The Unbearable Lightness of The Future

Everyone is wrong about the future. Man can only be certain about the present moment. But is that quite true either? Can he really know the present? Is he in a position to make any judgment about it? Certainly not. For how can a person with no knowledge of the future understand the meaning of the present? If we do not know what future the present is leading us toward, how can we say whether this present is good or bad, whether it deserves our concurrence, or our suspicion, or our hatred?
--Milan Kundera, "Ignorance"

I'm reading "Ignorance," a book about returning, by Czech/French writer Milan Kundera.

And The Moon Be Still As Bright.

In response to Carrie's previous post:
I think the best solution to this problem of being utterly forgotten in the future is to freeze yourself for a few hundred years so that when you thaw back out you can be like, "Hey, remember when I just jumped out of that time capsule? That was awesome!" Hopefully others will agree but in any case it is doubtful they would have forgotten that you did that by the time you popped that question. Unless the world as we know it had been destroyed by a sudden violent uprising of goldfish. Hmmm, I guess it isn't a foolproof plan after all.

I also want to share a short passage from The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury:

"His name was Benjamin Driscoll, and he was thirty-one years old. And the thing he wanted was Mars grown green and tall with trees and foliage, producing air, more air, growing larger with each season; trees to cool the towns in the boiling summer, trees to hold back the winter winds. There were so many things a tree could do: add color, provide shade, drop fruit, or become a children's playground, a whole sky universe to to climb and hang from; an architecture of food and pleasure, that was a tree. But most of all the trees would distill an icy air for the lungs, and a gentle rustling for the ear when you lay nights in your snowy bed and were gentled to sleep by the sound."

Sound familiar? A hippy tree-hugger who is colonizing Mars!

I'm going to take this moment to reveal something that I feel all the she-man science-fiction haters out there don't seem to understand. Science Fiction is simply a method of looking outside your self by stepping into a world where all your unrelenting prejudices, assumptions, and preconceptions are rendered completely irrelevant and thus melt away like so much of your face near the sun's corona. From this vantage of such facelessness we are able to view with eyes so blinded by impossibility ourselves but now without the things we thought we could see getting in the way of how things are. And now, since the future is really just a fiction for us so far yet our predictions of it firmly rooted in extrapolations of what we seem to have experienced logically in the past that it can be deemed science fiction by nature and thus this post is applicable to this blog. SF isn't about making it with sexy aliens or blowing up insectoid mother ships or traveling into the past, it is about the fact that we want to make it with sexy yous and blow up mothers and win the lottery. I think I got that right, right?

Also, for all those who don't like to check all the time and be disappointed that no new posts have occured there is a nifty little feature at the very bottom of this page where you can "subscribe" to this blog and therefore be notified of updates through "Google Reader". This exciting old technology is called an RSS Feed and is available for many other sites and it's pretty convenient so checks.

History

A Stone Jug

A bulldozer digging a pond
on my mother's family's land
unearths two stoneware jugs
buried four feet in the ground,
one broken and one intact.
Who put them there? When? Why?
We suppose, but can't explain.
Those who have come and gone
are gone. How lost to us
they are whose lives passed here
in the sun's beauty and sorrow!
And who in a hundred years
will know us as we are
in our present living and dying
here under the very sun, lost
to the future as to the past?

-Wendell Berry

The more I discover about The Future (that the world will end in 2012, snakes of zero thickness will continue to eat themselves, there will be no fresh water, holodecks will be the next Lynagh's (or we will go to Lynagh's via holodexing!)), the more I find myself thinking about the past.

What about time travel to the past? No way. I think the first time travelers to the past will be fun-ruiners, spying on everybody with wide eyes and writing things down and taking pictures with their futuristic image-capturers and always suggesting better ways to do things.

So I wrote a poem about the things I've been thinking about for the past few hours here in a coffee shop in Louisville.

Rumors

And who in a hundred years
will know us as we are
in our present living and dying
here under the very sun, lost
to the future as to the past?
(Wendell Berry, "A Stone Jug")

This is what the first man thought
as he pierced the skin of the first roaming animal
and watched her children scatter
as she sank to the earth.

This is what the first woman wondered
as she dropped the seeds of the first fruits
and watched the sprouts bloom
into a tree she wouldn't outlive.

They pondered the assurance of this constant renewal aloud,
quietly, in a language we no longer understand,
a simplicity we have forgotten over time,
as instantly as a twig is stamped, snapped.

This is an assurance growing steadily weaker
as we forget the future, as the land ever changes,
as it is dug and excavated,
developed and exhausted.

This is what we know:
only what has been passed down.
Stories and symbols,
artifacts and imprints.
Still, they are only rumours.

The The The ThThThThT-T-T-T...Future.

In the future we'll be able to go up to 3 seconds back in time so we can live our entire life as if it were a techno song.

In the future we'll be able to go forward 3 seconds in time so that we'll can live for 3 seconds longer.

In the future we'll increase the speed of our life spans to 3 seconds so that we can evolve more quickly into plasma computer gods.

In the future we'll be able to stop time, effectively rendering the future and this blog irrelevant and moot.

In the future we'll be able to escape from penitentiaries by absorbing and subsequently shooting lightning out of our appendages all the while making denim look hilarious (Ok I stole that one from Ernest Goes To Jail).

Survey Can't Decide

Gah! Carrie how could you make me choose between Blade Runner and Bowie! I've never actually seen The Man Who Fell From Earth but I voted for it anyway because Jareth sees all and if she ever kisses me he'll turn me into a prince...of Eternal Stench.

But the new revision of Blade Runner: The Final Cut comes out tomorrow, Friday! I've already got my advance tix. Oh, too bad you can't see it because it is only playing in NYC, albeit even only one theatre here. But its coming out on DVD as well so check it out if you've never seen it, this should be the best version ever.

You're right, I'd probably go with the billion years of rampant hedonism too...

What would you do if you knew the world was going to end? Good question, me. Maybe we'd take up religious sincerity or some might do the opposite and give up trying to please a god that's gonna smite 'em all anyway. Others may commit themselves to debauchery of all kinds while others may seek to share their final moments with a soulmate. Some people might even wait until the last moment and then bake themselves in a giant pan of cornbread. Who knows, but what we almost always assume is that we won't see it coming until it's really too late, like due to asteroids or disease or thermonuclear war or if someone thinks it's a bright idea to make an island full of kevlar-skinned dinosaurs with lethal heat rays instead of puny forearms and "accidentally" release them upon the unsuspecting hordes of New York City. Whatever. The point is that it is very possible that in the future we could see that the world is gonna end, but it's going to happen in like, a billions of years.

You see, the Universe is currently expanding away from a central point where we assume the Big Bang had occurred. We've been doing this at the speed of light for approximately 13.7 billion years (+/- 200 Mill of course) and it is theorized that at a certain point this expansion will cease and the universe will reverse its course and begin to collapse in on itself at the same speed constant (which happens to be the current max).

You might be saying now that if the universe is collapsing at the speed of light then this light will never actually reach us until it's too late and we'll be in the same situation as the first paragraph. True, other guy, but don't you think we'll start to see the effects of a universal collapse from a much greater distance? Ha!

And so we'd be all like, "Poo! The universe is pulling a four(+?) dimensional accordion act all up in our personal space and its pretty certain that eventually we're screwed but hey I'll be dead, and my children's chillin's chill'n's ch'll'n's be just as so. So let's not worry about it and go on boldly ahead hoping that some solution presents itself at the proper time like in those cinematic fictions we like so much." Sound familiar?

Or maybe the population of Earth would be shocked into getting its shit together and devoting our entire resources to doing something, anything, against these malignant (we'll think) cosmic forces. I like this one better because it's less boring. In this scenario, humanity will probably be in war for a little while to determine which methodology is best for this current and excruciatingly unique dilemma. But then we would get all badass and the like real quick. Say we've got a billion years to first, figure out the nature or at least a working model of the universe, metaphysics, and the sort. Then we gotta determine what needs to be done to survive since obviously we won't last long sitting around on this olde rocke. After that we implement our solution and badabing, cross our collective fingers.

I hope there wouldn't be too much despair and depressing feet shuffling because what the fuck we're awesome and it's worth a shot. For example, some have even suggested a solution to this massive catastrophe even now, in our feebly under-evolved state! And that took just a few thousands years to fantasize about but think what could happen in a billion years.

One solution that some have suggested passes over completely the implementation of the technology required of course, cuz if we knew how to do it we'd do it already. So as the universe collapses and the actual physical dimensions of space decrease then by the law of conservation of energy, the density of matter and energy will increase to drastic proportions. We'd all be burned alive way before we even came close to seeing the edge of the universe, sorry. This is where it would affect stars much beyond the cusp of danger that we could hopefully see them and begin preparing. Anyway so at a certain point in time all the mass and energy in the universe will converge into one infinitesimal point. Actually, no one can contemplate how small because it will essentially be directly at the point of nonexistence. Up until this point the density of energy (which increases heat and such which is the excitement of particles) increases until infinity, which is called the Aleph or Omega point. The calculations sort of break down at that point seeing as we can't really come close comprehending a universe of 0 dimension.

SOoooo, at this point all we have to have done is determine a way to make computations using universal interactions on the particle level which will increase exponentially to infinity which might theoretically result in a sort of endless supply for our "computers" if you want to call them, to process information. After we figure that out we just upload our consciousnesses into these subatomic computers and voila! We essentially live forever as hot plasma computer brains. Easy money, let's do this Yaaaaah battle cry!

Hmmm, well hope you kept up with that. Pretty heavy junk I know and also like one of those plots that end really abruptly and make you wonder if the writer ran out of paper or something.

Anyway, someone tell me what they would do if they were going to die by fiery-death wielding t-rexes in a few weeks. I can tell you I wouldn't be worried about the tanning bed.

And if you are interested I can go through the scenario of survival if the universe isn't a closed system and it just expands forever. Comments Comets.

If It's Yellow, Let it Mellow

In the last poll, 100% of you (all three respondents) voted "False" to "Things which have always been will always be." The results of this poll bring me to the next futuristic topic of discussion on this first day of October: that things which have always been (water) will not always be.

Here in Kentucky we've been experiencing somewhat of a drought. I find that reading Wendell Berry poems about praying for rain have been helping to bring a few morning showers, but nothing substantial. Now, less rain means fewer muddy footsteps and less mopping for me at the café. But it also means fewer crops for local farmers, and for us--fewer pumpkins, for example. In Lexington water use is restricted. I skim the Herald-Leader every morning and learn about how much water Lexingtonians used the previous day; this weekend, between Friday and Saturday, it was 43.929 million gallons, just from Kentucky American Water.

Water, being such a seemingly "abundant" resource on the planet, is a hard thing to fully understand and will perhaps even be a hard thing to come by. As we all know, scientists and English majors alike, matter can neither be created nor destroyed, so it's not as though water is simply dropping out of the evaporation/ condensation/precipitation water cycle and, literally, off the face of the earth.

I don't know much, but I will tell you what I do know.

Food Production
Every day we drink about 5 liters of water in various forms (tea if you're me, beer if you're Jacob). To produce the food we eat each day requires more than 2,000 liters.

• 90% of all the water we use in the world is used to produce food.
• It takes 25 gallons to produce 1 pound of wheat.
• It takes 5,000 gal to produce 1 pound of BEEF

Now, this is not an article about the evils of eating meat or the perils of thirsty cows or the greatness of vegetarianism. (Or is it?) But think about this: Americans consume 800kg of grain per person per year (that's almost 1800 pounds!). In Italy, the number is around 400kg; Japan is less than 200. Our life expectancy is lower than that of Japan. Red meat connection?

Using Water More Efficiently
The best way to do this is to capture rain before it runs down dirty streets, flows into drains, and hits useless land. It would be awesome if houses had water-catchers, if most drops of rain that fell were used productively, even just to flush the toilet with. In the meantime, if it's yellow let it mellow, and turn the water off while you brush your teeth. Or brush them less frequently.

Farming
Assuming that most won't commit to the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement (see: Nate's cause, VHEMT.org), population will only get bigger. The UN has predicted a number around 8.9 billion by 2050. How will everyone eat? Will everyone eat? In order to ensure the latter does occur, we need to develop some serious productivity improvement.

Genetically modified organisms
What if plants could be developed that were more resistant to insects and weeds, thus reducing the need for harmful chemicals? What if nutritious plants could be developed that withstood sub-Saharan conditions? I can't yet support this. Nor can I veto it completely. Controversial (and perhaps also a topic for a future discussion), but something to think about.

Hydroponics
A form of agriculture I'm curious to learn more about. What I do know about hydroponics is basically this: plants are grown with their roots in water--in a liquid that contains a good mix of nutrients. It uses very little water (good) and the minerals going to the roots can be precisely measured by a computer. I don't know enough about it to make any astute observations here. I just thought it was interesting. But diversity is a gorgeous thing, and it's a bad idea to foster the development of monocultures and chemicals.

I'm mostly concerned with Kentucky's pumpkin production.

Endangered Specie: Babies.

So I recently had the pleasure of re-viewing the ever-futuristic Blade Runner which takes place in Los Angeles in the year 2019. The cityscape is bleak and as far as I can tell blanketed by perpetual night. Marketing is pervasive and bright and forms a conspicuously striking contrast to the overly grimy denizens and architecture of the city. The prevailing motif of future-L.A. is black and neon and now that I think about it there isn't a single palm tree to be seen. To add to the misery all the models, movie stars, and marginally attractive humans (minus H.Ford) have apparently rocketed far away from this scene and Earth to the glamorous off-world colonies, presumably quite a ways away (at least as far as Orion) and everyone else is saving up to.
So what happens when we find/make planets that are just way better than Earth and everyone leaves except for the ugly and unsuccessful people? Let's just say that global overpopulation will not be as imminent an issue after the extinction of the erection.
I dunno about you but I'm already starting my off-world transportation fund.

A typical Future Dude,
note the facial scarring
and cheesy facial hair.
He also looks kinda down,
probably due to the
aforementioned extinction.

Speaking of Stephen Hawking, or, Another Funny Video

No blog about The Future is complete without "The Humans are Dead" by Flight of the Conchords.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=WGoi1MSGu64

Speaking of Stephen Hawking impressions...remember on Father Ted:

Dougal: It was like that time we put on that variety show and you did that impression of Stephen Hawking.

Ted:He was the last person you'd expect to turn up. That was a million to one shot.

In the future, Father Ted Crilly will be Pope.

Holodex!

As some of our readers may not be total future nerds yet I feel I should hit upon the most important make-believe future tech ever. I'm talking about the Holy Grail of the Geek; I'm talking about the universal definition of "If only"; I'm talking about the Holodeck.

The name may not ring any bells if you've never seen an episode of Star Trek (The Next Generation) but I'll lay it down for you nice and simple like. The holodeck is a room that can reproduce and project almost any environment you could possibly describe to a computer which you can then interact with exactly as if it were reality. Say you want to safari across the vast veldts of ancient Earth Africa, or maybe you want to solve devious crimes in 19th Century England, Baker street, or perhaps you'd want to play poker with Albert Einstein, Isaac Newton, and Stephen Hawking! All is possible with the holodeck!

Although I think they once tried to explain such a ridiculously amazing concept by saying that they used complex "photon manipulation" to achieve the Holodeck but other more actually living people are trying to reproduce the same effects in reality, even today! Of course we are so far from an actual implementation of even a rudimentary holodeck that it isn't even funny. Actually it's really sad because I'll probably die before it happens. Now that I think about it though I'm going to insert a clause for my Will that requires that my ancestry immediately create a holodeck version of me as soon as the technology is available! Of course since every piece of the internet is currently being cached by Google (whether you like it or not), by that time all that will remain for my progeny to use to reconstruct my personality will be Jacob and the Furries videos and witty Facebook profiles. In the future I will live on as a caricature of myself! But any metaphysics philosopher worth his weight in reconfigured photons will agree that that is better than nothin'.

To sum up, in the future we can all have post-humous sex with David Bowie without fear of necrophilia laws or rejection.

The Veldt by Ray Bradbury

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodeck



A really good example from ST:TNG
Einstein cracks me up every time.

I've Seen the Future, Brother:

"It is murder."

If the great poet Leonard Cohen could pen such a dismal prediction, how, you may ask, are we so optimistic about the future?

Thanks to Nate for sharing this link, which will lead you to an article from FromTheWilderness.com, a website claiming "More original reporting on Peak Oil than any other site on the net." The article, "An Important Announcement" by Michael C. Ruppert, asserts that there is, in fact, no "Plan B," addressing specifically the issues of oil and energy. (Be prepared for "Some Dots," an alarming list of evidence to support his topic.)

True, there is no Plan B. Clearly, biofuel, etc. won't suddenly solve problems. There are smart scientists, yes, but they can't fix anything, just innovate and improvise. We've done some real irreversible damage. My purpose in this entry, however, is not to discuss, however true, the idea that "Nature does not grant time outs," a wise statement made in the article by Mr. Ruppert. There will be more on future environmental issues in a future post. No pun intended.

"The victim has been the future," says the article, and I will agree that the victim still is the future. Literally speaking, the phrase, "The victim is the future" is very serious. Structurally and grammatically speaking, one finds it quite interesting as well. One way of analyzing it is to imagine the future as a real victim, cowering and taken complete advantage of. Another is to realize that what we are doing now does not affect us now, but it will. Basically, we can see the future as an object in itself, something we can save, or just as an idea, vague and distant. Which will affect how we act more?

Something they say in Ireland is "I'm just after [present participle]," and I've been lately considering this linguistic phenomenon as a way to perceive everything we do: that everything we do affects us. "I'm just after talking to my mom" or "I'm just after getting my exam results" both affect us. It's like saying, "This is me after doing something that has clearly changed my life." For example,

"We're just after using up all the oil." But Then What?

I can't (yet) propose any ideas for alternative energy sources. I am simply trying now to prove why the future is something to be optimistic about. Over the summer I read a book by James Martin called "The Meaning of the 21st Century." I don't agree with all of it, and you won't either, and the book's attempt to cover nearly every vital issue results obviously in a lack of details, but the book provided me with a surprisingly optimistic outlook at how things could be if we started doing things right as soon as we can (now). Maybe I just liked it because it was enlightening and educational but also made me feel warm and good, like listening to NPR. It was the first book of its kind I'd read, and I read it not as a manual of problems and solutions but simply a broad collection of possibilities. It empowered me more with information than it did monger doom.

I do declare that the future is awesome. We as a generation are creative, bright, and passionate. That's not to say we're too smart to do something stupid. But change is possible. It doesn't mean waiting for government regulations or big corporations to change policies in order to effect some sort of change. At last count, there were over 6.5 billion individuals. (More on population later.) Maybe the best option now is to do the best you can and encourage others to as well.

"The victim has been the future" but the future is not murder. At least, it doesn't have to be.

Two Words

Beard Implants.

Lame present Technology

"Smart Drugs"; take that, Mom.

So I've been reading about what you might call "Cognition Enhancing Drugs" or Nootropics. Let's get one thing out of the way: the person who came up with the scientific name "Nootropics" certainly wasn't using them. Thus, for the remainder of this post I will refer to Cognition Enhancing Drugs as CEDs solely because it reminds me of out of style shoe manufacturers (hard C).
Some examples of possibly useful CEDS are Choline, Acetyl L-Carnitine, and Nicotine (hmm) because they stimulate certain areas of the brain. In reply I purport that we are already effectively using CEDS every weekend. The source: Bourbon, Vodka, and PBR.
You see, in the future we will realize that promiscuous sex with strangers, booty-dancing, and drunk driving are at the core of a healthy, functioning society. Other examples of things we used to think were bad but now love include: freedom of speech, veggies, and black people. Thus I offer up alcohol as the most potentially viable current CED since, for most, it is required for the aforementioned activities that we very soon may suddenly discover as being totally advisable.
So my advice is to start boozin' because in the future you will be remembered as a visionary, ahead of your time, and an excellent dancer.

Welcome

Studies prove that the future is close, and that the future is awesome. Welcome to "No Pinkies," a blog dedicated to the future. Within the data-encoded entries of this weblog we hope to bring to your attention things that could, and in our opinions, will happen--from album releases to transhumanism to alternative energy sources, basing our ideas on clever imaginings, hearsay, and science. If we could send you a blog from the future instead of the past, we would.

And, just for the record, I think we will always have pinkies. And pinky toes.