The journey of humanity is not yet over.
With luck, or more likely, dedication and skill, we have a long way yet to travel.
There’s a lot happening in the present vying for our immediate attention.
But one important property that separates us from the other apes is our ability to plan for the long-term. To imagine a better world and then work to bring it into existence.
So now I’d like us to take a step back aqnd think on that big picture.
The future is coming, whether we are ready or not.
It can be hard enough to plan for the next week, never mind the next year, never mind the next decade. But decades are only a tiny sliver of the human story. Our story is thousands, in some ways millions, of years old. And if things go well, it’s nowhere near close to done. Predicting the future is difficult and it’s hard to tell specific stories about it. But there will be specific things happening.
So I’d like to end tonight with a question: What do you imagine?
What’ll have become of humanity millennia from now?
The future may be strange beyond our ability to visualize, but we are not completely blind, and our ability to foresee good or ill is key to our ability to steer the future’s course.
So when you look ahead, what do you see? And one more question: what do you want to see?
If things go well, if humanity makes it off of this rock alive, if you could nudge the universe onto a better path, with direction would you nudge it?
Where are we going and who shall we become?
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