The Future to me – at least the fantastic imaginative side of it – seems constrained to two realms decidedly outside of standard human perception: the very big and the very small.
The very big Future is stuff on a global scale and beyond our planet. Huge energy capturing devices like offshore wind turbines and the space ships of tomorrow that are in testing today. While some of these technologies are fathomable in comparison to my physical self (unlike, say, a massive solar sail…), these are technologies that will be deployed where I can’t see them. Like in the middle of the ocean or out in space, not in my neighborhood (like the flying car) or holstered to my hip (like a laser blaster).
The very small Future is the feeling I get when I watch a program like the NOVA Making Stuff Series. Metamaterials that do amazing things. At human scale they look innocuous (perhaps with the exception of broad-spectrum invisibility material, which would look like whatever’s behind it). These are the things that, when scaled up to human size, give us devices that behave like magic but we just expect them to work and go on with our lives. I’ve definitely fallen into that trap – it’s a part of the human condition – but whenever I read about or see images of what’s going on at the nano-scale level the amazement and wonder returns, because it is and will remain utterly outside of my experience.
This is where The Future of the past, like what you see inside the big ball at Epcot, falls flat. It was the The Future at human scale. But that’s not where the truly astounding advances will happen. Especially if we ever plan on being a Type I Civilization or better – the scale imposed by our physiology is as limited as the chunk of the spectrum imposed by our organic eyeballs. We’ve explored it so thoroughly that what wonders remain uncovered are few and far between, though not absent. Our exploration of other scales is really only starting to heat up and that’s where the best and most awe-inspiring advances of The Future lurk, waiting to be found and engaged.