The Future Isn’t What It Used to Be

How beauteous mankind is!
O brave new world
that has such people in ‘t!
- Shakespeare’s The Tempest

In the final scene of the film Quest for Fire, after learning how to harness the power of the flame, the first futurist gazes toward the silvery glow of the moon, and then afar, to the stars in the heavens, as if to contemplate his place on Earth, and in the universe.

It was, perhaps, that first display of out-of-body awareness, that first reach beyond the self, that set humankind, relentlessly, on the path of progress.

What gave man that splinter of discontent, that compulsion to free himself from the shackles of Plato’s cave, to venture outward toward the light of better tomorrows?

It seems a singular trait of our species to always reach beyond our grasp, to consider other possibilities, to forever shatter the status quo.

What is it about us that compels our thoughts beyond today?

There are many views of the future, the most popular being that grand tomorrow we all dreamt of, as kids — that miraculous wonderland of scintillating sci-fi scenarios, that silver-mountain majesty of our wildest imaginations.

What ever happened to that future? Was it lost in the translation of dreams into reality?

Or, did we set course for a future so compelling that it would render science fiction a quaint remembrance of things past?

Could our wildest visions ignite the flames of our reality? …  divinely wild dreams that shape our ends, to paraphrase a writer ahead of his time?

There has been more technological innovation in the past 100 years, than in the previous 100,000.

Human evolution is progressing almost exponentially, paving the way for a future far more elevating than anything our electric dreams ever could have imagined.

And therein lies the mission of the-future.com —  to investigate, to spotlight, to predict, to contemplate the-future’s nexus, as it heats, as it percolates, as it Becomes.

To ask questions that place tomorrow in perspective: Is there a limit to technological evolution? Is human advancement unquenchable? Why weren’t we content to remain prisoners of the cave? To simply hunt and gather? Was the thirst for progress inbred – a divinely inspired need to make things better? And better… and then, better, again? Why does humankind seem destined to change its destiny?

We are living in a time in which the dogmatic restraints of ancient histories are clashing against the intrinsic longing for the hope and freedom of tomorrow.

It is an ironic juxtaposition that allows one of the world’s newest technologies to kick the sands of time in the face of one of the world’s most primitive and repressive regimes, proving that ideological luddites, while retaining the military might of oppression, are simply no force against the indomitable human will to evolve.

So, it is with a spirit of reverence for the most exalted promises of past and present that we launch the-future.com.

Because the-future is more than pulse weapons and ion propulsion and houses floating in the clouds. The-future is the panorama of our hopes, our dreams, our fears, and… our mistakes.

The-future doesn’t begin in some distant time, separated from us by eons, or millennia, or centuries, or decades… or years/months/days/hours… or even minutes.

The-future begins at the end of this sentence, inexorably linked… to NOW.

Arthur G. Insana
Co-founder/Publisher & Editor-in-Chief