Looking at the phone in your hand, googling the past has a very special kind of irony. Can you imagine going back only 100 years and telling the people of the time what they can expect in the coming years? Why stop there? Go back 200, 300, 500 or even 1000 years and tell them about all the wonders of the future. You’d be strung up by your toes, put in a cage and murdered on public trial if you were lucky. If not you’d have nothing but an agonizingly real torture session, every waking hour of your day in a mental institution by the men and women who know what’s right and needed, in the name of truth and science. Knowing what we know now over the growth that just 50 years can bring, why are we so convinced that we are right about everything? How can everyone say they know without a shadow of a doubt that something we see at face value is correct? Trusting the science is a sure way to stop the science. Instead of blind trust, we need to have a certain level of skepticism with things that are presented to us, aside from a political viewpoint. Our ability to reach out across time and access knowledge about how wrong we’ve been about almost everything, should give us a little bit of insight on how much we don’t know we don’t know. An open mind, willingness to listen and the self-awareness to know we could be wrong are everything the future needs to flourish. What do you think? How do you choose what to believe? What will we be wrong about in 100 years? What will people look back on and wonder how blind we could have been?
