A Letter For People In The Year 3 000 AD

If you're in the year 3 000 AD and able to interpret this, I'm sorry. I can't even begin to imagine what you're thinking about the rest of the Internet contents and other media from this period you're viewing.

It's still crazy for me to think that everything that is 'now' for me, in full technicolour, will one day be not only 'old-fashioned' or even 'archaic', but 100%, bona fide indecipherable relics of a time forgotten.

I don't hold it against you: as much as I 'know' about ancient history, human consciousness only really starts from the 1930s. We still watch documentaries about World War II on television, still listen to the songs of Elvis Presley and The Beatles, and still recall the dance moves to 'The Macarena'.

Even if you don't understand my references to a pop culture that's lying in dust, let me just reassure you that there are things that don't ever have appeared to change. Humans now are still defined by their primary emotions - love, hate, fear, anger, hope - and struggling to figure out how to stay fed and find elusive happiness before we die.

I guess if you summarise it that way it sounds pretty bleak, and indeed bleakness and information overload is something we're struggling with a lot right now. We're expected to work harder than ever before, process so much information that 'brain-freeze' is a common phenomenon from over-loaded brains, and only the smallest fraction of people are wealthy enough to not worry about money.

If I had to guess about what YOUR life looks like, I'm pretty blank. Only 20 years ago we didn't have the Internet, which defines our lives now; and only just over 100 years ago humans first took to the air in a powered aircraft. What will be invented in the next 986 years?

Some guesses from my side:
- No more reliance on batteries which need to be recharged by users
- Intelligent clothing that can change designs dynamically
- An interface between human brains and computers
- True virtual reality, indistinguishable from real life
- 100% visibility at all times to law enforcers and loved ones
- Artificial organs greatly extending human lifetimes
- Life on space stations will become a norm for many

All of that is just window-dressing though, isn't it? If you're still HUMAN, I know for sure that you will still fall in love and be hurt by those who betray you. Many people are probably still struggling from poverty, and the price of that in space can only be death a lot sooner than it is now because the costs of living there are higher. And even if computers do a lot of your thinking for you, you'll be feeling more flooded by information than ever and unable to have true visibility of any complex endeavor.

Which begs the question, why are you reading this blog?

To my fellow survivors of 2014, all I can say is we'd be better advised to make the most of life now, than wait for a future which will yield more problems than answers. Now's the best time to be alive, unless they ever do figure out a way to travel back to 1960!