What if that feeling of living in the most interesting of times, and a level of empathy for past generations due to their lower standards of living remains constant? I think that the people who lived through the agricultural revolution must’ve felt that way towards their ancestors, and so have the people who lived through the industrial revolution.

At each stage it feels like the biggest thing that could ever happen just happened, because what better thing could possibly exist?! And now, we all collectively feel the same as we navigate the 21st century. But what if we’re all wrong again, what if the story of humanity over the last 13.8 billion years has only just begun?

I say this with a sigh, as we seem to repeat the same mistake throughout history of which we limit our imagination by the existing paradigms, and avoid being too ambitious of what’s possible. For sure if you told someone 1000 years ago in England that they’d be able to communicate with others across the Atlantic ocean and see them in real time, they’d think you’re either a fool or some wizard. Because what kind of analogy or existing technology did they have to think about how this might be possible?

You’d think that today we’re wiser to refute such arguments that are out of reach, but just 400 years ago a man from Italy named Galileo clashed with the orthodox (collective) view that Earth is the center of the universe and proved the heliocentric model of our solar system. No one would even consider this argument to possibly be true today, but that’s how dumb civilization was just a couple of hundreds of years ago!

Today, there’s a strong sense of urge towards solving grand problems like longevity, and perhaps the volume of critics is much higher than those who think it’s possible. But then again we’re making the same mistake and limiting our imagination to what’s been conventional wisdom of our ancestors.

To my knowledge, Roots of Progress is perhaps one of the best efforts towards asking these big questions like what philosophy of progress do we have for the 21st century. But we need much more effort from a top to bottom order, where leaders of countries that control vast amounts of resources and really the education of their citizens to promote these ideas and push their intellects towards research on this end.

The only popular studies I see towards the end of this century are usually around GDP and population projections. That’s okay and important, but we need to ask more fundamental questions around the future.

Every time I hop on a plane and look towards earth from 10,000 feet from the sky, I get this strong sense of urgency that we (nations) are wasting our time and resources on conflicts that neither help and mostly hurt the prospects of expansion.

Whatever prolific force that created this universe must think that the 2100s is only the beginning of what is yet to come. I wonder what the trillion human 100,000 A.D civilization will look like, and how they write about us in their history books, but I hope we make them proud!