Far Futures: overview

Science has been very interested in time and change, because that is, in part where the power is. The result is we know the sun will burn out, the earth grow cold, asteroids a problem, and populations have a course. These are the large parameters of our current thinking. (It s not the only possible frame, but it is the dominant one. Other civilizations and epochs have had different concerns, showing that other views are at least possible.)

The interplay between species success and its collapse, and reliance on technology probably frame what can happen. Stephen Jay Gould speculated that the reason we have not been visited by aliens is because no civilization in the history of the universe has been able to develop he technology to arrive here, and survive socially. Fred Hoyle, in Faces of the Universe, hoped that we would not develop nuclear fusion power before we vastly increased our capacity to govern.

More close at hand Donnella Meadows and the Limits to Growth, and Malthus, seem to be describing the problems of NOW, not the long future.

Science fiction, with its dystopias (see Oryx and Crake, Margaret Atwood), is read by many technologists. What does it do to their imagination, their hope, their strategy?