When is the Future?

Just an idle question for people out there: what year did you (or do you if it hasn't arrived yet) consider to be "the future". When I was a kid, 2000 seemed like a long ways off and I would be an adult. I rarely thought past this milestone date.

Obviously, it came and went and while it's a different and futuristic world from what I expected, it's never "the future". What were your childhood misconceptions?

The future is never, its always the present!

for me it was 2012 because people believe the world was going to end.

Tomorrow is always a day away and the future beyond that.

I had to get old to accept that as a truth. Flying cars are too dangerous, video phones on the kitchen wall will never happen as home phones are history and those big CRT computer monitors on Star Trek TOS will never happen after LCDs arrived like so many other failed predictions.

We are living in our past's future but the true future will always be ahead of us.

For me, when I was a kid, the distant future was 1984, based on the novel. That seemed like such a long distance in time. Then it came and went, and the year 2000 was the future. After that, 2014 seemed distant and far away, yet meaningful, as it was the date I would retire. I think we often associate the future with meaningful dates.

One can also think of it in more abstract terms, like: the future is when man walks on Mars, or travels faster than the speed of light.

Answer philosophy with philosophy.

The future is the yet to come. IF I plan for an event and it turns out or not is not the future but a planned reality.
If I think it and it comes then it is a planned history that I had control in guiding to action.

Therefor future is an unknown and unplanned event that I would not be aware of if it arrives.

I just arrived today at the future today marks 25 years and i almost did not make it, now i will shoot for 30 that is the future now.be present everyday of your journey because there is plenty of rest when its over but no second chance no do over no i took a detour ,its "quality over quantity"

When I have either my jet-pack or my hover-board, damn it!

EDIT: Or someone produces an AI that can pass the Turing Test at a post-graduate conversation level.

A long time ago, I consider 2015 so futustic and all because of the Back to the Future II.

Also, I remember ringing in year 1999, and my mom went like, "WOW! 19... 9... 9! That sound so weird and futuristic!". But now... it's sound ancient somehow considering 17 years had passed by since then.

Well, I came after flying cars and AI Winter, so it'd probably be something like Star Trek things like communicators (which we kinda got, but with cameras), computers you interact with by mashing the screen (which we kinda got, but not as DWIM), video home phones like Pokemon (which we also kinda got), or, well, furries... but even that's run into trouble (yes, we got that too). The Net of a Thousand Lies? Twitter and Facebook seem to have taken up the slack.

I'm still waiting for manned missions to Mars, I guess. The end of the world should be when chimera are acceptable. Hopefully the future happens before that.

Also, when will then be now?

TonyTonyChopper said:

The future is never, its always the present!

for me it was 2012 because people believe the world was going to end.

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As someone with a scientific mind I would have to disagree with the it's always present statement, humans always live in the past. I'll give you an example, you see something happen in front of you, for you to see that particles of light would have to hit the object then be reflected back into your eyeball hit the cones and be converted into electrical impulses which then travel along your nerves to your brain where you perceive the event. All of this takes time and so the event has passed by the time you have "seen" it. Although the elapsed time is miniscule in comparison it has elapsed nonetheless.

Everything you see hear and feel has already happened.

Onto the philosophical question of what I believe is the future, the future is beyond my life span and always will be, I truly believe that I was born in the wrong age. As they say born too late to explore the oceans born to early to explore the stars.

It depends, time is relative to your location and the speed at which you are traveling. My favorite sign at one of my local bars... "free beer tomorrow" hehe

City Council started running an 'Our Brisbane 2010' campaign around 2003. I always felt like 2010 was the future.

After 2010 I got the Perfect Dark tie-in novels which had events happening in 2016 and 2017 and I felt like that was the future.

Now it's 2016 and I think we are starting to get into what I would consider the future. Self-driving cars, electric vehicles, watches you can make phone calls on, wearable bio-monitors, constant access to encyclopedias, sharing of documents, voice communications across almost the entire planet (even African farmers have cell phones), concrete plans for moonbases and Mars journeys. I think it's exciting.

never and always, depending on how you look at it. you could argue that you are always in the future as you are always going foreward in time, and you can also argue that we always live in the present.

i never gave a date to the future. indeed, i'm not sure that i ever gave any great hope for a future.
that may sound strange coming from one who grew up with a space-age and engineering obsession and who was an avid reader of 2000AD from the first issue, but our reality, certainly in the 70s, was of the cold-war present, the aftermath of WW2 and the fall of empire. the future's presence was felt more in xmas presents and the new plastics, and in american films, which were usually a bit dated by the time they got shown over here. most often, when you thought of the future, you thought of America and americana.

if there was anything other than what we dealt with daily, it was the past; and most of our daily things were from the past. one thing which has always brought a little smile to face is how our books on all things futuristic and spacey were written decades before. so, even our thoughts of the future were from the past.
the future was on the telly and mostly makebelieve (or at least for the rich). the past was everpresent, not just something from long ago and in books. we played in air-raid shelters and bombed-out houses. we played war, fighting the germans and the japs. and since even a lot of our telly was from America's past and in black-and-white, we also played cowboys and injuns.

and when i'd settle down with a book, beside the fire, i'd mostly be reading about the war, the industrial revolution, the middle-ages or the Romans, and i could go and see, hear, smell, and touch those things.
it was in such a context that i found myself, at around 7 or 8, sitting against our house one summery day and musing on a brick in our house, and of all the things it must have 'seen' in it's 150 year life. as pleasant as it was, i jerked myself from such silliness with the jump in logic that as far as i could be concerned, there was nothing before me, that everything is see is only there because i see it so. but i didn't see the future (well, i didn't have a mirror on me at the time :biggrin.

As a kid I considered the future as post 2012, as that was when I graduated high school. Now, it would either be 2025, as there is a lot of new technology that is destined to be released by then that I find really interesting, or 2050 as it's far enough into the future that I can't even fathom how much things will change.

The future is soooo yesturday. :neener_neener:

The future always seemed so far and intangible but now the future is only a moment away. Yet as a kid, 2017 seemed so far into the future. Since the time has yet to come, we'll see what the future holds for me.

This is a tough question because I never really thought of an exact year of what I would consider the future. In fact, anytime I think about the future I am generally always thinking about many different years. I suppose 2012 though would be as good as any year that I am certain I have thought about on more than one occasion XD. Turned out to be a pretty uneventful year actually.

As for what the future still has yet to bring, well a whole hell of a lot. 2030 - 2050 should be an interesting time I think.

Koutei said:

As someone with a scientific mind I would have to disagree with the it's always present statement, humans always live in the past. I'll give you an example, you see something happen in front of you, for you to see that particles of light would have to hit the object then be reflected back into your eyeball hit the cones and be converted into electrical impulses which then travel along your nerves to your brain where you perceive the event. All of this takes time and so the event has passed by the time you have "seen" it. Although the elapsed time is miniscule in comparison it has elapsed nonetheless.

Everything you see hear and feel has already happened.

Onto the philosophical question of what I believe is the future, the future is beyond my life span and always will be, I truly believe that I was born in the wrong age. As they say born too late to explore the oceans born to early to explore the stars.

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I am well aware that there's a delay between the senses capting something and transmitting that to the brain. However, I agree and disagree. Why? English isn't my mother tongue, nevertheless I'll try to explain why.

What you see, hear, feel, taste and smell is your brain interpreting the signals by the sense organs. The truth is that reality is constructed in our brains based on the external stimuli. So, for example, if I hear a sound, that sound didn't happened in the past, the soundwaves that entered my ears perhaps, but the sound that I hear, which is nothing but my brain interpreting the electric signals sent from my ears, happened in real time.

Furthermore, past and future doesn't really exist, the past is just a memory and the future hasn't happened yet, and contrary to what most of us might think time isn't "moving", what happens is that everything is constantly changing, time is just a measure. What i'm trying to say is that the past isn't behinds us nor the future ahead of us, these are just ideas, concepts and memories. It's not that the past and future don't exist, they do but just as concepts, unlike the present.

We are eternally living in the present, that is impermanent and constantly changing.


I know I went a bit off-topic and too "out there".