it does not yet exist.

Many if not most people would shudder in disbelief or tremble with incredulous anger if they could somehow perceive the world yet to be. It is both fun and shocking to speculate, from a somewhat informal and barely enlightened perspective, whether we become gods or demons. Or, as now, minor league players at both.

Imagine, just for a moment, the most shocking, outrageous, unbelievable conditions that might exist in another hundred years or so. Neither good nor bad, just strange, weird, bizarre, and on the very fringe of understanding. Now imagine such speculations, regardless of how perverse, aberrant, decadent, or impossible, as being even less amazing than the actual world awaiting the grown child who is born one year from today.