© Mike Gebhardt / drnormal, All Rights Reserved[/caption]The Future (intentionally capitalized) is important. It's as important to us as food, water and shelter and is made from our dreams and desires to create a prosperous life for ourselves. It exists in the earliest cave art, religion, science, literature, education- because we visualize and desire to bend the inevitable Time, to our own will. It's the heart of creativity and who we are and we should pay reverence to it as amazing and somewhat mystical because it transcends needs of The Now, pointing a compass to a destination- a collective idea- traveled by like minded people. The Future is both large and complex, and small and personal.
Douglas Engelbart was a special man who actually lived in The Future. Not just in his dreams- Engelbart manufactured The Future for himself and for all of us. I can trivialize his biography simply as "inventor of the mouse" or you can read more about him here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Engelbart I think his memory is best served if you watch and listen to a man who invented The Future right here, on this blog, in these embededd videos, on this Internet. All of this existed in 1968, just not in that collective Now.
I'm concerned about The Future. Mainly because a person who thinks about these things everyday has pointed out that The Now seems to taking over more thought time in our consciousnesses which is confusing to me, since we have every bit of information, technology, and tool at our disposal to create The Future on a grand scale. I never imagined Instagramming my lunch to post on Facebook when I was a kid watching Star Trek on rerun television. I imagined we'd cure disease, eliminate poverty, bigotry and war, double our lifespans, and travel the stars exploring strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations. I think we can still do these things and they're easier than we think. What we need is a collective dream- a grand challenge much like "landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth". We haven't even done that in over 40 years!
I think we should tackle the problem of Time. We're slaves to this fundamental thing that we still don't understand well. Matter on the other hand, is becoming very clear to us- how it exists, where it exists- but we need a detailed understanding of Time if we are to grow into The Future next. We have it inside us. We can do it individually by starting small, making every thought have a future component to it, but we must begin to dream again of The Future here in The Now.
