Inventing the future for humankind | Community Perspectives – Fairbanks Daily News-Miner

Back in the halcyon days, when I somehow got paid for messing with the minds of the impressionable youth of UAF, I liked to ask said minds to project themselves back in time 400 years, to take a look around and report back what, if anything, they noticed different between those times (counting back from now, for example, to the Lords Year 1620. (James I was King, if that helps) and our own times: changes in musical tastes, ethics, physics, theology or attitudes regarding leprosy, for instance.

1620 CE was earlier than heart transplants, genetic engineering and baseball. It was before George Washington and water-seal toilets. Oxygen wouldnt be invented until the mid-1700s (Really: no Periodic Table of Elements, no radioactivity). The Holy Inquisition was in practice: pious religious officials were still torturing heretics and burning witches. It was before abortion rights. Autochthonous peoples in many parts of the world had not been introduced to the blessings of European economics, religion and warfare. It was before Facebook.

Things had changed in the last 400 years. Bigly. My students always got that answer right.

Then Id ask them to project themselves 400 years into the future, to the early 25th Century, say, to look around, to report back. I asked them to pay particular attention to the way our descendants in 2420 look back on our (presumably long-obsolete) ways of doing things: our medicine, say, or our governmental systems, or our responses to global hunger, overpopulation, pollution.

This was a harder task. The problem with prognostication is that we normal people are not particularly good at it, being annoyingly set in our ways. This is not to say that we cant make predictions, but even deeply considered and finely calibrated events such as space launches, brain surgery, or steering an oil tanker around Bligh Reef occasionally go awry. Some events, like nuclear meltdowns or worldwide pandemics, can present unanticipated difficulties.

I asked my students to avoid fantasies like self-aware computers, two-way wrist radios or honest politicians. I was hoping for revolutionary ways of perceiving the world, something on the order of the atalatl, General Relativity or Akira Kurosawa. I was angling for new stuff: examples of true scientific, artistic or musical invention.

My students always protested. Were on to you, old man, you you English teacher! Youve been harping all semester about how we mortals really cant see into the future, that we make up the future with our words. Now you want us to think something no one has ever thought before!

Thats exactly what I wanted them to do, of course. To be fair, really new ideas are not particularly common. It took humans millennia to come up with the atlatl (c.20,000 BCE), even longer to invent the calculus (c.1665 CE) or germ theory (c.1840). But without inventive ways of looking at the world, humanity might still believe that malaria is caused by bad air, that light travels across a medium called luminiferous ether, or that things burn because they contain phlogiston.

Theres been much talk lately of returning to normal, but I wonder if thats really what we want. I wonder if normal isnt what got us into our present public health and economic crises. I think for a lot of people in our community normal is worrying about buying groceries, paying the rent, health care, personal safety.

In this Year of Our Trump and the Corona pandemic (known also to certain elderly cynics as the beer virus or the sniffles) the question for my students would be, Given that we really cant see into the future and given that our current pandemic is unlikely to be our last, whats our best strategy for the survival of Our People (defined however you like) for the next seven generations or so?

Id hope for some inventive thinking along the lines of how to take care of every person on Earth in honest and practical ways. Emphasizing that we have plenty to be humble be about when predicting the future, Id ask them to come up with ideas never tried before. Id suggest that food, shelter and health care need never to be money-dependent, for example. Id ask our youth for creative ways of feeding people, sheltering people, caring for people all people on this, our planetary spaceship.

Id invite them to approach the task with an honest and generous spirit.

Lynn Basham lives in Fairbanks. He taught atthe University of Alaska Fairbanks as an instructor, mostly in the English Department, for about 20 years and retired about10 years ago.

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Inventing the future for humankind | Community Perspectives - Fairbanks Daily News-Miner