Is it too odd to feel optimistic for the future? By future, I mean not the nearest events yet to come. Definitely not those ones. I mean the Oort Cloud, far-off future rooted in the purest speculation, the speed-of-light-in-minutes sort of era. The kind of post-stellar daydreams that have been spelled out and envisioned a thousand times over, and yet we keep returning to it. I do, at least. At best, it’s rooted in some endearing form of mental adventuring, checking out of “now” and eyeing some Saturnian aloofness a few centuries from now, for a few minutes. Feeling optimism for that can grow out of some turmoil, pain even. A quasi-reverence for an era completely divorced from the reality you live in now, on a screen of nebulae familiar to many but resonating like a lone system. Longing, you could call it. To long for the future means you’d have to be optimistic about it, right?
It’s hard to imagine not being speculative, gazing upward and inward simultaneously and pinning both deep and shallow emotions to the future. I’d like to think we’ll still be doing the same in 2867 CE, getting ourselves worked up and using a hypothetical eon as a relief (or an escape). If we aren’t wiped out by a menagerie of sci-fi ills, maybe we’ll keep up the escapism or whatever we leave behind will do it for us. In our current tech trajectory, temporal lobes of nanobots smeared in thermal paste, sitting in mineral oil will probably still feel longing, even grief. Perhaps scientists will give them the desire of escape, just like the rest of us.
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