contemplect.

Imagining a multiracial future is not the same as imagining an antiracist future. The latter requires challenging the progress of racism as it proliferates and transforms our very capacity to imagine the future.

This discovery explains what happens when your mind wanders during a task: It’s simulating future possibilities. That’s how you can respond so quickly to unexpected developments. What may feel like a primitive intuition, a gut feeling, is made possible by those previous simulations.

An amazing set of experiments suggest the present and the future are entangled, and that events in the future may influence things happening in the world now.

I predict that far in the future, people will still be trying to predict what will happen far into the future. For the same reason we do it now... to give ourselves the feeling of control over our fate.

‘Science is crucial to the future,’ she said. ‘Without a good handle on science, we’re not moving forward, we’re moving backward.

We treat our future selves as though they were our children, spending most of the hours of most of our days constructing tomorrows that we hope will make them happy. Rather than indulging in whatever strikes our momentary fancy, we take responsibility for the welfare of our future selves… [But] our temporal progeny are often thankless.

The New York World's Fair of 1964 is dedicated to ‘Peace Through Understanding.’ Its glimpses of the world of tomorrow rule out thermonuclear warfare. And why not? If a thermonuclear war takes place, the future will not be worth discussing. So let the missiles slumber eternally on their pads and let us observe what may come in the nonatomized world of the future.

If you ask my eight-year-old about the Future, he pretty much thinks the world is going to end, and that’s it. Most likely global warming, he says—floods, storms, desertification—but the possibility of viral pandemic, meteor impact, or some kind of nuclear exchange is not alien to his view of the days to come. Maybe not tomorrow, or a year from now.

The kid is more than capable of generating a full head of optimistic steam about next week, next vacation, his tenth birthday. It’s only the world a hundred years on that leaves his hopes a blank. My son seems to take the end of everything, of all human endeavor and creation, for granted. He sees himself as living on the last page, if not in the last paragraph, of a long, strange and bewildering book.

If you had told me, when I was eight, that a little kid of the future would feel that way —and that what’s more, he would see a certain justice in our eventual extinction, would think the world was better off without human beings in it— that would have been even worse than hearing that in 2006 there are no hydroponic megafarms, no human colonies on Mars, no personal jetpacks for everyone. That would truly have broken my heart.

‘And we thought that [pre-made foods] were brilliant because they did away with pots and pans —we didn't have to go to the store to go shopping every day— and then we woke up 50 years later and realize that these products had been basically engineered to make us fat,’ Foer says. ‘And I worry that the same thing is happening now to the things that we ingest through our mind.’

The world is never not catching up with science fiction, for better or worse. But right now it would make my job easier in all sorts of ways if the world could just maybe take a break, catch its breath and have a snack before it continues its wild hurtle toward — well, wherever the hell we’re going in these ridiculous times. Then I could get back to writing work that’s minimally allegorical and not, intentionally or otherwise, something that looks like straight-up reportage.

There is never time in the future in which we will work out our salvation. The challenge is in the moment, the time is always now.

I am constantly aware that we’re the result of four billion years of evolution —and that the future of the earth will last at least as long. When you always have in mind how many generations might follow us, you take a different attitude toward many questions of the present. You realize how much is at stake.

The best way to predict your future, we've discovered, is not to close your eyes and use your imagination. There's a completely different way to figure out how you will feel, and that is to ask people who are already in your future how they feel.

The sensors turn animals into something like environmental buoys, using them to predict and monitor things beyond earthquakes, perhaps illustrating environmental patterns with broad economic significance for humans.

I wanted to spend my creative energy helping people understand that we can realistically imagine the world of tomorrow being profoundly better than the world around us today —understand that, in fact, envisioning and sharing successful futures is one of our most powerful tools for changing the world, now.

Therapists are exploring new ways to treat depression now that they see it as primarily not because of past traumas and present stresses but because of skewed visions of what lies ahead.