2107

A discussion came up in my office about what life will be like in one hundred years. Wouldn't it be cool to go ahead into the future and see what advances have been made and what changes have occurred in society? After giving this some thought, though, I have to question whether I want to know what the distant future will be like.

To understand how I may react to civilization in the future, I have to consider how people in the past might react if they were brought to the present. I have been through this line of thinking before, and I generally conclude that most people from one or two hundred years ago would have a very hard time with the current state of things. This is not because the current society is any worse than previous societies, but because things are very different and because the road here has not been without bumps.

Just imagine being relatively young in 1907 and finding out that the United States would fight in two world wars, go through an extended depression, be completely changed through a cultural revolution, and experience heightened security concerns from nuclear proliferation in a cold war followed by attacks from Muslim extremists. I think that would be scary. Sure, maybe the person from 1907 would be encouraged by improvements in medical science, communications, transportation, and so forth, but I don't know that the good would outweigh the bad in his or her perspective.

If a third world war was going to occur, I don't think I would want to know the details before they happened. If there were another depression, the only warning I would really want would be enough to pull out of the market before it crashed. If there were a pandemic of some disease I would only want enough warning to get my family inoculated in time.

So, if you are a time traveller from the future only tell me the good things.