Depending on your background, education, socioeconomic status, and chosen tribal affiliations, you see the present differently than I do. Likely the future as well.

Are the centuries ahead a place of vast wealth inequality and climate catastrophe, of oppression of the masses and alternative facts that replace objective reality? Or will they bring a post-scarcity society where the purpose of being human is, as Captain Picard would say “to improve yourself. To enrich yourself. Enjoy it.”

The likely truth is that the future will surprise adherents of both viewpoints. Perhaps even worse, whatever that future holds, it will not necessarily be either a recognizable or comfortable reality any alive today would hope for.

It has always been this way. As a species, we’ve been around in our current physical bodies for about 300,000 years. As a culture that advances its technology, creates representational art, and allows for specialized learning of skills, perhaps we go back only 65,000 years. Even so, one of our Cro-Magnon ancestors from a mere 50,000 years ago could hardly be expected to take our modern world as a welcoming advancement.

50,000 years ago, the Sahara was wet and fertile. Continental ice sheets extended as far south as London in Europe and New York City in North America.

If we were able to bring one of our ancestors forward in time, the physical world would be unlike any she had experienced. How could she process the idea of cities filled with millions of people where once there had been mile high barriers of ice?

The natural world she knew would be extinct. Rhinoceros, hippopotami, and straight tusked elephants no longer roam Europe. After millions of years on the hunt, saber-tooth cats no longer prowl the grasslands of a vanished ecosphere.

Our languages would be babble, our food perhaps inedible (far too sweet and salty, I would guess), the noise unendurable, the people weirdly taller with thinner faces and no brow ridges, the weather unendurably hot and wet. Even our concepts of family and law, of justice and gender, of God and the good would likely prove foreign in the extreme.

Would modern life be a utopia or a hellscape? Would a mother of 50,000 years past ever accept our world as a future to which her progeny should aspire?

50,000 years may seem like an exaggeration too extreme to be valid. So, should we bring forward a Carthaginian nobleman of only 2,000 years past? How would his sense of self handle the fact that even the poorest nations today live in lands of artificial light, that we inhabit a world where ordinary people communicate across oceans with handheld devices, where vast wealth is digital, where plague, leprosy, and tuberculosis are no longer common scourges, and where its ancient history that Carthage fell to its Roman foes before the “common era” even began. (And, of course, today even the Roman empire is long gone.)

Perhaps this aristocrat, if he could be made to understand our world at all, would come to see his own once proud empire as an impoverished backwater in time, where all his dreams inevitably would have turned to ashes.

But future dissonance need not span much time at all. As recently as the steam age and the advent of early trains, it was known that humans couldn’t breathe if moving over 30 miles per hour, or if such speeds were possible, certainly women were not designed travel at 50 miles per hour (their uteruses would fly out of their bodies at that speed), and as late as 1920, the New York Times proclaimed that no rocket could propel itself through space because it had nothing to push against in a vacuum.

Would someone from just 100 years ago have a difficult time dealing with our global realities today?  Before 1920, women had no right to vote and few rights and privileges overall. The total expectation for the average young woman was to marry and bear children. At the same time, segregation, lynching, and the open oppression of black Americans was the common reality. Obviously, most of us would consider our present culture a bit of an improvement, even if many challenges in social justice remain. 

That said, I’m certain my own parents —who passed away in the 1980s— would have a difficult time adjusting to the technological, cultural, and global changes of the 40 years since, if suddenly brought forward by some magical time machine.

The next few centuries are likely to be even more disruptive, and a trip to the future as disconcerting for us as a visit to Times Square would be for our Ice Age ancestors. Consider some of the following possibilities:

In all this, there will remain conflict, ignorance, injustice, poverty, oppression, and strife.

It has been said that one person’s utopia is another’s dystopia, and that may be true. But there are trends and likely outcomes that —from most objective viewpoints— are hopeful for humanity. Over the next few centuries:

The centuries ahead are certainly an undiscovered country, the landscape of which would seem unfamiliar at best and discomforting certainly to all those who hoped for a utopia suited to the stylings of their own limited imagination.

But for humanity, it will be as H.G. Wells penned it for the Science Fiction Film “Things to Come” in 1936. The movie ends with a dramatic monologue, paraphrased below:

“When we have conquered all the deeps of space and all the mysteries of time, still we will be beginning.  And if we’re no more than animals we must snatch each little scrap of happiness and live and suffer and pass, mattering no more than all the other animals do or have done. It is this-or that: all the universe or nothing… Which shall it be?”

And whether we can ever see the future clearly or not, there’s Hope in that.