What will our future be like?

If you believe the apocalyptic prognostications that run rampant in movies, TV and documentaries, we’re not going to have a future. The funny thing about this is the fact that people have been predicting the end of mankind for a very long time, at least back to the early Hebrews and certainly to the early Romans. The early Christians assumed that Christ would return soon after his death and resurrection and for some time they awaited this cosmic event.

They’re still waiting.

Many predictions are based on the Book of Revelation, which speaks of the end time, the second coming of Christ and the final judgment. Unfortunately, Revelation is not a book of prophecy, but rather a book of apocalyptic literature that was popular at the time. Revelation was written to encourage Christians of the first centuries and tell them that evil Rome would be destroyed and they would be free of persecution. Revelation borrowed a lot of imagery from the Old Testament prophets, scriptures that people of the time would recognize and understand.

Another famous predictor was Nostradamus, a French apothecary and seer who published a series of prophesies written in Latin backwards. People have latched onto his obscure writings to suggest that he predicted many modern calamities, such as Hitler, World War II and the 9/11 attacks. I would suggest that if you predict rain enough times it will rain. Predicting wars and famines and other bad things is no sign of legitimate prophesy. These bad things have happened and will continue to happen.

But, an apocalyptic ending could be of our own making. Climate experts claim that global warming will bring us to our knees in the future. A hotter climate will cause the oceans to rise, flooding out coastal cities like New York, Miami, and part of Florida for that matter. Many islands will disappear beneath the waves. There goes my Hawaiian vacation.

Be that as it may, our future will be filled with wondrous technological breakthroughs. We should see the end of diseases such as Cancer, Heart failure and even depilating diseases like diabetes, high blood pressure and arthritis. Life expectancy should be advanced past one hundred for many. We should see advances in entertainment with holographic projection TV, brain implant cellular devices and Google glasses hopefully that are practical.

Many of these things could be spoiled by overpopulation and the resultant higher crime rates and political unrest. The one thing that never changes is human nature. Politicians will always be greedy and self-serving. People will always be lazy and self-centered. The future won’t solve these problems.

So what do we have to look forward to? That’s a question that’s hard to answer and people who claim they can predict the future are usually insane. No one knows for sure. One thing that I vote for as a future agenda is the exploration of interstellar space. Humans need to get off this planet and out into the universe or we could end up becoming extinct. There’s no time to waste. We could be wiped out as a species at any moment. Besides, exploration of the cosmos is our human destiny. Space, the final frontier; these are the voyages of the starship Enterprise . . .

Thanks for reading.