We think the future’s looking pretty good.
We also think it’s changing very fast.
In the past hundred years, humanity has made staggering, dizzying advances. Compared to everything that came before, it’s been a literally stratospheric leap.
We’re still changing that fast. In fact, we’re accelerating, and the rate of our acceleration is accelerating. So the next hundred years will be even more revolutionary than the previous century.
And that’s pretty nuts, because humanity has already blown well past its comfort zone.
Our close ancestors lived in circumstances that changed very slowly—for most of our 300,000ish year history, our main tools were sticks and rocks, our most advanced technology was fire, and we had fewer than a billion relatives.
Then, ten to twenty thousand years ago, we started growing plants, and this innovation lit a slow, critical fuse. Gradually, the variety of our abilities and size of our groups exploded.
Only about two hundred years ago, we began industrial production, and that tripped a switch into the steep curve of our exponential growth.
We quickly crossed the line of a billion humans, doubling suddenly to two, four, and now eight billion in just a handful of generations.
We also started inventing radical new technologies one on top of the other. And not only has this trend not stopped, the gaps between steps are getting smaller.
In the 2020s, we’re less than a century into our experience with nuclear power.
We’re less than two thirds of a century into developing space travel.
We’re about half a century into building nanotech.
A third of a century into personal computing.
A quarter of a century into the internet
A fifth into personal genomics.
A sixth into social networks.
And just at the dawn of AI.
And this is all to say that whatever happens next will be even weirder, even wilder, and, hopefully, even more wonderful than all of human history to this point.
Our world changed more in the last two hundred years than it did in the previous million, and in the next hundred years it will change even more.
So if it feels like you’re living in strange times, that’s because you are. We’re off the map of what has come before.
And precisely because that can be scary, we think we should support each other more. Consider our values and engage with our ethics more. And where possible, attempt to have a little bit more fun.
Ftrhstry is here to help chart such a hopeful course—to celebrate advances as they come, and look with joy into the dazzling kaleidoscope of a world engaged in metamorphosis.
Please come help us out! We’ll learn some things together, share the thrill of unfolding changes, and ponder our place in the future’s dizzy wonder.
And at the absolute least, we can make fun of Caleb’s haircuts.