A Love Letter to Humans of The Future
Questions and hopes for our descendants
I realize that people of our era are too primitive to even imagine the scientific and technological wonders you enjoy.1 I will tell you, though, what I hope for, and what I’m curious about. I bet this will be amusing to you, in the same way that if I were reading something like this written in the 1526, I would laugh my head off. Just remember that I’m doing my best with the information I have, and like everyone else I can’t predict the future growth of knowledge.
Naturally, I’m wondering what your biology is like. What have you evolved into? How have you used technology to change you? How long is your life span, or should I say your health span? Are we still human in that case? When does it become like the paradox of the Ship of Theseus?
How about language? It’s funny, I’ve found great joy and put serious effort into learning another one, which must be obsolete for you. I’m already in awe thinking at what you will have accomplished on this front. Whether it is real-time translation due to glasses, or a brain chip, or an ear piece, or whether a new universal language altogether has been invented and somehow caught on. Or does it involve somehow being able to read each other’s thoughts? Of course it could be something else, something I have not imagined. Regardless, let me congratulate you in advance.
I’m uncertain about how you will deal with people’s religious tendencies. Are people still divided up into different narrow sects? Are there still people claiming the ultimate truth about the universe based on books full of unlikely claims written thousands of years ago in dead languages? Have we figured out how to create new groups and ways of thinking without them becoming destructive cults? Or are we still only able to think freely as lone individuals, like The Wanderer Above The Sea of Fog painting? Are societies able to avoid descending into a Soviet Union-style hellscape if they don’t have some transcendent religion? Are the less fortunate people able to find meaning without myths? Are there even unfortunate people?
I bet there are still millions of unfortunate people if you are still creating war machines, fighting wars of territorial expansion, and sending the young and the poor to kill each other because old rich men have different ideologies. More likely you are using machines to do all that. It’s scary to think that you must have weapons ten times stronger than our most powerful ones, which already have the ability to destroy the planet. I’m realizing that there is not much of a point in writing this paragraph, because if you have not figured this out, there will be no one to read this.
If you have avoided another world war and are actually reading this, I’m assuming there are not still people so blind and so low in intelligence that they cannot see that we are all human, right? Or is that actually still a thing, racism, dehumanization, bigotry?
Also, what do you use for currency? Did crypto really become something valuable? Are capitalism and socialism even useful concepts anymore? Or is there such abundance that those terms became meaningless? How good has AI got? Were we too worried or not worried enough about it, we humans living through the initial LLM boom? Do people still go to school? What is university like if so? How much more have you learned about our past? What have the archeologists dug up? What have bold explorers found in the ocean? And have you established space colonies as backups for human consciousness? If yes, did people create their own nation states there?
I think what I’m really asking is how much of our tribal, hunter-gatherer programming have you overcome? Are we still chained by millions of years of evolution that made many of our base instincts so ruthless?
More than anything, I’m curious if you’ve made any progress on life’s biggest questions. Have you understood the question of God, or a higher power of some sort any more? Have you made indisputable contact with aliens, or are skeptics still reasonable in doubting we’ll ever do so? Have you figured out why there is something that it is like to be human? Or is subjective experience still as puzzling to you as it is to us? Can you tell someone the meaning of it all, or are you just as much like Sisyphus as we are?
Although we would be able to understand them.