Regardless of what faith one believes or disbelieves in, everyone looks forward towards a better tomorrow. Whether it be through prayer or through hard work, we all desire something in our future. The future is a spotty subject to touch upon because, well, it hasn't happened yet. Even though we know this; it doesn't seem to stop us from drifting off at work for the idea of greener pastures.
Green pastures is exactly what I want to talk about, actually. What is the future going to look like for humanity? That is perhaps the most important question of them all. We all know that each person wants to be famous, wealthy or find their soul mate, but let's step aside from that sappy stuff and talk about humanity's future. After all, we all know that the individual will pass, but that the world continues to spin.
As a society, we love to entertain ourselves with the thought of losing it all: a zombie apocalypse, alien invasion, super powerful earthquake. Bottom line, we have spent an absurd amount of money making thousands of movies with identical plot lines and decent character diversity. In them humanity fails and turns people against one another in the struggle for survival. Then there are other movies, books and TV shows which are slightly more original; they depict unified governments and superior technology. That is where I am most interested in and where I believe humanity is heading.
Since the beginning of industrialism, humanity has been advancing at incredible rates. The discovery of general relativity and of atomic energy were huge leaps forward within the scientific community. Landing men on the moon, Rovers on Mars and a handful of probes which have exited the solar system into interstellar space; humanity is advancing its space programs and learning so much about the universe. Soon, we will be starting a colony on Mars (I still think Venus is a better option) and we are making breakthroughs in understanding quantum computing. Realistically, within the next century I believe the people alive now would not recognize future humanity.
Even now, we can see our society changing around us. Globalization is beginning as the world is starting to unite under common idealistic goals. The internet, as I have said before, is another great leap towards global unification. The European Union, NATO, and the United Nations are all strides to unifying large amounts of nations.
I was just reading a fictional short story written by Robert Heinlein titled, "Misfits," which took place on an asteroid. In this story, the military was preparing the asteroid to be a permanent station for fuel, supplies, and as a rescue point between Earth and Mars. Back to reality -- a few days ago, I read about a private company that is going to send a probe to an asteroid. It will bring back statistical information depicting the type of raw material within the asteroid. The company plans on creating a mining station on asteroids to mine for rare earth materials and fuel. This would make space travel within our solar system cheaper and easier.
We already see the events and plans of today shaping the future of tomorrow. The direction that humanity may be heading is a good one; we just have to continue moving forward.
