Quotes about the future

What made it possible for me to exercise freedom of choice also made it impossible to know the future. Conversely, now that I know the future, I would never act contrary to that future. [...] Those who've read the Book of Ages never admit to it.

When there are long delays in feedback loops, some sort of foresight is essential.

If you were to say to a physicist in 1899 that in 1999, a hundred years later, moving images would be transmitted into homes all over the world from satellites in the sky; that bombs of unimaginable power would threaten the species; that antibiotics would abolish infectious disease but that disease would fight back; that women would have the vote, and pills to control reproduction; that millions of people would take to the air every hour in aircraft capable of taking off and landing without human touch; that you could cross the Atlantic at two thousand miles an hour; that humankind would travel to the moon, and then lose interest; that microscopes would be able to see individual atoms; that people would carry telephones weighing a few ounces, and speak anywhere in the world without wires; or that most of these miracles depended on devices the size of a postage stamp, which utilized a new theory called quantum mechanics—if you said all this, the physicist would almost certainly pronounce you mad.

People were always getting ready for tomorrow. I didn’t believe in that. Tomorrow wasnt getting ready for them. It didnt even know they were there.

Quantum uncertainty, chaos—these forever screen precise knowledge of the future from our eyes.

I also think it's important for us to think forward and to imagine future history in a way that is not restrained by our own lifetimes. Oftentimes people say, well, if it takes that long, I'll be dead. So what? Everybody dies, right? And if people who were involved in the struggle against slavery-I'm thinking about people like Frederick Douglass, or Ida B. Wells in the struggle against lynching if they had that very narrow individualistic sense of their own contributions, where would we be today? And so we have to learn how to imagine the future in terms that are not restricted to our own lifetimes.

One alters the past to form the future but there is a real significance to the pattern which finally appears, which resists all further change.

It is quite likely that the 21st century will reveal even more wonderful insights than those that we have been blessed with in the 20th. But for this to happen, we shall need powerful new ideas, which will take us in directions significantly different from those currently being pursued. Perhaps what we mainly need is some subtle change in perspective—something that we all have missed....

The future belongs to crowds.

The future you have tomorrow won't be the same future you had yesterday."

“Not everyone is concerned with the deep future,” Manfred interrupts. “It’s important! If we live or die, that doesn’t matter—that’s not the big picture. The big question is whether information originating in our light cone is preserved, or whether we’re stuck in a lossy medium where our very existence counts for nothing. It’s downright embarrassing to be a member of a species with such a profound lack of curiosity about its own future, especially when it affects us all personally! I mean, if there’s going to come a time when there’s nobody or nothing to remember us then what does –”

“Manfred?”

He stops in midsentence, his mouth open, staring dumbly.

“Humans are molded by evolution to be short-termists, Miss Next,” he continued. His voice rumbled deeply and seemed to echo inside my head. “We need only to see our children to reproductive age to be successful in a biological sense. We have to move beyond that. If we see ourselves as residents on this planet for the long term, we need to plan for the long term.”