Inventing the Future in 12 775 Days- It’s All in Your Imagination
What a Difference 12 775 Days Makes
35 years ago, I was 30 years old and had just emigrated from South Africa to London, England, having tasted life in the northern hemisphere as a young lad in Canada. That was 12,775 days ago. In another 35 years, if I live that long, I will have lived another 12,775 days, and reached the ripe old age of 100. Yes, I hope to make it past 2050— that wonderful date beloved by climate scientists, politicians, sustainability experts, and governments and corporations seeking to delay eliminating fossil fuels for as long as possible.
Today is a day like many others — I’m taking my lunch break in the gardens enjoying a small Don Tomas cigar, something I do once a week, sometimes twice, if the weather is particularly good. It’s another beautiful sunny day here in Perpignan in the Pyrenees-Orientales in the South of France. The Spanish border is 30 kilometers from where I’m sitting — in 80 minutes I could be in Barcelona on a carbon-neutral high-speed train powered by the sun and wind communicating with the world on 5G at warp speed. What an amazing world, yet also one with so many tough challenges right now as we enter the post COP26 phase of negotiating with each other for our future. And doing well to remember one cannot negotiate with mother earth or physics.
I often reflect in such moments what it means to live a good life, something I ask myself on a regular basis. As I get older, I find myself reflecting on the deeper questions of life and focusing on what really, ultimately matters. For me, this seems to be a good way to connect with a deep sense of inner peace that I have increasingly felt since I left the hurly-burly of London some 18 years ago to create my own little corner of paradise in what was then a ruin of an old Chateau. The plan- halve my environmental footprint, double my quality of life, find the love of my life and make a positive difference in the world, a dream that has now come to pass. But what next?
That’s not to say there have not been some big challenges on the way and some battles that have been fought and won, that enabled us to continue being who we are and doing what we do. But right now, I feel the warm rays of the sun dancing on my face and neck on a fine late November winter’s day. It feels good, very good. No wonder the early Egyptians worshipped the sun god Ra.
The Future Emerges from the Past in the Now
Imagination is a critical tool in helping us actively choose our future. This future is already with us, posing a range of global and historic challenges — the earth’s environment, the spread of artificial intelligence and smart electronic networks, and the very idea of what it means to be human.
Imagining the future is activated by a set of brain circuits that juxtapose time and space and get you imagining things well and beyond the here and now. Time spent fantasizing and daydreaming about future plans is valuable, enabling us to escape routine and cultivate hope and resilience.
Our ability to predict the future is all thanks to our ability to remember the past. With my eyes closed and a gentle breeze caressing my left side I’m able to imagine all places in all times, to go anywhere in my mind, voyaging from the micro-world of my trillions of cells to the outer reaches of distant galaxies.
To go back in time to 4.5 billion years ago when the place I’m sitting was likely a smoking inferno with a red sky and sulphuric clouds obscuring the horizon, as the earth, then mainly a water-world, began to poke its head above the surface as volcanic islands. Blue skies and palm trees were still in the distant future, along with climate conferences and iPhones. What I do know for sure, is that we and all life are at home in the universe- we’re inevitable, and ultimately, life is indestructible, after five mass extinctions and entering a sixth.
As that boiling, volcanic third rock from the sun began to cool, it became receptive to life, some 3.5 billion years ago. And now, 3.5 billion years later, here I am, sitting in the sun speaking into an incredibly powerful computer and communications device about the size of a pack of cards but less than half as thin, writing these words. As a well-known contemporary philosopher put it: “Somehow dust got up and started writing poetry”. Isn’t that incredible, and even more amazing, that I can remember all of this and voyage in time in my mind and tell you about it at the same time?
3.5 billion years ago, in warm clay rock pools and boiling hot deep-sea vents, the first single-celled creatures evolved along with the first viruses- those sometimes deadly, but essential exchangers of DNA that ultimately enabled an explosion of different life forms in the oceans to emerge. Fast forward another 1.4 billion years or so as landmasses begin to form what will much later become Pangea and the six continents.
Now multicellular life explodes in the oceans in response to the oxygen catastrophe that forced single-celled organisms to join up and become complex creatures that could use this previously toxic gas to burn energy in their mitochondria. The bacteria and algae in the water and on land multiplied without limit, and early multi-cellular life became richly abundant.
Thanks to the oxygen emitted by the bacteria and algae, sponges, trilobites, jellyfish, and animals with shells emerged some billion to half a billion years ago in the oceans. The plant kingdom also began 500 million years ago as multicellular life began to proliferate in the volcanic dust and early rich soils of mud on earth. First lichens and fungi, very basic simple plants, but then a buzzing profusion of what would become tree-like ferns, cycads, and other amazingly beautiful green life sprang forth while fish evolved in the oceans.
Some creatures began to venture out of the sea onto the land — crawling amphibious life emerged able to live both in the water and on land. And slowly but surely those early amphibians gave way to the reptiles and ultimately, dinosaurs that dominated the earth from 250 million to 65 million years ago. What an age that must have been, as the first mammals hid in their holes in the ground safe from the raptor’s jaws.
Then that famous meteorite hit Earth in the Gulf of Mexico 65 million years ago and the dinosaurs, who had already eaten far too much of the plant life and reduced the oxygen levels on earth, began to suffocate. The meteorite impact was so severe that it produced a layer of dust and noxious clouds that blocked out the sun and made it impossible for creatures of their size to survive. They slowly choked to death on what was left of the atmosphere after that meteorite hit.
It took another 60 million years or so for monkeys and apes to emerge along with all sorts of creatures that began to resemble our two armed and two-legged species, able to climb trees and scamper across the face of the Earth. In the last 5 million years hominins such as Australopithecus and then homo habilis, homo erectus, and others eventually led to our species, homo sapiens.
Fast Forward 12 775 Days to 2056 and Beyond
But of course, our story doesn’t end there. Our so-called world leaders have just all gone home this week from COP26 in Glasgow having made some commitments to limit global overheating to 1.5C. Unfortunately, they all know that what was agreed is not enough and we could end up destroying forever the climactic stability that has enabled us to evolve civilizations over the last 10 millennia or so. We are literally flying blind into an unknown, and probably very dark future. Or are we?
We could be in the midst of a complexity catastrophe as the resources we need to sustain billions of human beings and the ecosystems that sustain us plus millions of other species become impoverished by our desire for more and more. Looking into the future we ask ourselves: “How many humans and species will actually be left a century from now?” We know our biosphere will survive and adapt as it has over the past five mass extinctions, but will we?
Most animals live according to their instincts although some species display a level of foresight that appears to be built into their genes, even though they are not capable of thinking centuries into the future. Although the future is impossible to predict in any fine detail, one can discern trends and some pre-determined elements that make aspects of the next few centuries familiar to us. Many “experts” enjoy scaring us with robots and artificial intelligence as potential replacements for our species- either a technotopian dream or a recurring nightmare, depending on your perspective.
For me, downloading our consciousness into some form of digital or quantum technology remains just that: a bad dream, unlikely to be realized soon, if ever. One of the things I’m deeply grateful for is that during my lifetime we’ve begun to understand that human beings are essentially quantum forms of consciousness (we used to call them “souls”) living in physical bodies. That consciousness seems to be a primordial quality of our physical universe- no longer some God sitting somewhere in the sky, but a kind of life force, an inchoate intelligence, embedded in the quantum vacuum generating the in-formation that forms and informs who and what we are and shapes what we can become.
After 65 years on earth, my own life experience tells me that consciousness is causal — in other words, our capacity to plumb the depths of ourselves and our own consciousness is the key to being able to shape our own future. Of course, you’ll point out that our ability to shape anything relies also on where we find ourselves and the conditions we're living in right now. Yes, the physical world poses constraints. But our imaginations are essentially limitless. When we are able to calm the physical, emotional, and mental storms that rage inside us and around us, we find a deeply peaceful state of mind, a state of mind conducive to seeing what we truly desire in our lives and our world, and bringing it forth.
Instead of boring you with more than half a century of solid science and evidence upon which I base my conclusions, I would rather trigger your imagination and your ability to see beyond your present circumstances and the state of the world you now perceive.
Since I was a child, I’ve dreamed of leaving earth and exploring the stars and galaxies out there. I’ve had luminous dreams where I’ve been living another life somewhere out there in space with the ability to actually see the future accurately, something I believe advanced and wise intelligences may one day become capable of if they are not already doing so. Something akin to what Professor Harry Styles in Asimov’s novel “The Foundation” works with, known as “Psychohistory”, combining history, sociology, and mathematical statistics to make general predictions about the future behavior of very large groups of people. Not far off what AI is already capable of doing and in fact being used to do to swing elections and much else.
As Stephen Hawking once said to me as a young man: “Anything that the human mind can conceive of is possible”. Like William Blake, he knew that there is an infinite amount of information that lies just beyond our common-sense perception — a universe of possibilities we may or may not be capable of realizing in this century or the next.
Our species has only been around for 100,000 years, and we’re relative teenagers learning to become adults capable of managing spaceship earth so that future generations can thrive and perhaps one day green our solar system and the stars beyond. The future lies literally in your and my heads, hearts and hands, but it will be depressingly familiar if we continue to do what we’ve always done and think what we’ve always thought, if we become trapped in our habits, our mindsets, and the traumas of the past, seeking to blame our current state on previous generations and others.
We must learn to let go of all that while also remembering the important lessons of the past. Personally, I believe that we are capable, individually and collectively, of creating incredible futures where beauty, truth, goodness, and justice prevail. History already tells us we’ve come a very long way from the naked ape that fashioned stone tools in the Pleistocene to a planetary species modifying spaceship earth itself in the Anthropocene, for good, and for evil.
Our species has always dreamed of and invented all-powerful gods able to fly with superhuman powers of strength, omniscience, and omnipotence. Yes, those gods also embodied many of the weaknesses of our species, but they helped us expand our minds to perceive what is possible.
Today we can fly all the way around the planet and back. Today we can see the earth and the universe from space and count the emissions of carbon dioxide and methane. We can map the oceans and understand how many football fields of rainforests have been destroyed this week. We can also communicate with each other in ways that would have been considered impossible 30 years ago. We are developing capabilities and superpowers that can either advance our evolution or destroy us. At the end of the day, it’s not the so-called leaders of the world that will decide our fate -it is you and me. What our minds and consciousness can conceive of can and does become real.
In conclusion, to put it as simply as possible: unless we nourish our imaginations and find the inspiration to perceive and act differently, we are condemned to a dark future. The light we can sense all around us and inside us enables us to penetrate our souls so that the future we create is a future we desire. As the palm trees begin to cast their shadow over me and obscure the sun, I must now go back inside both literally and figuratively and reengage with the stunning possibilities in our collective minds through the medium of my magic screens using my imagination sundial.
Perhaps, one day soon, our powers will enable us to collectively trigger the collective intelligence and wisdom we need to not only make it through the 21st century alive but to create a world we’ve always dreamed of, that comes from somewhere deep inside ourselves. At some level, each of us knows it’s possible, now let’s make it real so that the next 12,775 days see a brighter future emerging for us all. I’m personally counting on that, just as I hope you are. Let’s begin.