New York

“But instead I’ll skip directly to this: Einstein also said that our idea of time is fundamentally wrong.” […] “Meant that our conception of the past and the future is not correct. We think that the past is gone, the future is yet to come, and that there exists only the present. Because this is all that we can see”. Jack Finney, Time and Again, 1970. There is this photo with two men, a frozen lake and all around a city, that is the most interesting in the world. This photo doesn’t exist in this time, two meters/years from here, there is another time, another people, but the same place. I’ve take two opposite way to view the future: the first one is optimistic and sounds like reading the Economist’s annual essay, Daniel Franklin says: “there is every chance that the world in 2050 will be richer, healthier, more connected, more sustainable, more productive, more innovative, better educated, with less inequality between rich and poor and between men and women, and with more opportunity for billions of people.”

Omitting the exact prediction of what will happen, I would like to think that a future like that is possible. Like Pangloss (from Candide, a Voltaire’s satira) says “all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds”. […] “It’s proved, that the things that cannot be otherwise”

The second key to read the future proposal is the Olduvai Theory. The Richard Duncan’s Olduvai Theory said (in few word) that after the 2010 the world it’s going to live a decline of the global equilibrium, a Post Industrial Stone Age. Will have a lifetime of less than or equal to 100 years (1930-2030).

The first of the possible futures, it’s a quiet vision of the world… we have find an equilibrium in which everyone has a clearly defined and organized life, to be self sufficient. A time travel in which for be “happy”, a vegetable garden is enough. Where the doctor Despommier’s Vertical Farm has conquered every building, clinging to every wall.

The other future is under the ground. Where we find the missing space, for living, work, moving and preserve the energy (geothermic).

But everything it’s not finished yet. We have to find a logical compromised for living the past education with a support of technology.

Find a place for living the optimistic future of Megachange’s essay it’s not simple today…but maybe “Right here, in the heart of what is probably the most rapidly changing city in the world, there are entire square miles that were practically identical with the passing decades. If you put a map of Central Park in 1880 next to one today, you will find the same names: the water basin, the lake, North Meadow, Green, the pool, Harlem Mere, the obelisk.” (Jack Finney, Time and Again, 1970.)