The Future

T’POL: Neither of our species is what it was a million years ago, nor what it’ll become in the future. Life is change.

Star Trek: Enterprise, “Terra Prime” (s4:ep21)

One of my fondest memories in recent years was visiting the Museum of Natural History in Victoria, British Columbia, and watching the documentary about the geologic history of Antarctica.

There’s something strangely reassuring knowing that in the vast span of time, life will go on, as it adapts to changes on the ground one way or another. Of course, I won’t be alive to see it. Yet, knowing that life always finds a way, and that the problems of today will be ancient history in the future helps put things in perspective for me.

In the same way, it is also strangely reassuring to know that while we homo sapiens (humans) carry many instinctive throwbacks, and primitive behaviors, this is not always going to be the case. Some very distant future, far beyond myself and my descendants, there will be humans who will look and think differently. They will look at us as something curious.

I think this is also why so many of us are Star Trek fans too: that even a few centuries from now, society may be radically transformed in a way that replaces greed and profit for knowledge and exploration, peace replacing war, paranoia with openness and so on. Up until the 18th and 19th centuries, monarchies were just a default way of running a society. The “Divine Right of Kings” was just assumed by countless people, even if they hated it, but now seems backwards and antiquated. There are very few absolute monarchies now.

So, while our current society seems like something inevitable, it’s not. We can’t see the future, but the forces of history are already in motion and may surprise us someday (or maybe surprise our descendants) and people will organize societies that we can’t anticipate.

Time will tell, but as geologic history shows, nothing is static in the end.